Metallica Mama

The St. Petersburg Times out of Tampa, Florida recently published a feature on 85-year-old Margaret Priebe, cancer survivor and... Metallica fan.

On Saturday, Priebe attended her first Metallica show with her 48-year-old son, Jim, and met the band due to the article's popularity.

Despite an intensely fascinating subject with a personality to match, the article itself wasn't all that. Sean Daly, the Times' Pop Music Critic, missed the mark.

One spot in the story in particular was rather disturbing, and borders on inappropriate assumption:

After inspecting plane engines during WWII — B-24s to be exact — Margaret met the man who became her husband. They moved to Cleveland, then Florida, and enjoyed a 44-year marriage until his death.

Well, mostly enjoyed it. "He didn't like the hard music. I couldn't turn on the stuff when he was around."

Is Daly assuming that Priebe resented her husband for not liking the same music as her? If her marriage was unhappy and she said so, this would be a different story, but from the way the story has been reported, it doesn't seem to be the case.

But Daly further pushes the point:

Now it's just Margaret and Jim. They share a house in the buttoned-down Lakeside Estates neighborhood. About nine years back, Margaret turned on the radio and heard Metallica's 1999S&M album, recorded with the San Francisco Symphony. She bought it; she blasted it. For the first time in her life, there was no one to tell her no.

Does Daly want us to assume that Priebe is relieved to not have her husband there to suppress her musical tastes?

However, from the article, the reader really gets a sense of Priebe's personality. Daly obviously spent quite a bit of time with her judging by the amount of backstory he included and details of her living space:

At home, on a table next to her favorite chair, are an Art of Knitting DVD, a giant magnifying glass, The Rough Guide to Heavy Metal and a magazine devoted to the four men in Metallica: singer James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo.

While the story claims to focus on Priebe's cancer battle and how Metallica helped her through, there is really minimal detail of her struggle. The description is limited to the photo tag and one short paragraph in the story:

Mother and son have tickets to Metallica's show at the St. Pete Times Forum on Saturday. They wouldn't miss it — not after last year, a hard year for Margaret. She battled lymphoma and chemo and lonely nights in the hospital when the only thing she could do was untangle the headphones of her MP3 player and tune out: Enter Sandman, Bleeding Me, Devil's Dance.