Lars Ulrich: Metal Is Like Herpes, Never Goes Away

Alen Balen hosted this brief interview with Metallica`s drummer Lars Ulrich on Plavi radio station`s Backstage show.

How important is playing live to the band?

Lars: Anytime, obviously, you get a chance to do something where you’re playing live, I mean you sort of forget, you know, you’re doing all this stuff and TV things and this and that and standing on your head and in-stores, and it’s like nice when you actually play music, ‘cos that’s sometimes when you’re doing all this endless promotion, it’s like hey wait!  What about playing some music! 

You’ve been re-introducing some of your older songs lately, which haven’t been played for some time and you’ve also been playing songs from St. Anger, an album that didn’t go down too well when it was first released.

Lars: But we just figured that with all the love for Death Magnetic, and all the love for all the back to the old style and all that, now’s a great time to play all those like, all those commercial Load and ReLoad songs. 

We played in Germany the other day, we played a song from St. Anger you’ve got to give St. Anger some love. A guy was doing an interview from a couple of weeks ago said, ‘You know that album? You know an album called Born Again?’ Of course I do. Black Sabbath, Zero the Hero, one of the best Black Sabbath albums. He goes ‘exactly, that’s exactly my point. 

In twenty years from now, St Anger will be Black Sabbath’s Born Again’ ‘Cos when Born Again came out, everybody hated it, and now it’s one of the most revered Black Sabbath albums. You wait and see, St Anger will be Born Again. 

Listen, you know, in ‘04, the first show in Phoenix, we started this sing called Live Metallica, which is the dot com or something, where you go and you can download show but within two days of when we played it. Since that show, we haven’t played the same set list twice. And we’ve played probably what, two hundred shows since then, so every night we change the set list, and that’s kind of what keeps us alive and keeps it interesting, because you do different stuff every night. On the St. Anger tour we probably pulled from maybe sixty songs every night, so every night’s different, and that’s what we’re planning on doing. But you know, remember that on the never ending tour in the nineties, we played so much black album, Load, Reload stuff. Then on the St. Anger tour and since then, we’ve played so much of the stuff from the eighties because we played so much of the stuff from the nineties.

Who are the metal bands that you’re enjoying lately?

Lars: We’re looking forward to, we’ve got Machine Head with us in America, we’ve got Lamb of God coming. We’re kind of, we’re splitting it up to a bunch of smaller legs and so we’re gonna take Machine Head for a while, Lamb of God for a while, Down for a while. 

Maybe at some point later, take Masted I mean we want to, all those bands are so cool, we wanna try and get them all out there and get our fans turned on to them and so on. We are, there’s a band from Austin Texas called The Sword, who is gonna be the opener for most of the tour, because they’re just so cool that they have to stay with us the whole time. And then we’re gonna rotate, we’re actually gonna take two bands with us, which we’ve never done before, which is great to try and just give back to the kids, get as bands an opportunity to come out and play with us. So The Sword’s gonna open for most of it, and then we’re gonna rotate the middle slot, it’ll be cool.

What is it about heavy metal that makes it so appealing to fans?

Lars: That’s a great question. All I can tell you is that from travelling all over the world the last couple of years, heavy metal is alive and kicking and it’s just unbelievable. Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Far East, I mean it’s unbelievable. I don’t know if it’s like, if it’s like a right of passage, you know when you’re thirteen you gotta get your first heavy metal kick. I don’t know what it is, but it seems that in the nineties, you know, all the kids were you know growing up on grunge and all that stuff, and whatever they’re called, the double zeros, they have, it was all about rap rock. And Limp Bizkit and all that type of stuff. 

And now it seems like all the young kids are not only doing metal again, but they’re doing like seventies and eighties metal, it’s all about Iron Maiden, it’s all about Metallica, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath. All that stuff. And it’s just unbelievable. I guess at the end of the day, the word timeless probably comes into play. 

There’s a timelessness to metal, because it sits so outside of fashions, it sits outside of waves of popularity and ins and outs and all that kind of stuff, because it sometimes is, especially by the general mass media, is kind of considered the ugly step child or something like that, the urrgghhh, all the smelly heavy metal kids. It’s like, because we’re not ever associated with anything that’s in vogue, or you know, that it just continues and it’s just like, herpes or something, it never goes away!