Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  In December 1976, the year of The Song Remains the Same, Hotel California, 2112 and Frampton Comes Alive!, a UK music fanzine named Sideburns dedicated a full page to a guide for aspiring guitarists. Beneath the headline ‘PLAY’IN [sic] IN THE BAND … FIRST AND LAST IN A SERIES …’ were printed three crude sketches of a guitar fretboard, revealing the fingering required to play the major chords A, E and G. ‘This is a chord, this is another, this is a third,’ ran the accompanying text. ‘Now form a band.’ The message was simple, direct and wholly liberating for a section of suburban teenagers bored with the musical status quo. Yet, the global success of working-class hard-rock musicians from towns disregarded by London’s insular music journalists as provincial backwaters could be equally inspirational for music-obsessed young Britons. In the inky pages of the four main English music weeklies – Melody Maker, Record Mirror, New Musical Express and Sounds – rock fans from Barnsley to Belfast could see Robert Plant from Wolverhampton preening and screaming in front of 90,000 people at the 1977 Day on the Green festival at Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum or read about Deep Purple’s David Coverdale, a former shoe salesman from Saltburn-by-the-Sea, conducting a 200,000 strong choir at the 1974 California Jam. At a time when the media labelled superstar rock acts ‘dinosaurs’, the notion of aspiring to such heights may have been considered vulgar by the popular music press, but this judgemental attitude held little sway with ambitious young men such as Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris and Def Leppard front man Joe Elliott, who desired nothing less than that their bands would become numbered among the most successful musical acts in the world. Even as the punk movement gathered momentum in 1976, abetted by an elitist music industry’s voyeuristic fascination with violence and teenage rebellion, an underground metal community began to develop along lines parallel to those drawn by punk.

  On May 8, 1979, three of the movement’s emerging bands – Angel Witch, Samson and Iron Maiden – united for a gig at the 1,400-capacity Music Machine in Camden, north London. Also present that evening, at the invitation of heavy metal DJ turned promoter Neal Kay, was twenty-four-year-old Geoff Barton, a freelance contributor to Sounds magazine.

  At the tail end of the previous summer Barton had accepted one of Kay’s regular entreaties to visit him at his weekly rock club, the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse at the Prince of Wales pub at Kingsbury Circle. Here, to his great astonishment, the young writer discovered that the capital’s heavy metal scene, commonly held to have been decimated by punk, was flourishing.

  ‘I expected some sort of time warp populated by scruffy longhairs, a place where head-shaking, imaginary-guitar playing, peace-sign flashing and above all blood and thunder reigned supreme,’ Barton wrote in the edition of Sounds for August 19, 1978. ‘And that was all true apart from the fact that the Bandwagon ain’t no time warp.’

  Nine months on from this back-handed compliment, Kay staged the show at the Music Machine as a coming-of-age party for the home-grown heavy metal movement. It was at the point when the scene would graduate in triumph from the back rooms of east London and Essex pubs to the capital’s grand theatres. It was an ambitious undertaking, and a less excitable promoter might have blanched at receiving word of the evening’s distinctly underwhelming ticket sales figures. But Kay was not to be deterred. ‘Welcome to the heavy metal crusade!’ the DJ screamed down the microphone as he cued up his first record of the evening. On the edge of the beautiful old theatre’s dance floor, a handful of long-haired Bandwagon regulars broke into muted cheers. Expecting frenzy and chaos, Geoff Barton could not help feeling slightly cheated. Nonetheless, the copy the young writer filed for Sounds on May 19, 1979, was exuberant, passionate and effusive in tone. Beneath the headline ‘If you want blood (and flashbombs and dry ice and confetti) you’ve got it’, he tagged the scene as the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’ for the first time, and hailed the night as a year zero for this visceral and vital movement. In the basement of the Bristol Music Centre the review was passed around as if it were a sacred text.

