Lessons With Lars Joe Zawierucha remembers a time, approximately twenty years ago, when Metallica was known as "the worst band in Orange County." He should know. After all Zawierucha is assistant manager at West Coast Drum Center in Santa Ana, California, who taught drumming fundamentals to Lars Ulrich during Metallica's fledging years. To be fair, Ulrich was only a teenager when he studied with Zawierucha and exhibited the types of bad habits that one finds in most young drummers. "He tried to overplay." Zawierucha remembers. "He was very stiff and tight. So when he came to me he was mostly trying to loosen up his wrists and build hard-hitting, fast chops with incredible endurance, but be relaxed." It wasn't an overnight proposition. Though Zawierucha remembers Ulrich as a serious, dedicated student. "Lars was ferocious," he says. "He would tell me 'I did this for thirty minutes and I did that for twenty minutes. Last week, my total practice time per day was three and a half to four hours.' I was impressed. He knew exactly what he wanted to learn. He wasn't interested in reading or learning pressed rolls, but he was definitely chops oriented-kind of like an athletic workout in terms of kinds of things we did." Ulrich continued to ask Zawierucha for advice, even after Metallica began to get its first taste of success. "All these drum companies were after him after the band came back from Europe," Zawierucha says. "He was still a young man, and was confused by all the attention. It was like the success was growing faster than his maturity was as a person." However, the drummer never forgot Zawierucha's help, and repaid his teacher on more than one occasion. "One time I was at the old drum shop and I got a UPS special delivery from a company I had never heard of," he says. "I thought, 'What's this? It must be a mistake.' This is when...And Justice for All went triple platinum. So I opened it up, and it was a platinum album with my name on it. I had five people in the store who wanted to buy it for $2,000 right then and there. I keep it at home. It was very moving." |
