Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”

Hey, one song nation. It's the middle of summer. And for some of us, that means one thing and one thing only metal. That's right. This week, we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes from the archives where we break down Metallica's 1986 thrash classic Master of Puppets. On this episode, you'll hear us talk about all things James, Kirk, Lars, and of course, the late lamented Cliff. And we're going to, of course, get into that song's isolated drums, guitars, bass, and bask in the beauty of Papa Hett's isolated vocals. So in case you missed it the first time, or if you want to listen to this classic thrash song again from the inside out, I mean, let's face it, stranger things have happened. Stay tuned as one song breaks down Metallica's Master of Puppets. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, and songwriter, Luxury, also known as the guy who whispers interpolation. And this is one song. Now, Luxury, you chose today's song, Master of Puppets. That's the song on today's episode. I guess let's just start here. Why? Why this song? Why is it special? You know, it's funny. Like, there is a real question. This show so far, Metallica seems a little bit of an outlier. And in fact, it wasn't. It wasn't on the short list for me when we first put together our dream list of songs for season one. Out of our years of experience as music fans, we had a hard time coming up with, like, the right songs. It's really important to us to pick them. And it took me a minute to realize that buried deep in my psyche, in my youth, was this major moment of my life as a teenage boy where Metallica was everything to me. Wow. Both as a person, like, because of what they were singing about, the aggression of the music, but also as a budding musician. Like, I was learning instruments, and Metallica, like. I literally brought. This is how I learned guitar. I'm showing. Oh, snap. If you're watching the video. For those who are just listening to the podcast, he has brought out the advanced edition. Guitar. What would you call this? This is the. This is Guitar Tabs. It's a book. This is how you learn guitar if you're a young metalhead, is they've got all the notes, like classical theory, but they also just have where your fingers should go. So it's like a simplified version with the numbers. Like, it's just. It's before there was YouTube. It's how you would have learned guitar. And, yeah, this is where I began. I began as a musician, as well as it being such an important part of my life. Was this the first music that you played guitar to? It might have been. If it wasn't literally the first song, it was certainly the first where I would buy a book like this to try and master the entire album. You know what? I'm going to ask you a question about yourself. A lot today. Did you learn. Because we're both drummers. Did you learn the drums first? Because I learned the drums, and I was good. I never learned any other instrument. Thank you, public schools. But I wish I had. Yeah. But you learned the drums first, and then at some point. Did you transition to guitars? Yeah, I started on drums when I was in high school, and I had. I think I've mentioned before, two of my best friends, shout out to Scott Stafford and Alex Mandel, they were the master guitar players. So I couldn't keep up with them, and I was like, I want to hang out with these guys musically. So I learned drums so I could hang with them. So I would be behind them at school assemblies where they would. But at some point, you were like, I'm going to learn that instrument. It was actually at the end of high school that I bought my first guitar from the aforementioned Alex Mandel. Wow. End of high school. Okay. Yeah. I bought my first guitar, and I bought this book. That's where I started to learn. Tell me about the first time you heard Metallica. All right. So this is like one of those life moments that you never forget because it changed the course of history for me. But I was in high school, probably sophomore year, and it was one of those break periods in between classes, and a friend of mine had to leave to his class, and he gave me his Walkman, and I put it on. I'd never heard Metallica before, and he had been listening. This is Ari Gold. Shout out to Ari Gold. This is the episode where I shout out all my high school homies. So Ari Gold's Walkman, he was playing a Metallica song. And not only was he playing. He was playing a song. I'm going to play it for you in a minute. This is the part of the song that he played for me, which destroyed my little brain. Why did it destroy your little brain? The song? Was it the aggression that you heard? What was it? I'm going to play it, and then we'll talk about it because it's hard for me to articulate, so part of the beauty of music is you don't have to. You just listen or talk. We're not dancing about architecture. We're not dancing about architecture, which was the original title of the show, by the way. And I think we made a good choice with the one song change. So this song is called Fight Fire With Fire. It's from Metallica's previous record, Ride the Lightning. Before the Master of Puppets record. And this is what I would have heard on a spring afternoon