The Guy Playing Metallica Riffs on TikTok Is Also Your Radio DJ

I’ve been playing around on TikTok a lot more lately.

Not in the “trying to go viral doing thirst traps and dance trends” kind of way, but in the way a middle-aged radio guy thinks, “Yeah, I’ll plug in the station’s Marshall Fender half stack and shred some Metallica riffs between commercial breaks—what could go wrong?”

It started casual, as all bad (and sometimes good) ideas do. I wasn’t trying to build an audience. I wasn’t chasing clout. I wasn’t trying to be the TikTok Guitar Hero. I just wanted to play some riffs into the digital void and see if anyone noticed.

Spoiler Alert: They did.

Now, I’ve done this kind of thing before. I used to hop on Instagram Live at 10 PM on Friday nights—when only four or five people were still awake and bored enough to watch a guy play Creeping Death through a semi-functional half stack. And that was fine. It scratched the itch. It fed the ego. It was the digital equivalent of playing to a bartender and a guy in a Pantera shirt who refuses to make eye contact but still gives you a head nod.

But TikTok is a different beast. There’s a weird freedom to it, like public access TV for people with ring lights and unresolved trauma. There’s no expectation to promote anything. You just go live, say nothing, play a riff, and a hundred people scroll past like you're some guy posted up outside a Circle K hoping someone recognizes the intro to Master of Puppets.

So I started doing that. I’d go live, plug in, and run through Metallica riffs—’83 to now, no discrimination. Ride the Lightning? Sure. St. Anger? I’m not proud, but yes. I’m not aiming for accuracy. I’m not trying to impress Steve Vai. I just want to feel the strings vibrate and blow off the psychic clutter of the day.

And for the most part, it works.

Until it doesn’t.

Because at some point—usually around the second verse of …And Justice for All—someone shows up in the comments with the kind of urgency usually reserved for yelling “Bomb!” on an airplane.

“Bro. Can you play Run to the Hills???”

Now, I want to pause here and acknowledge something: Iron Maiden is a great band. Run to the Hills is an iconic and coveted song in the industry. But when someone demands that I play Run to the Hills, it feels less like a request and more like an attempt to assert dominance. There’s a type of guy (and it’s always a guy) who believes that knowing every Iron Maiden song is some kind of masculine litmus test. Like if you can’t play The Trooper on command, your man card should be revoked and replaced with a ukulele.

But here’s the thing: I don’t really feel Maiden. I respect them. But I don’t logon to TikTok to soundtrack a Viking battle. I don’t want my music to sound like a medieval war cry wrapped in a calculus equation.

Metallica, on the other hand? Metallica is primal. It’s the sound of someone getting kicked down a flight of stairs by their own conscience. It’s not elegant. It’s not fantasy. It doesn’t slay a dragon. It’s down-picking until your arm feels like it’s filled with wet cement—and by the bridge of Blackened, you’re wondering if this is how professional drywallers feel before they quit and start a doom metal band.

So no, I can’t play Run to the Hills.

Or rather—I won’t.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum—the guys who roll into the comments like gatekeepers of some ancient Star Wars death metal order, name-dropping bands so obscure they might actually be fictional.

“You into old-school Mayhem?”
“What about early Burzum? Before the… prison stuff?”
“Ever think about covering anything off De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas?”

I can barely even pronounce half these songs! This is where metal stops being music and starts becoming interpretive performance art crossed with a forensic crime scene. Mayhem isn’t just a band—they’re a Norwegian cautionary tale. Their singer literally called himself Dead, then lived up to it. The guitarist took photos of the body and maybe—maybe—turned pieces of his skull into necklaces.

Imagine being in a band where your merch table includes human remains and everyone’s just… cool with it.

And look, I’m all for passion. But I don’t want my riffs with a side of ritual sacrifice and Satanic eloquence.

I don’t need my metal to feel like a punishment for something I didn’t do. Just give me some Hetfield down-picking, a few Papa Het “yeaaayyeeaaahs” mixed in, and let me live.

