Lars Ulrich Wants to Keep Metallica Going for “Another 20, 25 Years”
It’s been an entire day since we last posted anything Metallica-related, Corey Taylor hasn’t thunk anything in almost as long and we’ve got bills to pay — we feed the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys only the absolute finest bananas, OK? — so how ’bout a silly bit of content with little nutritional value that you can’t resist clicking on?
To that end, Lars Ulrich would like to keep Metallica going until he is nearly 80 years old. Either that or the 54-year-old drummer couldn’t quite grok the math during a recent interview with Philadelphia radio station 93.3 WMMR when he said “We hope we can get another 20, 25 years” out of the band.
Here’s the full quote:
“A lot of people are retiring, and we feel very energized and rejuvenated. I mean, we wanna go long. We hope we can get another 20, 25 years. I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, I don’t know what it’s gonna sound like, but that’s in our heads. So we’re not sitting there thinking retirement or this or that; we’re sort of more the opposite. So I would say, for us, everything we do is kind of a long game. And back then, when you were 17, you only think of, like, the next five minutes. ‘Where is the next beer? Whoo!’ So that’s kind of different mentality nowadays.”
“There’s more younger kids at our shows than I can ever remember. Half the audience is under 20. And it also feels more like it’s 50-50 between boys and girls now, which obviously [wasn’t the case] 20, 30 years ago. So it’s amazing how rock and roll and harder rock and what we’re doing just continues to appeal to… I don’t know if it’s a rite of passage, but it feels like it continues rather than regressing; it feels like it’s actually spreading.”
Metallica recently pledged to play no more than 50 shows a year, and they certainly have it way easier these days than they ever did before and than most bands do: they fly everywhere, they have multiple days off between shows (and weeks off between runs) and they live in luxury even on the road. In that context it isn’t difficult to imagine Metallica doing this into old age, although when one starts to think about 75-year-old men yelling about fuel, fire and that which I desire the picture becomes a bit murky. Perhaps they’ll transition into a cover band of old Irish folk songs and fade into the twilight that way.
