met for the first time, in May 1981. Born in Los Angeles, on 3 August 1963, on the surface the only thing James appeared to have in common with Lars was their age. Where Lars was small and doll-like, pretty-boy Eurotrash who ate with his mouth open and would go days without showering, James was tall and rangy, a full-blooded young American of Irish-German descent who brushed his teeth twice a day and always wore clean underwear. Where Lars never shut up, James never used two words where none would do. Where Lars came from a background of money and travel, of music and art, of multilingual, open-door hippy liberalism, James came from a plain-folks working-class family with strict fundamentalist religious beliefs, latterly an absentee father and, most recently and painfully, a tragically deceased mother. Where Lars was ready to push his way through any door and say, ‘Hi’, James stayed in the shadows, couldn’t even bring himself to meet anyone in the eye. People sometimes mistook this reticence for shyness. But James wasn’t shy, he was volcanically angry; a hair trigger waiting to go off. Years later, James would tell me his ‘favourite film of all time has got to be The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. Why? I asked. ‘’Cos there’s three characters in it that are completely different and I find a little piece of me in each one of them,’ he said. You knew just what he meant. Whiskery and brooding, James was a man’s man, born to die, a throwback to a time not that long before when Injun-killing frontiersmen that talked and walked a lot like him had built America, all guns blazing. At least, that’s how he appeared from the outside. From the inside looking out, however, for the young James Hetfield the world was often a frightening place, full of mendacity and betrayal, liars that would only let you down. This was the place he feared more than anything, and which he allowed his anger to shield him from. Once memorably described as looking like the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz, James Hetfield actually resembled the wizard himself – a timid, unsure character hiding behind a big scary screen image.
James’ father Virgil had been a truck driver: a big, ambitious, outdoorsy sort of guy who eventually ended up running his own trucking company. He’d married James’ mother, Cynthia, when she was at her most desperate: a no longer young divorcee with two young sons, Christopher and David. Virgil was a good guy who also taught part-time at Sunday school; a responsible sort of feller who James, his first of two children with Cynthia, looked up to even though he was strict. Once, when James and his younger sister, Deanna, ran away from home, Cynthia and Virgil found them hiding ‘about four blocks away’. When they got them home, James recalled, ‘They spanked the shit out of us, pretty much.’ Although James and Deanna would often ‘fight like cats and dogs’, they would always regroup in front of their parents. As James told me in 2009, ‘We’d help each other clean up the mess, and cover for each other with stories. So it was one of those things: love, hate.’ His older, half-brothers were more distant, ‘pretty much a generation apart and unfortunately it wasn’t as bonding…not quite old enough to tell me what to do and not young enough to understand what I wanted to hear or hang with, so it was kind of an awkward middle position there, but me and my sister were pretty tight’.
When James Hetfield was thirteen, his dad walked out of the house one day and never came back, didn’t even say goodbye. In the vain hope that perhaps her husband would return, Cynthia told the youngest kids that their father had merely left for a long business trip. It was weeks before she finally gave James and his younger sister Deanna the bad news. Even then, there was no explanation, just that daddy was gone, wasn’t coming back, and let’s leave it at that, okay kids? No. Not okay, actually. Not okay at all, especially for Deanna, a daddy’s girl who had always been the ‘rebellious one’, according to James, and who now went completely off the rails. James’ reaction was no