“Metal up your ass, baby!” Standing on the lip of the Lyceum theatre’s stage, sweat-soaked and smiling, James Hetfield urges the denim and leather-clad “noisy fuckers” before him to raise their voices in unity one last time for a raucous singalong loud enough to alarm the more genteel patrons of the arts spilling out onto the streets of central London’s bustling theatre district post-curtain calls.
The date is December 20, 1984, the occasion the closing show of Metallica’s first European headline tour, and the 21-year-old Californian and his bandmates - guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Cliff Burton and drummer Lars Ulrich - are in high spirits, already drunk and ready to party harder as they conclude their threesong encore with Metal Militia, the red-blooded battle hymn they positioned as the closing track of their debut album Kill ’Em All the previous year.
The quartet had much to celebrate in the last days of a year that had dawned with dark clouds overhead. In January, just weeks before the San Francisco-based band were set to fly to Europe to record their second album, Ride The Lightning, in their Danish drummer’s homeland, they were the victims of a robbery, when a Boston street gang stole their guitars, amps, microphones and a drum kit in the dead of night from the truck their crew had parked near the city’s Channel Club, where the band were set to perform the next evening.
Article continues belowThen in March, as they recorded the album’s final overdubs at Copenhagen’s Sweet Silence studio, they were dealt another morale-sapping blow when they were informed that, due to abysmal double-digit ticket sales, every date on the proposed British tour they had scheduled to follow the recording session - a three-band package along with New York’s The Rods and Canadian speed metal crew Exciter - had been cancelled by their British promoter.
Yet even as their momentum was brought to a juddering halt by this humbling setback, influential figures in the music industry were rallying to their cause. In the summer of 1984, following a riotously received gig at New York’s legendary Roseland Ballroom, the band were offered, and accepted, a record deal by US major label Elektra. They also appeared on the radar of Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein, co-founders of Q Prime management, whose roster included AC/DC and Def Leppard – and, soon enough, would also include Metallica.
As if this were not enough proof of their rising fortunes, in the same week that they arrived in London for their sold-out Lyceum gig, the band had their first cover-feature interview in influential ‘rock bible’ Kerrang!, with their most tireless advocate, drummer Ulrich, appearing alone on the cover, spray-painted silver.
In another industry acknowledgement of their enhanced status, when they returned to their dressing room after the show at the 2,000-capacity venue, the four musicians were presented with silver discs commemorating 60,000 European sales of Ride The Lightning. It’s little wonder, then, that Lars Ulrich was in bullish mood as he spoke to Metal Forces magazine ahead of the quartet’s return to northern California.
“Cliff Burnstein, who signed us to our new management deal in the States, has this big belief that what we are doing will be the next big thing in heavy metal,” he told writer Bernard Doe. “I honestly believe that the kids who are into Priest, Maiden, Kiss, and [Twisted] Sister will take onto what we’re doing.
“I’m not saying it’s something that’s going to happen overnight,” he added, “but it could start developing and Metallica could be the frontrunners of a new branch of heavy metal.”
Upon completion of the first leg of the North American dates supporting Ride The Lightning, the band returned home to San Francisco to begin plotting out a road map for the road ahead.
“I would like to say that there was something magical in the air in the summer we wrote Master Of Puppets, something that hasn’t been there before, and has never existed since,” Ulrich told me in 2006. “But that would be a lie. I guess we just had the right attitude and the right openness to ideas. The whole band was getting more confident.”
In the spring of 1985, in the two-bedroom home the band members all shared on Carlson Boulevard in the East Bay city of El Cerrito, Ulrich and Hetfield began sifting through cassette tapes full of riffs and musical ideas recorded by Hetfield, Hammett and Burton across the previous 12 months, to identify the foundational building blocks of Metallica album number three.
Lars Ulrich: Most of the record was written in May and June of 1985, from the best ideas that were kicking around on our riff tapes. But Cliff had been in the band for a few years and he brought in a lot of harmonies and melodies. It took a little while for James and I to open up to some of Cliff’s ideas about harmony and melody, because we’d never played stuff like that before. But after a while we got it and that’s when we started experimenting more.
Kirk Hammett: James would show Cliff and me the riffs, and we’d build the songs from there. Some I’d already be familiar with. The main riff in Battery, for instance. The first time I heard James play that was in England, on his acoustic guitar. We were watching The Young Ones, and all of a sudden he started messing around with this sort of galloping rhythm. I said: “Wow, that’s cool.”
