Event: Happy Birthday James Hetfield! A Holiday To Me :-)

Happy Birthday

and a hearty

Metal Up Your Ass

to one

James Alan Hetfield,

vocalist, songwriter

and founding guitarist

of the mighty

Metallica.

Thirty years ago in 1981 when you were a pimple-faced,

denim and leather-clad social misfit with a dream and a guitar,

you hooked up with the little drummer from Denmark, Lars Ulrich to form

Metallica, a band I and millions of others still love to this day.

For me personally, had it not been for discovering your music in 1987 and

truly getting into it and thrash in general in 1988, I would not have started

playing guitar that year and getting serious about it in January of 1989

at age fifteen Nor would I have been inspired to form my first band in August 1989 –

a thrash metal band called Metatrosity (yes, I purposefully exchanged the ‘c’ in the word atrocity for an ‘s’ because it looked better in the logo I designed — hey, I was fifteen, don’t judge).

Inspired by your great band Metallica, my band Metatrosity — in its two years of existence — served as the all-father sire of so many other local underground bands in Indianapolis because many key musicians either spent time in the band’s lineup, or so many people were connected to us as well as so many other people in the scene that there’s a huge family tree that roots back to my little thrash metal band that rarely had a drummer (a problem that reocurred with my last metal band Dichotomous). It’s literally

six degrees of separation for those of us who were in Metatrosity.

But enough about me.

This day is about you, man. It’s August 3rd –

your birthday. And a day to celebrate

and honor your mere existence

and your grand and rather

profound influence

on me, my music

and my life.

Thank you.