Part 1

Metallica�s Kirk Hammett is known as the one guy in the band with a darker, more mysterious sensibility. Dressed in black clothes, sporting black finger nail polish and a labret piercing, he could be found haunting horror conventions hunting additions to his large and rare memorabilia collection. Or, even side stage watching a performance by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds or The Cocteau Twins.

Today and for the next four days, Hammett reveals what lured him to the same dark alleys and dead end streets that exist on 13th Street.

13th St: When did your morbid fascination start?

Hammett: It started when I was six. Actually, it started when I was five years old and I sprained my arm. Well, my brother sprained my arm for me. I went to the hospital and had my arm put in a sling. When I got home I was told to STAY INSIDE AND WATCH TV. So I turned on the TV and the first thing that was on was �Day Of The Triffids�.

13th St: �Day of the Triffids�? (Laughter)

Hammett: Yeah, and I was fascinated with it. Shortly thereafter I bought my first issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine. I could barely read it but I COULD read it. I remember saving my lunch money -- I got a quarter a day -- and an issue of Famous Monsters back then was like 65 or 75 cents. So, you know if I didn�t spend my lunch money for two days or so (laughter) I�d have enough money to buy an issue of FM. And that�s where it all started.

13th St: So, all of those parents who claimed that EC Comics and FM corrupted their kids weren't wrong after all.

Hammett: Because of FM I started getting way into the movies. I bought all of the Aurora model kits and I'd blow them up with firecrackers. I would set them on fire, too; you know what every red-blooded American kid did with monster models. I STILL love firecrackers.

(He points to a bundle of firecrackers hanging threateningly in his kitchen) 13th St: What about BB guns?

Hammett: I didn�t have a BB gun, �cause I didn't have enough money for something as extravagant as that.

13th St: Well, I always borrowed my friend�s.

Hammett: (Laughter) Yeah -- I mean, we used to play target practice with rocks or whatever implement of destruction we could get our hands on.

13th St: (Laughter) Do you regret that now?

Hammett: Umm, yes and no.

13th St: Right. It was fun, but�

Hammett: Yes: in that I wish I had the original models that I painted when I was a kid. And, no: in that I had so much fun�burning monster models and blowing them up with the firecrackers.

13th St: So what about school? Did it have any adverse effects on you?

Hammett: I went to Catholic school and the fact that I read monster magazines in class didn�t help my reputation with the sisters.

13th St: I'll bet.

Hammett: In fact, one of the goriest FM covers, the one from Night of Dark Shadows (#88, pictured), which is one of the only ones where it wasn�t a painting but a picture of a guy with a huge gash in his head and his eyeball hanging out. Do you know the one?

13th St: Yeah, I think so.

Hammett: A nun caught me reading that issue in class and it didn�t go over too well with all of the other nuns. They asked me if my parents knew that I was reading something like that and I said, �Oh sure, they bought it for me.� (Laughter). My parents never had any problems with the fact that I was, you know, so obsessed with monsters. In fact, they thought it was a pretty healthy thing. I guess they felt that it could have been a lot worse. All throughout grade school I was way, way into monsters. And then we moved out of San Francisco and all of a sudden my resources for buying comic books, monster magazines, monster models and the friends that I used to hang out with were all gone. So I kind of got out of it and into other things like model rocketry.

Hammett: After model rocketry, I discovered Kiss (laughter), I discovered Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Pink Floyd, the whole bit and that kind of took over. I started playing guitar and I ended up playing for seven years straight, it seemed. When I actually started making money I started buying all the old FM�s and all of the monster toys I used to have. My interests grew into a general fascination with all odd things like taxidermy, and an obsession with circuses and circus sideshows. I acquired a morbid obsession with a lot of the darker forms of artwork like German Expressionism and more gothic stuff like Frans Von Schtock and Edward Monk at the more sophisticated, more cultured-end. I also started getting into stuff like collecting Frank Frazetta paintings and FM cover paintings. I also started buying more comic books. So, the next thing you know I�m collecting every dark and morbid thing under the sun. I started collecting a lot of the stuff that I wasn�t able to buy as a poor young kid living in the Mission. I didn�t even have enough money to buy a big Frankie. Back then they sold for a whopping, whatever it was, five bucks or something (Laughter).

