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

mocked, the teacher cuffed the youngster around the ears. As his classmates looked on in shock, Torben calmly packed up his books, shouldered his bag and walked out of the school, never to return. His distrust of authority did not waver from that day.
    At the time of their son’s birth, Lone and Torben lived in a beautiful four-storey house in Hellerup, an affluent upper- middle-class district on the north-eastern side of the Danish capital. The family shared the building’s upper floor while Lone’s parents, who owned the house, occupied the floors below. Throughout Lars’s childhood the property at Lundevangsvej 12 served as a culturalhub for the district, an open house for Hellerup’s bohemian set: artists, musicians, film-makers and writers dropped by daily to talk art, politics and philosophy with the urbane tennis pro and his family. American jazz men Dexter Gordon, Don Cherry and Stan Getz were neighbours and close family friends – indeed tenor saxophonist Gordon took on the mantle of Lars’s godfather early in 1964 – and their regular visits ensured that the Ulrich family home was always ablaze with music, laughter and conversation long after the house lights of neighbouring apartments had been extinguished. Young Lars was never excluded from the gatherings, never made to feel like an interloper in adult company, and in this fecund, nurturing environment, he developed into a happy, inquisitive and somewhat precocious youth.
    ‘I grew up pretty quick,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t have any siblings so I was around a lot of adults all the time. I found myself spending more time in the adult world than the adults spent in the child world. There was a very progressive scene [in Copenhagen], a lot of music and a lot of experimenting with thoughts and ideas. My dad was very much at the edge of that with music and writing and with poetry and film and so on. I grew up in that environment.’
    ‘My dad had a room opposite mine that was his music room and there was nothing in there other than records and a big fuck-off stereo … A lot of times when I woke up in the morning he would just be finishing in there, and I could hear the music through the walls. He’d be playing the Doors, Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, a lot of jazz stuff, [John] Coltrane, Miles [Davis], Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, that kind of stuff. Those are the earliest musical memories I have.’
    The home comforts of the Danish capital were accessible to the Ulrich family, however, only for part of the year, as Torben’s professional career necessitated the adoption of an itinerant lifestyle. The family’s calendar was broadly dictated by the tennis circuit’s four Grand Slam tournaments: January would see Torben, Lone, Lars and his nanny board long-haul flights to Melbourne, the host city for the Australian Open, while the months of May and June would see the tour relocate to Paris for the French Open. The final week of June brought the circuit to London and the grass courts of Wimbledon, after which the family could be found in the New York borough of Queens as Torben prepared for the late August opening rounds of the US Open. Elsewhere the template expanded to accommodate exhibition games and tournaments in Fiji, Tahiti, South Africa, India … wherever on the globe the International Tennis Federation could sell the game. Young Lars took it all in his stride, developing, by his own admission, ‘a pretty adventurous mind’.
    ‘I probably travelled an average of four to six school weeks a year, which was quite a lot, especially in the later years,’ he recalled. ‘So, I mean, of course in some ways it was somewhat unconventional but it wasn’t really until I came to America that I started hearing those words. I never heard those words when I was growing up … you know, “abnormal” or “unconventional”. It was what seemed to be the energy around not just my dad but my mom, the household in general, going back