Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (4 page)

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.