40 years ago, an underground band from Los Angeles released their debut album. Metallica became superstars in the 80s – and so did their drummer Lars Ulrich.
There was a moment in his life when Lars Ulrich had to choose between sport and music, between tennis and heavy metal. His decision to pursue a career as a rock star paid off. As the founder of the US heavy metal band Metallica, the drummer, who turns 60 on Boxing Day, celebrated successes that he hardly dared to dream of as a teenager. “My body may look like it has 60 years of wear and tear, but my mind strenuously contradicts that,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “I still feel like the 18-year-old who doesn’t even check any of this.”
From an underground band in the early 1980s, Metallica established themselves as one of the leading heavy metal bands with riff-heavy hits like “Seek & Destroy”, “Battery” and “Enter Sandman” and sweaty shows, thanks in part to Ulrich’s intense and powerful drumming. groups in the world. Just this year, Ulrich and Co. played a worldwide stadium tour with two concerts in each city, where the set list of songs varied from evening to evening.
Lars Ulrich’s childhood, however, began quietly. Born on December 26, 1963 in the tranquil Danish town of Gentofte, he grew up in an environment that was shaped by his father’s cultural interests. Torben Ulrich was a professional tennis player and a big music fan. “When I was growing up, my dad played a lot of jazz – Coltrane, Miles, Dexter Gordon, Ornette Coleman,” Ulrich Jr. told Classic Rock magazine, “and a little rock – Hendrix, the Stones, the Doors.”
Decision for music
Perhaps the decisive impulse for his career was a concert by the hard rock band Deep Purple, to which his father took the then nine-year-old Lars with him and which made a lasting impression on him. According to reports, he also had the talent to follow in the sporting footsteps of his father, who was a tennis professional from the 1940s to the 70s. But young Lars’ passion for music prevailed.
His grandparents gave him his first drum set. As a teenager, Ulrich moved to California with his family. In his new home, he continued to be particularly enthusiastic about music from Europe and purchased British records from an import mail order company. Ulrich was so impressed by the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal with representatives like Iron Maiden, Saxon and Diamond Head that he flew to Great Britain to see some of these groups live.
According to Diamond Head, the song “It’s Electric” made him want to form his own band. “After I heard the song for the first time, I probably played it around 9,000 times in the following months, I think,” said Ulrich in the “GQ” interview. “If there was ever a song that made me want to be in a band, it was this one. I was still very busy with tennis at the time, but that quickly went down the drain.”
Decision for music
With singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield, whom Ulrich had met through a newspaper ad, he eventually founded the band Metallica in Los Angeles, which initially included bassist Ron McGovney and the later Megadeth founder and frontman Dave Mustaine as a guitarist. As the US rock scene became increasingly dominated by glam or hair metal bands such as Mötley Crüe, Poison and Ratt, Metallica gave their first concert on March 14, 1982 at the Radio City club in Anaheim, California.
“We felt like total outsiders,” said Ulrich in a live interview on stage at the New York cultural center “92Y.” “But Metallica started out as a cover band. We thought if we covered all these songs by unknown bands from England that no one had heard of, then people might think they were originals.” Only later did he write his own songs with Hetfield. According to Ulrich, “Hit The Lights” was the first.
They initially described their style as Power Metal, but today it is called Thrash Metal. Metallica, whose current line-up is completed by guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo, are among the pioneers of the genre. Her song “Whiplash” from the first album “Kill ‘Em All” from 1983 is also considered to be the origin of the term. The lyrics say: “You’re thrashing all around, acting like a maniac, whiplash!”
Success and changes
The breakthrough came in 1986 with the LP “Master Of Puppets”, an absolute classic of the genre. Two years later, “…And Justice For All” was released and brought Metallica their first Grammy nomination. In 1990 they received the coveted music award for the first time for their song “One”. Their biggest commercial success was “Metallica,” known as the “black album,” which was released in 1991. The band then changed their style and even released ballads for the first time with “The Unforgiven” and the hit “Nothing Else Matters”.
“72 Seasons”, Metallica’s eleventh and final studio album, was released in April and impressed fans and critics. According to Lars Ulrich, if your health cooperates, many more albums and tours will follow. He gave up cocaine use around 20 years ago and only drinks alcohol occasionally. “Who would have thought that Metallica would still exist, that we would survive all of this, and that people would still be interested in us?” the drummer told Rolling Stone. “That’s really cool.”
During this long musical life, father Torben Ulrich was always a critical and beloved companion of the drummer. A few days before Christmas and his son’s big birthday, he died at the proud age of 95, as Lars Ulrich announced on Instagram. “95 years of adventure, unique experiences, curiosity, crossing boundaries, questioning the status quo, tennis, music, art, writing… and a whole lot of Danish contrarianism,” he wrote alongside a black-and-white photo of his father and others Recordings. “Thank you endlessly! I love you, daddy.”