have bigger songs. They have better songs. But no Metallica song has had the same impact as the one that opened their game-changing debut album, .
Four minutes and 17 seconds of suburban fury, fired the starting pistol on the career of the most successful metal band in history and, by extension, invented modern metal as we know it. If anyone can take credit for inadvertently galvanising both and Metallica themselves into existence, it’s . An LA fanzine writer and aspiring record label mogul with an ardent love of heavy metal, he’d met an exuberant, ambitious 17-year-old Danish ex-pat named Lars Ulrich in the parking lot of a Michael Schenker Group gig in Los Angeles in 1980.
Lars hadn’t been in LA long, arriving there after abandoning his hopes of becoming a professional tennis player like his dad to pursue his rock’n’roll dreams. “I remember being at his house one day, and he had a drum set in the corner – not put together, just the pieces,” Brian told in 2021. “He goes, ‘I’m gonna start a band.
’ ‘Yeah, sure, Lars, whatever...
’” Lars had been jamming with a bunch of musicians, including a lanky kid he’d met named James Hetfield. Nothing had come of any of it, but Lars wasn’t ready to give up. When Brian Slagel told his friend in the autumn of 1981 that he was putting together a compilation album titled to showcase the underground LA metal scene, Lars wanted in.
“He called me up and said, ‘Hey, if I put together a band, can I be on your c.
