Louder Faster Stronger

Hetfield eventually came back with what Rubin called "gut spill": jagged, abstract bursts of verse, charged with raw terror and challenge, about death, particularly suicide. "I hear the crowd screaming, 'Die, die, die,' every night [in "Creeping Death"] — that has been in our vocabulary for a long time," Hetfield acknowledges. But Hammett was an unwitting inspiration this time when he brought a photograph of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley to the control room at HQ, Metallica's Bay Area studio, after Staley was found dead of a drug overdose in 2002. "That picture was there for a long time," Hammett says. "I think it pervaded James' psyche."

"I did not know Layne," Hetfield says. "I met him a few times. I know [Alice in Chains guitarist] Jerry Cantrell quite well and learned about Layne through him. And I could see some of the things Jerry went through to keep that band together.

"After what I went through," Hetfield says, "I started writing a song based around a Layne Staley type, a rock & roll martyr magnetized by death. Why did he choose that path, someone with such talent? Is it necessary for some people?" That song, tentatively titled "Shine" ("Everything looks the same/In the shine of a midnight revolver"), did not get on Death Magnetic, but its reverberations did, in songs like "The Day That Never Comes" and "Cyanide" ("Suicide/I've already died/It's just the funeral I'm waiting for").

"I remember in an interview with Cliff," Hetfield says, "when someone asked, 'What's Metallica's mission?' he said, 'Conquer the world and self-destruct.' I'm like, 'What? What year is this gonna be?' But that was an interesting answer because it was the way we felt: Burn the candle as hot and long as you can. We never knew we'd be around this long."

Hetfield believes Death Magnetic is actually an album about fear. "There are people drawn to death," he says. "The other side of the magnet is people push away from it. They are afraid. They don't want to talk about it. It will happen to all of us, and we will all face it alone. How do you deal with it? And how can I get comfort from this?" According to Hammett, one of the other titles considered for the album was Songs of Suicide and Forgiveness.

Ulrich is glad he bagged movie night. "It's poetry," he says of Hetfield's lyrics for the record, "unfiltered, unedited. It's what's in his heart, in his spine." The drummer has also learned something new about his friend.

"He's a lot more tormented than I realized," Ulrich says. "The fact that he carries that shit around in him — I wouldn't wish that on anybody."

The overnight flight to Copenhagen on Ulrich's jet, after Metallica's show in Riga, is about 90 minutes — plenty of time for a parade of trays full of fresh fruit, raw-tuna appetizers, tiramisu and flutes of champagne. The small plane is full of Ulrich's family and guests, almost a dozen people, including his two sons by a former marriage, Myles, 9, and Layne, 7. (Ulrich and Nielsen also have a year-old son, Bryce.) There is Ulrich's old schoolmate Peter Von Wowern, now an engineer; and artist-musician Franz Beckerlee and his wife. Beckerlee was the guitarist in Gasolin', the top Danish rock band in the Seventies, and is a longtime Ulrich family friend. "I saw Lars make his first hit on a drum," he says while waiting to board in Riga. Lars, then eight months old, crawled across a floor and smacked a toy drum with his hand. "Look at him now."

It has been an exhausting night. After the concert, the entire Metallica entourage stopped at a Riga airport hotel, where the four members took over a room for a long band conference and a phone meeting with Rubin. But on the plane, which doesn't take off until 2 a.m., Ulrich is as energetic as he was onstage, wisecracking with everybody, making sure their plates and glasses are full. He's not just paying for the trip; he's in charge of hospitality, too. "Danes by nature are very social," Ulrich explains. "We love gathering people and making them feel welcome, rolling out the red carpet. I love bringing big bunches of family and friends on the plane."

But there are no other members of Metallica here. The Hetfields have flown with Hammett to Rome, where Hammett gets off, then to Milan. Trujillo and his wife are off to Paris. The band will not be together again until a few hours before the Bologna show two days later.

"We don't do this to be luxurious," Ulrich says, hoisting his champagne glass cheerfully. "It is a luxury, but it is a necessity. If we were still all on a bus to Düsseldorf, there would be one guy fed up with going to üsseldorf. There would be bad feeling, maybe an argument over nothing, and things fall apart again. This way, it is comfortable for each of us. We feel good when we need to be together, to play."

The Metallica air force is a far cry from the $5 per diem per member that Ulrich remembers on the band's first U.S. tour in 1983: "That was just enough for two cheeseburgers — or two beers." And there was the all-you-can-eat salad-bar scam: four guys taking turns loading up the same plate at Burger King for $2.99. "Four guys eating off that plate with the same fork — there's gotta be a lot of love in there."