Metallica: Enter Night (4 page)

Disillusioned with life in balmy Newport Beach, frustrated by his apparently futile attempts to find other like-minded souls to play his drums with, and, although he wouldn’t have owned up to himself about it at the time, desperately looking for something to fill the gap left in his – and his parents’ – life by his failure to make a go of a tennis career, Lars sought both a quick escape and, maybe, a more realistic chance of at least meeting others who felt the same way he did about music. Talking it over with his mother and father, they were, as ever, supportive. In Denmark they had allowed him to travel around alone. ‘In those days in Denmark, a child of eight or nine could take the bus to the concert hall and listen and then come back on their own,’ Torben recalled. ‘And then sometimes he would fall asleep on the bus and the conductor would say, “Now it’s time to get up and go home.”’ In that context, allowing your seventeen-year-old son to catch a plane across the Atlantic on his own was hardly a stretch – as long as he promised to write home and, when possible, phone, just to let his mother know he was safe, and with the unspoken agreement that when he returned he would at least settle on some sort of plan, whether that be going on to college or finding a proper job. Lars bought himself a return ticket to London and made ready to leave – alone.

Then, just a few weeks before he left, ‘I got this call from this guy named Hugh Tanner who had seen my ad [and] he came down and we had a jam, and he brought this guy James Hetfield along…’ That first meeting did not go well, though. Hugh and James went down to meet Lars together. Unsure who was auditioning for whom, the first number they tried out together was ‘Hit the Lights’. Lars ‘had one cymbal that kept falling over’, James recalled. ‘We had to stop while he fixed it.’ When it was over, he said, ‘It was, “What the fuck was that?”’ It wasn’t just Lars’ rudimentary abilities on the drums. It was ‘his mannerisms, his looks, his accent, his attitude’. Even, he said, ‘his smell’, reflecting on the difference between American shower-a-day standards of hygiene and Lars’ own more ‘European’ habit of going days without bathing, wearing the same shirt and jeans until they became stiff with sweat. As far as James Hetfield was concerned, Lars might have stepped off a spaceship. A stranger in a strange land, there was no way he could see it working out between them.

Lars was also less than impressed. James’ singing voice in those days had yet to evolve into the ferocious growl it’s now famous for. Instead, he sang in an affected, high-pitched aggro-castrato, part Rob Halford, part Robert Plant, part strangled squeal. Lars was also put off by what he perceived as the frankly unfriendly vibe emanating from the singer, who hardly spoke and refused even to make eye contact. His first encounter of the man who he would later characterise as ‘the king of alienation…almost afraid of social contact’, Lars went away that day utterly disillusioned. ‘We had a jam and not much materialised,’ he told me, ‘and I got kind of pissed off with the whole thing.’ Not with playing, but with the idea of ever finding anyone in America to play with. Instead, he reverted to another plan he’d been hatching: to leave America behind and return to Europe. Not to Denmark, but to Britain, ‘where the action was’. When, with the same incorrigible panache he had exhibited in his days waiting in hotel lobbies for Ritchie Blackmore’s autograph, he wrote to Linda Harris and asked if he might come and visit her and her son one day, and maybe come and watch the band play, Linda breezily agreed, never expecting the enquiry to go any further than that. But then she had never met anyone quite like Lars Ulrich.

‘Lars would always come up with these things that he wanted to do,’ says Brian Slagel. ‘We’d be like, “Yeah, whatever, right, Lars, sure.” So he was going to go over to England, like: “I have to go over there, I’m gonna start hanging out with the bands.” So, right, whatever. We figured he was gonna go. So he went, then I remember he called us one time…“Guess what I’m doing?” “What?” “I’m hanging out with Diamond Head!” “Yeah, right.” He’s like “Don’t believe me?” and he puts Sean Harris on the phone. Not only has he
seen
them but he’s hanging out with them. It was insane! He would kind of think up these things that he wanted to do and make happen, which you really thought never could happen, the Diamond Head thing being one of many examples. It kind of blew me away, some seventeen-year-old kid on his own just going to England. That’s one thing to go over and see the scene and see the shows, but to actually be able to hang out with the band was really pretty amazing.’

