Lars Ulrich: “James Hetfield Was Livid Over Grammy Mic Failure”

Appearing on The Late Late Show last night, Lars Ulrich said James Hetfield “was livid” over the mic failure that marred Metallica’s performance with Lady Gaga at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, February 12.

The group performed “Moth into Flame” from their latest album, Hardwired….to Self-Destruct. Though Hetfield’s mic worked during the line check prior to their performance, it failed when the song began and didn’t come back on until the final verse.

“We get offstage, we get [backstage], and I haven’t seen him like that in 20 years,” Ulrich tells Late Late Show host James Corden. “I mean he was livid. He’s aged really well and he’s a pretty chill guy, but the first five or 10 minutes in that dressing room was not a lot of fun.”

According to TMZ, Hetfield’s mic was accidentally unplugged by a stagehand. But a spokesperson from the Recording Academy says that “either a dancer or an extra clipped the line running on the floor and it unplugged at the base of the mic. It was, of course, accidental.”

Check out Ulrich’s appearance below, along with a clip from Metallica’s Romanian fan club that purports to be a web feed of the performance with Hetfield’s vocals intact. The club, RoLoad, says the mic problem affected only the TV broadcast, not the web feed.