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On this gloomy May morning Robert Trujillo makes a banana-and-mango smoothie. The 42-year-oldbassist – who replaced Newsted in 2003, receiving a $1 million signing-on cheque in the process – looks like a formidable but mellow surfer, largely because he is. Trujillo and the 44-year-old Hammett discuss sea conditions. Under harsh lighting the guitarist’s scalp is visible and he admits using hair-loss treatment Rogaine for 17 years. “If I didn’t do it, I’d look like Michael Stipe,” he says.
The core of Some Kind Of Monster – and Metallica’s entire career – is the friction between Hetfield and Ulrich. At the film’s beginning the two men are so belligerent and diametrically opposed that the situation seems unsalvageable. Hetfield is the taciturn frontman. A keen outdoorsman since going on boyhood fishing trips with his father, he hunts big game in his spare time. Ulrich is the urbane bigmouth sipping cocktails while part of his art collection is auctioned for $13.4 million. Matters are not improved when Hetfield goes to rehab and disappears for almost a year. Bankrolled by the band with editorial control given to filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the movie seems like
an act of complete madness until you remember that this is Metallica. The band has always either done things their way, all the way, or not at all.
James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich have told the story of their early encounters so many times before that Ulrich has distilled their differences into 12 words: “He was the shy one, I was the one that didn’t wash.”
Today, wearing a white T-shirt, dark jeans and black Converse trainers, Hetfield looks like he should be carrying a toolbox. He, like Ulrich, is 43 years old, his paintbrush beard streaked with grey. Interviewed in his upstairs office, a room decorated predominantly by custom automotive art, he talks in a low drawl with the considered frankness you would expect from someone who has spent the last six years discussing his feelings in therapy and group meetings in a bid to combat his alcoholism. Informally, he is more reserved. Conversation is not awkward, but he has to be engaged first.
The gregarious Torben Ulrich – father of Lars and a former professional tennis player – is at HQ to accompany his son and two grandchildren to a basketball game this evening. He will demonstrate how timid Hetfield was in his youth by hiding behind a pillar in the kitchen. “Where’s James? Would he like some coffee?” he asks, rhetorically. Peeping his head out, eyes to the floor, he murmurs the reply: “Yes please, Mr Ulrich.”
Lars Ulrich is Hetfield’s polar opposite. The drummer is seldom fully dressed, either half out of running clothes (he jogs daily) or stripped down to the shorts-and-vest combo he favours for drumming. He barely pauses for breath, whether expounding on the elitism of golf or recommending a Puerto Rican restaurant in an accent that is five parts West Coast to one part Scandinavian. “Trust me,” he says, “you won’t leave wanting more.”
James Alan Hetfield was born on 3 August, 1963 in Downey City, California. His parents, Virgil and Cynthia, were Christian Scientists; their religion proscribed spiritual healing and forbade medical care. This mystical attitude to physiology meant that the young Hetfield was not allowed to attend junior-school health class, in which pupils would learn how the body functions. Instead, he would stand in the corridor. “That was very alienating,” he says today.
Lars Ulrich was born in Gentofte, Denmark, on Boxing Day 1963. An only child, he grew up in an affluent, liberal environment and travelled extensively with his music-loving parents. After seeing Deep Purple when he was nine years old, he became a passionate devotee of rock music and received a drumkit from his grandmother when he was 13.
At the same age, Hetfield’s father, a truck driver, walked out on his family without saying goodbye. Three years later Hetfield’s mother died of cancer that, due to her faith, went untreated. “We watched my mom wither away,” he says. “It was very traumatic.” He moved in with his older half-brother, David, an accountant. The entry under “plans” in his high school yearbook read: “Play music, get rich.”
A promising junior tennis player, Ulrich was sent on a six-month residential course at Nick Bollettieri’s academy in Florida – the training ground for future champions Andre Agassi and Monica Seles – in 1979. He soon realised he possessed neither the discipline nor the skill to make it to the top. When his family moved to California’s Newport Beach the following year, he decided that his future lay in music.
Ulrich and Hetfield first met in 1981 after the drummer placed a “musicians wanted” advert in a local paper. “He just could not play,” says Hetfield, so they went their separate ways. A few months later Ulrich wangled a slot for a song by his as-yet-unformed band on a compilation album that a journalist friend was putting together. He phoned Hetfield to see if he was interested. This time, he was.
The pair quickly saw what they could do for each other. “He was gifted but shy,” says Ulrich. “He made up for my lack of talent.”
Hetfield: “He had the drive and aspirations that I did. I was searching for people that I could identify with.”
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