Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read Online Free PDF Page A

present when James Hetfield first encountered Lars Ulrich. By any measure, the session booked by Hugh Tanner was a disaster, the blame for which lay at the drumsticks of Ulrich. Baldly put, the kid couldn’t play. He could certainly talk – yap, yap, yapping constantly in a sing-song accent which seemed to traverse the Atlantic Ocean without ever dropping anchor – but the task of holding down even the most rudimentary 4/4 beat seemed hopelessly beyond him. Lost in the music, with his eyes closed at his microphone stand, time and again Hetfield would be jolted back into the room as the session came juddering to a premature halt. Opening his eyes, the Californian would see the young drummer’s cymbals or snare drum tumble to the floor beneathhis wildly enthusiastic flailing. It was with a certain amount of embarrassment that Tanner called a halt to the session before the trio’s allotted time at the facility had expired. Ulrich, however, appeared utterly unfazed. As he packed away his kit into the back of his mother’s AMC Pacer car, the drummer enthused, ‘We should do this again.’ Hetfield and Tanner smiled politely and made noises of assent. Never a man overly concerned with looking in life’s rear-view mirror, as he pulled away from the studio for the thirty-minute drive back towards Newport Beach that afternoon, Lars Ulrich wouldn’t have noticed his two new friends exchange smiles that then dissolved into laughter.

    Twenty years on from that first ill-fated jam session, in May 2001 Hetfield and Ulrich once again found themselves struggling to make a connection in a Californian recording facility. Sessions for their band’s eighth studio album were proving fractured and unproductive, only this time Hetfield was singularly failing to find humour in the situation. As spring evenings lengthened into summer, Metallica’s front man announced his intention to step away from the process in order to find the space and time in which he might weigh up matters in his life both professional and personal. He gave no guarantees as to when, or even if, he might return.
    Early the following day, Ulrich chose to return to Presidio, the former army barracks in which Metallica were stationed, with his father, Torben, in tow. Still stunned by his friend’s abrupt exit, it was Ulrich’s intention to play his father rough mixes of the material the band had committed to tape thus far, as much to convince himself of the validity and vibrancy of the project as to garner his father’s opinions on the recordings.
    The drummer decided to begin his playback session with a track recorded when the Presidio sessions were at their mostharmonious. In the small hours of May 3 Hetfield, Ulrich, Metallica’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and producer Bob Rock had entered the studio’s live room on a high after attending a concert by the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore auditorium. The music they were inspired to make that morning, with its reverb-rich guitar drones and off-beat drums, was both heavily indebted to the Reykjavik quartet, and a grand departure from anything previously recorded under the Metallica name. Always obsessive in his desire to push his band into territories new, Ulrich was inordinately proud of the piece. As the song flowed through the studio’s state-of-the-art speakers, the drummer made infinitesimal tweaks to the recording’s EQ levels on an SSL 4000 console, while his seventy-three- year-old father looked on impassively from the control room’s black leather couch.
    ‘Comments on that one?’ Lars enquired brightly as the song faded out.
    Torben sank back into the sofa and stroked his long grey beard as he weighed up his response.
    ‘If you said, “If you were our advisor what would you say?”’ he answered slowly, ‘then I would say, “Delete that.”’
    There followed a split-second silence, during which the air seemed to be sucked from the room. And then Lars