Metallica: Enter Night (2 page)

Given his extrovert personality and, some would say, over-willingness to be the mouthpiece for Metallica, I once asked him why such an obvious frontman had ended up at the back of the stage as a drummer. ‘Well, there’s just one problem,’ he chortled. ‘I couldn’t [sing]. I mean, when I tried to sing in the shower it bothered me. And so if I couldn’t even capture an audience of one in the shower, you know, I realised that was not gonna happen. And I just always loved drumming. I mean, I can’t remember ever having a conscious moment where I sat there and said, “Being a drummer and having my Type A personality is kind of gonna clash.” It just never dawned upon me that I would not be able to be myself. That whole thing of like, oh my God, if you’re a drummer you have to shut up and only speak when spoken to and hang out in the background. That never registered on my radar.’

Ironically, it wasn’t until he took his most serious step as a fledgling tennis pro that his commitment finally switched for ever to becoming a drummer: enrolment, at sixteen, in Nick Bollettieri’s now world-famous – then the first of its kind – tennis academy in Florida. Says Lars, ‘When you grow up in [tennis] circles it’s almost like you get dragged into it. I can’t remember ever sitting there and making like a super-conscious decision about being a professional tennis player; it was what I knew. It wasn’t until a little later, after I finished school, and we moved to America for me to actually pursue this tennis thing more full-on – out on my own, out of the shadow of my dad’s wing – that I realised that not only did I not have the talent to really follow in his footsteps, but I certainly didn’t have the discipline. You know, you’re sixteen, you’re just having a couple beers, you’re having your first experience with girls and other things, and all of a sudden it’s like, I gotta be out there six hours a day hitting fucking tennis balls back and forth? It just got a little…too disciplined for my tastes.’ He laughed.

In the end, he spent less than six months in Florida studying with Bollettieri. ‘I went the first year in 1979 after I finished school – to kind of see if I wanted to do that. I was still kind of infatuated with it enough. That was the first year [it opened], way before Monica Seles or [Andre] Agassi or Pete Sampras or any of the other guys [that went there].’ A top-ten-ranked junior in Denmark, coming to America proved a rude awakening. Moving from Miami to Los Angeles, ‘I was gonna go to this high school ’cos my dad was very close with Roy Emerson, the tennis player. And so I went to the same high school as [Roy’s son] Anthony Emerson and I was gonna be on the tennis team with him. Well, guess what? I wasn’t one of the seven best players at the high school. I didn’t actually make the fucking tennis team at high school! That’s how competitive it was. It was pretty crazy.’ There were other discouragements. Torben was tall; Lars was short, just five foot six, a marked disadvantage. Yet Bollettieri himself believes now that with proper application Lars might have made it as a wealthy mid-level tennis pro. ‘He could move extremely well and had a lot of ability.’ And while ‘We knew Lars was not going to be as tall as his father, nor did we expect for him to really bulk up’, the real problem was ‘he was not dedicated to the rigorous work it would require’. Or as Torben put it in a 2005 interview with Leigh Weathersby: ‘[Lars] was very interested in tennis at that time, but he was also very interested in music. After a year he still wanted to go out and listen to the concerts and I think at the Academy they were not so keen that he stayed out, so he was reprimanded there for keeping some late hours.’ At which point, Lars told me, ‘I sort of realised that maybe this tennis thing was gonna get kind of set to the side and maybe this music thing was gonna be more of a full-time thing.’

If a natural adolescent interest in girls, beer and the occasional puff on a joint were all key factors in moving Lars away from the wooden racquet and more towards the full metal racket, the young Ulrich’s disaffection with tennis also coincided with a moment in rock that was about to write its own noisome chapter in musical history: the self-styled and cumbersomely named New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). ‘It was March 1980,’ Lars would later recall, ‘and I walked into a record store in America, searching for the latest Triumph album or some such shit, and I was over at the import bin poking around. Now this was still before I was truly aware of what was going on in England, so when I came across an album called
Iron Maiden
I had no idea who or what they were. The front cover illustration of “Eddie” [the mummified corpse that would adorn all the formative Maiden record sleeves] could have been done by any one of a hundred bands, but the exciting live shots on the back of the sleeve really stood out. There was something so fucking heavy about the whole vibe – such aggression. Funnily enough, I never even heard the record until I returned to Denmark because I didn’t have a record player with me.’

