33 Things You Should Know About Metallica

1. James Hetfield had an unusual upbringing.
The Metallica singer-guitarist’s parents were strict Christian Scientists; the sect’s distrust of Western medicine meant Hetfield had to leave class during any health-related lessons in school. When his mother, an opera singer, died, the troubled teen cut loose. “Just causing trouble, shoplifting, getting a little stash box,” he says. He knew what he wanted, though: His high-school yearbook entry read: “Aspirations: Be a rock star.”

2. Kirk Hammett had an unusual upbringing.
The lead guitarist’s father — a merchant seaman with a drinking problem — was often absent. Unsupervised on the streets of San Francisco, Hammett barely even glimpsed the straight-and-narrow. “I was thrown in jail within a week of turning 18,” he says. “What for? I’d rather not say. Ha ha!”

3. Actually, so did Lars Ulrich.
The Danish drummer’s father was a jazz-playing hippie and famous tennis player. Hoping to follow his lead, Ulrich became a ranked junior player. But the eight-hour-a-day training regimen got tough. “Some players, like John McEnroe, are born gifted — and I didn’t have that,” he says.

4. Ulrich witnessed rock debauchery early on.
Hanging out with metal bands in his late teens, he saw the potential for fun. Getting friendly with some British nobodies called the Starfighters really opened his eyes. “When they came to L.A., their manager got them girls, drugs and alcohol,” he recalls. “I’m going, ‘These girls are fucking these guys because of what they are, not who they are!’ That was intriguing.”

5. Metallica were nearly called Thunderfuck.
“We’d have been plastered all over the radio with that name,” Hetfield says, laughing. Other questionable contenders included Nixon, Hellraiser and Blitzer. Ulrich “borrowed” the name Metallica from a friend’s list of possible titles for a new magazine.

6. Perfect houseguests They were not.
Their first manager, Jon Zazula, offered them the run of his New Jersey home — until his marriage started to suffer. “We got kicked out of our manager’s house for…being Metallica!” Hetfield giggles. “We drank every drop of booze in the house, including the champagne from their wedding.”

7. A Simple choice: buy alcohol or buy food. Guess which won?
Living in a New York rehearsal space called the Music Building without money, heat or hot water in 1983, Metallica would rely on handouts from their friends Anthrax or on sympathetic admirers bringing pizza. “There was a lot of nourishment in all the alcohol we were drinking,” Ulrich shrugs.

8. Welcome to the hair-metal jungle.
Metallica were grimy outcasts in a world of spandex and hairspray. So when new bassist Cliff Burton refused to move to Los Angeles in 1983, they instead relocated to his hometown, San Francisco, where they remain based to this day. “It was great walking around, giving the middle finger to everybody,” says Ulrich of L.A. “But in San Francisco there was a community that we could relate to. We could have conversations about Mercyful Fate instead of mascara or eyeliner.”

9. “Hi, do you have Metal Up Your Ass by Thunderfuck?”
Metallica’s thrash-metal debut, Kill ’Em All, was supposed to be called Metal Up Your Ass — until Zazula explained that most distributors wouldn’t touch anything with that title. A substitute emerged when Burton, pissed off at industry prudishness, said, “Fuck ’em; just kill ’em all.”

10. Metallica made metal good again.
The three albums recorded with Burton — Kill ’Em All (1983), Ride the Lightning (1984) and Master of Puppets (1986) — revolutionized metal. Purists still consider this Metallica’s most Metallica period. “I understand why people like those albums best,” Ulrich says. “But to me it would be like asking, ‘Which of your five kids do you prefer?’ ”

11. It wasn’t just Mötley Crüe with “Girls, Girls, Girls.”
As their fame grew, so did the number of their groupies. One ritual involved coming offstage to meet 10 naked girls waiting in the showers. “I was definitely digging it,” Ulrich says. “When you’re 22 years old, it’s part of the allure.”

12. Cliff Burton was killed in a tour-bus crash.
Driving through Sweden in the early hours of September 27, 1986, the band’s bus skidded on black ice. Burton was thrown from his bunk through a window and onto the road. The bus fell on him, killing him instantly. Recent auditions for new bassists stirred vivid memories. “It brought us back to that hole, that void left by his demise,” Hammett says.

13. Their booze-warrior alter egos, Alcoholica, started taking over.
The name came from a fan’s T-shirt, and they ran with it — Metallica turned emptying bottles into an Olympic sport. “We lost Cliff, and the only way we knew how to deal was to drink it away,” Ulrich says. Adds Hammett: “Our rider resembled a stock order from a liquor store. When we auditioned bass players, half the time I was so drunk I could barely stand up.”

14. They treated new boy Jason Newsted like crap.
They welcomed Burton’s replacement by insulting him, storming his room in the middle of the night, spreading rumors he was gay and smothering him in meat pies. Stoically, he took it all. “In retrospect,” Hammett says, “I regret all that, and I want to tell Jason that once and for all. We’ve been trying to meet with him, but for some reason he keeps canceling.”

15. They treated everyone else like crap, too!
“We used to abuse ourselves and everyone around us,” Hammett confesses. “We’d victimize people. And women, we’d treat women like crap. Assholes? Totally!”

16. On their next album, Newsted could barely hear himself.
On 1988’s…And Justice for All, Hetfield and Ulrich conspired to make an album of fancy structures, showy solos and barely audible bass. “That was just Lars and me getting away with as much as we could,” Hetfield says. “The drums, vocals and guitars are loud — there’s no bass!”

