The 5 Most Irresponsibly Badass Live Rock Shows Of All Time

5 Rammstein Sets Everything on Fire

Rammstein is a band known for being terrifying and German, and their live shows attempt to excel at both of those descriptors by literally setting everything on fire, including themselves. They even wear flamethrowers, which we imagine must make it difficult to play an instrument. The heat is so intense that, on occasion, people have been carried out of Rammstein concerts after suffering heat strokes and lighting gantries have been seen glowing red-hot from repeated fireball hits and intense European rage metal.

4 Metallica Fakes a Catastrophic Equipment Malfunction

Metallica may be the withered old elder statesmen of mainstream metal, but they like to remind us all how hardcore they used to be in the days before they did songs for Tom Cruise movies by scaring the absolute weenus out of everyone at their concert with an elaborate fake stage collapse, which you may notice is something that killed a bunch of people at a Sugarland concert in 2011.

In Metallica's spirited farce, a roadie runs onstage to check the pyrotechnics and gets set on fire, running feebly to the other end of the stage as the scaffolding and lighting rigs begin dropping around the band members like space debris in a Michael Bay movie. A man then falls from the ceiling, dangling upside down on a wire, before crashing lifelessly at the feet of James Hetfield like so many XXL T-shirt owners before him. Metallica has used this elaborate gag in many of their live shows, proving that while they may be old, they are still excellent at not giving one blasted ass about people's safety.

3 Boy Hits Car Takes a 6 Story Stage Dive

Boy Hits Car frontman Craig Rondell wanted to make sure his band would be remembered for something, so he climbed 70 feet above the stage at an outdoor music festival, where he perched atop some speakers, sang a few lines from one of his songs, and then dived the fuck off. The video looks less like concert footage and more like a public suicide.

Rondell later said that he regretted his decision the instant he started falling toward the crowd. We, on the other hand, were disappointed that he did not land on a car, because the world would've imploded from the irony.

2 Society 1's Lead Singer Performs While Hanging from Hooks

Society 1 is an industrial metal band whose lead singer, Matt Zane, routinely performs while dangling above the stage on a bunch of hooks. And we don't mean a harness or some bizarre bungee cord jumpsuit -- we mean he puts eight goddamned meat hooks into his goddamn back and hangs there like Criss Angel's Pinocchio, singing songs and pulling off nightmarish dance moves to the delight of his fans.

1 The Germs Give Their Fans Burn Scars

The Germs were an American punk rock band from the late 1970s, which is another way of saying they get way more credit than they deserve. Lead singer Darby Crash had a live performance ritual that, at best, defies explanation -- he would brand the wrists of a few lucky fans with cigarette burns, which he called the "Germ burns," because he was insane. People bearing Darby's personal tattoo can take pride in the knowledge that they are one of the elite few that allowed a drug-addicted lunatic to stub out his cigarette on their arm at a $5 club show in a demilitarized urban neighborhood three-and-a-half decades ago.

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