Metallica played their first concert at Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium on Wednesday, where the crowd’s rapturous reaction to “Enter Sandman” — which has doubled as the Hokies football team’s intro music for the past half century — triggered the Richter scale.

The Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory measured the sold-out crowd’s response to the Black Album classic, with singer James Hetfield prompting the performance with a chant of “Hokies! Let’s Go!” When the 60,000-person crowd started jumping up and down when Lars Ulrich’s drumbeat kicked in, the...