By Steve Newton
Way back in March of 1985 I did my first interview with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who was 21 at the time.
The band was touring behind its second album, Ride the Lightning, and headed to Vancouver for a show at the New York Theatre with guests Armored Saint.
Two years earlier Metallica had released its debut album, Kill ‘Em All, with its cover art of a stonemason’s hammer lying in a puddle of blood, while the latest LP depicted white lightning surging through an old-school electric chair.
So at one point in the conversation I asked Ulrich about Metallica’s apparent preoccupation with violence and death.
“On the first album most of the stuff is either about rock and roll, or banging your head against the stage, or death and destruction in the sort of ‘We’re gonna come kill you and your family’ type way,” he explained. “Whereas the lyrics on Ride the Lightning are a lot more about death in the ‘I’ form–what different people feel or think at the time of death, during death, after death, or whatever. Whether it be from the electric chair, as in ‘Ride the Lightning’, or from suicide, as in ‘Fade to Black’, or from nuclear war, as in ‘Fight Fire With Fire’.
“Some of those feelings really are a lot closer to home, for us anyway, than most people would think,” he added. “And we’re not afraid to write about what we feel. We’re not so scared that we have to write about heavy-metal women instead.”
To hear the full 22-minute audio of my 1985 interview with Lars Ulrich–and my interviews with him from 1989, 1997, and 1998 as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with the legends of rock since 1982.