when I was in high school. Kick drum. Right here. And then the guitars fade out, and you hear this. And I was like, what? That moment. That moment of those 16 notes on the kick drums. That's crazy. This is a human being doing this. Yes. And not just any human being. Like, in time, to the tempo, and for like a long duration. And not just any human being, but a pretty famous one. Right. So this is Lars Ulrich. By the way, on this episode, we're going to talk about Lars Ulrich. We're going to talk about all the members of Metallica. Lars Ulrich, we kind of alluded to in a previous episode. We talked about. The drummers, right? We talked about. He is in the same category a little bit with maybe Meg White from the White Stripes and Ringo Starr from the Beatles, where these are musicians that are often maligned. Maligned, right. They're people that are like, well, the band would be better if. Well, I malign Lars because he's the guy who came after Napster and always seemed to me. We'll get into my first impressions of Metallica because a lot of it has very little to do with the music and more of what they were saying in the public sphere. But this was teenage aggression. Yeah. And that's what I had a lot of in that moment. And this at the time I would have been listening to, again, alluding to previous episodes. If you haven't heard our New Order episode, Blue Monday, that was like I was listening to a lot of like synth pop and sort of post-punk. And I still loved it. But this was it. This switched a new gear on for me. This was like an aggressive. This spoke to that feeling of like, why don't girls like me? Why doesn't, you know, like a million different questions that flow through your hormone adult body at that age. Yeah. And. So this metal music was kind of the lock turning the key a little bit. That's so interesting. And this was this wasn't senior year of high school. When was this? This was I'm going to say sophomore year. Oh, yeah. Because Ari was two years older than me. It's helpful to have that reference point. You know, I think I think, look, there are a couple of things I want to say real quick. First is that, you know, suspiciously, everybody feels like music was never as good as when they were suspiciously between the ages of like 15 and 25. Like, I think your brain is just open to things. In a new way. Second thing I want to say is that I had a similar reaction to the very first time someone put on a public enemy CD for me. Like the very first time I heard that it was like everything else fell away. And I was like, why doesn't all music sound like in a weird way? That was my teen aggression. Just think about it. But getting back to Metallica, let me just say right at the top of this episode, I want to state this pretty clearly. I have so much respect. I consider myself a music nerd, but I have enough respect. For metal as a genre that I will admit right at the top to all of our listeners. I don't know this genre. I know a handful of groups in this genre, but you're going to be teaching me this episode. So I wanted to make that very clear from the start. OK, so before we get into Master of Puppets, I was hoping that you would just tell me and some of the folks who don't know. What is thrash metal and specifically, what is the difference between hard rock and metal? Right. Because I, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Please tell me. I mean, at some point in the 60s, we've got like white people starting to play like blues music and adding some distortion and you get like the Stones and Zeppelins. I love the Kinks. They get the Kinks. I love the Kinks. And not just white people. You got like, you got Hendrix, you got Santana. This music starts to become known as hard rock. It's harder because it's maybe it's a little louder. It's maybe the drums are a little louder. Some of that is how it's played. Some of it is production. And that's Sabbath, right? And Sabbath absolutely comes in there. And I would say that Sabbath, Zeppelin into Sabbath, we have kind of a shift happening partially because of the sound gets a little darker, but also thematically Sabbath starts to introduce these, you know, topics. Topically, they're more about like horror movies and darkness. Yeah. So that all starts to coagulate. And they're called Black Sabbath. It's right there in the title. Don't have to look much further. That starts to, in the 70s and then Queen, a lot of bands are what I would call. Well, hard rock, but there's with Sabbath, a little bit of metal beginning out of the ashes, so to speak, of hard rock. So where one begins and one ends, it's kind of a fool's errand to try to chase like, well, you've got like Sabbath albums that literally have ballads on them. So it's like there's a lot of eclecticism in there. But in the 70s, hard rock starts to turn into punk rock, punk rock, you know, from the Stooges through the Ramones into the Sex Pistols. That's just rock music. That's kind of a little faster. And topically, it's a little more political. So the changes that are happening sonically are a little subtle, but they've got a lot to do with loudness, distorted guitars and speed, I would argue, sonically outside of the subject matter. By the time we get to Metallica forming in 1981-ish. And