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James would still make the twenty-mile trek back to Downey for rehearsals with Syrinx. That soon petered out as the implications of his mother’s death started to sink in and a different sort of gloom descended. James also broke up with his first semi-serious girlfriend. Nothing, it seemed, would ever go right again. Unruly as ever, Deanna was soon ejected from Dave’s – preferring to track down her father and join him. James, who ‘wanted nothing to do with’ his father, stayed put, seeing his parents’ divorce as the final spur to his mother’s illness. As he told Playboy in 2001: ‘My mom worried a lot, and that made her sick. She hid it from us. All of a sudden, she’s in the hospital. Then all of a sudden, she’s gone.’ Typically, tight-lipped James kept the devastating news of his mother’s death all to himself. ‘We had no idea,’ McGovney later recalled. ‘He was gone for like ten days and we had thought he went on vacation. When he told us that his mom had just died, we were stunned.’ According to her Christian Science beliefs, there had been no funeral for Cynthia, nor any designated grieving period. No time, as James later put it, ‘where you’re able to cry and get support. It was just: “Okay, the shell is dead, the spirit’s gone, and move on in life.”’

In Brea, James enrolled at Olinda High School, where he hooked up for a time with an aspiring drummer named Jim Mulligan and yet another guitarist, named Hugh Tanner, who he approached after seeing him carrying a Flying V into school one day. They called the nascent band Phantom Lord, although it never quite got out of the rehearsal stage, mainly due to the fact that they didn’t have a bass player. In desperation, James turned to Ron McGovney. Ron had never seen himself as a bass player, didn’t even own a bass. But James insisted it would be easy enough and that he’d show him the basic chords. McGovney reluctantly acquiesced, renting a bass from Downey Music Center, and the four-piece began practising together at a garage at Ron’s parents’ place. This was a shift in scene that also precipitated James suddenly feeling brave enough to move out of his stepbrother’s house in Brea and into Ron’s place back in Downey, taking a job as a janitor to pay his way – the first of a succession of menial jobs that would occupy him over the next couple of years. ‘My parents had a main house with three rental houses in the back,’ McGovney says now. ‘The property was going to be bulldozed to build a freeway. My parents let James and me live in the middle house rent-free. We converted the garage into our rehearsal studio.’ Having left high school, they both had a little money coming in now too. ‘I worked at my parents’ truck repair shop during the day,’ recalls Ron. James, meanwhile, had now gotten a job in ‘a sticker factory’ called Santa Fe Springs. They used their first month’s salaries to insulate the garage against noise, putting up drywall, while James painted the rafters black and the ceiling silver. Along with white walls and red carpet, Phantom Lord suddenly had a space to call their own and build from.

In the final entry in his high school yearbook, under ‘plans’, Hetfield wrote: ‘Play music. Get rich.’ As with most young bands, however, Phantom Lord splintered before it had even played a gig, signalled by the departure of Hugh Tanner, a decent guitar player but one who now had his eye on a career in music management. Undeterred, the others simply stuck an ad for a guitarist in the local music free-sheet The Recycler. Enter, albeit briefly, Troy James, along with a change in musical direction towards what McGovney describes now as ‘a glam thing’. It was still an all-American rock sound, but now leaning more towards the kind of flashy, chorus-heavy mien soon to be popularised by Sunset Strip archetypes like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot, both then making names for themselves on the Hollywood club scene, and like-minded, fully made-up British outfits such as Girl (fronted by future Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen and L.A. Guns frontman Phil Lewis), whose song ‘Hollywood Tease’ the new