Birth School Metallica Death

On the bathroom wall of Metallica's headquarters in San Rafael, California, there can be seen a photograph of the band as they appeared in 1982. Shot in the dressing room of one of the insalubrious San Francisco nightclubs where they served their apprenticeship, it captures four young men in the aftermath of a live show, stripped to the waist and bristling with attitude as they leer into the camera lens. Drenched with sweat, adrenaline and testosterone, it is a snapshot of teenage machismo so studied and gauche as to appear almost charming.

Today the image holds bitter-sweet memories for James Hetfield. When Metallica's front man appraises the image, he can see beyond his band's two-dimensional posturing and recall, with genuine warmth, a more innocent time, a time of youthful excitement, camaraderie and shared dreams. But, inevitably, his eyes are drawn to the centre of the frame, to the acne-scarred face of a sad, damaged teenager, ill at ease with the world and furiously unhappy with his place within it. And blacker memories are quick to surface, recollections of betrayal, abandonment and loss. It was, says Hetfield, a difficult time.

When it comes to telling stories, musicians are not always the most reliable of narrators. Beyond its blue-chip corporation boardrooms, the music business is run from offices full of the trickery provided by smoke and mirrors, where perception and reality rarely share desk space. In the battle to transform artists into brands, truth is often an early casualty, and musicians' back stories are carefully manipulated, manicured and managed. But when James Hetfield rolls out one of the rock 'n' roll industry's favourite clichés, telling you that without music, without Metallica, he'd be 'dead, dead or in jail', he does so without a flicker of a smile, without a trace of self-doubt. That boy in the photograph, he'll tell you, was a 'really sad kid' who had imploded with his own anger. Music, he says, 'cracked the shell' he'd pulled around himself since early childhood, and became his 'escape and therapy and saviour'.

In the mid-Nineties Metallica's front man commissioned the renowned Californian tattoo artist Jack Rudy to ink on his left forearm an image of an angel delivering a single musical note through tongues of flame into his outstretched hands. Within the piece, an image signifying struggle and salvation, are the Latin words Donum Dei – 'A gift from God'. And if the welter of motivational mantras tattooed elsewhere on James Hetfield's upper body – Live To Win Dare To Fail, Carpe Diem Baby, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, Faith – are designed to act as road markings for his journey ahead, that one simple tribute serves to signal his gratitude for paths not taken.

'A gift from God' was the phrase that Virgil and Cynthia Hetfield employed when informing family and friends of the birth of their first-born son, James Alan, on August 3, 1963. Faith had brought the couple together as the decade of peace and love dawned. A truck driver by trade, with a modest haulage company of his own, Virgil Hetfield spent his Sunday mornings doing God's work, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to the children of his adopted home town, Downey, California. Cynthia Hale (née Nourse) had initially accompanied her sons Christopher and David to Sunday School classes from a sense of parental obligation, but in the wake of the dissolution of her first marriage, Virgil Hetfield's calm, thoughtful meditations on suffering and strength in adversity began to chime within her with a profound resonance. Romance soon blossomed. When the couple married in Nevada on July 8, 1961, Cynthia thanked her Lord and Saviour for delivering unto her a second chance of happiness.

On the face of it, the newly-weds were very different people. California-born Cynthia was vivacious, creative and liberal-minded, a thirty-one-year-old artist and graphic designer with a love of light opera and musical theatre; five years her senior, Virgil was taciturn, reserved and conservative, a broad-shouldered Nebraska-born grafter whose sole indulgence of frippery came in the form of his meticulously maintained goatee beard. But the couple shared an adherence to the Christian Science belief system, a curious blend of olde worlde Puritanism and superstitious mumbo-jumbo relying heavily upon faith in the healing power of Christ. They viewed their union as being part of God's preordained plan.

Situated fifteen miles south-east of Hollywood, Downey at the dawn of the 1960s was, as now, a wholly unremarkable little town, devoid of glamour or intrigue, which suited Virgil and Cynthia just fine. But in the year of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with civil unrest spreading from state to state as the nascent civil rights movement gathered momentum, few American citizens were immune to escalating national tensions. From the moment baby James left hospital, then, his doting parents sought to cocoon him in cotton wool, as if their blue-eyed angel was made of fine bone china and Downey's quiet suburban streets were under threat of invasion by barbarians wielding hammers. Where other truck drivers took their offspring on drives across state lines, bonding over AM radio songs as the asphalt rolled beneath their wheels, Virgil Hetfield determined that his son's world should be safe, sheltered and snow-globe small. Each morning Cynthia clutched James to her side for the three-minute walk to Rio San Gabriel Elementary School; each afternoon she would be in place at its gates as classes discharged, shepherding her boy away from his classmates for the short walk home, lest a single misdirected strand of school yard badinage might despoil her child's innocence.

