Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  It is surely for the best that Leather Charm’s oeuvre has been lost to history. One can only speculate as to the raw sexuality a teenage James Hetfield might have poured into the chorus of ‘Hades Ladies’, or what hysteria the libidinous throb of ‘Handsome Ransom’ and ‘Let’s Go Rock ’n’ Roll’ may have unleashed among West Hollywood’s teenage rock queens. But when first Hugh Tanner and then Jim Mulligan informed their band leader that his vision for the outfit did not concur with their own, Leather Charm tumbled off their stacked heels.

  Somewhat guilty after torpedoing his friend’s rock ’n’ roll dreams, Tanner vowed to assist Hetfield in assembling a new vehicle for his talents. In the first week of May 1981, he produced a copy of the Los Angeles listings magazine The Recycler, in which he had circled an advert in the ‘Musicians Wanted’ section. ‘Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with’, it read. ‘Influences: Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head, Iron Maiden.’ The ad featured a Newport Beach area code phone number and advised interested parties to ask for Lars. Tanner placed the call and scheduled a rehearsal session at a Fullerton recording facility for the following week.

  There is a special chemistry that occurs when certain musicians meet for the first time, an instinctive identification that transcends the simple appreciation of shared talents and aspirations. When the fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney met John Lennon, one year his senior, at Woolton Parish Church’s garden fete on the afternoon of July 6, 1957, both boys were struck by one another’s charm and musicianship, and McCartney was cajoled into joining Lennon’s band the Quarrymen two weeks later. When Jimmy Page invited John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and John Bonham to convene in a basement rehearsal studio in London’s Gerrard Street on the afternoon of August 12, 1968, each man understood that theirs was a most formidable union long before the group reached the end of the first song they performed together, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’. Song-writing sessions for Led Zeppelin’s debut album began the following week.

  There was, however, none of that intangible magic present when James Hetfield first encountered Lars Ulrich. By any measure, the session booked by Hugh Tanner was a disaster, the blame for which lay at the drumsticks of Ulrich. Baldly put, the kid couldn’t play. He could certainly talk – yap, yap, yapping constantly in a sing-song accent which seemed to traverse the Atlantic Ocean without ever dropping anchor – but the task of holding down even the most rudimentary 4/4 beat seemed hopelessly beyond him. Lost in the music, with his eyes closed at his microphone stand, time and again Hetfield would be jolted back into the room as the session came juddering to a premature halt. Opening his eyes, the Californian would see the young drummer’s cymbals or snare drum tumble to the floor beneath his wildly enthusiastic flailing. It was with a certain amount of embarrassment that Tanner called a halt to the session before the trio’s allotted time at the facility had expired. Ulrich, however, appeared utterly unfazed. As he packed away his kit into the back of his mother’s AMC Pacer car, the drummer enthused, ‘We should do this again.’ Hetfield and Tanner smiled politely and made noises of assent. Never a man overly concerned with looking in life’s rear-view mirror, as he pulled away from the studio for the thirty-minute drive back towards Newport Beach that afternoon, Lars Ulrich wouldn’t have noticed his two new friends exchange smiles that then dissolved into laughter.

  Twenty years on from that first ill-fated jam session, in May 2001 Hetfield and Ulrich once again found themselves struggling to make a connection in a Californian recording facility. Sessions for their band’s eighth studio album were proving fractured and unproductive, only this time Hetfield was singularly failing to find humour in the situation. As spring evenings lengthened into summer, Metallica’s front man announced his intention to step away from the process in order to find the space and time in which he might weigh up matters in his life both professional and personal. He gave no guarantees as to when, or even if, he might return.

  Early the following day, Ulrich chose to return to Presidio, the former army barracks in which Metallica were stationed, with his father, Torben, in tow. Still stunned by his friend’s abrupt exit, it was Ulrich’s intention to play his father rough mixes of the material the band had committed to tape thus far, as much to convince himself of the validity and vibrancy of the project as to garner his father’s opinions on the recordings.

