Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [4]
Torben’s close ties to the nascent jazz scene in Denmark led to the late Dexter Gordon becoming Lars’ godfather. Indeed, the first appearance Lars made on a professional stage was at the age of nine, bounding on and yelling into the mike during a Gordon appearance at a nightclub in Rome, where his parents had gone during a night off at the Italian Open. ‘Like some dog who runs amok for a moment,’ his father would later recall. The globe-trotting also gave Lars a facility for languages, able to converse from an early age in Danish, English, German and ‘little bits of other stuff’. It was an itinerant lifestyle that would mean he was ‘always comfortable on the road. I’d been places with my father we’ve never gotten to in Metallica.’ It also gave the boy a supreme sense of entitlement; a super self-confidence that meant no door would remain closed to him for long, the very idea that he might not be welcome somewhere never entering his head.
Although Lars would also inherit his father’s love of music and art, it was his mother, Lone, who gifted him the managerial abilities he would later bring to his career with Metallica. As well as taking good care of the two men in her life, ‘My mum was definitely the organiser and kind of the business head,’ he told me when last we spoke in 2009, our umpteenth interview in a relationship that now goes back more than a quarter of a century. ‘I mean, my dad didn’t know what time of day it was, what month it was, you know, what year it was. He didn’t know what country he was in. He was one of these guys that was just beautifully lost in the moment all the time. I mean that in a very positive sense [and] my mum was sort of full-time care-taking all the practical elements of his life. So it’s definitely from my mum’s side that I’ve inherited some of my sort of anal organisational skills.’
First and foremost, in those earlier days, there was tennis. Torben’s own father had also been a tennis star. For over twenty years he had been an advertising executive who participated in seventy-four Davis Cup matches before becoming president of the Danish Lawn Tennis Association. Almost inevitably, although there was no overt pressure exerted on him to do so, Lars grew up expecting to follow in what had practically become the family business. For Lars, though, tennis and a love of music would eventually dovetail in an even more significant way. In 1969, during the family’s by now annual six-week stay in London – built around Wimbledon and satellite tournaments in East-bourne and at Queen’s – the five-year-old Lars was taken to his first rock concert: the famous free concert by the Rolling Stones, given to over 250,000 people in Hyde Park. He still has pictures his parents took of him there. ‘I think that I’d been dragged along to some jazz events, you know, at some of the local jazz clubs in Denmark up through the years,’ Lars told me. Most often, he said, at a favourite haunt of the Ulrichs called Montmartre, which Torben helped run. ‘But in terms of rock concerts the ’69 Stones’ gig was the first one, yeah.’ His first genuine musical love, though, was for heavy rock stars of the early 1970s such as Uriah Heep, Status Quo and, most especially, Deep Purple, who he saw perform live for the first time when he was just nine. Torben’s friend, South African tennis player Ray Moore, had been given passes for the show, which was being held in the same arena as one of his tennis tournaments. When a friend dropped out at the last minute, he offered the spare ticket to Torben’s son instead. It quite literally, Lars said, ‘blew my mind!’ He couldn’t get it out of his head ‘for days, weeks!’ He immediately nagged his father into buying him Purple’s Fireball album. In this, though, Torben, for once, was not entirely supportive. ‘He’d say it was square and the drummer was too white,’ Lars recalled. But the son was not