  ‘Once Sounds showed up in your life on a weekly basis that was sort of the Bible,’ Lars Ulrich explains. ‘Geoff Barton was the gateway; you would see what was on Geoff Barton’s play list and he would write all these articles. Who could ever forget Barton’s quote about Angel Witch sounding like Black Sabbath played through a cement mixer? That’s one of the all-time great quotes. Angel Witch is not something I listen to a lot these days, but they were certainly one of the greatest named bands of the time, and that counted for a lot when you’re sixteen.’

  Just as this new musical world opened up for the teenager, Ulrich was packed off to the New World to follow what was considered to be his destiny. If he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, then that privilege originated with the tennis racquets his grandfather and father previously held in their hands for decades. It was expected that Lars would learn the family trade. By the time the boy reached puberty, he was ranked among the top ten junior tennis players in Denmark, and in the summer of 1979 the family decided that he should attend a newly opened tennis school in Florida, so that he might develop both the racquet skills and mental strength required to graduate on to the professional circuit.

  The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, a forty-acre site located fifty miles south of Tampa, was the first of its kind, a boarding school where students would spend hours each day on the courts in a fiercely competitive, hot-house environment designed to identify and develop future champions. A hard-nosed New Yorker, Bollettieri had never been a professional tennis player, but he brought other skills to the courts: a relentless work ethic, brusque motivational skills and iron discipline. Tennis, he argued, had a reputation as a ‘sissy game’, a reputation his academy would change. The thinking was revolutionary, the results extraordinary: Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Venus and Serena Williams and Jim Courier are just a handful of the school’s alumni. Reflecting upon his own time at the Academy, however, Lars Ulrich likened it to a ‘prison’.

  ‘All through the Seventies, as a teenager, I wanted to become a professional tennis player like my father; music was the passion, tennis was the day job,’ he recalls. ‘[At that Academy] I ended up playing tennis every day for six months. That was probably what turned me off.’

  ‘Where I grew up, tennis was something that was about having fun … All the players down at the club they would play and then afterwards they would drink beers and smoke cigarettes, it was kinda like a very social endeavour. In America at that time, in the wake of [John] McEnroe and [Jimmy] Connors, every middle-class parent in the United States sent their kids into these tennis factories to try to have the kids be their meal tickets.’

  ‘I’d been there for two or three months and couldn’t stand it any more … I was one of the worst troublemakers because I didn’t do well with all those rules after growing up in Copenhagen with all that freedom. We began to sneak out of school and go down to the local 7/11 store where we’d try to get some beers. One evening we even got some weed. So we smoked weed in the school after all the good upper-class American talent had gone to bed. And then they busted us. They called a meeting with the teachers and the fifty to sixty youngsters. Someone said, “Somebody’s been bad” and “We don’t tolerate this here” …’

  In April 1980 Ulrich downed his tennis racquet and quit the Academy. Deciding against returning to Copenhagen immediately (perhaps to allow his parents time to absorb the news that the $20,000 they’d stumped up for his tuition fees might have been better spent on making wishes at the fountains in Rosenborg Castle Gardens), the teenager opted to fly out to the West Coast to see family friends in San Francisco. It was here, while browsing through the heavy metal imports section of a local record shop, he chanced upon the self-titled debut album by New Wave of British Heavy Metal hopefuls Iron Maiden, released that same month in the United Kingdom.

  ‘Nobody in America was talking about NWOBHM as such,’ he recalls, ‘and I didn’t know anything about them, but I picked up the c
over and I saw the Eddie monster on the front and then these super next-level live pictures of these guys. There was smoke and hair and fans and energy and chaos and I said, “This has to be great,” so I bought the record.’

  As the family with whom Ulrich was lodging did not own a record player, this latest addition to his vinyl collection would go unheard until the teenager returned home to Lundevangsvej 12. When he finally did get the opportunity to listen to Iron Maiden, Ulrich was mesmerised by its energy, aggression and speed. Back at the Bristol Music Centre, Ken Anthony dutifully began filling in his young friend on the changing face of heavy metal.