Looking back at Lars Ulrich’s arrival in their midst now, almost three decades later, Diamond Head guitarist Brian Tatler still laughs at his young fan’s audacity. ‘He started sending handwritten letters over, saying “I live in [America] and I love all this NWOBHM movement.” Then he must have seen that we were touring in the summer of ’81, the big tour where we were doing the Woolwich Odeon, and he must have bought a ticket and decided to fly over to England and see his favourite band Diamond Head. This was just as a fan; he wouldn’t say he was a drummer or anything. It would be like, “This guy, Lars, from America, has sent another letter.” Then he turned up at the Woolwich Odeon and introduced himself and we were all really impressed because no one had ever flown from [America] to see Diamond Head before. It seemed like an amazing feat. I’d never been to America and he was seventeen, pitched up backstage and introduced himself! We were chuffed. We asked where he was staying and he was like, “I don’t know, I’ve just come straight from the airport,” and I said, “Come stay with me, if you like?” So he jumped in the car with us and we just squeezed him in. After that, Lars used to go everywhere with us,’ including two more Diamond Head shows: one in Leeds, one in Hereford, ‘all squashed up in the back of Sean’s Austin Allegro’.

Lars stayed at Brian’s for a week. The guitarist still lived with his parents and Lars would crash out on Brian’s thinly carpeted bedroom floor, wrapped in his brother’s moth-eaten old sleeping bag. Most nights they would go to the pub for a drink. ‘One night we walked home ’cos we’d missed the bus and got completely soaked,’ Brian recalls. ‘He told me he hadn’t got a spare change of clothes. So I found a pair of me brother’s old yellow flares at the bottom of the wardrobe and he put those on. I probably should have took a picture. He was just a character, you know? Full of beans, full of energy. Full of the enthusiasm for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.’ When they got home from the pub they would sit together watching a Betamax video Brian had recently procured of the 1974 California Jam – the festival at which a then-unknown vocalist named David Coverdale made his debut American appearance with Deep Purple. Lars ‘loved that’, says Brian; ‘we used to watch that into the early hours. And he used to mime the solos and all that, ’cos he was big into Deep Purple and Blackmore was it.’ Another video favourite was Lynyrd Skynyrd supporting the Stones at Knebworth, which Brian had taped off the TV, Lars rolling around on the floor doing the guitar solo to ‘Freebird’.

I wondered how the teenager had managed financially while he was in England. ‘He’d got loads of money!’ reveals Brian. ‘I think maybe his dad was well off or something. I thought: how come he’s got all this money? He’d got probably a hundred and fifty quid on him or something.’ A substantial figure in 1981. ‘He wanted to buy all these copies of
Sounds
off me. He hadn’t got ’em and they’d got loads of interesting features about maybe Angel Witch or whatever. He also went to Pinnacle Records, the distributor. I think he just found his way there. He just disappeared one day and said, “I’m going to Pinnacle,” and got on the train and figured it out and came back with, like, a big armful of albums and singles. He’d bought about forty records! And then we’d sit there and play them, he’d put these records on one after the other, you know, by [groups like] Fist and Sledgehammer and Witchfynde and god knows what. We’d say, “Ooh, that’s good” and “Don’t like that bit there”. We’d sit and dissect these albums. Anyway, after a week he went to Sean’s and stayed for a whole month apparently, and slept on his couch and raided the fridge. Sean said [Lars] used to stop up all night listening to “It’s Electric” on the headphones.’ He chuckles. More significantly, Tatler recalls how the young Ulrich would ‘watch us [when] we’d rehearse. I’d go to Sean’s and be writing songs and [Lars would] be sat in the corner watching, just observing…Sean had got a little four-track, a TEAC, and we’d be making demos as we’d go. And probably [Lars] was picking up on the vibe, and this is how you write songs and this is what you do.’

He never mentioned that he played drums, though?

‘He didn’t mention that at all. He never once said, “I’m a drummer,” or “I’m gonna form a band” or “Can I have a go on your drums?” Maybe he didn’t think he was very good, or didn’t think he was up to Duncan [Scott]’s standard, I don’t know. He was just a good kid [and] he had that very strange accent. That amused us for weeks.’

