Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [3]
Crash, I thought, what crash?
The first time James Hetfield met Lars Ulrich he had him pegged. ‘Rich kid,’ he said to himself. You know the type: got everything; an only child who didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘no’. And so he was. Born into a house as big as a castle, in the elegant town of Hellerup, the most fashionable part of the municipality of Gentofte, in eastern Denmark, Lars Ulrich arrived on Boxing Day, 1963. A late Christmas present for a childless couple in their mid-thirties – old, in those days, for having babies – Lars was regarded as special from the day he was born. It was a view he would quickly grow to share.
His father, Torben, was a tennis-playing veteran of over a hundred Davis Cup matches – during which time he led the team to several finals – and a fully paid-up member of the emerging post-war jet set; his mother, Lone, a bohemian ‘den mother’ who would spend her days keeping her perpetually moving husband’s feet on the ground; or trying to. A star of the amateur tennis era who was already forty yet still winning Grand Slam matches when he belatedly turned professional in the late 1960s, Torben’s interests were not confined, however, merely to sport. With the umbrella Danish sports authority in that amateur era limiting participation in tournaments abroad to just fifty-six days per year, he had time – just – to also become a skilled writer for Denmark’s Politiken newspaper, a regular horn player in various jazz ensembles, and later artist, film-maker and practising Buddhist. A long-haired, splendidly whiskered Gandalf-like figure whose obsession with physical and mental fitness continued long after his professional sports career ended, as he recalled in a 2005 interview: ‘Maybe I played tennis in the afternoons, and then I would go play music at night, and then after that I had to go up to the newspaper and write reviews, and after that maybe I would go meet some of my friends in the morning and have breakfast, and then I had to go to band practice at noon and play tennis at 3.00. All of a sudden I hadn’t slept for three or four days.’
His only son would also grow up bristling with round-the-clock energy; his earliest childhood memories enmeshed with his father’s ongoing obsessions and hyperactive lifestyle.
‘Up until when I started school when I was seven we would travel all over,’ Lars told me in 2009. ‘America, Europe, we went to Australia a couple times…We spent a winter in South Africa, I think, in ’66 or ’67.’ His father ‘would go out to the Australian Open in January every year. And this was back in the days when you didn’t just jump on [a plane]. It was like a real journey to get there…and we spent a lot of time in Paris and London and all these places.’ Tennis, though, was just ‘the day job, really’. At home, ‘we had art all over the house’: art and music. A lover of jazz at a time when Copenhagen was a hotbed for contemporary jazz musicians, Torben played both clarinet and saxophone, and as a child Lars grew up in a household that rang to the sounds of, as he recalls, ‘Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon’, all of whom ‘spent considerable amounts of time in Denmark. So it was a very healthy scene and [my father] wrote a lot about it.’
Lars’ bedroom at home was opposite the music room where Torben kept his record collection, from which a continuous stream of music flowed. Neneh Cherry, daughter of sax legend Don and, later, a singing star in her own right, grew up in the same neighbourhood and was a childhood friend. ‘There was also like tons of people hanging out and there was like a lot of like late-night activity – listening to a lot of jazz records and a lot of Hendrix and Stones and The Doors and Janis Joplin…So there was a lot of musicians and writers and artists and stuff like that, that were circulating through the house as I was growing up.’ As well as rock and jazz, said Torben, Lars would have been exposed to ‘Indian music, all kinds of Asian music, Buddhist chants, classical music. His room was right next to the room