Ulrich: We were just snot-nosed punks doing what we were doing, and trying to do something different from everyone else.
James Hetfield: I remember writing the chorus to Master Of Puppets in our living room and thinking it was too commercial, too obvious. ‘If it’s too easy, something’s wrong’ was kind of the Metallica mantra.
Over the course of just eight weeks, eight new Metallica songs were sketched out, arranged, fought over, rearranged, and finally recorded in the garage at 3132 Carlson Boulevard. “God, it was loud,” Hetfield recalled. “And the smell.”
“Everybody’s horizons were expanding, musically,” Ulrich told Revolver magazine in 2017. “We were starting to get into stuff like The Police and U2. I remember there was this Yes album called 90125, that was a great record. I can’t tell you that we sat there listening to that record and then went out to the garage and started writing Master Of Puppets, but it was part of that era.”
Hammett: When these songs were coming together it was as if we were being visited by beings from another planet! That’s what these songs felt like; they were so unique, and so individual – no one had ever heard anything like this before that.
Hetfield: Cliff was a genius at harmonies, and layering, and unique phrasing. Very classical-sounding, not your typical rock stuff at all, and he’d always push it that one extra little something.
Hammett: I could tell it was really blossoming into something to be reckoned with. Every song we came up with was like the greatest thing. Every time we’d write another it was like: “Oh my god.”
Ulrich: It was a period of pretty serious expansion.
Hammett: The four of us had really gelled as a unit, and were motivated by things that had nothing to do with commercialism or financial success. We wanted to be the biggest, baddest motherfuckers on the planet, but also have the best songs, with hooks and grooves and provocative lyrics.
It’s surely no coincidence that, lyrically, half the songs on Metallica’s major-label debut are about fears of being controlled, manipulated, exploited; about losing power and autonomy. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that, as much as they talked about being given complete artistic control by Elektra - “Elektra hasn’t said one fucking word” – somewhere in James Hetfield’s mind, there were fears that the band’s vision might be somehow compromised as they pushed forward.
Battery might be a celebration of the early Bay Area thrash scene, birthed in clubs like The Old Waldorf on Battery Street, but when Hetfield sings ‘cannot kill the family, battery has found in me’ it sounds like a threat to anyone seeking to contaminate the purity of the band’s vision. And while on the surface the title track is a cautionary tale about drug addiction - “Instead of you controlling what you’re taking and doing, it’s drugs controlling you,” its author told Thrasher in 1988 - it’s also about the fear of outside forces dictating your actions.
Inspired by One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the moody Welcome Home (Sanitarium) is rooted in the nightmare scenario where one is bullied into accepting false narratives and fake realities; Disposable Heroes reads like a thrash metal update of Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem Dulce et Decorum Est, while Leper Messiah, its title borrowed from David Bowie’s song Ziggy Stardust, calls out the hypocrisy and manipulation of organised religion.
“I’m not a storyteller,” Hetfield once insisted, but on Master Of Puppets he began to truly find his voice. So too, ironically, without using any words whatsoever, did Cliff Burton. The 24-year-old bassist’s magnificently atmospheric, harmonically complex eight-minute-27-seconds instrumental Orion, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Come, Sweet Death, being arguably the strongest composition on the album, certainly the boldest.
n an alternative version of reality, one in which the stars aligned differently, Master Of Puppets might have been produced by Rush vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee. “There was some discussion with Lars, back in the day, about working with them,” Lee admitted in 2015. “We talked about it, and I liked their band a lot at that time, but it just never came together.”
And with the band’s preference being to record in Los Angeles, their third record might have been recorded at Conway Studios. Except that when Ulrich made enquiries, he learned that the facility was block booked right through to the summer of ’86. So by default - and with budgets and international exchange rates factored in - a return to Sweet Silence studio in Denmark, where they would work under the tried and trusted guidance of producer Flemming Rasmussen, was booked from September 1 to December 27.
First though, on August 17, Metallica returned to England to make their debut appearance at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park, which that year was headlined by ZZ Top. “It was like the holy grail of metal gigs,” Hetfield recalled. “If you made it to Donington, that was the ultimate.”
