How Noel Gallagher helped Lars Ulrich quit cocaine
Drugs were an essential part of the Metallica experience early in their career. The legendary thrash metal pioneers were notorious for their alcohol intake, infamously being dubbed “Alcohollica” at the peak of their abuse, but pills and powders were usually in the mix as well. James Hetfield entered rehab in 2001, an experience that was documented in the film Some Kind of Monster, but he wasn’t the only one with issues at that point.
Drummer Lars Ulrich was still freely indulging in drugs, specifically cocaine, by the turn of the new millennium. The cleaner life that Hetfield was trying to live was in stark contrast to Ulrich’s continued use of drugs, but it all came to an end thanks to the help of an unlikely person: Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher.
“I don’t do that any more. That’s all done, thank you for asking!” Ulrich told Joel McIver in 2008. “A couple of years ago I was like, ‘You know? Enough of this. I don’t need it’. It was literally something that happened one morning, like ‘Y’know? Fuck that.'”
“I was very impressed with Noel Gallagher: as you know, I’m an Oasis fanatic, and Noel was like [adopts stentorian tone] ‘You know what? No more cocaine!’ and I thought, ‘If he can do it, everybody else can do it’. I had my fun with it, it was always more of a social thing,” Ulrich insisted. “We were never like rolling around and spending days in bathroom stalls, and peeking out the keyholes of doors for days.”
For a number of years, it was rumoured that Ulrich’s panic attack that prevented him from performing at the 2004 Download Festival was a result of his cocaine use. Slayer’s Dave Lombardo and Slipknot’s Joey Jordison filled in for Ulrich, but the drummer confirmed that drugs had nothing to do with him not appearing during Metallica’s set.
“No, not at all. Not at all. I wish! That would have been easier to explain,” Ulrich explained. “That [the anxiety attack] was the result of… I was at the tail-end of my divorce and there was a lot of things going on that were running amok.”
Check out Jordison filling in for Ulrich on ‘Creeping Death’ down below.
