Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [29]
Beer, it transpired, was a must at a Dave Mustaine rehearsal. ‘As a kid,’ he would later tell me, ‘everyone always said that I was going to end up an alcoholic like my father. You see, alcoholism is hereditary, it’s in the genes. I just could not drink.’ Unfortunately for his career in Metallica, he was some ten years away from discovering that fact. ‘In my childhood,’ he went on, ‘I did martial arts, and then I started getting into dope and thought no one could fuck with me. In reality, if anyone had tried it I would have been destroyed.’ Maybe. But that wasn’t the impression James and Lars had back in 1982. On top of the drug-dealing and alcoholism, as well as the karate-kicking, confrontational nature of this apparently unstoppable force of ill-intentioned nature, there was also an undisguised suggestion of occult knowledge. It’s true, he told me, ‘I believe in the supernatural. My elder sister is a white witch. I dicked around with her stuff when I was a kid.’ To do what, though? Occult rituals? Invocations? ‘I found a “sex hex”,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘and I used it on this girl I had the hots for. She was this cute little babe, looked like Tinkerbell. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So I did my little hex and the next night she was in my bed.’
Anything else?
‘One time I did one on this guy who picked on me when I was going to school. He was enormous. But without going into it too much, I did a chant, basically asking the Prince of Darkness to devastate this fella and stop him messing with me. Later, the guy broke his leg and he can’t walk straight now. I stopped messing with witchcraft after that, but it made me feel good at the time. Retribution,’ he cackled.
Whatever else he brought to the mix, the arrival into the nascent Metallica line-up of a guitarist of Mustaine’s ability brought an immediate leg-up, in terms of the band’s own musical self-image. ‘Pretty quickly [after Dave joined] things began to happen,’ said Lars, ‘because of those three words that have worked throughout our career – word of mouth. These outcasts started turning up, people who liked music a little more extreme than that served up by the American music industry. We took the riff structures of AC/DC and Judas Priest and played them at Motörhead tempos. And then we threw in our X-factor – and we don’t know what it was. We had this European sound and attitude but we were an American band, and there was no one else in America doing it.’
Interviewed in Rolling Stone fifteen years later, Lars would claim he could ‘never remember ever thinking about the future much’ when Metallica started. That he was ‘always so caught up in the present. Where I come from in Denmark, this whole American thing about goals is not a big thing. You’re taught very early on in America that you have to have goals. I never bought into that. We were always real comfortable in the present, in our little world, continuing with blinders on.’ Back in 1982, though, the Lars Ulrich everyone knew then that they remember best now was someone who clearly had found his one true path – and wasn’t about to dawdle along the way. Diamond Head’s Brian Tatler recalls Lars writing to tell him about the new band. ‘I’ve got this classic letter that says: “My band’s called Metallica and we rehearse six nights a week and it’s going pretty good.” I think he says, “The guitarist is pretty fast, you’d like him.” He doesn’t mention his name but I presume it’s Dave Mustaine. This would have been in early ’82. And I think he sent