  ‘I’d been in America for the better part of the last year and there was a lot of great stuff happening in America on the radio,’ Lars recalls. ‘Judas Priest and AC/DC were getting some airplay and bands like Pat Travers and Molly Hatchet and so on, so there was obviously heavy rock happening. But when I came back to Europe and back to Denmark it sort of became known to me that there was a bunch of stuff coming out of England that was much harder, much heavier and much more energetic and really, ultimately, much more about a lifestyle. A lot of the stuff in America at that time – it was just hard rock and people were into it, but the stuff that was coming out of England was really about a total commitment and a lifestyle choice.’

  That same summer the Ulrich family had their own lifestyle choices to make. With the emergence of younger players such as Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, the professional tennis circuit was no longer an arena for gentlemen philosophers, and so Torben Ulrich had switched to the rather more edifying Tennis Grand Masters tour, a competition established for players aged forty-five and over. The demands of the tour meant that Ulrich was spending increasing amounts of time in the United States, to the point where the idea of his family permanently relocating to America seemed sensible. And so in August 1980 the family sold their beautiful Copenhagen town house and purchased a three-bedroom condominium at 2600 Park Newport in Newport Beach, California.

  Today in one of Newport Beach’s public parks there stands a $50,000 bronze statue of former President Ronald Reagan, a bold display of the neighbourhood’s political outlook. A WASP-ish enclave which made middle-class, multicultural Hellerup look like Compton, Newport Beach was (and remains) one of America’s wealthiest, and most conservative, communities. Just weeks after the family’s arrival, Lars was locked up in a police cell for six hours following his arrest for drinking a beer while walking along the beach front. Liberal, laidback Copenhagen must have seemed like a distant memory.

  ‘Because of my last name, I was king shit [in Copenhagen],’ Lars recalled. ‘And then [we] went to LA and I was king dogshit. Nobody gave a shit about us.’

  The teenager enrolled for eleventh grade at Corona Del Mar High School, an institution with an excellent reputation for both academic and sporting pursuits. By his own admission, the new boy was ‘pretty geeky’ and ‘quite the loner’, his penchant for garish Iron Maiden and Saxon T-shirts bemusing his preppy, Lacoste polo shirt-wearing classmates.

  ‘They just looked at me like I was from another fucking planet,’ he laughs.

  Corona Del Mar’s number one tennis player was Anthony Emerson, the son of Australia’s multiple Grand Slam winner Roy Emerson. The Emerson and Ulrich families were long-time friends, and it was broadly assumed that Lars would slot into the school tennis team as Anthony’s number two. However, when a trial was arranged for the boy, the young European prodigy didn’t even rank among the school’s top seven players. It quickly dawned on him and his disappointed parents that he was never going to make the grade as a professional. Almost immediately, Lars switched to plan B: he informed his father that he was going to get a drum kit, teach himself how to play – within ten days, no less – and then start a rock band. As soon as he had finished laughing, Torben gave his son permission to rent a kit from a music shop in nearby Santa Ana. This done, Lars set about immersing himself in the Hollywood rock scene.

  ‘The first show I went to in Hollywood was Y&T at the Starwood,’ he recalls. ‘There was a couple of hundred people there, but everybody was having a great fucking time. There was drinking, there were chicks – and this was when you didn’t have to go to the bathroom to do drugs – it was great. Y&T looked as if they were playing to a stadium of 50,000 people and I was thinking maybe this would be a lot more fun than standing trying to hit forehands down the line for hours at a time. I didn’t have any aspirations to forming a band to become Deep Purple, but I just thought if I could have this sort of fun in a jam band playing clubs in LA every couple of weeks that would be great.’

  On the week of his seventeenth birthday, Ulrich discovered that former UFO guitarist Michael Schenker had booked a show at the Country Club in Reseda. Standing in the parking lot after the gig on December 22 he was approached by another teenager, who pointed at his Saxon T-shirt and demanded to know where he had acquired the item. Ulrich informed his interrogator that he had recently moved to California from Europe, where the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was a rather bigger deal than in the United States.

