You may have noticed that Metallica’s back again with a very bizarre new project, collaborating with Lou Reed on an album called Lulu.
It’s a pretty strange pairing to put together for sure, and funny enough, right as the album’s about to be released to wherever you can buy music these days, Lars Ulrich has looked back on his biggest musical regret, and no, it’s not the St. Anger album surprisingly enough.
For those who read the Kill Bill screenplay before it came out, in the House of Blue Leaves segment, there was supposed to be an original heavy metal score underneath it, and naturally enough, Metallica was approached about this.
As Lars Ulrich recalled to Newsweek in their “My Favorite Mistake” column, they got together for dinner in San Francisco, and Tarantino claimed he wrote two of the fight scenes in the film to Sad But True, with the music punctuating punches and kicks.
Ulrich got a copy of the script, the 180 page version, which probably didn’t have the Yuki’s Revenge chapter, which was never filmed. Once he sat down and got into it, “I became more and more puzzled. Page by page, I realized that most of this was written in a language that was outside of my realm of understanding. I had never encountered a narrative like this, set in, to me, a very foreign culture of martial arts and Asian myths. I just couldn’t wrap my thick Danish head around it.”
As Ulrich recalled, his gut told him, “Do it, do it,” but his head was spinning. “I experienced a rare inability to pull the trigger.” Ulrich never got back to Tarantino, which he called “Probably the single biggest mistake I’ve made in the creative department.”
But who knows if any of this could have gotten past anybody’s “people” anyways. Everything with Metallica usually comes with tons of terms, limits and conditions, if they’ll even consider it in the first place, and the Weinsteins probably would have lowballed them down to as little as they’d be willing to pay them, which wouldn’t fly with the band either.
In the end, the mountains of bullsh*t were probably too steep to climb on both sides.
