Metallica released S&M in the United States on November 23, 1999. The double live album captured the band with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Kamen, at Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, California, on April 21 and 22 that year. Kamen wrote orchestral arrangements for a set that combined established songs with two new compositions.
Those additions, “No Leaf Clover” and “− Human,” both made their live debuts at the first Berkeley concert. They gave the collaboration new Metallica material alongside songs fans already knew from the studio records. “No Leaf Clover” also received an official music video assembled from footage filmed during the April performances.
Kamen’s connection with Metallica predated those shows: he’d arranged the orchestration for “Nothing Else Matters.” Turning that relationship into a full concert meant working through the band’s repertoire on a much larger scale. In an April 1999 San Francisco Chronicle interview, he described the aim as “a conversation between all the musicians onstage.” The project had been developing for about 20 months, and Kamen had spent time on tour with Metallica to understand how the band worked in front of an audience.
Making that conversation audible took some practical work. Metallica intended to play at full volume, so the orchestra needed amplification. Keeping everyone together presented another challenge. Drummer Lars Ulrich described the timing problem in an October 1999 SFGATE report: his count-ins had to pass through Kamen’s conducting before reaching players farther back in the orchestra. Some cues arrived late. Timing corrections and overdubs were part of the work needed to prepare the concert recordings for release.
The orchestra’s players had their own adjustments to make. Cellist Barbara Bogatin told Strings in 2019 that she’d never played heavy metal before S&M. Her early concerns included the safety of her instrument around a rock audience. Rehearsals changed her view: she found Kamen’s arrangements intricate and his direction clear, and credited Metallica with working to get the balance between the musicians right. She called it “the loudest concert I’ve ever played.”
Listeners could explore the individual contributions on DVD. Alongside the combined performance, the release offered separate band-only and orchestra-only audio options, plus a documentary about the project. Those choices made it possible to follow the orchestral parts independently, then return to the full performance and hear how the two ensembles worked together.
That effort reached well beyond Metallica’s singles. The set included “Bleeding Me” and “The Outlaw Torn” from Load, with the latter running close to ten minutes, as well as “Master of Puppets,” “One” and “Enter Sandman.” An older instrumental also gained a new distinction: the S&M performance of “The Call of Ktulu” earned Metallica and Kamen the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 2001.
Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony returned to the format at San Francisco’s Chase Center on September 6 and 8, 2019. Those concerts revisited original S&M material and added orchestral versions of songs released in the intervening years. The recordings became S&M2, released on August 28, 2020, with “No Leaf Clover” again part of the set.
