“That was it”: The song Lars Ulrich admitted to playing “9,000 times”
No musician absent-mindedly thinks that they are getting into the industry solely to make money. That might be the endgame for people like Gene Simmons, but the majority of people see an opportunity to make music that relates to people in a much deeper way than some throwaway single that comes on the radio. Although Lars Ulrich never even imagined Metallica having one major hit to their name, he was already building an obsession with anything remotely connected to metal.
But for Ulrich, he may have been coming of age at the exact wrong place. San Francisco may have been where he cut his teeth as a musician and eventually hooked up with James Hetfield to form Metallica, but as soon as came to the US from Denmark, everything revolved around the music coming out of England.
After all, the majority of all good metal music originated from Birmingham when Black Sabbath debuted. The genre didn’t yet have a proper name, but as soon as the rainfall on that first album came on, followed by Tony Iommi’s doomy guitar riff, everyone knew that they were listening to something a lot more interesting than the same bluesy riffs that The Rolling Stones had been pumping out.
Once it reached Ulrich’s generation, though, the nastier side of hard rock and suddenly became a lot faster. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal may have had its first major band in Judas Priest after Sabbath, but they were still whetting everyone’s appetite. Once acts like Saxon and Raven started packing venues, fans were in for a much different ride than the droning Sabbath tunes or the nastiness of the punk movement.
Looking at every band that came out of that scene, the major success stories ended up going in completely different directions. Iron Maiden was always the band that most people connected with as purely metal, but the fact that Def Leppard got their start on the same stages doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The scene may have been more eclectic, but Diamond Head was the purest form of NWOBHM, taking pieces of blues and turning it into finely crafted steel.
While ‘Am I Evil’ would become the band’s enduring anthem, Ulrich always gravitated to ‘It’s Electric’ starting out, saying, “They were the opening cut on this compilation album – the song was called ‘It’s Electric’. When I heard that song I think I subsequently ended up playing it, like, 9,000 times for the next month. If there was ever a song that made me want to be in a band, that was it.”
Although Ulrich was more than happy for their inspiration, it would take a few years for him to repay them. Because while Metallica had done plenty of covers throughout their tenure, they would never tell people they were cover tunes, leading to many people assuming ‘Am I Evil’ was one of their originals. When the band released Garage Inc, though, they finally had an excuse to pay them back, including even more obscure hard rock acts like Budgie in the mix as well.
Thrash may been birthed from what Diamond Head had started, but Ulrich was always interested in something more. He knew Metallica had the power to take over the world, and when they had the right riff at their disposal, they were bound to take their love of Diamond Head to new heights.
