The 1983 album that made Lars Ulrich a lifelong enemy: “He’s not good”
Lars Ulrich has never been known as one of the most agreeable people in the music industry.
He may not have the greatest drumming chops and more often than not can come off as a little bit snide, but if it weren’t for him calling the shots, there’s a good chance that Metallica would have never been able to get off the ground when they made their first record. But even before they had become metal legends, Ulrich already had more than a few people shooting daggers at him whenever they saw each other.
Before the band even got together, though, Ulrich was already convinced that he could find himself up there with the greatest rock and roll artists of all time. He was inspired the first time he heard bands like Deep Purple, and when he fell in love with heavy metal, he knew that he and James Hetfield could be the ones who could bring heavy music above ground if they had the right idea.
But that was after they had a few good songs under their belt. At the very beginning, though, they were just hoping to make a living doing what they were doing when they made Kill Em All. To say that the album had a shoestring budget would be putting it nicely, and even though the band barely had any time to mess around when performing most of the album, a lot of the messiness came when they all realised that Dave Mustaine was too wild to be in the band after one too many parties.
It’s hard to believe that a band nicknamed ‘Alcoholica’ had a problem with a band member drinking too much, but Mustaine had a side of himself that wasn’t going to be tolerated. He was trashing people’s houses up and down the country when they made their way from San Francisco to New York, and while the band could have warned him beforehand, Mustaine remembered getting a rude awakening when he was fired right as they arrived in ‘The Big Apple’.
And considering how Ulrich talked about it, it didn’t seem like he was exactly sad to see him leave, either, saying, “[He said], ‘When’s my plane leave?’. We said, ‘Actually we’re going to spend the next few days on a Greyhound bus that leaves in a little bit so get your shit together and get out of here before you even know what hit you.’ And that was that.” That would have been one thing, but if Mustaine was already pissed, he was seething when he found out what his bandmates did to his songs.
He had been a key member of the band when cutting a lot of their records, but the fact that over half of Kill Em All had songs with his riffs on them was like them actively stealing from his songbook. Even years later, Mustaine was still taking more potshots at Ulrich than the rest of the band, saying, “I like James, Lars I could take or leave. He’s not a good drummer. Any good drummer will tell you that he’s not. And their success? A lot of it is based off of me.”
And while Mustaine can rest easy knowing that he made some of the greatest metal songs that anyone has ever made on his own with Megadeth, it does have to sting a little bit. He didn’t necessarily have to go back to working a day job or anything, but the fact that he could have been part of one of the biggest metal bands in the world has to sting just a little bit when they started using the basis of tunes like ‘The Four Horsemen’ and ‘Jump In the Fire’.
All of that might be water under the bridge these days, but when you look at how the band interact with each other, there does seem to be that little bit of tension every single time that Mustaine talks about his old band. He’s a legend in his own right, but missing out on becoming one of the most famous metal bands in the world isn’t something that someone can drop after a few years.
