“We’ve got to give this a shot”: The band Lars Ulrich called the catalyst for Metallica
No band spontaneously appears out of nowhere boasting great tunes. It’s a long road before anyone even tries putting together their first song, and the first step is taking the time to listen to whatever was in their record collections first. Although it’s pretty hard to ignore any type of metal music when the band’s name is Metallica, Lars Ulrich considered these forebearers of hard rock to be the moment everything got rolling for him and James Hetfield in the group’s early days.
When listening to Metallica’s early output, there are still a lot of influences that they are wearing on their sleeves. Outside of Cliff Burton’s fascination with classical music, their debut album Kill Em All is filled to the brim with riffs that are every bit as indebted to Iron Maiden as they are to early Black Sabbath, even sliding in a parody version of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ for the mid-section of ‘The Four Horsemen’.
Whereas Ulrich was drawn to the new wave of British heavy netal in the group’s early days, like Saxon and Diamond Head, there’s a lot of punk music in their delivery as well. James Hetfield did have a love for the great rhythm guitar giants like Iommi and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, but when listening to the sheer speed that they were playing at, it’s hard not to catch traces of what Johnny Ramone was doing a few years earlier in how solid those downstrokes are.
Because, really, punk and heavy metal have never been that far apart. Both of them are built on a tough aesthetic, and neither of them particularly went over well with parents at the time, so why did it take so long for a band like Motörhead to put all of those sounds under one roof?
Although Lemmy always maintained that he founded the group as a rock and roll band, Motörhead has all the trappings to earn a spot as rock juggernauts and heavy metal mainstays. Even if they weren’t as entrenched in metal music as Sabbath seem to be these days, a song like ‘Overkill’ is the basis of thrash metal drumming to this day, complete with the relentless double bass drums pounding away all the way through the tune.
It may have taken Metallica years before releasing a tribute song to their favourite group in ‘Murder One’, but for Ulrich, the influence of Lemmy’s band of misfits almost goes without saying, explaining, “When I came back to Southern California, I called James up and said: ‘Listen, we’ve got to give this a shot.’ Motörhead is the catalyst.”
If Ulrich was one of the biggest fans of the group, though, James Hetfield really took their aesthetic to heart. Whether it was him being uncomfortable with his voice, his way of barking like Lemmy and copying his famous muttonchops was half the reason why they roped in so much of their audience when making albums like Master of Puppets.
Whereas Metallica was looking to go one step further by writing songs that took people on a journey, the omnipresence of Motörhead on their sound is something that will never go away. Because the minute that someone gets rocked by ‘Ace of Spades’ once, that’s a musical scar that will be there for life.