17. Hetfield was a regular in the EMERGENCY ROOM.
Among the thrill-seeker’s many accidents: In 1987, he broke his arm skateboarding; in 1992, he was severely burned by onstage pyrotechnics; in 2000, he damaged his back while Jet Skiing. “I was out there to hurt myself to feel alive most of the time,” he reasons. “I didn’t know how far to take things.”

18. Dig stuffed animals? Hammett’s your man.
The taxidermy enthusiast’s home is packed full of stuffed badgers, foxes and assorted other fauna. He recently bought a fossilized skeleton of a cave bear that’s one million years old. Thirteen feet tall, it stands in his stairwell. “I have a sheep with two heads — it’s antique, from the turn of the century. It’s old and decrepit-looking,” he says.

19. Ulrich collects modern art.
He especially likes physical, art brut–style painters such as Asger Jorn, Jean Dubuffet and the CoBrA group. Trivia question: What are the three cities represented in the CoBrA name? “Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam,” he answers breezily. “Everyone knows that — come on!”

20. The Black Album’s cover was a homage to AC/DC’s Back in Black. Not Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove!
Their 12 million–selling, self-titled mainstream breakthrough from 1991 was packaged in a none-more-black sleeve. They wanted to focus on the music by ditching the Dungeons & Dragons imagery and thank-you lists stretching to infinity. “At that time in heavy metal, everybody was seeing who could have the longest ‘thanks’ list,” Ulrich says with a laugh. “How many times can you thank God on one record?”

21. OK, James, whatever you say.
In band bust-ups, tough guy Hetfield would throw his considerable weight around. His intimidation tactics didn’t wash with Ulrich. “I could see through his bullshit,” the drummer says. “That’s why he and I had the most volatile relationship — I was the only one who didn’t get intimidated. And I knew how to push his buttons.”

22. Hammett is the band’s “lukewarm-water” peacemaker.
Like Derek Smalls did for Spinal Tap, Hammett often literally came between Hetfield and Ulrich’s fire-and-ice act: “My role was — and I emphasize was — acting as referee between James and Lars when things were bad. I’d often step between them when they were slowly inching toward each other, zeroing in on the kill.”

23. Cutting your hair doesn’t equal selling out.
For their next two albums — Load (1996) and Reload (1997), Metallica’s new alt-rock image angered metal diehards. Ulrich’s fuzzy mohair jacket came in for special criticism. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he counters. “I’m not saying that I don’t look at some things and go, ‘Urgh!’ But at least I had guts.”

24. The Playboy Mansion is really a better place for bachelors.
Metallica played at Hugh Hefner’s softcore palace in 1998. But it was a trying time. “To be honest, I felt uncomfortable there,” Hammett admits. “I was a married guy! I was scared shitless. I thought something might go down and somehow I might be implicated in it!”

25. No one expected the Napster debate to turn into Metallica vs. the Kids.
Rock’s most zealous anti-Napster campaigner, Ulrich even testified against illegal downloading to the U.S. Senate in July 2000. Many fans felt betrayed. “I was leading the cavalry forward, and I looked behind me and nobody was there,” he ruefully recalls. “I’m proud of the stance we took, but it was a very difficult time. All the stuff people were throwing at us hurt more than we let on. It was a very lonely time.”

26. By 2001, no one in the band liked one another much.
After a long period of inactivity, with Hetfield increasingly angry about Newsted’s side project, IR8, Metallica was in a bad spot. Says Ulrich: “There was absolutely no communication. We were talking to each other through managers. That was our lowest point.”

27. Finally, Newsted couldn’t take it any more.
After 14 years, they again needed a new bassist. The split was complicated and traumatic. “Jason didn’t ask to leave,” Ulrich says, glaring. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute; you can’t make a decision without being told what to do!’ ”

28. Hammett found out he had suffered liver damage— luckily, it wasn’t irreversible.
Years of excessive drinking had left their mark, so Alcoholica went on hold. Hammett cut out cocaine, too. “I’d become useless,” he says. “I’d become depressed; my relationships suffered. So I made a few decisions — and I took up surfing!”

29. It was time for a checkup from the neck up.
Hetfield isn’t the most obvious candidate to catch the therapy bug. But in 2001 he entered drug and alcohol rehab, starting a process that soon engulfed the whole band. “When we started talking after Jason left, we started turning our eyes inward,” he says. “That’s when the mud got stirred up, and I couldn’t ignore all this stuff from the past. There was a lot of grief and depression that hadn’t been worked through. We were all addressing our inner selves.”

30. Famed hunter Hetfield has even stopped killing things!
After years spent blasting anything that moved, Hetfield has hung up his hunting rifle. After rehab, he realized his family and band came first. “You’re more important than killing small, furry animals, Kirk!” Hetfield offers, generously. “Wow, that’s great,” his guitarist replies.

31. New guy Rob Trujillo is fitting in fine.
After months of wild speculation about Newsted’s replacement, the former bassist for both Ozzy Osbourne and Suicidal Tendencies finally beat out the competition. “Rob’s been in our band a month, and I’ve felt closer to him and feel more complete as a band than maybe I ever did with Jason,” Ulrich says. “That says something about those 14 years, and I’ve only just started to realize that.”

32. St. Anger sounds very, uh, angry.
The new album is an all-out, intense, hardcore punk-metal assault — surprising stuff from a bunch of old hands. “We feel good about playing aggressively again,” Hetfield explains. “There are parts where it’s just an onslaught, all instruments as loud as they possibly can be.”

33. Metallica still feel like underdogs.
“Some people [mistakenly thought] that because the mainstream came to Metallica, then Metallica suddenly belonged to the establishment,” Ulrich says dismissively. Nobody should harbor such illusions. Says Hammett: “We’ve always been aliens, man!”