The tour Lars Ulrich was most proud of playing: “That was so unprecedented”
For Metallica, the touring life ruled above everything else. As much as people like to talk about getting the sonics right whenever they enter the studio, the thrash legends were the definition of the term road dogs every time they got onstage, usually giving every single headliner a run for their money whenever they performed. While it could occasionally get ugly on the road, Lars Ulrich remained defiantly proud of being able to get two of the biggest bands together on one bill when working alongside Guns N’ Roses.
But when you break down their ideologies, both bands couldn’t have been further away from each other. They both did play different flavours of hard rock music, but the minute that they stepped out onstage, Metallica were just looking to kick ass and take names wherever they went, regardless of whether there was a market for it or not.
Guns N’ Roses were the same way, but they were just about as destructive to themselves as they were to anyone who paid for a ticket. Slash and Axl Rose made for an electric pair onstage, but the minute that Rose decided that he needed to be treated like a king to sing properly before a show, Metallica probably knew that they had their hands full when signing on.
Even James Hetfield remembered just how cumbersome it was trying to deal with Rose on the road. No matter how many times someone has tried to give excuses for their performance, hearing him convince people in Montreal that his voice was giving him trouble wasn’t going to fly after Hetfield accidentally set himself ablaze just a few hours before they took to the stage.
For Ulrich, though, that’s how rock and roll was supposed to be. Despite their penchant for just cutting shows midway through their set or flying blind throughout every show, there was something almost punk rock in the way that they conducted themselves, usually never going along with the program unless it meant disrupting someone else’s plans for what they thought a show should be.
So even though a lot of their dates turned into a shitshow, Ulrich remembered feeling proud to make such a big mark, telling Kerrang, “Metallica and Guns N’ Roses found a way to connect to fans outside of [that] and went out together in unity for the fans. That was really cool and so unprecedented and I was so proud that we could make that tour happen. All those guys are buddies of mine, and we just had a lot of fun.”
Even if it was fun, it proved to be fatal once Guns N’ Roses returned home. Metallica had been used to going out on the road for years at a time, but after crisscrossing the globe twice, the LA rockers returned home absolutely sick of Rose’s antics, only making it through one more album before leaving the lead singer on his ass with a completely different lineup.
The fans may have got their money’s worth at a handful of those shows, but there is a large price to pay for putting together something of that magnitude. For all of the great showmanship on display, the road always takes a piece of the soul, and Guns N’ Roses were practically a husk of themselves by the time the last note rang out on the final night.
