A week before James Hetfield and Co. are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the metal icons’ Guitar Hero: Metallica videogame hits stores, on March 29. The new addition to the GH franchise boasts 28 controller-shredding songs taken from Metallica’s voluminous catalog as well as band-approved acts including Motorhead, Slayer and Mastodon (check out our sneak preview here!). Rolling Stone sat down with frontman James Hetfield at SXSW a few hours before Metallica’s epic “surprise” show to find out how he likes his pixellated persona, whether he thinks Death Magnetic sounds better on videogame or record and if he believes encouraging kids to pick up plastic instruments is hurting their chances of learning real ones.

Which member of Metallica is the best at playing Guitar Hero?
Oh, I don’t know. I think we’re all equally bad.

As a guitarist, how are you at using the guitar controller?
The initial thought was, “This is gonna be so easy.” And then I picked it up and tried doing it. And it was like [makes plunking sound]. “Are you kidding me? You guys suck! You’re supposed to follow me!”

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Can a Metallica album be too loud?

The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s.

But even though Metallica’s ninth studio release, “Death Magnetic,” is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It’s so loud, they say, you can’t hear the details of the music.

“Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.

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Metallica, whose leaked album Death Magnetic is slated for a Sept. 12 release, launched a promotion on YouTube today featuring the band’s favorite Metallica cover songs on the site. Drummer Lars Ulrich introduces their selections in a video posted on the site.

“It makes us feels alive and special that you guys can be out there doing that cool stuff that you guys do … we’re mighty proud of what you do out there.” says Ulrich. Later, he explains one reason the band is doing this. “You’ve all seen enough versions of us playing ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Master of Puppets’ on German MTV for the last 10 years. Who needs that, right?”

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Even the dark lords of ’80s metal listen to the blogosphere these days. After coming in for serious online criticism over the decision to lean on bloggers who had posted reviews of new Metallica tracks (tracks which they had been invited to listen to and which were not covered by an NDA), the band has posted a statement on its Web site.

“Once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites,” they wrote. “Our response was ‘WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record… that makes no sense to us!’”

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