Two weeks later, back in the US, on August 31 they closed out the summer with an appearance at the huge Day On The Green festival at Oakland Stadium, sandwiched between Yngwie J Malmsteen’s Rising Force and local heroes Y&T, on a bill headlined by Scorpions. Then to Copenhagen, and the SAS Hotel, where the group split into two halves, with Hetfield and Ulrich sharing a suite, while Hammett and Burton roomed together.
Flemming Rasmussen: We more or less wanted to re-do Ride The Lightning, just a lot better.
Ulrich: We worked at night, so for three months I don’t think we saw daylight. This was like September, October, November, December. In Denmark, if you wake up at four in the afternoon it’s already dark. So we’d wake up, go over to Flemming Rasmussen’s house, and his wife’s sister had the unthankful task of cooking a meal for us. That would be around six o’clock. Then we’d go down into the studio and start at seven, and then we’d work until five or six in the morning, then go back to the hotel and do the breakfast buffet. And then we would go to bed.
Rasmussen: They had made such massive strides. Technically, as musicians it was very obvious that they’d spent most of the time since we’d recorded Ride The Lightning on tour. It was very obvious that their technical abilities had really improved, especially Lars.
Ulrich: We had so much energy and belief. It’s interesting how instinctive things used to be, how impulsive. I don’t remember labouring over ideas or ways to do things. We just did it. When you’re twenty-one you just do shit.
Rasmussen: We all had the same vision of how the album should sound, so we all pulled in the same direction. That doesn’t happen very often. I had a strong sense that we were making a classic record. It felt like a joyride. I don’t remember a single argument.
Hammett: The tension was there, it was heavy tension. A lot of arguing, but that goes with the territory.
James Hetfield: Lars was being way too fucking picky. Things towards the end went kinda: ‘Ugh, I want to kill somebody.’
Kirk Hammett: I remember thinking is it arrogance, or my ear telling me that what we’ve made is really special.
Lars Ulrich: We braced ourselves for fucking uproar in the thrash community about the sellouts and the acoustic guitars and all that. But we had to go on that path because that was the truth; that was our truth
Cliff Burton was the first band member to pack up and leave the Danish capital, bailing out as soon as his bass parts were laid down to his satisfaction. On December 23, Hetfield and Hammett also flew home to San Francisco, while Ulrich remained in Denmark to spend the holiday season with family, before returning to Sweet Silence after Christmas to make final tweaks with Rasmussen.
On December 27, the porn mag pages which the band had taped to the studios walls during their residency were torn down and binned, and the studio sound desk’s levels reset. Metallica had left the building.
Back on home soil, on New Year’s Eve, headlining their biggest hometown show to date, at the Civic Auditorium, the band performed the title song of their forthcoming third album for the first time. Work on Master Of Puppets resumed in January, with the band’s two co-founders joining mixing engineer Michael Wagner at Amigo Studios in Los Angeles.
One night, however, their progress was stalled due to an unexpected intervention by the US Customs Office, who had impounded the master tape of Battery en route to California from Copenhagen. Hetfield and Ulrich decided to have a quiet dinner together at The Cat & The Fiddle pub on Sunset Boulevard, only to find their plans torn up when they were spotted by some members of British rock royalty, namely Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, Judas Priest guitarists KK Downing and Glen Tipton, and Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood.
When last orders were called, the party continued at Smallwood’s apartment above The Rainbow Bar & Grill. At some point in the small hours, a ‘refreshed’ and emboldened Ulrich decided to premiere some rough mixes of his band’s unfinished album on Smallwood’s stereo.
“We never thought we were particularly hot shit,” Ulrich told me 20 years later. “But this was the first time that I felt this album might connect on a different level than before. When Welcome Home (Sanitarium) came on, Rod was like: ‘Can you play that again? That’s a really good song.’ And I started thinking: ‘Hmmm, maybe there’s hope for us here.’”
Master Of Puppets was released in the US through Elektra Records on February 26, 1986, and in the UK on Music For Nations on March 7. In their homeland it debuted at No.128 on the Billboard 200 and peaked at No.29, while in the UK it stalled just one place outside the Top 40. Not that any self-respecting Metallica fan, or the band themselves, gave a flying fuck about such stats. Had the quartet been hung up on chart placings, they might have prefaced the album’s release with a teaser single, or their first ever promotional video. They did neither.