According to received wisdom, Lars Ulrich ended his summer sojourn in the UK by somehow finagling his way into Jackson’s Studio in Rickmansworth, where another of his favourite bands, Motörhead, were in the process of recording their
Iron Fist
album. Speaking now, though, Motörhead leader Lemmy says he has ‘no recollection at all of Lars being there in the studio when we were recording the album. I’m not saying he wasn’t, but it’s so long ago my memory is very hazy of that period.’ Before adding, benevolently, ‘But if Lars says he was there, then I won’t contradict him.’ What Lemmy does recall, however, is a very young and fresh-faced Lars Ulrich turning up at several gigs during the West Coast leg of the band’s first tour of America supporting Ozzy Osbourne, earlier that same year, just weeks before Lars left for the UK. This would tally with Brian Tatler’s recollection of Lars taking him to see Motörhead during his stay that summer when the band headlined Port Vale football ground, where, in a reverse of the situation in America, Ozzy Osbourne was now the opening ‘special guest’ act. ‘[Lars] told me he knew Lemmy and would be able to blag a couple of passes,’ says Tatler. So they took the train to Stoke-on-Trent where Lars did indeed see Lemmy and got both himself and Brian backstage passes for the show.

‘I first met Lars in about 1981,’ confirms Lemmy. ‘It was definitely before Metallica were even together. That first occasion was in my hotel room in Los Angeles. He introduced himself as the guy who ran the Motörhead Fan Club in America – well, it turned out that this was an unofficial branch of the Motörheadbangers, and he was the only member. He never actually had anything to do with the official fan club, although he obviously loved the band. The meeting will always stay in my mind, because he wanted to have a drink with me, and clearly wasn’t used to drinking my measures, so he threw up. It wasn’t that bad, and I didn’t make him clear up or anything like that, but I did insist that he wore a bib for the rest of his time with me in the room.’ He adds with a smirk: ‘Oddly, he threw up the next time we met as well. He hadn’t got any better at this drinking lark. Maybe I should have offered to give him lessons. Or perhaps it’s a strange Danish greeting. I do recall one night – it must have been in about 1985 – when I met up with Lars at the St Moritz Club [in central London]. Anyone who knew anything about me would always know I’d be down there on the fruit machine. Lars came down, and insisted we go drink for drink – and I think he paid for most of it. So, okay we did it, and he ended up virtually passing out. Give the kid credit, though, he kept coming back for more…’

One other band Lars Ulrich definitely did hook up with in the summer of 1981 was Iron Maiden – though not in Britain but at a small club show in Copenhagen, where he intentionally made a stop-off in order to see them before returning home to America. ‘I met [Maiden bassist and founder] Steve Harris for the first time in 1981,’ he recalled. They were playing ‘at a place the size of your living room’. Nevertheless, for the seventeen-year-old rich kid and aspirant megastar, at that moment ‘Iron Maiden were the best rock band in the world’. He added, ‘But it wasn’t just the music.’ There was quantity as well as quality; a factor he would later utilise to deliberate effect in Metallica. Maiden would ‘put ten minutes more music on albums than any other rock band’. They had ‘the best packaging, the coolest T-shirts, everything’. There was ‘a depth to [their] whole organisation that was great for fans like me, and it was a big inspiration for us in Metallica. I wanted to give the same quality to kids who were into our band.’ It was also the last time Maiden singer Paul Di’Anno would sing with the band: sacked for allowing his drug habits to get in the way of Maiden’s rocket-like upward surge. Going backstage after the show to say hello and get their autographs, Lars noticed there was clearly only one leader of Iron Maiden: Steve Harris. It taught him an important lesson, he later told Harris: ‘True democracy doesn’t work in a band.’

The crazy little kid with the funny accent and the energy to burn was learning fast. Or as he later put it to me, ‘That’s one of the reasons Metallica exists, because I’d sit there and learn from the Motörheads and Diamond Heads and Iron Maidens, because I was so far up their asses all the time – as a punter, absorbing and learning the vibe. That’s what made me realise I wanted to do this shit myself.’

Miami, or maybe Tampa, the Monsters of Rock tour, 1988, walking down the hotel corridor, Kirk and I.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘do I smell…what is it? Wait…lavender?’

