Metallica Drummer Lars Ulrich Reveals His First Love Before Music
Metallica‘s drummer Lars Ulrich has recently joined a podcast conversation with Tanya’s Table. He is co-founder and drummer of Metallica also opens up about his first real love before music. Ulrich tells how and when he ended up in the US and the journey of him finding his place with music.
So, it seems like Lars Ulrich‘s father has really great effects on his son’s life somehow. He introduced both passions of Ulrich’s to himself and somehow helped him getting this point, as well. At least, we see it that way.
On his first try, he couldn’t manage it that much, as we understand. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps about not much happened. Why? Because it was not the real thing Lars Ulrich was meant to do.
The big date is when his father took him to see his first Deep Purple show. This actually was the first step to Lars Ulrich’s fate with music, I guess. Well, we could count it two as well if we also add the part of him coming US. That’s how his real journey begins, and co-founds Metallica with James Hetfield, and also has been there for every triumph and mishap along the way, as the band has carved out its unique place in rock n roll history.
During their conversations, Lars Ulrich discusses music, food and the concur of those two:
“I was 17. I came over in 1980. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark, and my dad was a tennis player, and spent a lot of the ’60s and the ’70s traveling a lot in the United States. So I spent quite a bit of time with him on the road here, and when I started going to school when I was 16 or 17, I encouraged my mom and my dad to find my idea of moving to Southern California.
We landed in Newport Beach in the fall of 1980 when I was 17, and obviously, that was a pretty significantly different world from what I grew up with, still under the false impression at the time that I could follow my father’s footsteps and play tennis, and maybe take it to a professional level.
In Denmark, which is a very small country, I was playing at different levels and ages, but when I came to Newport Beach, I was not even in the Top 10 in the street where I was living in.”
Lars Ulrich’s breakpoint of tennis
“There was a lot of competition. Where I grew up, tennis was an old-school gentlemen’s sport. Social people get together and play tennis, have a couple of beers – it was that kind of thing. But at that time in America, it was very competitive, and a lot of parents, maybe middle-class parents, pushed their kids into tennis to achieve economic success.”
As far as I get to understand, Lars Ulrich‘s real passion for tennis was not to win at it but to play it. Making sports is one of the most relieving activities in our lives that this also seems what sports also means for Metallica‘s talented member, as well. So, it might not be that awkward that once he seen the stressful side of it and couldn’t stay away from it, cause everyone besides him was just in that mood, he gave up. Naturally.
Right after him, Tanya continues and says, “A lot of our sports heroes were tennis players. I grew up knowing tennis players’ names. And I took tennis lessons when I was little, but it wasn’t aspiring to be a tennis pro. But for you it was so significant – Arthur Ashe, he was so significant, Billie Jean King, you just knew because their personalities really showed through.”
In an addition, Lars Ulrich starts telling the tennis back in days, and how he got kicked right before he jumped into the music,
“Obviously, at that time, there were those three guys, and Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert, and all the great players of the ’70s, they all brought tennis to a much wider audience, and it became such a big thing in the mid-70s, it became much more competitive, and much more commercial.
And I was still operating under the pretense of a small country and gentlemen sport, and all the rest of it, so I landed in Newport Beach and I got my ass kicked. And that moved my passion away from tennis, it went quickly, and I jumped into music, and that was about 1981.”
Well, even if this makes me a little hurt, I also can’t say I’m heartbroken or whatever. No matter what, his and Metallica‘s talented and unique music has been with us for like forever that we probably wouldn’t know what to do they were not here. What do you think? You can also hear the whole conversation of Lars Ulrich here.