Six years ago, Avenged Sevenfold embarked on the successful “WorldWired” tour as Metallica’s opening act. Now, Avenged singer M. Shadows reveals the union almost didn’t come to pass.

“If you headline, people think of you as a headliner, and if you go and open for people constantly, they’ll always think of you as second fiddle,” Shadows says. “And so the conversation just went, ‘We’re not gonna do that.’ Then they would call and offer more money, and we were, like, ‘We’re not gonna do that.’”

While Shadows doesn’t say if it was the money or Metallica’s persistence that finally convinced Avenge Sevenfold to take the gig, he says he and his bandmates ultimately decided they’d “be idiots not to.”

Funnily enough, Shadows originally thought “I don’t think this is the right look for new people getting into Avenged Sevenfold. This isn’t where we’re at.’ But to a lot of mainstream people, it was, ‘Oh, you’re the band that opened for Metallica,’ which put us on a higher pedestal, which was weird to me.”

In the end, Shadows says he “Walked away from that tour extremely grateful.”