According to Blabbermouth, Hetfield's whining about the "rough ride over their stance on Napster."

"The fact it was free was what was bothering us," he said. "We could care less if they're downloading, we want convenience. But we wanted to be asked if we wanted to be a part of it. For me, it was stealing and in my book, I was raised that stealing was not OK. We were defending what we thought was right. It was difficult because people were excited about the possibilities. We were, too, but we were fearful of them too - what did it mean to us and our careers? How were we going to feed our kids?

"You know, magazines like Rolling Stone or Forbes print lists of highest-grossing bands and we're always in there. But they never have a column of our expenditures, how much we pay in taxes and all the other stuff. It's really unfair that people think that because of the money you have, you should act differently - stealing is OK because you've got enough. I really don't understand that."

The full article is here and it's worth a read, if for nothing else than to hear him whine some more about how tough it is to be James Hetfield and how hard it was to write St. Anger.

On another Metallica front, they're going the Pearl Jam way and recording all of their concerts and offering them to the fans. LiveMetallica.com offers all of the shows up to now and will continue to do so.

As part of this unique band-to-fan service, LiveMetallica.com will offer high quality, unedited soundboard recordings of all shows in standard MP3 and CD-quality FLAC files via a state-of-the-art delivery system powered by CinemaNow's PatchBay technology and nugs.net enterprises. All download files are compatible with Windows, Mac and Unix, allowing for maximum flexibility and ease of use. Once downloaded, shows can be burned to disc, transferred to portable players, or played through a computer. Each show also comes with printable booklets, tray inlays, and labels for fans that elect to burn the files to CD. The cost for each two-plus hour show is $9.95 for MP3s and $12.95 for higher-quality FLAC files. These are the same prices currently offered on similar live music services such as Phish's LivePhish.com and LiveDownloads.com, which features The String Cheese Incident and other bands. Making this offer even more exciting is the fact that "The Madly In Anger With The World" tour will feature Metallica playing a greater variety of songs than they have in years, changing the set list each show and drawing from their deep twenty-year, ten-album catalogue of rock classics.

Regardless of how "good" you think the new CD is, Metallica live is always a treat. I haven't downloaded anything yet, but they've started to play one of my favorite Metallica songs, "Dyers Eve," live in it's entirety for the first time ever on this tour, so I'm going to check it out.