Without realising it, Lars had stumbled on one of the most important touchstones in what was fast becoming a watershed moment in rock history. By the late summer of 1979, although still unsigned to a major record label, Iron Maiden was already a band clearly on the up. Boosted by the unforeseen success of
The Soundhouse Tapes
, a self-financed EP of a three-track demo recorded for next to nothing,
Sounds
– then one of the most popular weekly music magazines in Britain – had run its first live review of the band: a show at the Music Machine, in London’s Camden Town, where Iron Maiden had been sandwiched between Black Sabbath copyists Angel Witch, and the more bluesy, old-style boogie of Samson (featuring future Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson, then known as Bruce Bruce).
Sounds
’ deputy editor Geoff Barton, who was there that night, would later write: ‘I do definitely recall Maiden being the best band of the evening, infinitely preferable to the Sabs-worshipping Angel Witch and way ahead of Samson.’ What really intrigued Barton, though, he would later tell me, ‘is that a band like Iron Maiden or Angel Witch could even exist at a time like that’, when punk and new wave had apparently killed off the hard rock and metal genre. Sensing the makings of a follow-on feature, Barton talked
Sounds
editor Alan Lewis into allowing him to put together a coverall piece not just on Iron Maiden, but on a whole new generation of rock heavies he dubbed, in deliberately eye-catching tabloid style, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really feel that any of these bands were particularly linked in a musical way,’ says Barton now, ‘but it was interesting that so many of them should be then emerging at more or less the same time. It was a good thing for the genuine rock fans who had really gone to ground, hiding in their wardrobes waiting for punk to go away.’ They had begun ‘by doing a feature on Def Leppard, who had just released their first, independently produced four-track EP,
Getcha Rocks Off
. Then Maiden came along’, followed by ‘Samson and Angel Witch, then Tygers of Pan Tang and Praying Mantis, and so we did features on them, too, and it just kept going from there.’

What not even Barton had foreseen, however, was the enormous purchase that one almost comedic phrase dreamed up one rainy afternoon in the
Sounds
office would have on the music world. ‘We ran the [NWOBHM] feature and the response we got from both the readers and other bands was just phenomenal. It was obvious that, whatever you called it, there was definitely something going on out there. Suddenly there were new heavy metal bands springing up everywhere, it seemed. Of course, not all of them were as [good] as bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, but the fact that they were even trying was news back then and we just ran with it for about two years in the end.’ Ironically, considering the short srift most of the post-punk music critics could be expected to give any band called Praying Mantis or Angel Witch, the motivation behind this resurgence came from a similar dissatisfaction as punk with what a new generation of record-buying kids saw as the self-indulgent, album-oriented monoliths that had preceded them. By 1979, bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, ELP and Yes (all prominent members of the ruling rock royalty of the day) were rarely seen on British stages, and when they did deign to make a fleeting appearance, they invariably spurned the idea of actual touring in favour of a more languorous (not to mention lucrative) handful of dates at a large, impersonal arena like Earls Court in London. Rock bands had become grandiose and pompous; the music they played grown old before its time. As a result, the gap between those on stage and those off had never been greater.

Punk’s response was a desire to see the past wiped out; to start again from the ground up. But in its hurry to tear down the edifice, punk had overlooked the obvious – that at its foundations, hard rock and heavy metal was not so different from what the best punk rock imagined itself to be: raw, alive, unafraid to offend, unafraid to be ridiculed and spat on for the clothes it wore and the lifestyle it chose to expound; alert to the creative possibilities of existing defiantly outside the mainstream. NWOBHM bands had also absorbed the more practical lessons of punk: that you could release limited editions of your own records on small independently run labels, as a spur to later getting longer-term deals with one of the major labels. Hence Def Leppard’s
Getcha Rocks Off
EP, released on their own Bludgeon Riffola label, and Iron Maiden’s home-grown
The Soundhouse Tapes
EP (original copies of which both now exchange hands for several hundred pounds). Saxon and Motörhead, although neither fell strictly speaking into the NWOBHM category, found themselves lumped in anyway, almost entirely by accident of timing and the fact that their first records were also released by independent labels.

