“The electric energy”: Lars Ulrich names one of the greatest live records ever made
Putting together any kind of live album is usually tricky for any band to pull off. Not only do you have to live up to what you could do behind the studio walls, but with an audience to engage with, it becomes that much harder trying to interact with everyone while also ensuring that everything stays clean enough to end up on tape. Although Lars Ulrich thrived off of that live energy whenever he played with Metallica, he felt that the benchmark for any great live performance isn’t even considered proper heavy metal.
That said, it’s not like Ulrich is responsible for knocking it out of the park every time he stepped behind the drumkit. If you listen to any of his subpar performances, there are moments where he starts to slip a little bit, and even a handful of occasions where he seems to forget the groove entirely and replace it with the most chaotic drum fills ever recorded.
But the idea of ‘groove’ and ‘feel’ wasn’t something that Ulrich was born with. That’s something that’s ingrained in any musician over time when they play, and while Deep Purple certainly could throw down at the best of times, Ian Paice was more interested in demolishing his kit like Ritchie Blackmore was assaulting his guitar.
Look at how the song ‘Pictures of Home’ kicks off. Before anything properly drops, Paice’s drum fills are sheer magic for those first few seconds, almost like he’s trying to make sure that he hits every single piece that’s on his kit before the band comes in. This wasn’t normal drumming; this was percussion gymnastics, and Ulrich fell head over heels for it when he picked up Fireball for the first time.
Even though Ulrich jumped on before Made in Japan was released, their stay on the other side of the world was among the finest performances laid down by human hands. All of these performances may have been the versions most already knew, but hearing them jam through tunes like ‘Space Truckin’ turned it from a hard rock take on a funk track to this massive slab of hard rock.
Although Ulrich had a long way to go before seeing the stadium lights of Metallica shows, he was awestruck listening to Made in Japan, telling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “You would probably start with Made in Japan, which is one of the greatest live records ever in terms of the live elements, the pulsivity, the unpredictability, the electric energy in the air. If you to the versions on the studio albums and then the Made in Japan versions, they’re like night and day.”
But somewhere along the line, Ulrich did eventually find a way to combine Paice’s frantic playing with the groove-flavoured songs on The Black Album. Every drum fill on that album may have been basic to some extent, but it was about taking Paice’s mentality and combining it with the flair of someone like Charlie Watts.
Ulrich has never claimed to equal the precision of what Purple did, but really does he need to? When you’ve seen this kind of demolition go on onstage, all that anyone can do is bow and pay their respects.