13th St: Right.

Part 2

Our exclusive 4-part interview with Metallica guitar god Kirk Hammett continues. Yesterday, Kirk confessed to classic childhood antics like blowing up monster models and pissing off nuns by reading Famous Monsters magazine in Catholic school. Today, in Part Two, Hammett reveals his favorite horror film, and how he expanded on his childhood by collecting classic toys and, well, other things.

Hammett: And, when I was able to afford the stuff that I couldn�t afford as a kid, I jumped totally into it. I tracked down all the sources that had a lot of those monster toys that I grew up wanting in the 60�s, but could never afford until the 80�s (laughter). So, the collection just grew from there and took on other shapes and forms. Now, like I said, I collect all sorts of monster stuff, including movie posters from the 20�s, 30�s, 40�s, 50�s, 60�s and 70�s as well as, you know, taxidermy and pickled punks.

13th St: And that two-headed�

Hammett: The two-headed sheep in my library?

13th St: Yeah. Do they have a name?

Hammett: The Twins.

13th St: Oh, the Twins.

Hammett: My wife Lani is in the process of building a circus tent for the Twins. They didn�t look like they were having too good a time when they were alive, so we�re just trying to compensate a little and give them a happy time in death.

13th St: Postmortem joy

Hammett: Postmortem. We�re real big fans of a lot of modern artists too. My favorite current artist is Mark Ryden. As you can see, I have various Mark Ryden pieces all around the house.

13th St: Tell us about growing up in the Mission. Not necessarily the safest part of San Francisco, is it?

Hammett: Hell, no! (Laughter)

13th St: You�d think that if you were inundated with real life horrors you wouldn�t be that fascinated by fantasy horror.

Hammett: Ah, I think back then they kind of went hand-in-hand. Living in San Francisco, just in the neighborhood, I can remember buying a comic book at a comic book stand and hearing a scream from across the street. I saw this man yelling and screaming and chasing what I think was his wife around a car. He had a Coke bottle with him and all of the sudden he got close enough to her and just smashed her over the head with it. Actually it was a 7-Up bottle. I know it was a 7-Up bottle because when he hit her with it all I could see was this white stuff foaming down her head. Seeing a random act of violence like that, as a little kid you know, you lose a little bit of innocence. All of a sudden when you stare at a horror comic book, monster magazine or whatever, the world makes a little bit more sense. It�s there to be acknowledged.

13th St: Did you find the Catholic symbolism of your youth pretty horrifying, as well?

Hammett: Yeah, well just the fact of being Catholic. I mean I was a lousy Catholic. I must admit I flunked religion, much to the chagrin of my parents and all of the nuns. The caper with the monster magazines didn�t help either. Because, you know, in Catholic school you�re with the same fifty kids year after year and the only thing that changes is the teacher. The Catholic school faculty never forgot the stir I caused with the monster magazines, so I was always shifting in and out of favor. I can remember New Year�s Eve 1974, I said to my dad, �Hey Dad, what are we doing for New Year�s?� and he goes �Oh, nothing," so I said, "Let�s go see The Exorcist.� It had just been released like two days before, so the fallout had not hit yet. All of the tales of the extreme scenes and how children shouldn�t see it had not reached the general public. I was shocked, because not only did it shake me up as a movie and as a story, but also since it dealt directly with what was being forced down my throat day and night, the evils of sin and Hell and everything, it had clearly more realism for me than if I wasn�t a Catholic schoolboy.

13th St: Did The Exorcist make you run back and try to be a good student?

