Metallica joins FBI in hunt for missing student

It has been more than a week since a 20-year-old college student called her friends at a Metallica concert to say she was outside the arena and would find her own way home. Now the famed heavy-metal rockers are participating in the search for her, adding $50,000 to the reward for information leading to her whereabouts.
While investigators attempt to discover what happened to a young woman described as open, beautiful, artistic and giving, Morgan Harrington’s parents, Dan and Gil Harrington, have been keeping a high public profile, trying to focus attention on the disappearance.
“One word that comes to mind when you think of Morgan is ‘shiny,’ ” Morgan’s mother, Gil Harrington told TODAY’s Amy Robach during a recent interview. “She was beautiful and she was beautiful inside, too. She radiated life.”

Dutiful daughter

Young adults sometimes disappear intentionally, but the Harringtons were uncommonly close to their daughter. A student at Virginia Tech, about 35 miles from her parents, she talked to her father every day and trusted him with her computer passwords and the key to her apartment. She also spoke with her mother daily and frequently returned home to visit.
On Saturday, Oct. 17, Morgan Harrington spent the day at home planning with her mother what she was going to wear at the Metallica concert she planned to attend at the University of Virginia.
Such days were the norm for the family, Gil (pronounced “Jill”) Harrington told Robach.
“It was a regular day for us: got up, made tea, had coffee, chatted some, showed the outfits, showed me how she was going to do her make-up,” the mother recalled.

Morgan went with friends to the concert. Sometime between 8:30 and 9 p.m., she called her friends to say she had gone to the restroom and ended up outside John Paul Jones Arena on the University of Virgina campus in Charlottesville. She told them she wasn’t allowed back in and would find another way home.
The next day, her phone and purse were found in a parking lot near the arena. Morgan, who never went anywhere without her cell phone, hasn’t been seen since.
“We have a purse and we have a cell phone. We have a missing girl,” Lt. Joe Rader of the Virginia State Police, told reporters last week. “We do not know whether if she is alive or has met some ill fate.”

‘Let Morgan go’

Gil Harrington said her daughter normally wouldn’t try to get home from a big event on her own, but added: “Kids are impulsive, especially in that excitement. Perhaps she knew who she could get a ride with. We don’t know. We wish we did know.”
Her parents reported her missing the next day and local and state police along with the FBI have been conducting the search for the 5-foot-6, 120-pound blonde with blue eyes.

“She’s really very a sweet person, kind of an innocent individual who probably is quite trusting,” Dan Harrington told Robach. “She’s quite artistic, loves to read, and, really, over the last six months, Gil and Morgan and I had just a phenomenal relationship. She goes to school only 35 miles from here. We’ve been able to have daily contact with her. She’s a wonderful person.”
The Harringtons also have a 22-year-old son who told his mother that if Morgan were abducted, whoever took her would have no choice but to keep her alive.
“He said, ‘Morgan has a purpose in this world, and Morgan is so special that whoever took her is going to keep her around for a while,’ ” Gil Harrington told Robach. Then, addressing the presumed abductor, she added, “So please let Morgan go. No questions asked. Let her come home to us.”

Robach asked Gil Harrington what she would say to her daughter if Morgan was listening.
Signing her words in American Sign Language, the mother looked in the camera and said, “Morgan, we are trying to shine our heart to you as a beacon to come through wherever you are. Come back home.”
Boosted by the $50,000 pledge from Metallica, there is a $150,000 reward for information that helps find Morgan Harrington. Police ask anyone with information to call 434-352-3467.

By Mike Celizic
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 2 hours, 34 minutes ago

AC/DC tears up arena with explosive salute

Never the darlings of the critical establishment, and written off as “caveman rock” by altrock snobs for several decades, AC/DC still managed to become one of the most successful rock bands of all time, selling some 300 million albums since its early ’70s inception.

Sunday evening, several generations of AC/DC fans convened in HSBC Arena to bear witness to the enduring power of the band’s bad boy boogie.

Now with a median age of nearly 60, the Australian band simply tore the place apart with its raunchy take on old school rock ’n’ roll. Louder than one would’ve thought possible, tighter than all get out, and deliciously sleazy, AC/DC pulled songs from every corner of its fabled career, blessed us with a fair bit of its latest album, the visceral smackdown “Black Ice,” and concluded by blasting fully functional cannons at the crowd during its anthemic final encore, “For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).”

The core of the band is, as ever, the twin guitar team of brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. The siblings write the songs, and split the bloody red meat assault of the sonic attack that is the trademark of the band’s sound — Angus, dressed in his school boy’s uniform, handling the molten blues-based guitar solos and bobbing about the stage like a problem child with a few gallons of Jolt cola pumping through his veins, while Malcolm roots the band with the metronomelike precision of his right hand.

The rhythm section of bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd plays a four-on-the-floor rhythm that is deceptively simple. Making this music do the AC/DC version of “swing” is no mean feat, and requires playing absolutely nothing that is not integral to the song.
Atop all of this, singer Brian Johnson howls like a man possessed, his thick Scottish brogue tinting every blues yelp that emanates from his throat with an emphatic fiendishness.
After a fairly naughty animated introductory montage, the band launched into “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” the opening number from “Black Ice,” and the place just plain exploded. Heavy on the hooks, completely fat-free, and deliciously nasty, this tune is already a hard rock classic.
The band’s first era — prior to the death by alcohol poisoning of original singer Bon Scott —was celebrated early with the swanky strut of “Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be,” and then the band started cranking out songs that are rightly considered among the most memorable of the rock era.

“Back In Black” is a sledgehammer to the head, but also lithe and funky; “Thunderstruck,” heard often in this same building as a crowd-pumper during Sabres games, was now an onslaught of molten Angus guitar licks and cranium-rattling drum accents; “Shoot To Thrill” moved with menace, like Led Zeppelin if the band had been a troop of punky teenagers.
If Johnson’s voice has grown a bit thinner with age, he has adjusted to his sightly reduced capabilities, and still sings with soul and muscle.

AC/DC does not sound like a band facing down senior citizenship.
The show, like the band’s music, was bombastic and deliriously over-the-top — explosions, inflatable tattooed women, and enough high voltage amplification to wake the dead, all presented with tongue firmly in cheek and fist raised high.
Hard rock ’n’ roll gets no better than this.

Concert Review

AC/DC

Sunday night in HSBC Arena.

By Jeff Miers
NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC