10 Things We Learned at Lars Ulrich’s ‘Front Row’ Summit
Metallica got their start in the East Bay community of El Cerrito in the mid-Eighties after relocating from L.A. to play with bassist Cliff Burton. They went on to become one of the biggest rock bands in history. In February, they played for a packed stadium the night before the Super Bowl in their adopted hometown of San Francisco. Metallica have in many ways become synonymous with the Bay Area — not only because of their pivotal role in the creation of thrash metal but because of their prominent place in the region’s musical and cultural community.
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich was recently asked by a group of student curators at the University of California, Berkeley, to organize an event that touched on the creative process and explored what being from the Bay Area means to artists, business leaders and thinkers. A small number of tickets were sold to students for $5 each. The “Front Row” event that followed on campus Wednesday night was a diverse evening of panels featuring two members of Metallica, Primus’ Les Claypool, Ulrich’s octogenarian father Torben, Zen Buddhist and actor Peter Coyote, and many others. For several hours, the group discussed everything from art to philanthropy. Here are 11 things we learned.
Ulrich’s love of the Bay Area long preceded his Metallica days
Ulrich sometimes visited Berkeley as a teenager when his father came up for tennis events from Southern California. “My Dad took me to Berkeley when I was about 15,” he said. “I was running all over Telegraph Avenue to Tower Records and Rasputin and Blondie’s Pizza. A lot of my cultural horizons were shaped just around these corners.
“When I was here in 1981, I was walking around Telegraph Avenue. There was this crazy-looking metal dude walking down the street with a boom box on his shoulder and Motörhead was blaring out of it — it was playing ‘Overkill.’ I became friends with a lot of people here and became sort of infatuated with the whole Bay Area scene. It really made me want to go to Los Angeles and start a band. When James and I wanted to get Cliff in the band, we came up here in a nanosecond because this place honed my outlook on the world.”
One of the places where Ulrich spent time during those visits was People’s Park, home of the free-speech movement
“It was sort of everything that Berkeley represented in terms of individual expression and counterculture,” Ulrich said. “This is in the thick of stuff that has been brewing for five decades. In Metallica, we talk all of the time about how proud we are to represent the Bay Area to the world — that the Bay Area has shaped who we are.”
Ulrich is willing to literally have his commitment to free speech put to the test
During the event, Berkeley’s Student Labor Committee was staging an on-campus protest against unfair treatment of subcontracted workers. Before starting the forum, Ulrich opened up the stage for five minutes to anyone who “wished to be heard.” One protester accepted the invite, followed by two fans that took selfies with Ulrich before the audience. Later in the evening, another protester was tackled by security while trying to rush the stage, and several others were escorted out of the building.