Lars Ulrich

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Lars Ulrich (2013)
Lars Ulrich with drums
Collage of different facial expressions by Lars Ulrich on drums, March 2009

Lars Ulrich (born December 26, 1963 in Gentofte , Denmark ) is a Danish musician and songwriter . He is the co-founder and drummer of the metal band Metallica .

Life

As the son of the professional tennis player and jazz club owner Torben Ulrich , Lars Ulrich came into contact with music at an early age. The father played Lars records by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker . The family traveled all over the world for the tennis tournaments. In 1973 Lars Ulrich and his father attended a concert by Deep Purple , whose guitarist Ritchie Blackmore made a deep impression on him.

As a child, Ulrich initially wanted to be a professional tennis player like his father. In 1976 he started making music after his grandparents gave him his first drum kit. In 1979 the family moved to the United States and settled in Newport Beach , a small town south of Los Angeles . Ulrich remained a Danish citizen and still is today.

Ulrich was sent to a tennis boarding school by his parents. But after only six months he devoted himself to music again, especially the New Wave of British Heavy Metal . The problem, however, was that this music movement was still completely unknown in the USA at that time. In order to be able to hear the bands of this genre, Ulrich asked friends from Denmark to send records to him in the USA, mainly from Diamond Head . Ulrich was so fascinated by this band that he - still a minor - flew to England in 1980 to watch the group live. He befriended singer Sean Harris and spent a month with the band. Lars was also the founder of the American Motörhead -Fanclubs.

Back in the USA, Lars Ulrich set out to found his own band. He had to refuse an offer from Kurdt Vanderhoof because the band Anvil Chorus (the forerunner of Metal Church ) was based in San Francisco, too far for him.

He met guitarist James Hetfield through an advertisement in Recycler Magazin , in which Ulrich was looking for bandmates . With him he founded the band Metallica in 1981 . Since then, both musicians have been playing together to this day. In the creative process in the band, Ulrich is primarily responsible for arranging the riffs and song ideas of the other band members. In addition, over the years he has become a kind of spokesman for the band (for example, he represented the band in the discussion about Napster at a hearing before the US Senate).

Ulrich was significantly influenced by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal . He put together the sampler New Wave of British Heavy Metal '79 Revisited , published in 1990 , but, according to his own statements, underestimated the work involved.

“It started with the fact that I couldn't reach some of these groups at all, nobody knew how to contact them, they were literally lost. Like Holocaust, for example . The only thing we could find out about this band was that their guitarist lived somewhere in Edinburgh. So one day when I was at Phonogram in London , we called information and asked them to give us the numbers of all the John Mortimers in Edinburgh. They gave us six or seven numbers, too, and off we went. We called John Mortimer after the other. It went something like this: 'Hello?' · 'Hello, are you the same John Mortimer who played guitar in the Holocaust ten years ago?' · 'Are you kidding me? I am a miner and have never had anything to do with any holocaust . Goodbye! ' We had mine buddies and car dealers and I don't know what. Some of them must have thought we were pretty stupid. "

- Lars Ulrich : Metal Hammer / Crash , No. 8/1990.

Ulrich was married to Skylar Satenstein from 1997 to 2004. Between 2003 and 2012, he dated Danish actress Connie Nielsen , who brought a son into the relationship. A son was born on May 21, 2007 in San Francisco. In 2015 he married model Jessica Miller, who is 20 years his junior.

On June 13, 2017 Ulrich was accepted into the Dannebrogden by Queen Margrethe II .

Instruments

Currently (since 2016) Lars Ulrich plays a double bass drums with two hanging toms and two standing toms. It is a Tama Starclassic Maple in "Lars Ulrich Deeper Purple". He also plays his own 14 ″ × 6.5 ″ Lars Ulrich signature snare . He uses Zildjian A Custom Projection cymbals as well as an 18 "and a 20" Oriental China Trash, also from Zildjian. He plays his own ahead signature aluminum sticks .

Web links

Commons : Lars Ulrich  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Lars Ulrich. Retrieved June 16, 2017 .
  2. ^ "Birth School Metallica Death: The Biography", by Paul Brannigan, Ian Winwood (en)
  3. ^ A b c Matthias Breusch, Edgar Klüsener: Metallica . “Were you ever a guitarist in the Holocaust? . In: Metal Hammer / Crash , No. 8, 1990, p. 10.
  4. Lars Ulrich and Jessica Miller. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
  5. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich knighted in Denmark . In: Rolling Stone . June 14, 2017 ( rollingstone.de [accessed June 16, 2017]).