Lars Ulrich created Metallica in 1981
In an interview with Jan Grandvall in Sweden, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich spoke about the first time he met vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield .
“[My family] moved to Los Angeles, to Newport Beach, a suburb in the south, and I was going to play tennis on the local high school team. There was an Australian tennis player named Roy Emerson who was close to my dad, and he had a son named Anthony Emerson, and he was the star tennis player at the high school. In Denmark at that time I was kind of ranked in the top 10 in the country and blah blah blah, and I was going to Newport Beach to play with Anthony Emerson on this tennis team, except the problem was that when I played on the high school team, I wasn't one of the top seven players in the school. And I wasn't even one of the top seven players on the street I lived on. So, literally, in one day, the whole tennis dream fell apart – fell apart and burned hard – and music was waiting to take over. There was a 7-Eleven [store], and the 7-Eleven had a local classifieds newspaper called Recycler, […] and there was a little section about musicians looking for bands and bands looking for musicians. So I put a An advertisement saying, 'Drummer looking for other heavy metal fans,' or whatever, 'to start a band. Influences: Diamond Head, Angel Witch, Tygers Of Pan Tang and Venom, ' or something like that. And I'd get all these calls from these guys saying, 'I like heavy metal. I like Styx and I like Kansas and I like Van Halen, ' or whatever. And 'Who is Diamond Head?' […] And then I went and tried to play music with a lot of people and nothing worked. And then, one day, there was a phone call from a guy named Hugh Tanner, who said he could bring a friend, and we met and played music for an afternoon. And the guy he brought was James Hetfield. [James was] very shy, super introverted, could barely look you in the eye, barely have a conversation. But there was some connection with him while we were playing. And even though nothing happened that day, I ended up getting kind of frustrated with the whole thing. And now it was June of 1981, so I went back and spent the summer in Europe and spent some time in England with Diamond Head and Motörhead . But when I got back to the United States in October of that year, I called that James Hetfield guy again, because there was just a vibe, a connection. And I said if he wanted to get together and see if there was a possibility of something, and we connected. And 37 years later, I'm sitting here.
Back then, he was… I came from a cultured European upbringing, I was an only child, very close to my parents – my parents were my best friends at the time. And he was the complete opposite – the classic American rebel, like, 'Fuck my parents, fuck society, fuck man' – that whole thing…[…] I know he was very disconnected from his father and he was raised by his mother who then got cancer when he was 14 or 15. And because of the particular Christianity they believed in, they weren't allowed to seek medical help. So, basically, I think for about a year and a half, he watched his mother wither away before his eyes. So, obviously, that had a significant impact on him. I met him, I think, about a year after that – maybe he was 17 or 18. [He was] painfully shy and awkward. But we connected with the music and we'd sit in my room in Newport Beach and listen to, like I said, Tyger Of Pan Tang, Girlschool, Saxon and Angel Witch, and all that stuff, and he loved all that stuff.
He grew up listening to more American artists like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and that sort of thing. But we found a common language and something in common that we could feel connected to and identify with. And we started playing music together. Most of the songs we started with were covers of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that were pretty much off the radar, because we wanted to start playing shows immediately. So we figured if we learned a set… A lot of bands in bars and clubs back then were playing Kiss and Judas Priest , or whatever, so we figured we’d play some covers, but not songs that people knew. And then we took our time and started writing our own songs later on.”
