Ulrich has also publicly discussed using the drug for years before finally stopping on his own and Hetfield has candidly acknowledged his own experiences with addiction and recovery. If people are into it that's cool, they wouldn't mind about the subject we're talking about.” Years later, Hammett would succumb to and recover from cocaine addiction. Hetfield was quick to clarify that Metallica were never going to be an anti-drug band, explaining, “we don't want to tell anyone what to do. there were all these freaks shooting up and geezin' and this other girl was real sick.” One of the song’s most famous lines - “Chop your breakfast on a mirror” - was inspired by their old friend Rich Burch, who often crashed at their house in El Cerrito and who would wake up on the floor of the house and greet the day with a fresh line of blow. How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you're taking and doing it's drugs controlling you. In 1988, Hetfield told Thrasher magazine, “ Master Of Puppets deals pretty much with drugs.
Hetfield captures the devastating sense of powerlessness wrought by the disease in a highly-poetic manner, creating a dialogue of betrayal between the addict and his drugs, who have become his Master.
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Lyrically, Master Of Puppets is a cautionary tale about drugs and the terrifying loss of free will experienced by someone in the throes of addiction. Fittingly, the song drives to its finish with “the riff,” finally ending with an echo-drenched melange of the band laughing and a spectral wash of reversed guitars. Instead, nearly seven minutes into the song, they introduce another new verse, pile into the pre-chorus and then take one more triumphant run at the chorus. Aching with visceral melancholic beauty, the solo builds into a second duet before the two guitars coalesce in a siege of bone-crushing power riffs, followed by a key change and new verses beginning with “’s the dream that I’ve been after?” The next movement erupts with another flamethrower solo, a bridge in the middle of that solo and, finally, a connection back to “the riff.” At this point, the modern rock blueprint would have directed the band to hit the chorus two more times and fade out, but Metallica were writing a new rulebook. From there it plays out with unrelenting aggression in a standard verse/chorus format until fading at the echo of “Master!” at 3:30 and melting into the spiralling, dual-fretted harmonies of the next movement. "We banged it out a couple of times and decided on the one with the best feeling," the producer told Rolling Stone, "because they'd have to play it live." Of course, “live” does not equate to “simple.”Ĭomprised of four distinct movements and clocking in at a total of eight minutes and thirty-five seconds, Master Of Puppets begins with “the riff” - that taut, distorted power chord, followed by three sharp, descending chords before ripping into the track’s galloping 4/4 groove. To give the riffs that lean sense of attack, Rasmussen summoned some studio trickery, directing the band to tune their instruments slightly lower so that, when recorded with fast-moving tape, the resulting track would be in tune. "It's gotta be tight! Every guitar track has to be totally tight to the other guitar tracks!” Indeed, for a song built on heavily-distorted guitar parts, the riffs are taut, compressed and utterly lethal. “It was all about getting it tight," Ulrich said in 2017. Instinctively, they realised that they had tapped into something genuinely poignant and they understood that they had to absolutely nail it. Building off of its main riff, the band added a dizzying array of tempo changes, solos, grooves and lyrics until settling on its final form. That September, they decamped to Sweet Silence studio, in Copenhagen to record the new album with producer Flemming Rasmussen. Metallica had sussed that Master Of Puppets would be the title track of their forthcoming new album.
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Among these was a rough instrumental that would soon be revved up, stretched out, pumped full of blazing riffs, jaw-dropping solos and anthemic lyrics. They watched sets from the likes of Black Sabbath, Status Quo and a re-formed Led Zeppelin and the next day, they retreated to the garage where they bashed out the first round of demos for what would ultimately become the new album. It was the summer of 1985 and on July 13, the band gathered around the television to watch Live Aid from their party pad and shared living space in El Cerrito, a sleepy California town just north of Oakland.
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