Here’s the thing about me: I know a little about a lot, which is both impressive and entirely useless depending on the context. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to break down a Tool song by time signature and compare it to Fibonacci spirals while watching a Maynard James Keenan interview with Rick Beato on YouTube. I don’t care if something’s in 4/4, 6/8, or 7/11 (this isn’t even a real time signature). If the riff feels good, it feels good. That’s the whole theory.

Would I be a better musician if I knew music theory? Probably. But I also might be significantly less fun at parties.

If a riff is cool—like truly cool, the kind of cool that makes you scrunch your face and say “damn, that’s filthy”—then yeah, I’ll give it the ol’ college try. But if the riff sounds like homework or gives off heavy “Jazz Ensemble at Noon” vibes, I’m out. I’ll pack it up, go back to my defaults, and rip the intro to Alice in Chains'“It Ain’t Like That” and call it a day.

Usually, after about twenty minutes of riffing, I step out of frame to do a break on the radio. It takes maybe twenty seconds—just enough time to intro another one of those country-rock fusion acts who all sound like they were genetically engineered in a lab somewhere between Nickelback and Morgan Wallen.

I digress.

I slide back into frame, pick up the guitar again, and that’s when the comments light up like I just pulled off a magic trick.

“Wait… what are you doing?”
“Are you at a radio station?”
“Do you work there?”

At this point, the cat is completely out of the bag—which is odd, considering the literal radio soundboard and microphone in the background since I started the live stream. It’s like someone watching a cooking show and being surprised there’s a stove.

But now the conversation shifts. I put the guitar down and brace myself. The questions start rolling in:

“How long have you been in radio?”
“Where do you work?”
“Is radio even still a thing?”

I tell them I’ve been at KUPD for 25 years. That usually gets followed up by some snarky remark about whether radio still exists or if I’m secretly broadcasting from an abandoned tower in the desert.

I ignore the existential crisis happening in the comments and keep chatting. Most people are cool. Friendly, even. It’s fun talking with folks from all over the world, especially when they’re curious instead of combative.

But then the radio people show up. The insiders. The ones running morning shows out of spare bedrooms in Market 97—wearing all the hats, doing the playlists, cutting the spots, and posting their own remotes like it’s a one-man media empire. Suddenly, I’m being quizzed like I wandered into a secret clubhouse where the entry fee is name-dropping three nationally syndicated DJs and reciting the exact PPM ratings trend from 2021’s second quarter—while clutching a coffee tumbler that says “#1 With Adults 25–54,” like that’s supposed to mean something to normal people.

(PPM, for the normal people reading this, stands for “Portable People Meter”—basically a digital device that tracks what radio you’re exposed to, assuming you’re even listening to radio anymore.)

Radio people are a unique ecosystem. Like a zoo. A loud, over-caffeinated zoo where everyone has a story and a favorite Bruce Springsteen album.

There are tiers. Not formal ones, but instinctual. Like how animals sort themselves out in the wild.

Tier 1: On-Air Personalities

Some of them are brilliant, funny, and quick as hell. Others are human foghorns with egos so oversized they need a parking space on top of the line instead of between them, because they’re convinced they’re that special. These are the people who think a four-minute break about McDonald’s Sprite is a career-defining moment—something worthy of a highlight reel or a LinkedIn update.

Tier 2: Salespeople—or as I call them, Sales Clones

Because no matter which market you could possibly go to, they’re all running on the same software: commission breath, business buzzwords, and those “Just circling back!” emails that hit your inbox at 7:42 AM—panicking about whether you’ve cut a commercial that doesn’t air until next Tuesday, like the fate of Western civilization depends on it. Some are awesome. Most are tolerable. And a few could probably sell a screen door in a submarine—with absolutely no idea why the submarine needed one.