Instead, in a knowing, smart-ass wink to radio station programmers who had thus far ignored the band, and with a defiant, deliberately provocative challenge to the right-wing pro-censorship lobby who had begun to demand that albums be labelled for ‘explicit material’ in the Land Of The Free, subsequent runs of the hit album came bearing a sticker that read: “The only track you probably won’t want to play is Damage, Inc. due to multiple use of the infamous ‘F’ word. Otherwise, there aren’t any ‘shits’, ‘fucks’, ‘pisses’, ‘c**ts’, ‘motherfuckers’ or ‘cocksuckers’ anywhere on this record.”
At least the music press was welcoming. Writing in Sounds, Neil Perry boldly pronounced the album “a landmark in the history of recorded music”.
Rolling Stone’s Tim Holmes went deeper. “Metallica has taken the raw material of heavy metal and refined all the shit - the swaggering cock-rock braggadocio and the medieval dungeons and dragons imagery - right out of it,” he noted. “Instead of the usual starstruttin’ ejaculatory gestures and hokey showbiz razzmatazz, the members of Metallica pour out pure apocalyptic dread. Their version of heavy metal is the sound of global paranoia. Not for them is the tra-la-la music of escapism; they never promote the notion that rock itself is some sort of method for salvation or transcendence… Master Of Puppets is the real thing. Metallica has the chops and, yes, subtlety to create a new metal.”
For long-time champions Kerrang!, Mick Wall was equally effusive, awarding the record a maximum KKKKK review, and declaring that Metallica had “grown up”. “The band are still travelling the same hungry roads,” he observed, “but where they used to stomp and maul the senses like a bully out of control, now they dance and fly adding an animal grace to their sheet metal aggression.
“Metallica should be very pleased with themselves: Master Of Puppets is their finest LP to date, finer I think than any of their so-called contemporaries are likely to record this year.”
In his critique, Wall was spot-on. But if the eight tracks on the record offered emphatic proof of Metallica’s increasing ambition and enhanced musical development, the portrait of them on the album’s inner sleeve, shot by photographer Ross Halfin amid the detritus at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, was a sharp reminder that these were young men barely out of their teens, with alcohol on their breath, acne on their faces, and a shared sense that the world would soon be at their feet.
On one end of the couch, Hammett points a beer bottle at Halfin’s camera, at the other Burton salutes the photographer with a raised middle finger. Scumbags maybe, but our scumbags, and soon to be the scumbags of choice for a million discerning record buyers, helped in no part by the largesse of Ozzy Osbourne; or more likely the sharply attuned business sense of his wife and manager Sharon, who extended to Metallica’s management Q Prime an invitation for the band to open up for her husband on his upcoming arena tour, set to kick off on March 27, in support of his latest hit album The Ultimate Sin.
With an itinerary that stretched into early August and offered the band their first opportunity to grace the stages of hallowed, storied concert halls such as Long Beach Arena in Los Angeles, Cow Palace in San Francisco and the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, signing on for the Ozzy tour was a no-brainer for Peter Mensch. For his first rising clients, it was a dream come true. And for ‘mainstream’ metal fans, it was an introduction to their new favourite band.
Peter Mensch: Sharon knew Metallica was up-and-coming. She never said: “Let me hear the new album.” It was just: “Ozzy likes Metallica, he appreciates what they’re doing, so let’s do it.”
Hetfield: We were huge Black Sabbath fans, so the idea of touring arenas with Ozzy was the coolest thing ever… We were ready. Ulrich: Five years earlier, James and I were meeting and figuring out what we were doing, and now we were playing arenas. The first couple of songs, everyone was looking up at us going: “What is this racket?!” Forty-five minutes later they were pumping their fists, getting into it and understanding what we were doing. That’s when it kicked in in terms of exposure.
It was the funnest [time] of my life. We only had fifty-five minutes a night, not like the two-plus hours we play as headliners today. That was the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll tour. We were only twenty-two back then and drank a bottle of vodka a day. We’ve never hidden the fact that we like to indulge. We have this nickname ‘Alcoholica’. But we can all control what we do.
Ozzy Osbourne: Everybody used to stay at LA’s Sunset Marquis, so I ran into them there. I had no idea they were big fans. I remember walking past the dressing room and they were playing Black Sabbath… I thought they were taking the piss!
