
Lars Ulrich has taken a lot of trash talk from Metallica fans.
Outside of Napster, Ulrich has been called out online about his drum performance not being close to what it used to be.
While it might be up to taste, one of Ulrich’s former bandmates agrees that he is slipping.
When Dave Mustaine was asked about working with his former bandmates, he wasn’t shy about Lars’ performance saying,
“I would love to work with James [Hetfield]. I’d like to work with Lars again, too, but I think the real talent in Metallica has always been around the guitar — everybody makes fun of the drums.”
While Mustaine might have some hangups with the drums, he does compliment Ulrich’s ability for arranging saying,
“Lars is a really great song arranger. And believe it or not, I watched him on a piece-of-shit acoustic guitar write the opening riff to ‘Master of Puppets.’ You know what that was? It was a guy with a guitar that doesn’t know how to play, and he’s going all the way down the neck. It wasn’t anything really mind-blowing by any means. The way James played it made it mind-blowing.”
Despite being an arranger of some of their biggest songs, Mustaine was not okay with Ulrich getting royalties back in the day saying,
“James and I wrote ‘Metal Militia’ and ‘Phantom Lord’ — every note. And somehow, on the record it says Lars gets 10 percent. And on ‘Metal Militia’ that Kirk [Hammett] gets some of it, and he wasn’t even in the band at the time it was written.”
While Metallica might want to build bridges over time, Mustaine isn’t looking to give up his songwriting royalties saying,
“If James wants to give Lars his percentage, that’s fine if he’s afraid of him. I’m not afraid of him. I could not willingly enter into a new agreement with these guys predicated on Lars getting credit for something that not only he did not do but he was incapable of doing — he was incapable of writing songs that good back then.”