‘Yeah,’ I smiled. ‘I’ve just been dousing myself. Gotta headache.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘lavender is supposed to be good for that, right?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘they call it the medicine chest in a bottle.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘what do you do, like, put drops on your clothes?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘or maybe rub some on the inside of your wrists or your temples. Better than taking aspirin.’

‘Sure,’ he said.

I liked Kirk. It was a relief talking to him. We were both vegetarian, smoked a lot of weed and liked to kick back. We stood there waiting for the elevator to come. The door slid open and there was James inside.

‘Hey,’ said Kirk, smiling.

‘Hey,’ said James, not smiling.

‘Hey,’ I said, but he just ignored me, barely nodded. I wasn’t surprised. To James I was just another one of Lars’ little friends and Lars had a lot of those. I decided to ignore him and carry on my conversation with Kirk.

‘So,’ I said, ‘are you into essential oils then?’

Kirk looked aghast. ‘What?’ he spluttered. ‘No! I mean…no! I’ve read a little about them, I wouldn’t say I was like
into
them.’ He made to laugh it off as James looked down at us and glared fiercely.

I felt like I’d just had a bucket of water – or worse – thrown over me. Like, shut the fuck up, fool! You don’t talk about gay stuff like essential oils in front of James! Jesus, what are you, fuckin’ crazy?

Realising my blunder, I wanted to turn and run. There was no escape, though, as we rode the elevator in silence the rest of the way down to the lobby. As we all walked into the bar together, I noticed Kirk affecting a sort of mini-Hetfield saunter. Safety in numbers, I found myself doing the same. There was a tape of an Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay show blaring from the big video screen on the bar-room wall and we all sat down to watch it, ordered three bottles of Sapporo (large), and began yucking it up. The Dice was a very Hetfield sort of a guy, took no shit from homos or foreigners. Told it like it was; mouth like a machine-gun. The Dice was a very Metallica sort of guy, I realised. I just hoped the smell of lavender didn’t get in the way of James’ beer…

They say opposites attract. That was not the case when Lars Ulrich and James Alan Hetfield met for the first time, in May 1981. Born in Los Angeles, on 3 August 1963, on the surface the only thing James appeared to have in common with Lars was their age. Where Lars was small and doll-like, pretty-boy Eurotrash who ate with his mouth open and would go days without showering, James was tall and rangy, a full-blooded young American of Irish-German descent who brushed his teeth twice a day and always wore clean underwear. Where Lars never shut up, James never used two words where none would do. Where Lars came from a background of money and travel, of music and art, of multilingual, open-door hippy liberalism, James came from a plain-folks working-class family with strict fundamentalist religious beliefs, latterly an absentee father and, most recently and painfully, a tragically deceased mother. Where Lars was ready to push his way through any door and say, ‘Hi’, James stayed in the shadows, couldn’t even bring himself to meet anyone in the eye. People sometimes mistook this reticence for shyness. But James wasn’t shy, he was volcanically angry; a hair trigger waiting to go off. Years later, James would tell me his ‘favourite film of all time has got to be
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
’. Why? I asked. ‘’Cos there’s three characters in it that are completely different and I find a little piece of me in each one of them,’ he said. You knew just what he meant. Whiskery and brooding, James was a man’s man, born to die, a throwback to a time not that long before when Injun-killing frontiersmen that talked and walked a lot like him had built America, all guns blazing. At least, that’s how he appeared from the outside. From the inside looking out, however, for the young James Hetfield the world was often a frightening place, full of mendacity and betrayal, liars that would only let you down. This was the place he feared more than anything, and which he allowed his anger to shield him from. Once memorably described as looking like the cowardly lion from
The Wizard of Oz
, James Hetfield actually resembled the wizard himself – a timid, unsure character hiding behind a big scary screen image.

