METALLICA's LARS ULRICH: 'FRED DURST Is An Innovator'

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich recently spoke to Metal Edge magazine about how the lineup for this year's Summer Sanitarium Tour came together.

"When Summer Sanitarium was conceived three years ago, the idea, in a nutshell, was to recreate all the shit we grew up on, which was Day On The Green and Texas Rockfests and all that shit, because no one does that anymore," he said. "We thought that if you were going to do that, the premise had to be variation, not METALLICA and four fuckin' METALLICA support bands. It's gotta be other bands who are fully capable of headlining in their own right. The idea of seeing a bunch of headliners together, that was always the theme. In 2003, after you've done KORN and SYSTEM OF A DOWN and KID ROCK, where else do you go but to LIMP BIZKIT and LINKIN PARK? No one else is capable of doing it. To me, I will not have METALLICA and a bunch of second-rate bands. It's gotta be the bans who are innovators, and whether you like him or you hate him, [LIMP BIZKIT frontman] Fred Durst is an innovator. Fred Durst is a fuckin' pioneer, and I will yell that from every rooftop. And so are LINKIN PARK. If you're going to do this thing in 2003, that's what you're going to do. I'll look all of those people in the eye — whether there's 10, 10,000 or 50,000 people there — and say that I'm proud of these bands being with us. I like these bands, and I'm totally psyched that these bands are here, and I wouldn't have them on tour if I didn't respect them. It's really interesting that post-'Icon' [MTV's performance tribute to METALLICA at which LIMP BIZKIT and KORN performed—Ed.], there's a lot of love for Durst now. On all the METALLICA threads on our web site, it's all respect to Fred Durst."

In the same interview, Ulrich spoke in more detail about "mtvICON: Metallica" and whether METALLICA had a say in which bands were selected to perform at the event or if they were all "political" picks by MTV.

"To me, it's not so much politics, it's that they [MTV] come to you and we have a chat about it, and there's conditions to having people who are part of the 'now' generation," he said. "It's not going to be VENOM or MOTÖRHEAD, and we understand that. I mean, they asked every time if we thought it might be good, and we thought it was awesome. I thought it was cool that it was generational, with bands like KORN and LIMP BIZKIT, and it was really cool to kind of feel the love from that era. I was actually really psyched because when I watched it the other day, it was a lot more generational than the AEROSMITH one was last year. I had mixed feelings about some of it going into it, because I definitely kind of have issues about this thing — I'm still in my 30s, and they're all talking about 'Icon' and all that shit… Call me in 20 years! I sort of have to just come around this corner and realize that it was all just about respect."