Listen to the Lars Ulrich interview

As best Lars Ulrich can tell, those rumors about Metallica becoming an “alternative” act began on the Internet. Word started spreading just before the band released its sixth studio album, Load, and headed out for the summer to headline the Lollapalooza festival.

The stories turned out to be false, of course. Metallica remains the world’s premier heavy-metal group.

“Some idiot somewhere associated the fact that (guitarist-singer) James Hetfield cut his hair with something about fitting into the ’90s,” Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer, says by phone from Chicago. “The next guy picked that up as being alternative and there goes the brush fire.

“Basically, any idiot with a computer can post something on the Internet and, 15 minutes later, it’s a half-truth that’s circulated around the world. It’s a pretty frightening instrument, really. While we were finishing the record in the studio, I was reading almost-reviews of the record on a daily basis, before it was even done. It’s a very strange beast to deal with.”

Ulrich, one of rock’s lighter spirits, can’t help but laugh about the uproar created by Metallica’s supposed makeover. While it’s true that the band has pulled back some from its fierce, 1980s speed metal roots, tension, fear and crunching riffs still dominate its sound.

And on its 1996-97 tour, which stops at Market Square Arena on Sunday, Metallica augments the music with 225 explosions, strategically placed flame-throwers and six giant-insect-like lighting towers. Alternative? That sounds more like ’70s spectacle.

But what Metallica has done in the past year is prove that the expanse between metal and alternative isn’t all that wide.

“The things we’ve always talked about being so insignificant really continue to be insignificant – which are dividing music into groups and forcing tags and separations between different music,” says Ulrich, 33. “It sounds kind of corny and it sounds a little simple when you say there’s only two kinds of music: good music and less-good music. But that’s almost how I feel.”

Can write its own ticket

Metallica also has earned the right to do what it wants.Thirty-four weeks ago, Load entered the Billboard magazine Top 200 album chart at No. 1. It has sold more than 3 million copies thus far. Load takes a couple of detours from the usual Metallica sound. The song Hero of the Day “is probably the first song we’ve ever done in a major key that has some major musical passages through the verses,” Ulrich says. Mama Said is a ballad with a bit of a country twang in the chorus.

“James wondered if it was `Metallica enough,’ ” Ulrich says. “I said, `What are you worried about? If it’s on a Metallica record and me and you write it and the four of us play on it, then I think it qualifies as a Metallica song.’ ” The idea for Mama Said came from one of Hetfield’s tapes. The members of Metallica – lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Jason Newsted, Ulrich and Hetfield – record their individual ideas on tape.

Hetfield and Ulrich listen to the tapes and pick out the best parts. “Not anything that’s ever written as a song really stays as a song,” Ulrich says. “It’s like, here’s a part that gets married to another part that gets married to this guy’s part and then we throw in this chord progression and then we go to a half-tempo thing here.

Then we put the words to it, and James does most of that. “If you go back to our early stuff, you can hear how a lot of that stuff is really sort of pieces of songs forced together, which is pretty much what we started getting away from after (1988’s) . . .

And Justice For All. It was a very forced thing, and now it’s a lot less forced. We try to keep the songs a lot more simplistic.” A more accessible sound Metallica first took that approach on 1991’s Metallica, which proved to be its mainstream breakthrough. Although some longtime fans felt that Ulrich, Hetfield and co. abandoned them, the new sound proved to be more accessible. Metallica sold more than 6 million copies.

People can pick at Metallica if they want, Ulrich says. He just laughs. “I really don’t take any of this seriously,” he says. “Let me rephrase that – I don’t take it too seriously. I think you’ve got to have the ability to mock yourself and laugh at yourself about this.

Half of the laughing I do is always at myself or the people I’m with. That’s the one thing that separates us and gives us longer legs than most other people.”