Hammett: HELL, NO! (Laughter) It scared the living crap out of me but I was determined not to let it get the best of me. After all, it was a monster movie and I loved monsters so why should I be so afraid of it? But, you know, like I said, it had a particular resonance because I was Catholic. It felt like it could have easily happened to me.

13th St: Being possessed?

Hammett: Yeah, I mean, we were talking about Satan every day in Catholic school. So, when you get to school you say your morning prayers and then when you leave school you say your afternoon prayers just so the DEVIL WON�T GET YA. So you won�t go to Hell. And here I go to see a movie and it looks like I won�t even have to go to Hell, the fucking devil will come to ME. It was the peak of my childhood horror, seeing The Exorcist. It's THE horror movie.

13th St: So what about the real life horrors of being in the band?

Hammett: Being IN the band is one of the biggest horrors!

13th St: I mean what sort of horrifying things have you seen while in the band?

Hammett: I think it�s pretty well documented, the horrible things.

13th St: Being in a band like Metallica, you must have seen some sort of injustices or tragedies.

Hammett: Yeah, I have seen a lot of injustices while traveling in third world countries and a lot of injustices in general -- you know, a lot of injustices in the first ten rows (laughter). You can�t get away from it; it�s a fact of life. Evil forces are everywhere. That�s why I take it upon myself to be a good human with somewhat decent karma.

Part 3

Our exclusive 4-part interview with Metallica guitar god and horror fan Kirk Hammett continues. In the last few days, we learned about his boyhood fascination with horror and morbidity. Today, in Part Three, an older and wiser Kirk reflects on truly scary instances in his life, as well as his views on the worship of death in today�s pop culture.

Hammett: It�s not very fun being stalked and I think the difference between groupies and stalkers is groupies, at one point, have some sort of satisfaction and know when to turn around and go home. Stalkers are obsessive and know no bounds. They never get enough of whomever they are fixated with. I�ve gotten the weirdest stuff in the mail. I mean God damn scary stuff. In fact, I have files of it.

13th St: Really?

Hammett: Yeah, and you know, in the band it�s gotten to the point where certain people had to get restraining orders against certain fans. This is a typical situation: a package will arrive in the mail to our management. It will be filled with pictures, a love letter (which is always 8 or 9 pages long), and it goes into detail about your future with this particular person. This one person went so far as to send me a video of her singing love songs to me! And being really, really fucking scary! A lot of these people are people who are in need of psychiatric help. A lot of times they talk about it. They talk about �Yeah, I just got out of the hospital,� or �I didn�t take my medication today,� or �I�ve been put away for awhile and I just got out, but they�re trying to put me in again.� I mean it's scary fucking stuff! You know, how does one protect oneself from it? There�s only one way. Not expose yourself at all. And that, in and of itself, is a scary prospect. You kind of have to handle each situation differently. It�s the scariest part of what comes along with being in the situation that we�re in.

13th St: Do you think there is such a thing as mental health?

Hammett: I think our society isn�t as supportive of people with mental problems as societies in other countries. I think, because of that, inherently we have more insane people around and we just have to deal with it.

13th St: Weren�t you telling me how a lot of homeless people were kicked loose from mental facilities?

Hammett: It was part of the great Reaganomics legacy. Reagan signed a bill saying that any mental patient who was not a threat to society and was well enough to take care of himself or herself had the option to leave the mental hospital. And, literally overnight I think he had half the mental patients in California getting up and leaving -- just leaving -- and where did they end up? For the most part they all ended up on the streets of San Francisco. And, you know, that was like 10-12 years ago. Where are those people now? There certainly aren�t as many of them now as there were back then. They either died on the streets or�well, they certainly didn�t get any better. They got killed, or whatever, and that�s a sad, sad thing.

13th St: Are there people that visit your house and look at the imagery and its darker aspects and freak out about it?

Hammett: Yeah, my soundman big Mick came here once and saw the Twins and said �That�s disgusting,� and every time I mention my house he has to go "What are those fucking things?", "Do you still have those fucking things?", �You�re a sick man!� But, he says it all in jest.

