Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (6 page)

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 metal 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.

‘I was into bands that a lot of people were into – Kiss and Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and all that kinda stuff – and I knew there was something out there that was further out,’ says Scott. ‘Then I started seeing Judas Priest records and I looked at the pictures on them and I knew that this had to be what I was looking for … so then I just started buying records based on the
covers themselves. I used to go to a record store in Costa Mesa, California, which was kinda between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and we’d go to this store called Music Market and they’d have a bunch of imports there. And then we started seeing Neat Record releases and I found the
Lead Weight
tape that had Raven and Venom and Bitches Sin and all that stuff on it, and that was taking it a little further. And it kinda went from there.

‘But it’s a funny thing that Lars and I never jammed. I was a beginning guitar player, and I didn’t want to go out until I could really play. Lars was [starting out as] a drummer at that point, but he just wanted to play. He didn’t care that he wasn’t really up to a certain standard of proficiency as a drummer, he didn’t care, he just wanted to go out there and play. And you know, he did the right thing.’

‘People would come over to talk to me about Van Halen or whoever,’ says Ulrich, ‘and I’d be like “No, no, no, we gotta learn how to play [songs by] Trespass or that Witchfinder General song or Silverwing’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Are Four Letter Words’. I have recordings of me jamming those songs with other people, but they never got it. Hetfield was the only other person who got psyched about those bands …’

Frustrated with the lack of progress, in the summer of 1981 Ulrich decided to take his New Wave of British Heavy Metal obsession to its logical conclusion by undertaking a road trip to England. On the evening of Friday, July 10, 1981 the
seventeen-year
-old pitched up outside the Woolwich Odeon in south London and handed over £3 in exchange for a ticket in the stalls to see his new favourite band. He would subsequently describe the evening as ‘life-changing’.

When the hype around the New Wave of British Heavy Metal first began to build, Stourbridge quartet Diamond Head were billed as the scene’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin. Built around the high-pitched vocals and matinee idol looks of front man Sean
Harris and the muscular riffing of guitarist Brian Tatler, the band’s independently released debut seven-inch single ‘Shoot Out the Lights’ attracted the attention of the United Kingdom’s major label A&R fraternity. All approaches, however, were rebuffed by manager Linda Harris, Sean’s mother, who wanted to build the band’s profile to a point where, like Zeppelin before them, they could dictate their career on their own terms. By the time the quartet released their debut album
Lightning to the Nations
on their own Happy Face records, Ulrich was a confirmed fan.

‘I’d heard the single “Shoot Out the Lights”/ “Helpless” and it was good, but it didn’t particularly stand out from all the other stuff coming out in 1980,’ Ulrich admitted. ‘But then I heard “It’s Electric” on a compilation called
Brute Force
, and it blew my fucking head off. Diamond Head had a vibe and an attitude no other band could match.’

After the show, displaying the kind of breezy nonchalance that was fast becoming his trademark, Ulrich knocked on the stage door and asked to speak to Linda, with whom he had been corresponding by letter while awaiting delivery of his
mail-order
copy of
Lightning to the Nations
that spring. Astonished that a seventeen-year-old boy had flown across the Atlantic to see her son’s band, Harris immediately ushered the
sweat-drenched
teenager into Diamond Head’s dressing room. When Tatler enquired as to where Ulrich was staying, the young Dane shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve just come straight from the airport.’ Given the lateness of the hour, and the fact that parts of south London had been on fire just one week earlier as racial discord spilled over into street riots, the guitarist offered to let the precocious tourist crash out at his parents’ house in Stourbridge. Within the hour Ulrich was sandwiched in the back of Sean Harris’s Austin Allegro bound for the West Midlands. ‘I think I was just pretty tenacious back then,’ he laughs.

The drummer slept at the foot of Tatler’s bed for the next week,
before relocating to Harris’s couch for another month. During his time, Ulrich accompanied Diamond Head to gigs in Hereford and Leeds, blagged Tatler and himself into the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival co-headlined by Motörhead and Ozzy Osbourne in Stoke on August 1, spent a small fortune on vinyl and passed many a night getting drunk on pints of snakebite in Stourbridge pubs. But not once did Ulrich mention to his friends the fact that he himself was a drummer with dreams of starting a band.

‘I was just some fucking snot-nosed Danish kid who was really excited about their music and, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but I think they were psyched about having a guy around who was as passionate about their music as they were,’ Ulrich later recalled. ‘[I enjoyed] being around them and watching them write and, watching them play, watching them interact with each other, watching their relationship with the music around them, you know, in terms of Zeppelin and stuff that was inspiring them and so on. I was just interested then in how bands worked.’

In mid-August Ulrich said farewell to his new friends and travelled south to London ahead of his flight to Copenhagen. He had one final mission in mind.

In the summer of 1981, when their ferocious, feral live album
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
debuted atop the UK album chart, Motörhead could justifiably lay claim to being not only the noisiest rock band in the United Kingdom, but also the most popular. In the wake of their headline bow at the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival, the trio’s redoubtable leader Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister decided to capitalise on his band’s momentum by booking a room at Nomis studios in west London for the purpose of writing material for what would be their fifth studio album. To Lemmy, the unscheduled appearance of a slight Danish teenager at the rehearsal room door one August afternoon would prove to be only a minor distraction; for Lars Ulrich the experience was nothing less than ‘a mindfuck’.

‘Motörhead were obviously among my two or three favourite bands,’ says Ulrich. ‘I’d met Motörhead when they were opening for Ozzy in June 1981. That was their first kind of big tour of America so I followed them around California – San Diego, LA, San Francisco – I even drove behind the tour bus at one point. They were very easy-going, friendly people and invited me in. A month or two later, I found out they were rehearsing at Nomis [so I] rang the doorbell and within thirty minutes I was sitting in [their] rehearsal room.’