The 1990s rock legend Lars Ulrich initially hated watching: “Their attitude annoys me”
Throughout every facet of his career, Lars Ulrich didn’t want to be thought of as a rock star.
The idea of raking in the biggest sales of any metal band in history probably didn’t hurt in the long run, but some of the best moments of his career were when he was living out the dream that every single fan wanted to have when they first heard their favourite bands as a kid. And while Ulrich could be brutally honest when it came to some bands that he disliked, he did have to take a while before truly understanding some of the new kids on the block.
But if you look at where Metallica was coming from, it’s not like everyone was going to truly understand what they were doing at the time, either. There was no real precedent for metal bands playing that fast and that precise, and even when Ulrich could barely keep up with what the rest of the band were doing, James Hetfield was the machine behind the group. Most people would break their wrists trying to play as fast as he could, but life wasn’t always about trying to outdo the person next to you.
Ulrich figured that there was something a lot more interesting waiting for them if they switched things up, but by the time they became the biggest metal band in the world circa 1991, the world was already shifting. Everyone had been going for the macho approach to music, and then in just a few short minutes, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ did away with everything that had to do with the metal scene that was coming out of the Sunset Strip.
The story normally goes that Kurt Cobain made a masterpiece and killed off any poodle-haired rock and roll bands, but it’s not like everyone else was safe, either. In fact, a lot of the biggest names in metal had to do a quick shift in their direction to keep up with the times, and even though Ulrich was still leaving and breathing metal, he admitted that he didn’t really understand what he was looking at with Nirvana.
The record sounded amazing, but Ulrich didn’t like the idea of someone like Cobain crying about being a rockstar, saying, “They don’t really do very much for me, but I don’t mind them. They have very nice, hummable pop metal anthems. Some of their attitude annoys me a little bit, though. Because they’re so…I dunno, they just seem really contrived to me, somehow. If you don’t want to sell any records, then don’t release any records. They should be glad there’s a million motherfuckers that want to listen to their stuff.”
Then again, it didn’t take that long for Ulrich to change his tune a little bit on Cobain’s work. A lot of that sad energy came from the fact that Cobain was uncomfortable with the idea of fame, and while Ulrich was the kind of person who ran towards fame like an Olympic sprinter, he could at least acknowledge that he was witnessing a legend in the making later on, even if he didn’t see everything at the time.
And especially when you listen to the Metallica records that came out directly afterwards, Ulrich may have had more than a little bit of inspiration from Seattle. Alice in Chains may have made a lot more sense when it came to bands to steal from, but if you look at the post-modern irony that Ulrich was trying to do at the time, it’s clear that he was going for an image that fell somewhere between Bono’s ‘The Fly’ and Cobain’s could-give-a-fuck attitude whenever he made his records.
It didn’t necessarily work, and the Load series of records is still held up as one of the more questionable periods of the band’s career, but it’s not like Ulrich wasn’t at least aware of what he was doing. The biggest names at the time were going in another direction, and he was going to need to take a few lessons from Cobain, even if he found himself at the top of the rock and roll world.
