Songfacts®:

• Credited to all four band members (James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett), "Damage, Inc." is the last song on the band's third album, Master Of Puppets. The album deals with the many forms of manipulation; "Damage, Inc." looks at it from a corporate level, indicating how the band had become essentially a corporation and was now on both sides of the equation, being part of the machine but also railing against it. This being Metallica, Hetfield's lyric is filled with bellicose imagery imploring us to take a stand.
• Metallica were adamant about making music that worked for them without catering to trends or the wants of their label. In this song they present a dilema:
  
  Living on your knees, conformity
  Or dying on your feet for honesty
  
  They chose the later, which came with consequences that took years of therapy to resolve.
• Master Of Puppets was the second album the band recorded in Denmark with Flemming Rasmussen at the helm. The band worked from demos and did a lot of experimentation with settings, mic placements and studio effects. The sessions took a lot longer than they anticipated, but the result was one of the best-selling and acclaimed albums in metal history, selling over 6 million copies.
• Metallica called their subsequent tour the "Damage Inc. tour," which ran for nearly a year, starting on March 27, 1986. It turned tragic when a tour bus accident in Sweden killed bass player Cliff Burton on September 27. The tour resumed on November 15 with Jason Newsted on bass.