I said to James, 'just look as demonic as you possibly can, 'cause we gotta get this bat-mitzvah party going!' " remembers Mark Seliger, who was working against the clock when he shot this February 1993 portrait of the Metallica frontman. The previous day he'd photographed Hetfield outdoors, on a plain -- in what he describes as "a toxic-waste dump" -- for a Rolling Stone cover. This photo, which ran inside the magazine, was taken the next morning in a banquet hall of a Sarasota, Florida, hotel that was indeed booked for a local girl's bat mitzvah later that afternoon.

It would be the second time in less than eighteen months that Hetfield's face would grace the cover of Rolling Stone. After the immediate success of Metallica (better known as the Black Album), released in August 1991, Hetfield joined his bandmates on their first cover. But by the spring of 1993, Metallica had arguably become the biggest band in the world -- the Black Album had moved more than 6 million copies, and the group was selling out arenas and stadiums worldwide -- and this time the cover was Hetfield's alone. "It was the first photo session on my own, away from the band," says Hetfield. "Being on the cover was a major deal." In the accompanying interview, in which Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke described Hetfield's look as "a cattle-baron version of Erik the Viking," the enigmatic singer-guitarist discussed for the first time in great detail the death of former bassist Cliff Burton, his anger over his Christian Science upbringing and the truth behind his hard-partying band's latest nickname: Alcohollica. "It's been a while since we had a real band drinking session," Hetfield told Fricke, adding without a hint of sarcasm, "You just missed it. It was two or three days ago."

"We set up some lights and a little kiddie tub in this banquet hall," says Seliger. "Good heavy-metal guys will always play along, and he was very generous with his scowl." Because he was short-handed, and to butter up his subject, Seliger recruited "a cute eighteen-year-old Metallica fan" who worked at the hotel's pool to dump the water on Hetfield's head. "He [Seliger] said, 'I've got some ideas about pouring water on you,' " Hetfield recalls. "And then the water didn't look cool enough, so they had to use some kind of oil. Then I looked satanic!" Hetfield kept a Polaroid from the session on his refrigerator for seven years, until it disintegrated. "Thank God for photos, because my memory is horrible," he says. "We've probably had a few hundred different hairstyles over the years, so it's kind of easy to remember when it was. And that photo reminds me of a great time in our lives."