If any two of the big four bands tour together, I think it’d be a pretty sweet show. Any three? Fucking amazing. But all four? That would have to be some kind of miracle, right? I mean, half these dudes hate each other. King and Mustaine practically make their living talking shit about Metallica – and one another, for that matter. So it’ll never happen, right?

Well, King now tells Metal Hammer otherwise. Sort of.

Says the Reigning King:

“I’ve heard people referencing Lars… I don’t know Lars that well and I haven’t heard it from Lars but apparently he’s talking to somebody about it. Maybe us, Metallica, Megadeth (and), I think he even threw in Anthrax and I said in this day and age, I know we had that time together but how do you leave out Machine Head? There’s better options than Anthrax and that’s nothing against Anthrax, but they’ve just been in pieces for quite some time and that doesn’t make as much sense to me.”

So, um, yeah. I think right now this can only be treated as rumor – in fact, King says it’s a rumor, so you have to treat it as rumor.

And honestly, I’ll be pretty shocked if it happens. For one thing, Metallica doesn’t really need this tour. Cred with metal douche bags (like me!) is all well and good, but at the end of the day, they still make more money than God, and let’s be real, this tour probably would not change anyone’s opinion of them at this point (Unless maybe Hetfield stops honky-tonk singing and Dave Lombardo plays drums for them. That could really do it for me, actually.). Meanwhile, Anthrax don’t even have a singer right now and Dave Mustaine can’t talk about Metallica without getting all weepy, so the press conference announcing the tour would just be a total mess.

Still, we can dream. We’ll see if anything actually comes of this in the next few months. But I don’t think anyone should get their hopes up right now.

-AR