Old Bridge Township, New Jersey

New Jersey

Metallica moved across the country to this New Jersey suburb to record their first album.

culturehistoricalracing

In the early 1980s, Metallica packed up and left Los Angeles for a bedroom suburb in Middlesex County. They landed in Old Bridge Township, and there they worked up the songs that became their debut album, Kill 'Em All. The place they came to was farmland within living memory. When the township was created in 1869, it was mostly farms, and in 1880 fewer than seventeen hundred people lived there. By 1950 the count had reached about seven thousand. Then the building boom hit. Farms turned into subdivisions and the population tripled in a single decade, to nearly twenty-three thousand by 1960. Today it is one of the twenty or so largest municipalities in New Jersey, with about sixty-seven thousand people. For its first hundred and six years it went by a different name entirely. It was called Madison Township.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The heavy metal band Metallica relocated from Los Angeles to the township in the early 1980s to record the songs on what would be their debut album Kill 'Em All.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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  • USS PC-1264 11.5 mi Of all the ships in the wartime U.S. Navy, only one ended up with a crew that was entirely African American, and it is still tied up on Staten Island.
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