James’ father Virgil had been a truck driver: a big, ambitious, outdoorsy sort of guy who eventually ended up running his own trucking company. He’d married James’ mother, Cynthia, when she was at her most desperate: a no longer young divorcee with two young sons, Christopher and David. Virgil was a good guy who also taught part-time at Sunday school; a responsible sort of feller who James, his first of two children with Cynthia, looked up to even though he was strict. Once, when James and his younger sister, Deanna, ran away from home, Cynthia and Virgil found them hiding ‘about four blocks away’. When they got them home, James recalled, ‘They spanked the shit out of us, pretty much.’ Although James and Deanna would often ‘fight like cats and dogs’, they would always regroup in front of their parents. As James told me in 2009, ‘We’d help each other clean up the mess, and cover for each other with stories. So it was one of those things: love, hate.’ His older, half-brothers were more distant, ‘pretty much a generation apart and unfortunately it wasn’t as bonding…not quite old enough to tell me what to do and not young enough to understand what I wanted to hear or hang with, so it was kind of an awkward middle position there, but me and my sister were pretty tight’.

When James Hetfield was thirteen, his dad walked out of the house one day and never came back, didn’t even say goodbye. In the vain hope that perhaps her husband would return, Cynthia told the youngest kids that their father had merely left for a long business trip. It was weeks before she finally gave James and his younger sister Deanna the bad news. Even then, there was no explanation, just that daddy was gone, wasn’t coming back, and let’s leave it at that, okay kids? No. Not okay, actually. Not okay at all, especially for Deanna, a daddy’s girl who had always been the ‘rebellious one’, according to James, and who now went completely off the rails. James’ reaction was no less turbulent but less obvious. He held it all in, put a stern face on it, not brave exactly, just expressionless, hard, what he called ‘my stay-the-fuck-away-from-me face’. The one he would wear for almost all of the next twenty years. ‘It was very confusing for me, as a kid, to not know what’s going on,’ he would later say. Coming home from school some days to find his father’s things missing – retrieved by Virgil while the kids were out of the house so as to cause as little disruption as possible – didn’t soften the blow, only sharpened the pain and sense of betrayal. ‘It was kind of hidden. That’s a big character defect that I still carry – I think everyone’s hiding something from me.’

At school, before his father had left, James told me, he had been ‘a pretty average student. Pretty quiet, pretty reserved, just kind of get it done and then go home and, you know, have fun and play, do whatever.’ A lover of sports, the only things that held him back, he said, were the consequences of his parents’ strict adherence to the Christian Science belief system. A misnomer, in that Christian Science forbids its followers any sort of practical engagement with science, including, most distressingly, modern medicine, whether that be taking aspirin for a headache or receiving hospital treatment for fatal accidents or illnesses. One of those nouveau American religions that had sprung up in the nineteenth century, that no other people on Earth would have taken seriously, it still holds huge sway in certain sections of mainly working-class US society. James still sighs heavily when asked to talk about it. ‘It didn’t impact on the school,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t like they had their own schooling or like going to a Catholic school. It certainly did affect me, though. It affected me more than my sister and my brothers, where I…I don’t know, I think I took it a little more personally.’ He paused, considered his words. ‘Our parents didn’t take us to the doctor. We were basically relying on the spiritual power of the religion to heal us or to shield us from being sick or injured. And so at school [because] that’s what my parents requested, I wasn’t allowed to sit through health class, to learn about the body, to learn about illnesses and things like that. And, say, you know, I’m trying out for the football team, you have to get a physical, to get a doctor’s note…I’d have to go and explain to the coach that, hey, our religion says this. So I felt really like an outcast…alienated. Kids would laugh about it and I took it personally and some of the more, I think, traumatic stuff for me was [when] health class would begin, I would be standing in the hallway, which was basically a form of punishment in other aspects. Hey, you’ve been bad, you’ve got to go to the Principal’s office or you stand out in front of the class. So everyone who walked by would look at me like I’d been some criminal of sorts, you know?’

It was tough but, he suggests, it also ‘helped mould who I was, you know?’ Not that James saw it that way at the time. ‘When you’re young you want to be like everyone else, you don’t want to be unique. But I see the uniqueness in it now and it’s helped me to, uh, you know, accept and embrace the uniqueness of me.’ It was those difficult early experiences of always being the odd man out at school, James now believes, that nurtured his ability to not run with the pack, to always stand just a little bit apart from the rest of the gang. ‘It helped me carve my own path, and even the spiritual part of it; when you’re a kid you can’t really grasp the concept of spirituality. It was a very adult type of concept and for me not going to the doctor was strange. All I saw was the people in the church that had broken bones and they were healing wrong – it didn’t make any sense to me. So when I was saying these things to the [sports] coaches or teachers I was just speaking for my parents, I wasn’t really speaking for myself, so it was a kind of a sell-out thing, which I really never wanted to do again. But also it helped me embrace the spiritual concept later on, and actually see the power in that, along with the knowledge of doctors these days, so it did help me with my concept of spirituality.’