  The drummer decided to begin his playback session with a track recorded when the Presidio sessions were at their most harmonious. In the small hours of May 3 Hetfield, Ulrich, Metallica’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and producer Bob Rock had entered the studio’s live room on a high after attending a concert by the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore auditorium. The music they were inspired to make that morning, with its reverb-rich guitar drones and off-beat drums, was both heavily indebted to the Reykjavik quartet, and a grand departure from anything previously recorded under the Metallica name. Always obsessive in his desire to push his band into territories new, Ulrich was inordinately proud of the piece. As the song flowed through the studio’s state-of-the-art speakers, the drummer made infinitesimal tweaks to the recording’s EQ levels on an SSL 4000 console, while his seventy-three-year-old father looked on impassively from the control room’s black leather couch.

  ‘Comments on that one?’ Lars enquired brightly as the song faded out.

  Torben sank back into the sofa and stroked his long grey beard as he weighed up his response.

  ‘If you said, “If you were our advisor what would you say?”’ he answered slowly, ‘then I would say, “Delete that.”’

  There followed a split-second silence, during which the air seemed to be sucked from the room. And then Lars Ulrich, a man hitherto wholly unacquainted with the concept of being lost for words, gave a nervous, anxious laugh. With his face communicating a mixture of petulance, exasperation and embarrassment, he began a stammering defence of the track. His father’s verdict was ‘interesting’, he noted, but out of step with feedback the band had received elsewhere. He pointed out that Metallica’s co-manager Cliff Burnstein was so taken by the wordless piece that he had ventured the opinion that it might serve as the opening track on the new album.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Torben. ‘That could well be, but I’m pretty sure that … I really don’t think so. I really don’t think so.’

  The exchange (captured by film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky as they amassed fly-on-the-wall footage for what would become the 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster) was revealing, shining a light on a side of Lars Ulrich rarely seen. Abandoned by his friend and musical soulmate, and understandably emotionally raw as a consequence, in this briefest of moments the years appeared to roll back for Ulrich. Stripped of his usual bullish self-confidence, he stood in front of his father once more as a gauche adolescent, eager to please and craving approval. As a glimpse into the intrinsic motivations which willed Metallica into existence in the first place, the moment is priceless.

  Lars Ulrich was born on December 26, 1963, in the municipality of Gentofte, in eastern Denmark, a late Christmas present for his parents, Torben and Lone. Transformed from an agricultural community into an affluent industrial society in the post-war years, the nation into which Ulrich was born was progressive, liberal and aspirant, a fully functioning social democracy growing in confidence and ambition. Well-heeled and well-connected, the Ulrich family were considered part of Copenhagen’s cosmopolitan elite. Torben was a professional tennis player – like his father, Einar, before him, Denmark’s number one – and a celebrated polymath, with a range of cultural interests that stretched far beyond the baselines of the outside courts at Wimbledon or Flushing Meadows. A regular columnist for the Danish daily newspapers Politiken and BT, by the time of his son’s birth Torben had also co-edited a literary magazine, presented on Danish radio, co-founded a Copenhagen jazz club and played clarinet and tenor saxophone with a number of the capital’s best-regarded jazz ensembles. A 1969 Sports Illustrated profile hailed him as the
tennis circuit’s ‘most fascinating, most captivating figure’.

  ‘He is a sort of gargoyle in a pretty game played and watched by pretty people,’ wrote journalist Mark Kram. ‘As tennis now slowly and desperately tries to lure the masses, Ulrich is invaluable … Win or lose, he provokes reaction and constant comment, the one indispensable vitamin for all sports.’

  Torben’s free-thinking, philosophical attitude to life was shaped by events in his formative years. In October 1943, at the age of fifteen, the boy and his younger brother, Jorgen, were encouraged to flee Nazi-occupied Denmark with their Jewish mother, Ulla, as concerns for their future welfare intensified. Their intention was to travel across the Oresund strait to Sweden, but the fishing boat commandeered for their flight was spotted by the German army while still in Danish waters, and when the Germans sprayed the vessel with arcs of machine-gun fire, all aboard surrendered. The Ulrich family were sent to a Danish concentration camp, and threatened with a transfer to Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. Two weeks later, however, they were released, the German authorities having apparently decided their Jewish heritage was not sufficiently ‘pure’ to warrant their deportation. Upon returning to high school in Copenhagen, Torben apologised for his prolonged absence from class, explaining to his teacher that his family had been imprisoned by the Germans. Thinking he was being mocked, the teacher cuffed the youngster around the ears. As his classmates looked on in shock, Torben calmly packed up his books, shouldered his bag and walked out of the school, never to return. His distrust of authority did not waver from that day.

