about every aspiring musician in Southern California. Few of them sparked my interest, largely because I had no desire to be a hired gun in someone else’s band. I knew I was a pretty good guitar player; I also was beginning to come to the realization that I liked to be in charge. I was not good at taking direction.
This particular ad caught my attention, though, since it was the first to reference not one or two but three of my favorite bands. The first was Iron Maiden. Nothing really special about that—you couldn’t play metal and not appreciate Iron Maiden. The second was Motörhead. Nothing unique there, either. The third, however, was a band called Budgie. Just seeing the name in print made my heart race. I’d been introduced to Budgie, a groundbreaking band from Wales—in fact, they are regarded in some quarters as the first heavy metal band—one night a few years earlier, while hitchhiking on PCH. The driver worked for a radio station in Los Angeles.* He was a decent enough guy. Shared some Quaaludes, kept the music blaring, and at one point, after finding out I played guitar, he smiled and said, “Dude, you gotta listen to these guys.” Then he inserted a Budgie tape in the cassette deck.
I was instantly blown away. The speed and power of the music, without abandoning melody—it was like nothing I’d ever heard.
Now here I was, reading the Recycler, wondering what to do with the next phase of my life, and it was like I’d been sent a message.
Budgie!
That day I called the number in the ad.
“Hey, man, I’m looking for Lars.”
“You got him.” The guy had a strange accent that I couldn’t quite place. He also sounded very young.
“I’m calling about your ad? For a guitar player?”
“Okay…”
“Well, I know Motörhead and Iron Maiden,” I said. “And I love Budgie.”
There was a pause.
“Fuck, man! You know fucking Budgie?!”
That was all it took. You see, Lars Ulrich, the kid (and, yeah, he was just a kid, as I would soon discover) on the other end of the line, was an avid collector of music from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). And when I dropped the name of a band that was at the forefront of that movement, I was in. The thing is, I didn’t even realize until later that Budgie held such a prominent place in that world; I just liked their music. And Lars respected that, which just goes to show you that deep down inside, a very long time ago, we really were kindred spirits.
We met a few days later at Lars’s condo in Newport Beach. Actually, it was his parents’ house, which I didn’t realize until I arrived. The drive was like a trip down memory lane, as Lars lived in a neighborhood not far from where my mother had worked as a maid when I was growing up. At one point, after exiting the Pacific Coast Highway, I came to a stoplight and realized that if I made a right turn, I’d be driving into Linda Isle, where my mom had cleaned toilets for the rich folks. If I took a left, I’d be at Lars’s place in just a couple minutes. After making the turn, I remembered that once, many years earlier, I’d put on a little bow tie and white shirt to help out while my mom worked for a caterer at a private party in this very same neighborhood.
You can imagine what I was thinking when I pulled into the driveway in my old Mazda RX-7, with the rusted-out muffler rattling so hard I thought the windows might crack:
“Silver spoon motherfucker…”
Lars’s father, Torbin Ulrich, was a former professional tennis player of some renown. His mom was a housewife; I never knew too much about her. Lars was born in Denmark. Not surprisingly, he’d begun playing tennis at a very young age and was something of a prodigy himself. Supposedly, he’d come to the States with the idea of furthering his tennis career, but that soon took a backseat to his real passion: music, specifically playing the drums. I didn’t know any of this when we first met. All I knew when he came to the door that morning was that he was very young (I was twenty years old; Lars was not quite eighteen) and obviously had come from a different world than the one I had known.
I had no great expectations regarding this initial encounter. In a lot of ways, I was still very innocent. I had some pot and figured if nothing else, I’d hang out with this kid, get high, and listen to his plans for conquering the music world. We shook hands and went right upstairs to his bedroom, presumably to get down to business (whatever that might mean). The first thing I noticed when I walked into his room was that he had an assortment of interesting shit on the walls: pictures of bands, magazine covers. One that stood out right away was a big poster of Philthy Animal, the drummer from Motörhead, hammering away at this incredible drum kit, the skins of which were adorned with what appeared to be gaping sharks’ mouths.
Very cool, I thought.
A little more disconcerting was the gigantic stack of Danish porn on the nightstand. I was no prude. By this time I’d lived out my fair share of Penthouse fantasies. But this shit was strange. Not the kind of stuff you’d see in mainstream American skin magazines, but hard-core European strangeness: girls getting fucked by baseball bats and milk bottles, things of that nature.
“Dude, this is a little weird, huh?”
Lars shrugged. Part of it, I think, was that he looked so young. He could have passed for thirteen or fourteen, and it just seemed odd to be hanging out with him, leafing through Danish porn and talking about starting a band. And smoking dope, of course, which is what we did next. Lars had a bamboo bong sitting right out in the open (his parents rather obviously ruled with something less than an iron fist), and naturally the conversation gravitated to drugs. We traded war stories for a bit, and Lars told me about his favorite method of smoking hash. He’d dig a hole in the ground, bury the hash while it was burning, then dig a little tunnel and inhale the smoke through a screen on the other side. I tried to picture that: this little kid facedown in the dirt, sucking hash smoke into his lungs. I couldn’t imagine doing that myself, and I’m not sure what advantage this method provided over more traditional modes of delivery…but I had to admit it was inventive.
So we talked for a while, got high, and eventually I asked Lars if he had any samples from the band he was trying to form. There were three people in the lineup already, he said: a singer named James Hetfield (James had not yet begun focusing on playing guitar for the band), a bass player named Ron McGovney, and Lars, the drummer. They needed a guitar player—a really kick-ass player—to complete the lineup. Really, though, the band was still in its embryonic stages. It had no name, no history of performing. What it did have, apparently (although I didn’t know it at the time), was an agreement between Lars and a producer named Brian Slagel, whose new label, Metal Blade, was about to release a heavy metal compilation called Metal Massacre. A spot on the album had been reserved for Lars’s venture; all he had to do was come up with a song, a band, and a recording.
“Listen to this,” Lars said. He inserted a cassette into his stereo and played a rough demo of a song called “Hit the Lights,” written by James and one of his buddies from a previous band. The guitar work was by a guy named Lloyd Grant, who had played with Lars and James briefly, before I came along. The song wasn’t bad; the playing was uniformly sloppy, the sound quality even worse, and the singer had little pitch control or charisma. But there was energy. And style. When it ended, Lars smiled.
“What do you think?”
“You need more guitar solos, that’s for sure.”
Lars nodded. He didn’t seem offended. I think he wanted to hear my honest opinion. Lars had been looking for a guitar player who matched his taste in music, and maybe I fit the bill. Crude as it was, the tape reminded me of the NWOBHM stuff I’d been hearing. I understood the way those guys played guitar from a riff point of view. It wasn’t so much about strumming chords or arpeggiating—picking from one side of the guitar to the other—it was more like picking the same string over and over, to the point where it almost became monotonous. In that way, the riff had to carry the weight of the whole song. If that sounds simple, well, it isn’t.