Also like punk, NWOBHM fans started their own fanzines: titles such as
Metal Fury
and
Metal Forces
, in the UK, and similar titles around the world like
Metal Mania
and
Metal Rendezvous
in the USA and
Aardshok
in Holland, had all made the leap from the back-room press onto the shelves of record stores and newsagents as the demand for articles on the new, revitalised UK rock scene rapidly grew. With
Sounds
leading the way, the rest of the large-circulation British music press also moved to get in on the act. Malcolm Dome, a life-long hard rock and heavy metal devotee then working as Deputy Editor for Dominion Press, publishers of educational scientific journals such as
Laboratory News
, had begun contributing articles on the NWOBHM scene to
Record Mirror
in 1980, and later became a leading writer for
Kerrang!
. He now describes the years between 1979 and 1981 – the apotheosis of the NWOBHM – as ‘some of the most exciting for new rock music this country has ever witnessed’. Dome had been recruited to
Record Mirror
after their previous in-house rock correspondent, Steve Gett, had been poached by the more prestigious
Melody Maker
, keen not to miss out on what they rightly viewed as a coming wave of important and – more to the point – increasingly popular music. By 1981, the mainstream UK music press was even ready to give birth to the world’s first dedicated rock and metal magazine,
Kerrang!
– originally begun by Geoff Barton as yet another adjunct to
Sounds
’ ongoing nurturing of the no longer quite so jokey NWOBHM scene, now about to become a significant part of the media landscape not just in Britain but around the world.

As Dome recalls, ‘Maiden were regarded as at the top of the pile of the NWOBHM. With the possible exception of Def Leppard, they were obviously streets ahead of everyone else. But, of course, like any scene, it completely fed upon itself.’ As a result of all the media attention they were now attracting, both Maiden and Leppard would score big record contracts: the former with EMI, the latter with Phonogram. Indeed, it became a race between the two as to which would break into the national charts first. Maiden’s commercial potential had been made apparent to EMI when their
Soundhouse Tapes
EP, given limited release in November 1979 on their own Rock Hard Records, sold five thousand copies. Never intended for retail, the five thousand seven-inch vinyl copies of
The Soundhouse Tapes
were made available by mail order only, priced £1.20, including postage and packing, and were distributed by a friend of the band named Keith Wilfort, who enlisted his mother to help him send them out from the family home in East Ham. Miraculously, they managed to send out over three thousand copies within the first week.

After the band then signed with EMI, they spearheaded the release of a NWOBHM compilation, titled
Metal for Muthas
, released in February 1980. The brainchild of EMI young gun Ashley Goodall,
Metal for Muthas
showcased nine avowedly NWOBHM bands, most prominent being Iron Maiden, the only band on the album to have two tracks (‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Wrathchild’). The rest of the album was a mixture of tracks from the likes of genuine NWOBHM stalwarts such as Samson (‘Tomorrow or Yesterday’), Angel Witch (‘Baphomet’), Sledgehammer (‘Sledgehammer’), Praying Mantis (‘Captured City’) and more opportunistic, old-fashioned album-fillers such as Toad the Wet Sprocket, Ethel the Frog, and even former A&M artists Nutz, a band that hardly qualified as ‘new’ at any stage of its unremarkable career. As Malcolm Dome, who reviewed the album for
Record Mirror
, says now, ‘I found it all very exciting. It was a shame they couldn’t get Def Leppard or Diamond Head as well [but] I still think it was actually a fine summation of that period.’

The
Metal for Muthas
tour which followed, was more representative and featured Maiden, Praying Mantis, Tygers of Pan Tang and Raven, all bona fide members of the NWOBHM elite. Then Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton, who’d only just joined the band, told me he was ‘shell-shocked by the response [the shows] got from their fans’. He went on: ‘Musically, it was bordering on punk rock…the audience was just fanatical. To me, it was all heavy metal music, but for some reason the fans could pick out that Maiden were different.’ Fellow Maiden guitarist Dave Murray remembers it as ‘people just waiting for the tour to arrive. It felt like the punk thing was kind of coming to an end and there was this gap and that everybody was just waiting for something to happen again. And it was great because rock was supposed to be dead, you know, but the reality was there was loads of kids out there who were coming to the shows or forming their own bands.’