When he was a child, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich had a pet donkey called "Lightning", which lived on his family's hobby farm in Copenhagen's leafy suburbs. This beast of burden is immortalized in the title of the band's second album, "Ride the Lightning." Metal up your ass, indeed!

Metallica's lead guitarist, Kirk Hammet, is the cousin of The Bangles frontwoman, Susanna Hoffs

Since 1996, Rob Zombie has had the car vanity plate "B L Z BOB".

Ronnie James Dio wrote Black Sabbath's 1980 song, Die Young, about his music teacher - a Welshman called Dai Young - at Cortland High School in upstate New York. The teaching taff did not live up to their name, passing away two years after the song was released, aged 85.

U2’s Bono took his stage name from the Bonobo, believing the endangered great ape was "like a small and sexy chimp". When the band formed, the 5'6" singer was keen to project a spicier image than the boy called Paul Hewson by his teachers at Mount Temple in Dublin's wealthy suburb of Clontarf.

Glenn Danzig wrote The Misfits' 1978 hit "We Are 138" after drunkenly jumping on the wrong bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Instead of heading north to Lodi on his regular #164, the pint-sized frontman headed south on the #138, ending up in Old Bridge with a new tune.

Ozzy Osbourne 1980 hit "Mr. Crowley" started life as a ditty about Mr. Chaudry, the Bengali man who employed the ex-Sabbath singer as a paperboy back in Birmingham