Every Shirt C: Metallica - Ride The Lightning

shirt: Metallica - Ride The Lightning
size: XL (US)
vintage: 1997
provenance: retail

As fitting for the hundredth (seriously? what the hell?!?) shirt in this series, this one is as close to the Generic Metal Shirt as can be found. Almost everyone who considers themselves a fan of heavy music either owns this shirt, or owned this shirt at some point in time. The Ride cover on the front and the skeleton dude getting electrocuted on the back has been around, in some form or another, since the mid-'80s, and this exact shirt is probably still in print today, unaltered from when I picked it up at Newbury Comics more than a decade ago. I constantly see people in this design at shows from DIY bar gigs up to festivals, watching all kinds of bands; metalheads are almost required by law to own Number of the Beast, Metallica's catalog to 1990, Reign In Blood, British Steel, Rust In Peace, and Paranoid regardless of what they listen to otherwise, and it sure seems like the same may be true for this shirt design.

Every Shirt XXVII: Metallica - Unforgiven

shirt: Metallica (Unforgiven/Harvester)
size: XL (US)
vintage: 1996
provenance: retail

This was the first shirt I acquired, in the spring of 1996, as I started to combine "being into metal" and "able and willing to walk ridiculous distances". Because I didn't want to rely on anyone else to lug me around, and I wasn't able to drive yet, I walked about six and a half miles out to Newbury Comics to pick up a Metallica or Type O shirt; this is the kind of thing that you do when you're in the suburbs and, as a metalhead, don't want to take the easy way to do anything.

For a long time, this was also my only shirt; if you have to walk thirteen miles round-trip to buy metal shirts, you may not want to do it so often. As such, and due to the thirteen years of age on this one, it's pretty battered, as can kind of be seen with the overexposure and that it's lighter than the background.