Hier ist ein Interview mit Lars ...
Ist zwar nichts neues (deshalb hab ichs auch net unter News gepostet), aber wens trotzdem interessiert, der kanns sich ja mal durchlesen...
Metallica may be older and wiser but definitely not softer
There was a time when the guys in Metallica might have sneered at something like a Governors Award.
But drummer Lars Ulrich and his bandmates were humbled by the honor bestowed on them earlier this month by the San Francisco chapter of the Recording Academy.
"Being there with Carlos Santana and Mickey Hart, I thought, 'Whoa! That's some serious (bleep).' It was just a little intimidating," Ulrich said in a phone interview this week.
"But we've been doing this now for 23 years or so. It's OK to get a pat on the back and accept the recognition. You don't need to be a rebellious, snot-nosed teenager your whole life."
Though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't attend the St. Francis Hotel gala, concert promoter Gregg Perloff was on hand to remind Ulrich, singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and new bassist Rob Trujillo of the Bay Area group's rowdy past.
"We would get drunk after shows and trash the dressing room, then get reprimanded by (the late concert promoter) Bill Graham," Ulrich said with a laugh. "It was like getting called to the principal's office and getting finger-whacked."
In the 1980s, Metallica rose from the heavy-metal underground to become one of the country's top arena acts. The release of "Kill 'Em All" in 1983 raised the band's profile at a time when thrash- and speed-metal were rebellious upstarts and hair-metal bands reigned supreme on the arena circuit. "Master of Puppets," a metal masterpiece, followed in 1986. At the end of the decade, Metallica reached the top of the charts with its conceptual album, "... And Justice for All."
In 1991, the year Nirvana and other Seattle bands launched the grunge revolution, Metallica released "Metallica" (often called the "Black Album"), a stripped-down collection of songs that sold more than 7 million copies.
"It was a really exciting time. The 'Black Album' came out in August and 'Nevermind' came out in September," Ulrich said. "The hair-metal stuff was crawling back into the hole it crawled out of and we were hitting our stride."
Metallica roared through the '90s with a slew of major albums, from "Load" and "Re-Load" to "S&M," a live album documenting their groundbreaking performance with the San Francisco Symphony. But at the start of the new century, Metallica found itself in the midst of a public-relations debacle after launching a legal offensive against Napster. The controversy raged for more than a year.
The group's current tour with Godsmack, which earlier this month released a new acoustic album, "The Other Side," includes a show Sunday night at 7 at KeyArena. Metallica's concert trek is a follow-up to last year's "Summer Sanitarium" stadium tour with Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. The high-decibel show appeared last August at Seahawks Stadium.
"We just about scraped even," Ulrich said of the money-losing tour. "With stadium tours, you do them for the vibe and because they're fun and because it's summer. The idea was to get some cool bands together and go out and have a good time. It had an old-school rock-festival vibe. But unless you're like the Rolling Stones and can charge a fortune for tickets, you don't go out on a stadium tour to put your kids through college."
Though the current show is a downsized version of "Santarium," it features a rotating set list of more than 40 songs.
"We do a different show every night," Ulrich said. "In the past, sometimes we'd get stuck in the sameness of it. Every night for six months, we'd play the same show. If you wanted to put a different song in there, you had to give the lighting director three days' notice so he could program it into the computer.
"Now we put together a different set list every night. It keeps it fresher for us. We've been playing songs we've never played before. We have a little practice room where we get together for about 30 minutes to fumble our way through whatever new songs we're trying to play that night."
The tour supports the group's 2003 album, "St. Anger," a powerful CD that has received mixed reviews from fans.
"Some people were overwhelmed by it," Ulrich said with a chuckle. "I can see now that for people who knew Metallica through the simpler stuff, 'St. Anger' can be a pretty challenging record. But I'm proud of it, and proud that we stuck with it and didn't pussy out. A couple times in the past when we set out to make some aggressive stuff, we kind of watered it down. I'm glad we didn't do that.
" '... And Justice for All' is one of the cornerstones of the band's career. But next to it, 'St. Anger' sounds like 'Dark Side of the Moon.' It'll be interesting to see what people think of the record five or 10 years from now. There are people who think it's just a little ahead of its time."
This summer, Metallica fans can look forward to a provocative documentary film, "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," chronicling the internal struggles -- including Hetfield's substance-abuse problems, his rivalry with Ulrich and the departure of bassist Jason Newstad -- that preceded the release of the cathartic "St. Anger."
"It's about a band in turmoil and how the group pulls itself together and gets out of that turmoil. You're going to see some things in this movie that you probably haven't seen in a lot of movies about rock bands," Ulrich said. "The film puts you right in the thick of things. You're pretty close to the action."
The film offers a candid look at the breakdown between Ulrich and Hetfield.
"We were fighting for pole position," Ulrich said. "We have two incredibly different personalities, and each of us was trying to control everything. There was a lot of fighting and insecurity issues. When he and I were in a room alone together, there were never any problems. It was always when we were in a room with other people and both of us would try to take over. So there was a lot of stuff that kept mounting and mounting and never got resolved."