  At the time of their son’s birth, Lone and Torben lived in a beautiful four-storey house in Hellerup, an affluent upper-middle-class district on the north-eastern side of the Danish capital. The family shared the building’s upper floor while Lone’s parents, who owned the house, occupied the floors below. Throughout Lars’s childhood the property at Lundevangsvej 12 served as a cultural hub for the district, an open house for Hellerup’s bohemian set: artists, musicians, film-makers and writers dropped by daily to talk art, politics and philosophy with the urbane tennis pro and his family. American jazz men Dexter Gordon, Don Cherry and Stan Getz were neighbours and close family friends – indeed tenor saxophonist Gordon took on the mantle of Lars’s godfather early in 1964 – and their regular visits ensured that the Ulrich family home was always ablaze with music, laughter and conversation long after the house lights of neighbouring apartments had been extinguished. Young Lars was never excluded from the gatherings, never made to feel like an interloper in adult company, and in this fecund, nurturing environment, he developed into a happy, inquisitive and somewhat precocious youth.

  ‘I grew up pretty quick,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t have any siblings so I was around a lot of adults all the time. I found myself spending more time in the adult world than the adults spent in the child world. There was a very progressive scene [in Copenhagen], a lot of music and a lot of experimenting with thoughts and ideas. My dad was very much at the edge of that with music and writing and with poetry and film and so on. I grew up in that environment.’

  ‘My dad had a room opposite mine that was his music room and there was nothing in there other than records and a big fuck-off stereo … A lot of times when I woke up in the morning he would just be finishing in there, and I could hear the music through the walls. He’d be playing the Doors, Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, a lot of jazz stuff, [John] Coltrane, Miles [Davis], Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, that kind of stuff. Those are the earliest musical memories I have.’

  The home comforts of the Danish capital were accessible to the Ulrich family, however, only for part of the year, as Torben’s professional career necessitated the adoption of an itinerant lifestyle. The family’s calendar was broadly dictated by the tennis circuit’s four Grand Slam tournaments: January would see Torben, Lone, Lars and his nanny board long-haul flights to Melbourne, the host city for the Australian Open, while the months of May and June would see the tour relocate to Paris for the French Open. The final week of June brought the circuit to London and the grass courts of Wimbledon, after which the family could be found in the New York borough of Queens as Torben prepared for the late August opening rounds of the US Open. Elsewhere the template expanded to accommodate exhibition games and tournaments in Fiji, Tahiti, South Africa, India … wherever on the globe the International Tennis Federation could sell the game. Young Lars took it all in his stride, developing, by his own admission, ‘a pretty adventurous mind’.

  ‘I probably travelled an average of four to six school weeks a year, which was quite a lot, especially in the later years,’ he recalled. ‘So, I mean, of course in some ways it was somewhat unconventional but it wasn’t really until I came to America that I started hearing those words. I never heard those words when I was growing up … you know, “abnormal” or “unconventional”. It was what seemed to be the energy around not just my dad but my mom, the household in general, going back generations. All the artists and that whole scene. And it seemed like I was just a product of a scene.

  ‘I think part of the strength, part of the real positive thing of my early years, was that there was a lot of freedom to experience a lot of things on my own, to seek a lot of answers on my own, to not have anything handed to me, to not have particular ways of thinking, ideologies or whatever, forced upon me. I did a lot of soul-searching. I did a lot of sniffing around, I did a lot of kind of checking into things. Checking into things myself with a kind of a juvenile curiosity.’

