Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (5 page)

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 Status 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.

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 cover 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.