REFLECTIONS OF METALLICA

“Oh, sorry,” a strangely accented voice mumbles into the phone. “An interview, right. I was just, er, sleeping. Well, uh, you could come up to this room I guess.” The phone goes silent a minute. “Hey,” drummer and band spokesman Lars Ulrich hollers, “where the fuck are we?”

Metallica, it transpires, are camped out between shows on a rare day off in New York City. But even in trendy Manhattan, some rock ’n’ roll traditions survive—the band is waking up to The Dating Game in the big city’s only Holiday Inn, while their tour bus is sitting outside in front of four expired traffic meters. Lars and guitarist-singer James Hetfield look comfortably comatose as they review the rigors of the road. “Oh, we’re up every morning at nine exercising,” Lars deadpans. “You know, taking the vodka bottle from the table to the mouth. No, really, we need as much sleep as possible. It’s not like we just stand there on stage. So we usually just get up before soundcheck and wake up playing.”

Right now they’re engaged in a long road stint with those P-for-perverts W.A.S.P. and now that both bands’ crews have “duked it out” to reach a fair working relationship, everything is smooth sailing.-‘‘I don’t know if we’re supposed to say this,” 22-year-old Lars demurs, ‘‘but W.A.S.P. are quite a bit older than us and they rely a lot more on visual things. I mean they have to have this much space for chainsaws to come down from the ceiling and skulls exploding and blood spraying, where all we need is a stage and some instruments.”

And, it would appear, some vodka. Mention unemployment to Lars and he insists that somehow he’d find a job as “a vodka taster.” But perhaps that’s only natural for a Danish lad who had his first taste of heavy metal when he was only ten years old. “A hippie friend of my Dad’s who was staying at the house had an extra ticket to see Deep Purple,” Lars recalls. ‘‘So, they dragged me along. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but I thought it was neat how Ritchie Blackmore threw his guitar around.” Blackmore, Lars chuckles, would be the ideal candidate to play Lars Ulrich in the made-for-TV version of the Metallica story, while Jim insists that Richard Pryor would be the most suitable casting choice.

The true story of Metallica, however, is somewhat less amusing. Perhaps something was rotten in Denmark, or perhaps the Ulrichs thought their baby boy would profit in the Van Halen manner if they relocated, but whatever the reason, Lars ended up in Los Angeles at the turn of this decade. ‘‘Metal was very different in Europe at the time—Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon, they were just a big question mark,” Lars remembers. ‘‘Most of the stuff in L.A. was Van Halen or Kiss or Journey sounding. I met James through an ad in The Recycler and played him a lot of European stuff. We had a rawer sound, more European influenced and we ended up going through a lot of band members. In 1982 we played the clubs and stuff, but it was mostly Ratt and Motley Crue going on. It didn’t work out too well for us. We were playing aggressive, energetic things—not very visual. Then there were all these other bands with their nice hair and soft songs, so we split to San Francisco.”

“Even though we write songs about electric chairs, nuclear bombs and suicide, we don’t want to force our opinions on anybody. ” -James Hetfield

With the move, they acquired the services of bassist Cliff Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett as full time members and built a solid following with the ‘‘hardcore, non-posing” underground. They also put together a demo tape that attracted the interest of Megaforce Records all the way over in New Jersey. ’’The usual bullshit story,” Lars laughs. ’’You know, the guy heard the tape in a record store and ran out to the phone and got in touch with us.” Pretty soon they were touring the East Coast for the first time and recording an album in Rochester, New York. Kill ‘Em All, their debut platter, became one of the best-selling indie records ever and Metallica did the first-ever indie metal tour in the summer of ‘83 with England’s Raven.

‘‘Bald Knob, Arkansas,” James recalls, ‘‘was the worst gig ever. It wasn’t even really a town, even! We played the Bald Knob Amphitheatre which ‘seats 14,000’ and we walk in and there’s this stage in the middle of a cow field and bugs flying everywhere in 110-degree August heat. About 200 people showed up. You know, drunks beating up on each other for looking at their girlfriends.”

TURN TO PAGE 56

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

Metallica fared much better in Europe, where they’ve toured three times already. “It’s more of a street, word-of-mouth thing there,” Lars acknowledges. “You can’t compare it to the States and arenas and stuff, because over there even the biggest acts usually only pull in three or four thousand.” “Yeah,” James grumbles. “And that’s 80 percent guys and 20 percent sluts.”

America is set to be the next frontier, and now that Metallica are being distributed on a big record label and share the same management as Def Leppard, superstar status seems just around the corner. But Lars and Co. intend to do it their way.

“We haven’t been doing this long enough for any other reason except that we want to do it,” he exclaims. “Take any band that’s been around for 15 years doing the bars and feel they need to get rewarded for 15 years of bulllshit—they’ll do anything. But it’s not more than two years ago that I was doing a paper route and playing in a garage in Los Angeles. I’d practice with the band and have a coupla vodkas and then deliver papers. It’s mind control—you just tell yourself you can throw papers onto people’s lawns.

“But put Twisted Sister’s image on us and...fuck!” he says, warming to the subject as he not-so-delicately picks at the crotch of his regulation grey sweatpants. “In the process of trying so hard not to have an image, I guess we have an image after all. But I hate that word ‘image’—it implies being something that you’re not and we don’t do that. I mean look at that devil worship shit, it’s the most overdone cliche in heavy metal these days.” “Yeah,” James is quick to agree. “You think wearing a pentagram on your forehead is gonna make you sound heavier. That’s ridiculous.”

Still, the defiantly dowdy combo manage to attract some highly motivated groupies. “How about that one who said she was your sister?” James guffaws. “And you’re an only child!” And despite the fact that “even though we write songs about electric chairs, nuclear bombs and suicide, but we don’t want to force our opinions on anybody,” Metallica has their fair share of demented followers. “Some guy from Texas wanted to be official Metallica photographer," James smiles. “He sent in a whole bunch of pictures of mutilated animals. There were little polaroids of his pet rat next to an axe that said ‘Goodbye, Scooter’ on it.”

“Yeah,” Lars howls, “And he called himself The Green Slime!”