METALLICA Drummer LARS ULRICH - "I Wish I Might Have Been More Prepared For The Backlash On The Napster Thing"

November 22, 2008, 15 years ago

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METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich is featured in a new three part interview with StereoWarning.com. An excerpt appears below, with the third installment due to be online tomorrow (November 23rd).

Q:Is there anything you'd change in your career?

Lars: "I probably would've chosen not to wear a white leather jacket in the summer of 1992."

Q: That's right, the jacket from the "A Year And A Half In The Life Of Metallica" video! Where is it now?

Lars: "Locked away safely in the attic, trust me. I also wish I might have been more prepared for the backlash on the Napster thing. Obviously I wish I could change the accident that took Cliff Burton. But other than that I'm not a guy that spends to much time in the past. If anything I'm guilty of spending too much time in the future. In the last few years I feel like I've been in the present more. I wish I'd done it earlier on cause I missed out on a lot of things that were going on around me because I was always so occupied with long-range planning."

Q: You were right about Napster and most people would probablly admit it now, but you took a lot of heat at the time. Was it a PR mistake to take on those guys then?

Lars: "No, it was the right thing to do but we should've been better prepared. But that's Metallica, man, we just jump and we don't know where the fuck we're gonna land most of the time. And that's a beatiful thing to do but once in a while you also hurt yourself when you land. They were brilliant because they set us up against our fans. It wasn't true that Metallica was suing the fans, we never sued any of our fans. We said please take us off the server, they said we can't do that, we don't know who's downloading your music. We said that's bullshit. So we called up some company and they got the names of everybody. It was as easy as putting milk on your cereal. So we said here they are, and they said Lars is suing his fans. They were very smart. I wish we'd been more prepared. It was annoying that it was so misunderstood and still to this day, 8 years later some people remember that 'Metallica is about money.' It wasn't money, it was control. It wasn't supposed to be a big thing. The way I look at Metallica this is a footnote. but to some people Metallica are the guys that went after Napster."

Go to this location for the complete interview.



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