  ‘You need to meet my friend Brian,’ the boy responded.

  Brian Slagel and John Kornarens were two heavy metal obsessed teenagers from Woodland Hills and Studio City respectively, who, like Ulrich, had discovered the NWOBHM via Geoff Barton’s writing in the pages of Sounds. At the point when they met Ulrich, the two were convinced that they were the only two people in America who had heard of Iron Maiden, Angel Witch, Saxon and their contemporaries. Meeting the young Dane then would prove to be quite the education.

  ‘With the few people I knew who listened to Iron Maiden, talking to them about music was like going to primary school,’ recalls Kornarens, ‘but with Lars it was like going to college: it was definitely a much higher level. Lars really understood the music and really was passionate about things like I was, like a certain riff leading into a lead break, just the little details. He understood why it was such an exciting genre. When it came to finding out new music, he was like Indiana Jones. I told him I’d just got the new Angel Witch single and I think his head exploded. He was incredibly passionate about the music, high energy, borderline annoying.’

  ‘In 1980 I was still living at home with my mom, I was going to college, I was working at Sears, I was obsessed with this whole musical thing and I was just about to start a fanzine,’ recalls Brian Slagel. ‘I used to tape and record live concerts and tape trade with people all around the world and that’s how I was indoctrinated into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, because a guy I was trading with in Sweden sent me an AC/DC live show and said, “Oh, and here’s this band Iron Maiden that you might like …” Once you get into that world someone will say, “Hey, you should meet this guy,” and so your network starts to expand.’

  Kornarens, Slagel and Ulrich bonded instantly. Each week, the trio would meet up to tour Southern California’s import record shops in search of new New Wave of British Heavy Metal releases they had seen flagged up in the pages of Sounds. That Ulrich already had a standing-order subscription with Wigan-based record shop Bullit Records, who would deliver regular shipments of vinyl to 2600 Park Newport every few weeks, did nothing to quell his competitive instincts, as Slagel recalls.

  ‘We became friends because he had a lot of records that I didn’t have, and I had all the records that he didn’t have, and we both knew the whole scene,’ says Slagel. ‘So then there was me, Lars and John Kornarens driving hundreds of miles trying to find an Angel Witch seven-inch or something, and having a fight over it because there was only one in the shop! We’d get to the store and Lars would literally be out of the car before we’d even shut off the key, because he knew there’d only be one or two copies.’

  One weekend in January 1981 Ulrich’s ever-evolving vinyl obsession led him to take a solo road trip to San Francisco, to check out independent record shops in Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley. While shopping on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, the young Dane was approached by a local meta
l fan named Rich Burch, who complimented him upon the fine selection of New Wave of British Heavy Metal badges on his denim jacket and invited him to a party at the summit of Strawberry Hill, on an island in Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. Arriving later that evening, Ulrich was met with the sight of twenty or thirty local youths sitting around ghetto blasters, enthusiastically headbanging to Motörhead and Budgie. These teenagers, Burch excitedly explained, were the ‘Trues’, the Bay Area’s most devoted metalheads, defenders of the faith. He introduced Ulrich to his friend Ron Quintana, and the three sat talking about the European metal scene until dawn. Upon hearing that Ulrich played drums, Quintana mentioned that his friends in a local band named Metal Church were on the lookout for a new member, and he offered to pass Ulrich’s number on to guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof. Ulrich politely demurred, saying he already had some band plans back in Los Angeles. That same month, he placed his first ‘Musicians Wanted’ advert in The Recycler.

  ‘It wasn’t about “Let’s start a band to get laid” like everyone else in LA, my aspirations weren’t even that high!’ Ulrich laughs. ‘I just wanted to start a band to play all my favourite New Wave of British Heavy Metal songs.’

  One of the first people to respond to Ulrich’s advert was a young guitarist named Patrick Scott, the son of a Huntington Beach doctor. Scott drove over to Ulrich’s house in early February, but never got as far as removing his guitar from its case, so distracted was he by the older teenager’s record collection.