Metallica's Lars Ulrich At Guitar Center

there was a room down in the basement of the house where I grew up that kind of turned into my music room and uh my friends and I would um would get like cardboard boxes paint stirs we'd have a foosball table and tennis racquets and a broom shaft and we would um be deep purple and status quo and uriah heep and we would turn the heat up there was an old radiator heater you know and we would turn the heat up to ten in the room then we start sweating and you know miming along - made in Japan and uriah heep live and so on and so forth and I was the one that kind of ended up on the cardboard boxes with the Paint Stores and it just kind of gravitated towards that and probably pretty soon thereafter I got down on my knees in front of my grandmother and I was about 14 or 15 and um I begged her for a drum kit and all lo and behold that grandmother's are prone to make these things happen within a fairly short time period a drum kit showed up single kick one rack two floor toms it was kind of pieced together I think it was like a Slingerland tom and a premier floor and something else they're all sort of a little bit kind of like maybe there was a Ludwig drum and there was a little bit kind of the kind of that classic cream color kind of thing there you know but that was the first kit and I banged away on that for a couple of years after my drum kit got stolen my camco drums got stolen in in the spring of 84 on the East Coast I think I um punted my way through renting drums for the better part of the next six or eight months he played a lot in Europe but every time I went to Europe would get rental drum kits that would fall over and bah-bah-bah so when we hooked up with Q prime and cliff Bernstein and and that whole thing in the fall of 84 instantly they connected me to Tama this was a probably October 84 and on Neil Peart time was the big Tom endorsee and cliff Bernstein our manager was the guy that signed rush to mercury records a decade before so he knew the rush guys really well so if you want to talk to me help heard about drums I was like that big at the time and it was like talking Emil was like the God of gods and so I actually um you know managed to sort of get enough gusto up to dial the phone number that I was given and I called him and it's like I spoke to Newport for like half an hour about Tama drums it was pretty amazing the good people at Thomas sent me a drum kit to my specifications and um so that's 29 years I've never thought of I playing any other drums um its they were the first ones that stepped up and helped out and they've been absolutely amazing since that's the only setup I've played since um since the summer of 94 uh before that I had two extra rack Tom's the small one there and a big one there um and so what that did it pushed the hi-hat really far this way and the ride cymbal really far started would play the the ride on the hi-hat like this and I was hanging out with Jerry Cantrell up in Seattle and went to an Alice for Alice in Chains rehearsal room and played Shawn Kenny's drums and he had just two rack Tom's in front of Act II I think just one maybe um and his hi-hat sat in front of him rather than on his side I go that's pretty cool and that was a lot easier to play so I lost the two rack toms on the side so that's probably been the only change since then oh I think that um I think the second floor Tom back there was affectionately dubbed the coffee table for many years because it was never actually used for anything other than to put you know drinks on or sticks so I think at some point that went from a 22 and 18 other than that it's been just about business as usual for about 20 years you know the one thing that struck me when I came to America was that um in America everybody was talking about making it and I found that there was a particular kind of sort of the goal oriented culture at play in America that I had not really experienced growing up in Europe I'm not saying that there are worse I'm just saying a lot of kids I've talked to you come to American so you don't want to be a rock star I want to do this and I want to do this and in five years I'm going to do this and I just sat there and said I just want to play diamond hit songs and sweat in my room I didn't I wasn't like that ambitious um and so I think if you can just kind of hone in on on what your real motive is and try to be pure you know I don't think there's a right or wrong it's just about you know I want to be a rock star I want to make money I want to meet girls or okay fine do your thing you know it but I want to play music I want to write songs I want to communicate through the medium of music with other people you know there many different ways it's not some of better or worse it's just I think if you can identify what your pure motives are then the less thought you know the less kind of force thought you put into it the better the chances are of something good happening now something good may not equal something successful but that's okay I mean you can still be successful and not necessarily be widely recognized you know what I mean so there many different takes on this uh I think that um ultimately people that are talented you know will rise to the top you know an audience will find you if you stick with it but I mean I've st. I'm not going to sit here and go and sort of you know like the only way to do it is to be pure and tooth phul you know it everybody's got their own truth you know um but for me I I just wanted to play music then I don't know what it was about sweating tastes a little silly but it was just like it was like playing and turning up the heat and sweating I don't know I guess that's what people that we looked up to did on so that's what we want it to be you know you know in some way I think you could argue that I look at the stage as being probably the safest place in in my day on tour there's nobody that bothers me up there there's nobody taps me on the shoulder there's no phone calls there's nothing I can do I can there's a tremendous amount of freedom up there and when it really works and and and you free yourself of everything else it's going on and you connect with the three other guys in the band and you connect with um the audience um you know obviously it's very freeing and I think obviously um sort of just being able to sort of do what you feel in that moment is very liberating we've had a pretty fulfilling ride for the better part of 32 years and um a lot of different experiences I think that uh I don't know I I wouldn't say that any of us are Metallica as a van of ever has ever been particularly goal oriented it's not like whoo we got to do this we gotta you know we got a you know make it to here sell this or played standing on our heads somewhere I mean it's it's just uh nowadays it's um the fact that we're just still around and um seemingly lots of people still care and um they're even those that call is borderline relevant still so we appreciate that and and and I think that um just kind of um I guess the longevity element of it itself is enough to keep us going you know listen this is the main thing I've been doing in my life for 32 years it's not I don't really know anything else or do anything else and um you know I I'm not particularly I don't really have any ambitions or anything like that we've got to do this or when we take a year off I've got a go climb climb you know Mount Everest or anything like that so it's which is I love playing I love playing with James Kirk and Rob and I love getting out there and getting amongst it and and I would never change any other you you

Channel: Guitar Center

Views: 2,118,029

Rating: 4.8565178 out of 5

Keywords: metallica, the black album, guitar center, interview, rare, lars ulrich, tama, drummer, metallica drums, drummer lars

Id: uI07pAt34i0

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2014