The 1972 album Lars Ulrich said he played “18,000 times”
For as big as Metallica has become over the years, Lars Ulrich never stopped being a true fan of metal music.
He didn’t like the idea of getting creatively stale all the time, and while his drumming hasn’t really improved all that much over the years, the fact that he has been so gung-ho about his love for the music shows that he still has the same passion for it as he did when he was collecting old bootlegs of bands like Diamond Head. But even when working on finding the next big thing, Ulrich did have those records that he would be willing to listen to for the rest of his life.
But Ulrich definitely had a much different approach to rock and roll than what he was hearing when he first moved to the US. He had already started falling in love with music after his parents exposed him to jazz records as a kid, but the moment that he crash-landed in California, everything was shifting to what the music in England was all about. This was the prime time of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Ulrich couldn’t get enough of it when everything started congealing.
Everyone might have become a bit more used to metal thanks to Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but it wasn’t like they had sprung out of nowhere. Metal was birthed from the sounds of bands like Black Sabbath, but when talking about the origins of the genre, Deep Purple don’t seem to get mentioned nearly as often as they should compared to other giants like Led Zeppelin or The Who.
Then again, it’s not like the band was willing to meet the public halfway, either. They wanted to make some of the greatest songs that they could, but whenever they played live, no one knew what they were going to get. The band had become legendary for their improvising whenever they performed onstage, and even though they didn’t know what they were going to play, they knew exactly where their bandmates were going whenever Jon Lord or Ritchie Blackmore led the charge.
And while most live albums are considered throwaways in many group’s catalogues, Ulrich felt that nothing could replace the rush he felt listening to Made in Japan, saying, “I just wanna take a brief second and say… 53 years ago, this very weekend, Deep Purple were in Japan for the very first time, and those three concerts were recorded – two nights in Osaka, one night in Tokyo were recorded – and eventually became the Made In Japan album, in my humble opinion, hands down the best hard rock live album ever. I have heard it just about 18,000 times, and every time I hear it, it just gets better and better and better, and it’s so crazy cool.”
But its power doesn’t necessarily come from the hits or anything. If anything, the band weren’t that well-known outside of the major hits like ‘Highway Star’ and ‘Smoke on the Water’, but the way they stretch out their tunes is absolutely perfect every time they perform. Blackmore was already on another planet before he joined, but hearing him bounce off of Lord is a sight to behold whenever you look at live footage from around that time.
Since Ulrich chose the drums first, there’s no getting around the massive drum solo in the middle of the song ‘Lazy’. Ian Paice was a tour-de-force behind the kit, and even though the rest of the band are playing their hearts out on every track, there’s a certain madness that makes someone able to make that much of a raucous in only a few minutes.
Purple never claimed to be the godfathers of heavy metal by any stretch, but when looking at what they contributed to the genre, it’s hard to think of any metal band that could have existed without them. They did have more grit than the average rock and roll band, but whereas Sabbath were scary and Zeppelin were larger than life, Purple was willing to blow people away through sheer musicality.
