The Rolling Stone Interview: Lars Ulrich

Last year you declared war on your record company by suing to get out of your contract. Did you see any irony in having started out as the ultimate Diy metal band and ending up entangled in corporate politics? After all, the title of your first album, "Kill 'Em All," was really a euphemism for "fuck the industry."
But my vibe is, this is the reality of where we're at now. And why pretend it's otherwise? For the last 10 years, our thing has been very pure, very clean, very straightforward. But there comes a point where you have to realize that you're taking it up the ass, and I don't like the feeling very much. Kill 'em all or not kill 'em all, this is what it feels like, and we have to see it through.

The interesting thing was the way the whole thing finally came together. I went out to New York in early December. We were at the level where we were doing depositions for the court case. I was sitting there when Robert Morgado was depositioned — him nervously smiling over at me. It was quite funny being in a room with 12 lawyers. And me sitting there after sleeping three hours, still drunk from the night before, with my shades on, not having showered in a week.

You must have brought a special aroma to the proceedings.

There was definitely a comic element to the whole thing. It came to the point where our lawyers would report to [co-manager] Cliff Burnstein, Cliff would call me up, and then I would tell the other three guys in the band what was up. It was silly and a waste of time. How about if the people who can make these decisions get together in a fucking room, sit down and slug it out?

So one morning me and Cliff and Peter [Mensch, co-manager] sat down with [Warner Music U.S. chairman and CEO] Doug Morris. We said, "All the people who can fix this are in this room. We don't need to deal with lawyers, with the food chain. Let's talk this through."

We went back and forth for about two hours and came to an agreement that everybody felt comfortable with. I pulled my hand out, [Morris] shook it, and there was the deal. Of course, three months later, it's still being argued on paper — the fine print, 2,000 pages worth of clauses that nobody gives a fuck about.

How did you end up becoming the business head in the band?

More through default than anything else. Fourteen years ago when we were sitting around making our No Life 'Til Leather demo tape, I was the one who went out and bought all the tapes. I was the one who sat down and copied them. I was the one who sent them out to people. That's where it started. Somebody had to do it.

We've been more in touch with those business things around us because we didn't want to get fucked. A lot of people think saying you're on top of what goes on around you businesswise means you have ulterior motives. But it's a defensive mechanism. Anyone in the '90s who's in a rock band and hands their whole lives over to somebody else, that's just fucking ignorance.

What was your state of mind regarding Metallica 10 years ago — where you thought the band was and where it was going?

I can never remember ever thinking about the future much. I was always so caught up in the present. Where I come from in Denmark, this whole American thing about goals is not a big thing. You're taught very early on in America that you have to have goals. I never bought into that. We were always real comfortable in the present, in our little world, continuing with blinders on.

But if you had a band meeting, what did you talk about? Surely you were interested in having a career.

There was an unspoken and fairly innocent — or ignorant — feeling that sooner or later, people would open up to what we were doing. Not that we would make it easier for them. But when we were writing the songs for Justice and Puppets, we knew that sooner or later, people would start getting it. In San Francisco, New York, Chicago, it was happening. But in Wichita Falls, nothing. And we knew early on that the right way for us was the constant barraging and touring. Not this stuff now where bands say, "Oh, I gotta go out and play 40 dates. I can't handle it anymore, I gotta go home." We did these two-year tours and kept on pushing it in people's faces.

Was there a gig in a Wichita Falls-type place where you remember thinking that you were making that connection?
In 1988 we were on the Monsters of Rock tour with Van Halen, 17th on the bill or whatever, and I was hanging out with Cliff Burnstein in New York. He said, "Let's go up to the office of your booking agent," who was Marsha Vlasic at ICM. She pulls out a tour schedule of dates being held for us headlining arenas. I look down at the first two weeks, and Indianapolis is there. Now, Indianapolis was always this joke between me and Cliff, about how in Indianapolis they just don't get it. That was the barometer. Lo and be-fucking-hold, we go to Indianapolis, and there are 9,000 people there. I remember thinking, "Wow, maybe all those people in Middle America will get it."

Speaking of goals, what kind of values did your parents try to instill in you? As a professional tennis player, your father certainly had career ambitions of his own.

I grew up in as open an upbringing as you can imagine. Americans would call it spoiled. But I was very independent I had nothing tying me down. At the same time, anything I wanted I had to get it myself. It's 1975, and I want to go see Black Sabbath. As far as my parents were concerned, I could go see Black Sabbath 12 times a day. But I had to find my own means, carrying the paper or whatever, to get the money to buy the tickets. And I had to find my own way to the concert and back.

From that point of view, I was left alone a lot. But in terms of culture, there was always shit going on around the house. My dad was always around music. He was hanging out with Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Dexter Gordon. Dexter Gordon was my godfather. I used to play with Neneh Cherry when we were little kids. Her stepfather, Don Cherry, lived like six houses from where we lived in Copenhagen.

Those types of people were always around. Even though tennis was his main source of income, my dad was also writing about jazz in the papers in Copenhagen. Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman were always playing in the stereo around the house. Later it was the Doors and Jimi Hendrix.