Rio San Gabriel's curriculum presented an early test to the family's religious convictions. As Christian Scientists Cynthia and Virgil were duty bound to forswear health education, as their faith contends that the human body is merely the vessel that houses the soul of the believer: consequently, James's teachers were informed that their son would not be permitted to attend health class, the school's introductory science course. In place of this, each afternoon the youngster would be required to stand alone in the school hallway, or outside the principal's office, drawing unwanted attention as passing students wondered aloud as to the nature of the actions that had resulted in this punishment. Word soon got around that young Hetfield was 'different', a tag no child welcomes.

'That alienated me from a lot of the kids at school,' Hetfield recalled. 'Like when I wanted to get involved with something like football. You needed a physical from a doctor, and I would be like, "I don't believe in this, I have this little waiver saying I don't need this." In a way, it was going against the rules, which I kinda like. But as a child, it really fucked with me as far as being different from other kids. You wanna be part of the gang, you wanna do the things they do.'

Virgil and Cynthia were largely too preoccupied to notice James's growing isolation from his peers and the attendant anxiety this engendered. With the arrival of their first daughter, Deanna, in the summer of 1966 the couple now had four mouths to feed from a single income. As much as the head of the family assured his wife that God would provide, the Almighty wasn't prepared to clock in at 6 a.m. each morning in order to drive an eighteen-wheel rig for minimum wage, so Virgil's stints on the road expanded from days at a time into weeks. With her eldest boys having descended into the hormonal clusterfuck of adolescence, and her infant daughter reacting to Virgil's prolonged absences with ever more rebellious behaviour, Cynthia considered her sensitive youngest son's sullen silences the least of her worries. But in a bid to bond with the boy, and draw him out of his black moods, she suggested to James that he might enjoy piano lessons, just as she herself had as a child. If three years of tuition proved to be an utterly joyless experience for Hetfield – 'I hated it,' he has stated baldly on more than one occasion – nonetheless in later years he was gracious enough to concede that it was not time entirely wasted, admitting, 'I am so glad it was somewhat forced upon me, because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now.'

With his interest in music piqued, the child began experimenting with some of the other instruments lying around the family home. His half-brother David played drums in a rock 'n' roll covers band called the Bitter End, while Christopher Hale, much taken by the developing singer-songwriter scene developing in the Los Angeles Canyons, flirted with acoustic guitar: neither instrument initially made much sense to James's young ears, though the obvious irritation his exploratory noise-making caused other family members secretly delighted the youngster and served as some incentive to persevere. But it was the discovery of David Hale's record collection that truly brought the power of music into focus for James. David had warned his half-brother countless times that the vinyl in the corner of their shared bedroom was off-limits to him, instructions which only served to inflame the younger boy's curiosity. And so, one afternoon while David was at his accountancy class, nine-year-old James plucked up the courage to rummage through the dog-eared sleeves. He was drawn, 'like a magnet to metal', to one album cover in particular, the artwork for which featured a mysterious, unsmiling black-garbed woman standing outside an old watermill in a woodland clearing. He placed the black vinyl within on David's record-player turntable, and dropped the stylus on its outermost groove. The sound of rainfall, thunder and a single, solemn, tolling church bell crept from the stereo's battered speakers. And in that moment everything changed for James Hetfield, changed utterly.

Released on Friday February 13, 1970, Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album stands as a death knell for the idealistic hippie dreams of the Sixties. Inspired by horror movies, bad dreams, drug come-downs and the terminal grind of the factory floor, it was designed to unnerve and unsettle – 'Everybody has sung about all the good things,' reasoned bassist Geezer Butler. 'Nobody ever sings about what's frightening and evil.' – and succeeded in offending the sensibilities of every notable music critic of the era. But in Ozzy Osbourne's baleful vocals and guitarist Tony Iommi's dread-laden, down-tuned riffs, young James heard the sound of liberation. 'This was more than just music,' he recalled, '[this was] a powerful, loud, heavy sound that moved [my] soul.'