Tier 3: Promotions Directors, Promo Coordinators and Assistants

This is where the real survivors live. You’ve got promo directors juggling ten events, PAs sweating through logoed polos in parking lots, and that one guy who treats setting up folding tables and handing out bumper stickers like he’s coordinating a military extraction. This usually leads to the jock saying, “Yo, pump the brakes. They’re just bumper stickers.”

I say all this with love. I’ve been in it for 25 years. I’ve seen the magic. I’ve also seen a guy in a mascot suit get heatstroke next to a prize wheel at a cell phone store. Hell, I’ve been that guy in the mascot suit!

Shannon working a promo as Arthur at a PBS store circa 2001

So when radio folks start popping into my TikTok livestream, I can almost smell it. They show up in the comments like it’s a breakout session at a regional radio summit—firing off questions about call letters, market clusters, and the kind of insider lingo that feels like it was designed to be understood by exactly seven people in a Marriott conference room.

And yeah, maybe I should care more about that stuff. But honestly? I don’t.

I’m just the guy trying to make the intro to “Give It Away” sound cool again between a 60-second commercial spot for insurance and a listener who thinks the Chili Peppers peaked in ’99.

The part that really bakes these viewers’ noodles?

I’m not obsessed with guitar gear or radio microphones.
I’m not chasing radio clout.
And I’m completely fine not knowing what everyone else knows.

Which, ironically, is probably the most radio thing about me.

All in all, doing live streams on TikTok is a lot like shattering people’s perceptions of what a radio personality is supposed to know.

Like yes—I once called “Shiny Happy People” by R.E.M. “Tiny Happy People” and didn’t even flinch. Not because I was trying to be funny, but because I genuinely forgot the title and, honestly, didn’t care. I remember the song. I remember the video. But I also remember changing the channel after the first minute because it felt like musical homework. It was too alternative for me at the time. Too bouncy. Too smiley. The kind of track that sounds like background music in a feel-good prescription drug commercial—right before they list the side effects.

But I don’t look down on people who love that stuff. In fact, I’ve always admired musicians who are just massive fans of music itself.

Take Dave Grohl. He’s talked openly about how the drum groove for Smells Like Teen Spirit was basically lifted from The Gap Band—and decades later, he recorded a Bee Gees tribute album with the Foo Fighters under the name Dee Gees. It was full-on disco falsetto and polyester vibes. Not a parody, but a wink. Because Grohl just loves music. All of it.

Same goes for Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains. You’d think a guy with his tone and catalog would be a gear junkie, but he’s admitted in interviews that he doesn’t really know much about guitar specs. He just picks up what feels right on the guitar and lets his tech figure out the rest. It’s not to say he won’t play with sounds, but for the most part it’s what he feels.

And that’s kind of where I’ve landed too.

It’s not that I don’t like music. I love it. But I’ve stopped treating it like a trivia game or a gear catalog. I’ve gotten older. My perspective’s changed. These days, I listen to music for the arrangement, the texture, the atmosphere. Sometimes the lyrics hit. Sometimes it’s just the way the chorus folds into the bridge. That’s how I connect with it now.

Telling someone you don’t love their favorite band is like you just called their childhood dog overrated.

So when a guy demands I cover some Judas Priest deep cut like it’s the national anthem of his emotional development, I just nod, smile, and go back to pretending I’m in a Guitar Center commercial no one asked for.

We all have tastes. And mine have evolved.

Twenty years ago, I was hunting down every underground band I could find—from E-Town Concrete to Deathstars. Now? I’m chilling out to Cannons, Dayseeker, City and Colour, Bad Omens, and yes, even Dua Lipa. My musical palette expanded, and I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll throw on synth pop while installing a new water pump in my car. There’s no shame in my game.

That’s just where I’m at.

People get weird when you don’t love what they love. But I’ve learned that not knowing every Shinedown B-side or the precise mic settings for a Market 74 airshift doesn’t make me a fraud.

It just makes me a guy who stopped pretending to care about impressing strangers online.

And that’s how I know I’m finally free to say:

Your childhood dog was a little overrated.