Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [13]
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