Metallica Drummer! is a hilarious bit of home-video footage that became a phenomenon on the underground video-trading circuit in the late ’90s. A couple of years ago I summarized the video’s backstory in the lead paragraph of a book review I wrote for The New York Sun:

One day in the early 1990s, a young Canadian heavy metal fan put a chair in the center of his living room, turned on a video camera, cued up a Metallica album, and launched into the most hilariously earnest display of fantasy musicianship ever captured on tape. Glaring straight at the camera, and wearing a pair of Bart Simpson shorts, the scowling young man re-created every snare hit, every kick-drum thud, every cymbal crash on the recordings—but he did it on an imaginary drum kit. The young air drummer quickly forgot about the tape he had made, but someone later found it and released it into the underground trading circuit without his knowledge. Metallica Drummer!, as the video came to be known, developed a cult following in the late 1990s, probably because it’s so revealing of the fantasy world that lurks in the imagination of every music freak. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have seen Metallica Drummer, and he is us.

The video—a clip is below—is funny without any context, but knowledge of the backstory makes it richer and funnier. The historical record consists primarily of two articles published in the San Francisco alternative press in January 1999. The first article appeared in The San Francisco Bay Guardian when Metallica Drummer’s identity was still a secret. The second came out a couple of weeks later in SF Weekly and related the reporter’s experience of tracking down the mysterious Metallica Drummer in Vancouver and informing him that he and his video were famous. Sort of. The guy was shocked but oddly proud.

Here’s a clip of the first song on the tape, “Sad But True.” I think that link may work best if you have Quicktime 7. It’s a smaller file, so try it first. If you have any trouble, try this version instead, which is slightly bigger and may have fewer compatibility issues.