"If seeing Dave Lombardo and Joey Jordison playing with Metallica isn't a great show, then I don’t know what is! I wish I could have seen it too, although the whole thing is such a mindfuck " - Lars Ulrich

Music Legends Magazine, Metallica

c.2019(?)

Lars recalls, "We took off, it was just me and my friend Steve, and about halfway over to Midlands Airport... I don’t know what the fuck happened, but all of a sudden I just fuckin’ lost it, and I had never quite experienced anything like that before. It was pretty fuckin’ scary to be in a little fuckin’ metal tube at 41,000 feet... I’ve never had anxiety attacks or any kind of stress attacks ever. It was fuckin’ freaky, dude. So I’m sitting there sucking on an oxygen mask and I’m like, fuck this, I need to get this checked out, so we landed in Hamburg and went to the hospital.

 “They took some blood tests and everything was completely normal physically,’ he said, ‘it was just everything caught up with me mentally. At about six o’clock I was talking to James and Kirk and Peter Mensch from my hospital bed, and I was saying, I’m gonna get on a plane. And they were like, listen, you're not getting on any fuckin’ plane — stay the fuck in bed and chill out for a couple of days and we'll manage without you. I was saying, dude, I’m not gonna lay here in Hamburg while you guys are playing the coolest gig in the entire metal universe! But we all agreed that it was the right thing, and by this time James and Kirk told me that they'd talked with some of the other bands and they were gonna pull it off?

 Ruefully, Ulrich laughs: ‘It was the first Metallica gig I'd missed, ever — I was the only one left with a perfect track record! I swear to you, I was lying there with an IV in me and there was a window at the other end of the room — and I was like, fuck this, I'm gonna pull the IV out, jump through the window and make a run for it! Anyway, it was weird, but a couple of things came out of it. For the first time I realised what James had gone through in all the times when he had missed gigs and watched Kid Rock and Jonathan Davis step up. And it made me realise that — and I don’t want this to be misinterpreted — but it’s still just a rock’n’roll show.'

 Lar’s place on the Metallica drum stool was taken by Slayer’s Dave Lombardo and Slipknot’s Joey Jordison — a sobering experience for him. As he remarked, “You try laying in a hospital in Germany while Dave Lombardo — the greatest drummer on the planet — is playing with your band! That’s not easy. Joey Jordison, too. It was a pretty fucked-up day. I’m kinda like, that didn’t really happen, did it? After a few days of sleep, I was thinking, did I dream that? I was disheartened to think that people would have travelled from all over England and beyond to come to this show, and then we didn’t step up — but at the same time, it made me realise how proud I am of the fact that we always do the best we can and we always go the extra mile, and that sometimes you gotta do what the fuck you've gotta do. And there was life on the other side of that — people were respectful. I have a bit of an odd relationship with it — I still haven’t really looked at any of the press for it, or the pictures... I fuckin’ hope it would be a great show. If seeing Dave Lombardo and Joey Jordison playing with Metallica isn't a great show, then I don’t know what is! I wish I could have seen it too, although the whole thing is such a mindfuck. I feel bad for the kids who made the trip, but at the same time I know they got to see something truly unique.’