It would be many years, however, precipitated by lengthy and still ongoing counselling sessions, before James Hetfield was ready to give any ground on these particular points. After his father left in 1977, ‘I just said to my mom: “I’m not going to Sunday school any more. Make me.” That was it.’ Instead, music – one of the few forms of expression open to him as a kid that could be enjoyed alone – would become first a solace, then a guard and, eventually, an inspiration. Long before he became interested in rock, though, there was the classical piano, which Cynthia – whose hobbies included amateur operatics, painting and some graphic design – first encouraged him to study when he was nine. James told me: ‘What it was, my mom had seen me over at a friend’s house just kind of start bashing on the piano. I was more or less playing drums on the piano and she thought, “Oh, he’s gonna be a musician, okay, we’ll sign him up for piano.” I did that for a couple of years and it was really a bit of a turn-off because it was learning classical pieces, stuff that I wasn’t listening to on the radio, you know? I remember it was an older woman’s house and the cookies at the end was the big deal, so something was cool about it. But I remember she had some music that she put out that we were gonna learn, and it was called “Joy to the World” [the Christmas carol adapted from an old English hymn]. I thought it was [starts singing] “Joy to the world!”, you know [the 1971 pop hit by Three Dog Night], but it was not. I got a little excited, like, “I heard my brother play that song before!” But it was theory.’ Discouraged at the time, he is now ‘so glad it was somewhat forced upon me because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now. It gave me an idea of that, that’s natural to do. So singing and playing are somewhat easier than it probably could have been if I hadn’t [studied] piano.’

He discovered rock via his older brothers’ record collection. ‘I was always looking for something different, something other people didn’t always dig. When I was into Black Sabbath, all my friends would go, “Oh, my mom won’t let me have that album. It’s scary and I’ll have nightmares.” I thought that was funny, so I had to go out and get it.’ Groups like The Beatles ‘and shit like that’, he said, ‘I never dug so much’. It was around now that he also tried his hand at playing his brother David’s drums, but couldn’t get it going. He was fourteen, he told me, before he remembers ‘picking up a guitar for the first time and going, “How do they make all these noises?”’ He couldn’t ‘remember learning’ to actually play one. ‘I started off with an acoustic then started fiddling around, and then learning the chords, and it just kind of went on from there, I guess. But it seemed to go pretty quickly and I was playing in a band pretty soon, like within a year or two: playing cover songs, which is certainly the way to learn guitar.’ He would also ‘slow down LPs, trying to learn stuff’. Listening; copying; repeating; always alone. ‘I liked being alone,’ he later told writer Ben Mitchell. ‘I liked being able to close off the world. And music helped with that a lot.’ He would put the headphones on and just drift away, digging Kiss and Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper: all-American hard rock; irony-free, kick-ass music for straight-shooting dudes that didn’t dance but liked to party. ‘I didn’t get into other stuff until being introduced to Lars.’ The first concert he went to was in July 1978, just before his sixteenth birthday: Aerosmith supported by AC/DC at the Long Beach Arena. Aerosmith’s 1976 album
Rocks
‘was one of the albums I could play over and over; it was filled with good stuff’. The same summer he also bought a ticket for the two-day California World Music Festival, also featuring Aerosmith, alongside Ted Nugent and Van Halen. ‘I remember following around my buddy, who was selling drugs. He tore up a part of his ticket – it had a kind of rainbow edge – and he cut it into bits and sold it as acid. I was like, “What are you doing, man?” He used the money to buy beer.’ Working his way through the crowd to the front, James recalled being ‘blown away’ by the fact that Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler addressed the crowd ‘as “motherfuckers”. I was like, “Whoa – are you supposed to do that?”’