Louder Faster Stronger

When the paydays ballooned with the Metallica album, it took Hammett time to adjust to his fortune. His mother was a clerk for a U.S. government service, and his father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Hammett was a teenager. "My family never had money," he says. "Fiscal responsibility was dropped in my lap, and I didn't know how to handle it." The first thing he did with a big royalty check was buy a Porsche, which he lost in a bet.

"It was more of a gentleman's wager," he claims. "I told our tour manager on the Black Album, 'If it sells over 10 million copies, I will give you my Porsche.' He called me up when it sold 10 million and one. It's funny, because a year ago, he put it on eBay. He was having health problems. He called: 'Is it OK if I sell it?' I said, 'Hey, bro, I gave it to you. You can do whatever you want with it.'"

"A lot of these luxuries — I didn't know they existed," Trujillo says one afternoon, sitting in a room in St. Petersburg's five-star Grand Hotel Europe. A former member of Suicidal Tendencies and Ozzy Osbourne's band, Robert Augustin Miguel Santiago San Juan Trujillo Veracruz III was born in Santa Monica, California, and raised on the west side of Los Angeles. "It's actually longer," he says, grinning, of his full name, "but we'll roll with that for now." His mother, who was born in Mexico, worked for Prudential Insurance. His father, who came from New Mexico, played flamenco guitar, was a business and math teacher, and now drives limousines in L.A.

"I didn't even know what a massage was when I was in Suicidal," Trujillo cracks. He first met Metallica when Suicidal Tendencies opened shows for them in the early Nineties. He later got to know Hammett through their mutual love of surfing. Trujillo is now in a band that tours with a full-time chiropractor, Hammett's cousin Don Oyao. "Metallica is also a band where, when you go on tour, you train for it," Trujillo says. "I've had to hire a trainer who has me running cones and doing drills on a football field.

"But the magnitude of the work ethic is important to this band," he insists. "Nobody wants to have to worry about the other person. You get up there and give 100 percent, no matter how sick you feel or what dramas you have in your life."

Asked about his first encounters with big money, Hetfield is typically blunt. "I was very anti-rock-star — I felt guilty about having money," he says, sitting with his family in his chartered jet, flying from St. Petersburg to Riga. When his mother died, Hetfield, his sister and half brothers received an inheritance — "probably $100,000," Hetfield estimates. "That was for college." But Hetfield never went. "Maybe, in a way, I wanted to hang on to that money because it was a part of my past, of Mom. I wasn't going to spend it."

He realizes his children have a different relationship to wealth than he did as a boy. "Yeah, we're in St. Petersburg, staying in the nicest hotel. But driving to the airport today, I'm saying, 'See that apartment, floor eight in the corner? With the windows completely dirty? Somebody lives there. What would it feel like to you guys to live there?'"

"I bring my kids around all this stuff," Ulrich says over that cup of tea in Copenhagen, "because I was around all my dad's stuff. I grew up in tennis locker rooms, around jazz musicians." But as a father, Ulrich maintains "clear rules, order." He points overhead, to his hotel suite upstairs. "We just had a packing party. I didn't pack for them. The nanny didn't pack for them. We're standing over them while they're packing themselves. You try to do the best you can, with 'please' and 'thank you,' and not taking it for granted."

For all of their sometimes combustible differences, Hetfield and Ulrich are very alike in one way. They are warm, commanding dads, openly affectionate, firmly reprimanding when necessary. "C'mon, girls, watch out!" Hetfield says as his daughters buzz around him while he changes guitars, offstage, during the Riga concert. "It's hard for me to be separated," admits Hammett, whose wife, Lani, and sons are in Hawaii. (Trujillo's children are staying in Paris during this run of shows.) "My dad wasn't around a lot, shipping out. I remember having a relationship that was just letters — 'Oh, a letter from Dad.'"

"We're still a viable band — bring it on," Hammett says with some fight in his generally chipper voice, "as long as it doesn't interfere with our family lives, which is the number-one priority for all of us." Which makes Metallica "number two. Sorry, everybody out there. But if our families came second, the band would implode."

And when all of the kids are grown and out on their own? "Who knows?" Ulrich says with a mischievous smile. "Maybe 10 years from now, it's back to buses."