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Metallica – Louder, Faster, Stronger

How the band conquered bad habits, group therapy and ego clashes to make their heaviest record ever

Oct 10, 2008

 When the paydays ballooned with the Metal­lica album, it took Ham­mett time to adjust to his fortune. His mother was a clerk for a US government service, and his fa­ther was a merchant seaman who left the fam­ily when Hammett was a teenager. “My family never had money,” he says. “Fiscal responsibility was dropped in my lap, and I didn’t know how to handle it.” The first thing he did with a big royalty check was buy a Porsche, which he lost in a bet.

 “It was more of a gentleman’s wager,” he claims. “I told our tour manager on the Black Album, ”˜If it sells over 10 million copies, I will give you my Porsche.’ He called me up when it sold 10 million and one. It’s funny, because a year ago, he put it on eBay. He was having health problems. He called: ”˜Is it OK if I sell it?’ I said, ”˜Hey, bro, I gave it to you. You can do whatever you want with it.’ ”

 “A lot of these luxuries ”“ I didn’t know they existed,” Trujillo says one afternoon, sitting in a room in St Petersburg’s five-star Grand Hotel Europe. A former member of Suicidal Tendencies and Ozzy Osbourne’s band, Robert Augustin Miguel Santiago San Juan Trujillo Veracruz III was born in Santa Monica, California, and raised on the west side of Los Angeles. “It’s actually lon­ger,” he says, grinning, of his full name, “but we’ll roll with that for now.” His mother, who was born in Mexico, worked for Prudential Insur­ance. His father, who came fromNew Mexico, played flamenco guitar, was a business and math teacher, and now drives limousines in LA.

 “I didn’t even know what a massage was when I was in Suicidal,” Trujillocracks. He first met Metallica when Suicidal Tendencies opened shows for them in the early Nineties. He later got to know Hammett through their mutual love of surfing. Trujillo is now in a band that tours with a full-time chiropractor, Hammett’s cousin Don Oyao. “Metallica is also a band where, when you go on tour, you train for it,” Trujillo says. “I’ve had to hire a trainer who has me running cones and doing drills on a football field.

“But the magnitude of the work ethic is important to this band,” he insists. “Nobody wants to have to worry about the other person. You get up there and give 100 percent, no matter how sick you feel or what dramas you have in your life.” Asked about his first encounters with big money, Hetfield is typically blunt. “I was very anti-rock-star ”“ I felt guilty about having money,” he says, sitting with his family in his chartered jet, flying from St Petersburg to Riga. When his mother died, Hetfield, his sister and half brothers received an inheritance ”“ “probably $100,000,” Hetfield estimates. “That was for college.” But Hetfield never went. “Maybe, in a way, I wanted to hang on to that money because it was a part of my past, of Mom. I wasn’t going to spend it.” He realises his children have a different relationship to wealth than he did as a boy. “Yeah, we’re in St Petersburg, staying in the nicest hotel. But driving to the airport today, I’m saying, ”˜See that apartment, floor eight in the corner? With the windows completely dirty? Somebody lives there. What would it feel like to you guys to live there?’ ”

 “I bring my kids around all this stuff,” Ulrich says over that cup of tea in Copenhagen, “because I was around all my dad’s stuff. I grew up in tennis locker rooms, around jazz musicians.” But as a father, Ulrich maintains “clear rules, order.” He points overhead, to his hotel suite upstairs. “We just had a packing party. I didn’t pack for them. The nanny didn’t pack for them. We’re standing over them while they’re packing themselves. You try to do the best you can, with ”˜please’ and ”˜thank you,’ and not taking it for granted.”

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