'Sabbath was the band that put "heavy" in my head,' he said. 'That first Sabbath album I would sneak out of my brother's record collection and play on the forbidden record player. I wasn't supposed to touch any of that stuff, but I did, and the first Sabbath album got in my head. That initial song, "Black Sabbath", was the one [where] when you'd put your headphones on and sit in the dark and get scared to death. Then the Devil's riff comes in, and it got you!'

For Hetfield the Black Sabbath album served as a portal into an alternative universe. Each forbidden excavation into his half-brother's record stacks brought forth new delights – Led Zeppelin, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper, the Amboy Dukes – a succession of lank-haired libertines channelling the raw, ragged howl of the blues into monolithic proto-metal. When Hetfield placed his headphones over his ears and twisted the volume control on David's record player hard right, the world outside his bedroom seemed to fade away.

'Music was a way to get away from my screwed-up family,' he explained. 'I liked being alone, I liked being able to close off the world and music helped with that a lot. I'd put on the headphones and just listen … Music would speak my voice and, man, it connected on so many levels.'

Perhaps if he had been a little less immersed in his elder sibling's vinyl treasure trove, James might have been a little more aware of the escalating rumble of domestic discord at home. As it was, he remembers nothing special about the day in 1976 on which his father walked out on his family. There were no cross words exchanged that morning, no lingering hugs on the doorstep; no tear-moistened note of farewell was found resting on the mantelpiece as Virgil hit the road. In point of fact, months would pass before Cynthia Hetfield gathered James and Deanna to her side and informed them that this time their father would not be coming home from his travels. The children were hurt, angry and confused, scarcely able to comprehend their mother's words. When Cynthia told James that he must be strong, that with David and Christopher now living their own lives under their own roofs, he was now the man of the house, the teenager was terrified. He withdrew further into himself, raging against his father for his selfishness, despising him for not even saying goodbye. 'It devastated me,' he admitted.

To block out the constant hiss of white noise in his head, James attempted to drown himself in sound. Pocket money previously spent on candy and Topps trading cards was now deflected towards the acquisition of a record collection of his own, with Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' single and Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic album the teenager's first two purchases. Inspired by a poster of Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry adorning his bedroom wall, he began picking out chords and melodies on Christopher's guitar, slowing down his favourite songs on David's turntable from 45 rpm to 33 rpm so that he could play along.

'My ear was developed quite a bit from the piano playing so I knew what was in tune, what was not in tune, what sounded right and what didn't,' he says. 'I was always into the big, fat riffs. I was drawn to the rhythm and percussion bit because I had messed around on drums as well. The rhythm style came from percussion as well, hitting the guitar as hard as you would a drum.'

In September 1977 Hetfield enrolled as a freshman at Downey High School on Brookshire Avenue. He instantly hated the place, with its cliques and clubs and insider codes. When he trialled for the school football team, the Vikings, Coach Cummings informed him that he had a choice to make: he could lose his long hair and join the team, or keep his locks and forfeit his shot at gridiron glory. Despite nurturing pipe dreams of a starting position with the Oakland Raiders, Hetfield turned on his heels, knowing full well that he was condemning himself to pariah status within the school echelons.

'I was a misfit,' he says. 'Didn't fit in, didn't want to fit in. I hid as much as possible in my music … I did not feel like I identified with anyone … Basically, instead of hanging out at school, I went home and practised guitar.'

By the school lockers one morning Hetfield ran into Ron McGovney, a former classmate from Downey's East Middle School. McGovney's parents owned a vehicle repair shop directly across the street from Virgil Hetfield's trucking company, but the boys had never been close: McGovney only remembered the younger boy because Hetfield was the one student in music class who could play guitar, while Hetfield did not recall McGovney at all. But cast adrift from their status-obsessed peers, each recognised a certain loneliness in the other. Drawn together by a common obsession with music, their friendship developed cautiously – McGovney's first clumsy attempt at bonding saw him scribble the word 'Fag' across a photo of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler on Hetfield's homework folder, while Hetfield taunted his new buddy by mocking the recent passing of McGovney's musical idol Elvis Presley – but soon settled into an easy rhythm. When James purchased a 1969 Gibson SG from the guitarist in the school jazz band, Ron began taking acoustic guitar lessons, keen not to be left behind. Later that year when Hetfield joined his first band, Obsession, the older teenager offered to act as his buddy's guitar tech.