The "Master" of puppets is a reference to drugs. Throughout the song the Master controls you and your life. This is evident in lyrics like, "chop your breakfast on a mirror," "the Master Of Puppets is pulling your strings, twisting your mind and smashing your dreams." Drugs are the Master while the drug user is the puppet.
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Suggestion credit:
Tore - W. Germany
This is one of the most famous and enduring songs of 1986, but it wasn't released as a single, except in France. Metal was still seen as a niche, and few radio stations would touch it. Putting it out as a single would have been pointless because it wouldn't have gotten airplay and Metallica's fans were far more likely to buy the whole album (and with a running time of 8:36, it wouldn't have fit on one side of a 45).
But the album went Gold almost immediately (500,000 copies in America), and two years later went Platinum (one million), which changed perceptions. Rock radio found room for Metallica amongst offerings from Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe. MTV even got on board, launching
Headbangers Ball in 1987. When Metallica released their next album,
...And Justice for All (1988), they were commercial enough for a single and video, which they delivered with "
One." That song got them on the Hot 100 for the first time, landing at #35.
This is Metallica's most popular live song, played in concert more than any other. The crowd dutifully shouts back "Master!" at appropriate times, which could be seen as the kind of conformity the song warns against, but is simply an irresistible, adrenaline-fueled release.
James Hetfield plays the first solo during the slow instrumental part, Kirk Hammet plays the final, fast heavy solo. While playing the solo, Kirk pulled the top string off of the fretboard of the guitar (usually done by accident when someone bends the high string down instead of up) to make the really high siren-like sound. Everyone loved the way it sounded on the track so they kept it that way.
There are two ways the song is played live. There is one where they just play the song how it is normally played in it's entirety, and another where they play the first two verses, and when it's time for the instrumental part they play another song (like "Nothing Else Matters" or "Sanitarium") and when that song is done they continue the final verse of "Master Of Puppets."
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The title track to Metallica's third album, "Master Of Puppets" has songwriting credits going to the full band: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Cliff Burton.
Hetfield and Ulrich are original members; before their debut album was released, Hammett replaced Dave Mustaine and Burton replaced Ron McGovney. Mustaine was ejected from the band for excessive drug use and erratic behavior, which is more than a little ironic. McGovney got along well with his bandmates, but when they saw Burton play in his band Trauma, they were smitten and convinced him to join. Sadly, Master Of Puppets was their last album with Burton. On the subsequent tour, their bus went off the road and flipped, killing him at 24.
Like their previous album,
Ride The Lightning,
Master Of Puppets was recorded at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen with Flemming Rasmussen engineering and serving as co-producer. What made that studio special?
Rasmussen told Songfacts: "We had a really kick-ass drum room. We had the Trident mixer, which was not the newest thing, but some of the new desks that came out were not the greatest circuit desks, and ours was transformers and everything, and it just sounded better. So, that would be the main thing. And then of course... me!"
Rasmussen also worked on the band's next album,
...And Justice for All.
The end of the song is quite memorable. There's a bit of Kirk Hammett's guitar played backwards, followed by some laughter by the band, which is made to sound maniacal through the use of echo.
James Hetfield in Thrasher magazine: "'Master of Puppets' deals pretty much with drugs. How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you're taking and doing it's drugs controlling you. Like, I went to a party here in San Francisco, there were all these freaks shooting up and geezin' and this other girl was real sick."
In an MTV
Icon special, James Hetfield said that it wasn't until after this song was written that he realized it related to his alcoholism.
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
The song was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" enough for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the United States Library of Congress in 2016, the first metal recording to do so.
When Metallica played two shows in China in 2013, the Chinese government told them not to play this song - perhaps not wanting to harbor unrest with lyrics about being controlled by a greater entity. The band complied, although Kirk Hammett made sure to play the riff during their sets.
Metallica recorded this with the San Francisco Symphony in 1999. That version is on their album, S&M.
When iTunes and digital downloading became a thing, this song was made available as a single (strongly encouraged, as the band took a firm stand
against Napster and illegal file sharing). In 2012, it was certified Gold for selling over 500,000 copies.
"Master Of Puppets" plays in a key scene in a season 4 episode of Stranger Things where the metalhead character Eddie Munson plays it on guitar to help battle a demon. The episode is set in March 1986, the same month the song was released on the Master Of Puppets album. Tye Trujillo, the son of Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo, added guitar tracks to the version that appears in the show.
We're not sure if the character is named Eddie because it's the name of the Iron Maiden mascot, but in the previous episode, we see him pick up a copy of an Iron Maiden cassette and say "This is music!" and he also wears an Iron Maiden patch on his jacket.
Thanks to its use on
Stranger Things, the song entered the Hot 100 for the first time on July 16, 2022, placing at #40 and peaking at #35 a week later. It also made its debut appearance on the Official UK Singles Chart and various other tallies worldwide.
Kate Bush's "
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," used in the same season, got an even bigger boost and joined Metallica on the charts at this time, giving Generation X the thrill of gloating to their kids about how much better their music was back in the '80s.
Speaking with Songfacts in 2022,
Dave Mustaine recalled watching Lars Ulrich come up with a key section of this song. "Lars is a really great song arranger, and believe it or not, I watched him on a piece-of-s--t acoustic guitar write the opening riff," he said. "It was a guy with a guitar that doesn't know how to play, and he's going [mimics playing a chromatic run] on the neck. It wasn't anything really mind-blowing by any means. The way James played it made it mind-blowing."
In a 2017 video retrospective on the album, James Hetfield talked about how the meaning of the song has evolved for him. "Now, lyrically, it applies to so many things in life," he said. "Being manipulated by many, many things if you want to let yourself go there. It wasn't just drugs."