In 2003, Metallica hit the road on the second and final edition of their Summer Sanitarium Tour, joined by a very of-the-era roster of opening acts: Limp Bizkit, Deftones, Mudvayne and Linkin Park. That last band’s Mike Shinoda recently guested on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show — celebrating the impending 20th anniversary of Linkin Park’s smash second album, Meteora — and looked back on the trek. In particular, he told the story of how he and his bandmates worked up the guts to prank Metallica during the middle of their set, when they were playing “Master of Puppets,” no less.

 

 

 

“Nobody had ever pranked them onstage,” Shinoda recalled, adding: “Their show was always so tough and dark, and so we were like, ‘What would be the least tough, least dark thing to do?’”

The answer? Have a picnic. “We ended up going out with a picnic basket and like little sandwiches and drinks and Chester [Bennington] had a skateboard so he skated out onstage. And then we walked out on to their stage, and they were playing, I think, ‘Master of Puppets,’ and we set up a picnic right above Lars [Ulrich].”

 

 

Shinoda noted that they’d planned the gag with Metallica’s head of security who “promised he wouldn’t take us out.” Plus, Linkin Park knew Metallica “just well enough to know that James [Hetfield] wasn’t gonna knock my teeth out,” according to Shinoda, and the prank went off without a hitch. “The guys were laughing,” he said. “They were playing ‘Master of Puppets,’ like, turning around laughing at us.”