The Rolling Stone Interview: Lars Ulrich

So what kind of house were you living in 10 years ago?
Me and James were living in a house together over in El Cerrito, which is about 45 minutes from here. It's the house where we wrote both Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning. It's still there; we still drive by it.

Was it a manic heavy-metal bachelor pad?

Every clichè that you could muster up. Me and James each had a bedroom. Dave Mustaine [who left the group in 1983] slept on the couch. Dogs running around. We had the old garage converted into a rehearsal room with egg cartons. It was the refuge, the sanctuary for everybody in the neighborhood. People would come over and live there, hang there. It was a lot of fun — when you're 19.

The thing is, I'm not scared of the fact that we're all over 30 now. I'm not intimidated by it. Because no matter what, we still go out and play, and we still fire up in the same way. When you're 18 or 19 years old,you have that gang mentality in your band. It's this tiny little situation. Nobody can stray outside of it. It's the thing you do when you're 18,19, 20. And that's 10, 12 years ago for me.

That's also 10 or 12 years ago for your audience. What's the difference between the fans who came to see you then and the crowds you play for now?

If anything, we're getting to the AC/DC/Van Halen level. The audience is a lot more general than it ever was but without losing too many of what we call the Metallifanatics, the Metallibangers. Obviously there's been a lot of changes in what people refer to as the mainstream-rock audience. But I think there's also a lot of fans who don't care as much about this alternative stuff. For two and a half hours, they want to forget and loosen themselves up instead of listening to messages and heavy, serious things.

That's one way in which we're really different from a lot of the newer bands. Live, when I see these other bands, I don't see them bond very much with the audience. With the classic rock bands that I grew up on and respected, like Aerosmith, Iron Maiden and Motörhead, there was a thing where the audience and the band became one. In the new school that doesn't happen as much.

Do you think the newer bands are too self-absorbed?

It seems to be part of an attempt at coolness. I look at Eddie Vedder, and he really lets himself go. So you can't say that he's not emotional. But he lets himself go in a land of selfish way, without necessarily bringing the people around him into what he's doing. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that when you talk about the old school, that was one big fucking hug! A total shared experience. And these days it seems like it's the band, then there's the audience.

Have you ever been in a mosh pit?

Yeah, I have.

Did you enjoy it?

Yeah. But I've also been in a mosh pit in my living room. It's not something that has to happen at a show. I run around in a circle in my living room listening to the guitar solo in [Deep Purple's] "Child in Time." I can get just as much out of that.

In the mid-'80s people talked about Metallica in the same breath as other underground metal bands like Slayer and Megadeth. Whom do you consider to be your peers now?

Peers are anybody you respect and admire, if I understand the word correctly. AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Motörhead.

I mean bands that are going now. AC/DC started two decades ago, and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy is dead.

The only contemporary band I think of as a peer is Alice in Chains. They sit on a pedestal for me, pretty much above everybody else. They're like a '90s Black Sabbath. There's something about the riffs, the looseness. It's not boxed in, it's not square. Sometimes when I listen to some of our earlier stuff, I get this vision in my mind of a square. Alice in Chains' sound has a lot of round edges to it.

One bizarre thing about the new generation of hard-rock bands is how they've redefined the acceptability and coolness of heavy metal. Metal used to be a bastard genre. Now you have Black Sabbath and Kiss tribute albums.

Ten years ago when you thought of heavy metal, you had this vision of Rob Halford of Judas Priest wearing more spikes than you can find in the entire Castro area of San Francisco or Motley Crue wearing more makeup and hair spray than you could find at the Elizabeth Arden factory. Bands just started slowly shedding the clichès.

I trace most of what's going on today back to 1976 in England, when the punk movement started. Most of today's metal scene is inspired by that — when all the bands in England said, "Fuck the excess, fuck the grandeur." It was brought back to a minimalist approach of people wanting to do their own records, not caring about sellable images.

We picked up on a lot of that. Bands like us and Slayer started selling records. We were appealing to the kids in a way that everything didn't need to be so prefabricated and product oriented. With us it was constant touring and constantly being in people's faces. And it showed all the people in the high-rise buildings — the record companies ? that there were kids out there who wanted more than what they were getting through FM radio.