13th St: Was there anybody who has been seriously disturbed to the point where you have felt that you had to justify yourself?

Hammett: Oh, just my mom!

13th St: Isn�t she used to it by now?

Hammett: She still asks me about all sorts of stuff. But, I mean, it�s the pickled punks, the taxidermy and the various types of things that I have in jars. They are a bit much for someone who hasn�t had an orientation toward that sort of thing and so�what can you do except say, �Hey, if you don�t like it, don�t look at it.�

13th St: Right.

Hammett: Things like this are more intriguing to me because they are more interesting. My life feels more interesting with things like this around me. I just like to color my personal landscape with things like this because it makes me feel good (laughter). I like the energy. I am totally obsessed with the notion of death. When you go into my library I have a section on death and then it splits into all of these sub-genres. The beauty of death, the ugliness of death, you know, death as a religion, death as recreation, death as philosophy and death as enlightenment.

13th St: Beauty of death? Is that like Joel Peter Witkin?

Hammett: I love Joel Peter Witkin!

13th St: Have you ever been to the Museum of Death?

Hammett: Yes.

13th St: What did you think about it?

Hammett: To see how other people die or the glory of the moment, the horrifics of the moment, that�s such a clich� presentation. I�m more interested in the influence of death on life, which is more its impact on art, literature and music. That to me is more intriguing then reading eight different books on Ed Gein or any other serial killers. That stuff's been done and done to death. Your typical guy who says, �I�m really into death�, a lot of times the only thing they�re REALLY into is like serial killers, you know, creepy ways of dying, or exotic ways of dying, and the Museum of Death is a good example of that sort of thing. Death on like a pop culture basis, which is basically what it is, I�m just tired of it. I think it�s a big clich�.

13th St: You went through your phase on that?

Hammett: Yeah. And you know it was interesting to me when I was like 22 years old. But now that I consider myself a little more cultured, older, wiser I�m less interested in those aspects of death.

Part 4

We conclude our exclusive 4-part interview with Metallica guitar god and dark philosopher Kirk Hammett. We�ve seen how morbid fascination shaped his childhood and how it matured into disdain for �death on a pop-culture basis.� Now he turns his eye toward the future and sees plenty to fear in communications, new technology and � horrors! -- that file-sharing service that begins with �N�.

13th St: Do you think the prevalence of reality TV shows like COPS that actually show real-life inhumanity on prime time has desensitized people?

Hammett: Totally! Totally desensitized people. When I was younger and dealing with the real life pictures or video or whatever, I didn�t really think about the inhumanity that lurks behind acts like that. And, as I get older and as I grow more compassionate, I don�t regard it with as much value as I do other things. When I see something like that I think about the absolute absence of compassion and it really gets to me. Not that I�m a wimp, and it�s not the gore, it�s just the fact that someone could do that to someone else really gets to me now. I have a lot more respect for human life then I did way back when. The allure went away, so let�s find something else.

13th St: So what do you think are some of the more terrifying aspects of modern life?

Hammett: Being a vegetarian, I�m not really happy about splicing the genes of swine DNA into tomatoes. I mean, all of a sudden you�re not a vegetarian anymore, eating a vegetable with animal byproducts in it. They�ve been splicing animal genes with plant genes now for about the last 2 or 3 years. Where do you draw the line? I know the possibility to clone humans is here now and I have a sneaking suspicion there is someone somewhere who is being funded to clone humans. If it�s not being done right now, it�s going to start very soon. That�s scary! You get into all sorts of moral and spiritual -- as well as the physical -- questions of the thing. Why create a process that takes all the love out of procreating? It�s just scary, �cause who�s to say we are not going to start splicing animal genes with human genes? It�s beginning to look like a 50�s sci-fi movie. Those days are here now and they�re much more sinister and insidious. The big corporations have their hands in a lot of it. 13th St: Why would someone want himself or herself cloned in the first place? The clone is going to be raised with completely different stimuli. They may look like the same person, have the same flaws but they won�t be the same person. It�s not like the original person�s consciousness is going to be transferred to the clone.