  In the dog days of the summer of 1969 that curiosity led Lars Ulrich into one of London’s most exclusive quarters for a gathering which would secure him bragging rights for years to come. While his father practised his ground strokes in SW19, young Lars’s interest was piqued by a photograph of a group of louche, long-haired young men in a national newspaper; his mother informed him that the gentlemen in question were a rock ’n’ roll band who that same week would be staging a free concert in one of London’s royal parks. Lars demanded that he be taken along. And so on July 5, 1969, mother and son joined Torben, his South African colleague Ray Moore and approximately 500,000 other music fans in London’s Hyde Park for the first live Rolling Stones concert in over two years. On a balmy summer evening, England’s most celebrated rock ’n’ roll collective turned in a historic performance which sealed their reputation as one of the form’s most supple and dexterous live turns.

  It would, however, be another English rock band that Lars Ulrich would ultimately credit with setting his life in the direction it would follow to the present day. On February 10, 1973, Deep Purple closed out the first leg of their Who Do We Think We Are European tour with a date at the K.B. Hallen in Copenhagen. In the stalls that evening, alongside his father and Moore, was the nine-year-old Lars.

  ‘There was a tennis tournament there – all tennis tournaments start on Monday so on the Sunday all the players were invited to see Deep Purple,’ Ulrich recalls. ‘So my father and a couple of the other guys went. It was pretty fucking cool. I was just infatuated, not just with the music but the event. The people, the volume, the reverberation, the light show, the whole thing. Ritchie Blackmore – I didn’t even know his name – I remember him rubbing his guitar on his ass. That was so cool. The next day I went into the local record store and the only Deep Purple record they had was Fireball so I started with that and didn’t look back.’

  In the aftermath of Deep Purple’s Copenhagen bow, Lars set his heart upon learning to play guitar, cajoling his cousin Stein into parting with his own electric guitar in exchange for an album by Danish singer/songwriter John Mogensen. Six months of lessons with the music teachers at Maglegårdsskolen ensued, but the boy had little aptitude for the instrument, and it was soon cast aside, with Lars finding greater entertainment in strumming a tennis racquet in front of his bedroom mirror. His commitment to this ‘instrument’ was nonetheless impressive: on one occasion he, Stein and a couple of local boys air-racqueted their way through both sides of S
tatus Quo’s Live! album without a pause, replicating the intensity of Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre circa 1976 by turning the heating in his playroom on to full power so that they were dripping with sweat before the first of its twelve tracks reached its end. Such dedication was mirrored in the lengths the youngster would go to in order to see his favourite bands. In spring 1976 Kiss announced a show at Copenhagen’s Falkoner Theatre as part of their first ever European tour, news which thrilled Lars Ulrich until he realised that the date fell smack in the middle of a school trip to North Jutland, meaning that he would be almost 450 kilometres away when the Demon, Starchild, Space Ace and Catman first planted their stack heels on a Danish stage. Crestfallen, he explained his predicament to his parents, who promised to have a word with his teachers. And so on May 29, 1976, the twelve-year-old Lars undertook the six-hour train journey from Fjerritslev in North Jutland to Copenhagen’s Central Station unaccompanied, so that he and Stein could be stage front when Gene Simmons first drooled fake blood on to the faces of the Danish chapter of the Kiss Army. As dawn broke, the boy was heading north by train to rejoin his classmates.

  As 1976 drew to a close, Ulrich acquired his first drum kit. A gift from his grandmother Gudrun, the kit had the same specifications as that used by Deep Purple’s Ian Paice, and the teenager would spend long hours in the playroom at Lundevangsvej 12 pounding along to Purple’s Made in Japan live album. Soon enough Ulrich found a musical mentor to encourage his fanaticism. Ken Anthony worked in the basement of the Bristol Music Centre, a three-storey record shop in central Copenhagen, curating the store’s hard rock/heavy metal section. ‘Heavy Metal Ken’ took great pride in his ability to source the most obscure and rare releases for the delectation of Denmark’s headbanging fraternity, filling the basement of the BMC with curios from Bow Wow and Bang, Black Axe and Sledgehammer, Buffalo, Lucifer’s Friend and a thousand more unheralded international artistes. Ulrich regarded the shop like a church, and would make pilgrimages to it up to four times a week. Once inside he would stand enraptured by the counter as Anthony spun black circles, filling his young acolyte’s head with the names of new bands and introducing him to what Anthony himself considered the most thrilling music scene in the world, the rising New Wave of British Heavy Metal.