Ulrich: He thought we were taunting him and making fun. But we were up on stage playing Hole In The Sky or Symptom Of The Universe because we wanted him to sing with us! That was our big dream.
Osbourne: They were nice guys. The wildest we had from them was James, who must have broke his arm three fucking times on that tour skateboarding.
Hetfield: We told the management: “Hey, look, we’re thinking about taking boards out on tour.” I though Peter Mensch was going to go: “Oh shit. No way, you can’t.” He just said: “Well, you break something, you still play.”
Hammett: He said: “You break a leg on your skateboard, you play on stage with a broken leg.”
‘Big Mick’ Hughes (soundman): I remember pulling up to the venue in Indiana [on July 26]. James threw open the bus door, tossed his skateboard out onto the ground beside a hill, and shot off like a bloody rocket.
Hammett: I came around the bend, and James was lying there, going: “My arm’s broken.”
Hetfield: Ozzy was on our bus, going: “What the fuck happened?” I felt so bad, like: “Please don’t kick us off the tour!” I was really freaked out.
Osbourne: They came right out of their box. People loved them. They brought along a great following, which helped them take off down the line. You could tell that they were going to be a big deal just from how the crowd reacted every night. They’re a great band.
Ulrich: It’s impossible to put into words what Ozzy Osbourne meant to Metallica. Hero, icon, pioneer, inspiration, mentor and, most of all, friend are a few that come to mind. Ozzy and Sharon believed in us and transformed our lives and careers. He taught us how to play in the big leagues while at the same time being warm, welcoming, engaging and all-round brilliant.
Ozzy Osbourne: I’m kind of honoured to be able to hand the torch to a new generation.
Ulrich: I remember the last date of the Ozzy tour - and this would be James’s birthday, so that’s August 3, 1986 in Hampton, Virginia - and our manager Cliff Bernstein came down from New York for the last show. So we’re all sitting there in the back of the bus, and he said: “You’ve sold enough records and you’ve made enough money to go and buy houses.”
We’d been on the Ozzy tour at that point for five months. All of us, band and crew on one bus, drinking twelve hours a day, fucking, just living every crazy fantasy about girls and heavy metal and being on the road. We were completely blissfully ignorant to what was going on, you know, on that side of it. I remember Cliff sitting there and going: “Fuuucccckkk, I can buy a house”, and the rest of us didn’t want to buy a house - we wanted to stay on tour. We didn’t want to go home!
Hetfield: Life seemed a lot more simple back then. The songs on Master Of Puppets remind of an innocent Metallica… not stupid, but not tarnished, not ruined by fame… the honesty and the innocence… still sleeping, living at the studio, still roughing it and still having that fire. And only Metallica on our minds. Master Of Puppets was all we ever thought about - ever.
Rasmussen: Master Of Puppets is definitely a more uncommercial album than Ride The Lightning. Master Of Puppets is Metallica celebrating that they’ve got a major-label deal and that they no longer give a shit. It was them saying: “We’re just going to do the stuff we like and if the record company doesn’t like it, then fuck them.” I think that was the attitude. And it worked, too. There’s not one bad song on the album, not a single one. It is just fabulous from start to finish. They had that youthful attitude of: “We’re better than everybody else in the whole world” and they were just out to kick some ass.
Hammett: What surprises me the most is when I listen to the radio and something from the album will come on and I’m amazed at how current and modern it still sounds in the midst of all the other music being played before and after it. I’m thankful for that. That doesn’t always happen.
Ulrich: It’s a motherfucker of a record. It’s superdense and intense, and it doesn’t let up until Damage Inc is over. There’s a real natural youthful energy to it, and I’m pretty psyched about how strong it sounds. Lyrically too, I think it’s still as relevant. Is Master Of Puppets the greatest Metallica album? I’m too close to it… it’s difficult for me to judge that shit. We’re just honoured that it’s a record that’s perceived as a milestone, and as a record that’s been so inspiring to so many people.
Further reading: Metallica: Back To The Front: A Fully Authorised Visual History Of The Master Of Puppets Album And Tour by Matt Taylor (Pocket Books, 2016); Birth School Metallica Death by Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood (Faber & Faber, 2014); Metallica Talk 30 Years Of Master Of Puppets by Kory Grow (RollingStone.com, 2016). Kirk Hammett on youthful mischief behind Metallica’s Master Of Puppets by Dan Epstein (Revolver, 2017).