Hammett: Scientists make the argument that there may come a time when all blood is tainted and you have to clone yourself just to have enough of your own blood in case something happens, or if you need a liver or a kidney. 13th St: That�s horrible -- you�d be farming your own organs from another living being.

Hammett: There are so many moral and ethical questions that come into play. I�m not interested in cloning myself because the only positive thing that I can see is if it could save someone�s life.

13th St: What do you think about computer technology advancements?

Hammett: I read an article about how we should all love Napster. The argument was, �Where are we going to stop policing intellectual property? Will it get to the point where I�ll have to contact the FBI to look at the contents of a book?� The one fault in that article is that the writer went in only one direction. If you go in the other direction and examine the possibility that nothing was safe, not movies, books, photography�what if the protection of all intellectual property fell apart? That would mean almost all of society would fall apart. It would be total anarchy and chaos. People wouldn�t be making things with the proper motivations. They�d be motivated by a completely different term and, I think, to a large extent, the only things that are going to have any bearing or worth are things that aren�t intellectual properties, which is what corporations would love. If the worth of intellectual properties zeroes out, something has to fill that slot. What better to fill that void with but commodities of elevated worth for the consumer? A big corporation's dream come true.

13th St: Do you think that technology of policing these things is going to advance as fast as the criminal aspect of it?

Hammett: The technology aspect and the criminal aspect seem to go hand and hand. I mean, you have all these tech heads that have no regard for the law, or ethics as we know it. They�re anarchists. They�ll never be able to stop people like the ones who feel they have a certain legacy to uphold. They feel they have to bring change no matter what the cost. They�re doing it for purely selfish reasons. I don�t think that they realize the larger picture.

13th St: Do you think artists will quit creating art because they can�t make a living at it?

Hammett: No, but I think that the quality of art will be affected because the motivation won�t be there. Someone who is just doing something to get by, like washing dishes, and is not being paid for a quality wash job is less likely to do a quality wash job. Artists are motivated just as much as businessmen.

13th St: One last question. Since you are considered a "Guitar God," how would you like to be worshipped?

Hammett: With a steady flow of virgins. The living kind.

The 13 Questions

1) What scares you? Noticing how long my toenails have gotten lately.

2) Who scares you? The President.

3) When were you last scared? Last Friday (2/2/01) when I had my wisdom teeth removed. After the first tooth was torn from my skull by a pair of pliers and then realizing that it had to happen again, now that's terrifying.

4) What is the scariest place you can imagine? Earth, the suffering never ends. Reality is scary. Mere existence is scary.

5) What is the scariest book you�ve read? It would have to be a tie between Stephen King's "The Shining" and "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub. They are both epic ghost stories and I love epic ghost stories.

6) What is the scariest movie you�ve seen? The Exorcist had a particular resonance for a Catholic schoolboy like myself. As I watched, it felt like Satan was fingering me. There are some Japanese horror films that I've seen lately like "The Ring" and "Death Powder" too. "Death Powder" was particularly disturbing since I couldn't figure out what was going on half the time cause it was only partially translated into English.

7) What goes bump in your night/lives under your bed? Ticks, there are ticks everywhere sometimes. I know I need a rest when the ticks are crawling all over the elevator walls.

8) Where would you start a killing spree? While skydiving.

9) Who is your favorite villain? Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) and Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) from the 1934 film "The Black Cat."

10) What has been your most terrifying experience? Birth.

11) Who would you most like to be haunted by? Billie Holiday so she could sing to me at night. Most people consider ghosts to be malevolent; I don't have any problem with ghosts. There are good one and bad ones.

12) What's your worst nightmare? Trying out 150 bass players.

13) What would be your last meal? A good bottle of wine, that's it. Just kick back and reflect.