by the way, side note, shout out to I'm wearing this T-shirt. You can't see it, but there's a radio station called KUSF. And there's a pretty funny story about how Metallica got their name. The guy who at the time, Ron Quintana, was running a fanzine. And he met Lars when they were young and touring in San Francisco. And he really liked the band. He really liked this unnamed metal band. And he's like. They were unnamed? At the time, they had an earlier version of the name, which is lost to my memory, at least. It may exist on somebody's notepad somewhere. But they said. guy ron quintana says hey guys i'm starting a metal zine i'm either going to call it metal mania or metallica what do you think and according to legend lars goes metal mania is a great name and he took the other one and he took metallica for himself according according to legend this is how the origin of the name mataka so shout out to uh ron quintana it seems very lars to do that and be like you know i think the best name of those two is definitely metal mania yeah so metallica uses the name metallica and then ron quintana goes on to do a show called rampage radio which he still does to this day and this is the radio station i used to work at in high school so i met him at the time and it was a big deal to me to know the guy who named metallica there's a lot a lot of teenage me is happening here on this episode i realized but when we were preparing for this episode at one point on your guitar you were playing the song barracuda yeah which i do know yeah yeah but i feel like you said that's more hard rock yeah maybe not pure metal what's the difference between hard rock and metal so again like anticipating that there's a lot of like yes buts in this topic i would say the difference between hard rock and heavy metal has a lot excuse me hard rock into thrash metal specifically which metallica is thrash metal one of the big four as they're called megadeth metallica anthrax and slayer are considered the big four of the specific sub-genre of heavy metal called thrash which i'll explain to you adds the punk energy and speed arguably okay and some of the attitude some of the lyrics lyrical content but mostly i would say it's about speed because prior to this you know there's iron maiden has a couple of fast songs but for the most part barracuda zeppelin all these hard rock bands in the 70s they are not doing 260 bpm like crazy riff oriented technical songs just 130 technically and it's 65 i mean you heard you heard fight fire with fire like heart and led zeppelin are not doing like those are insane breakneck tempos so a big part of it is the punk speed aspect which you know if you go back to the ramones the ramones are sort of like just sped up shangri-la songs with crunchier guitars and in a way it's very girl groups but faster a lot of bubblegum pop in those early punk i mean i feel like i'm not gonna win a lot of fans uh in the metal community with some of my so some of my opinions on this because but but by the way they're they're born out of my ignorance of the genre to me one of the reasons i think i one of the reasons i i probably did not get into metal is because to me one of the fun things about punk is that it is raw and that it's so like it's just it's just raw and it feels unfinished and i feel like a lot of times when i think about metal i think of these like very like almost like harpsichord things that they're doing with the guitar like and you're just like man that guy sounds classically trained on guitar but it doesn't it's not it doesn't it lacks that rawness and but you're saying that there actually is that punk thread in thrash but you're actually you're actually tapping into something specifically with metallica that makes them interesting that there is a rawness and a sloppiness in some ways to some of the performances but it's also mixed with specifically like in this song and in this era of the band when metallica still had cliff burton in the band i've heard of cliff burton uh through my nephew who is a metalhead uh and he was the bassist correct and he was the guy who like because he's sort of the reason why early metallica albums don't sound like metalhead and metalhead and metalhead and metalhead and metalhead like the later metallic albums right like he's a little bit the the answer to your question about he's part of the reason why metallica is so special because he did bring a music musicology aspect like he is a storied musician with a lot of he understood he was into bach and what you're describing when you when you talk about classical is likely to be some of the choices he made melodically some of which we're going to hear when we get into the stems in a minute but cliff brought in a very deep musicianship which lars and james they had a lot of energy they had a lot of ideas their musicianship certainly developed over time but on day one they are more coming from a punk ethos of let's just do this we're good enough which is another part of what i love about punk and i think that is part of why metallica and thrash metal it has at its core a little bit of all of those things happening as was told to me they go down to los angeles and they see this bassist who is playing with another band and they absolutely fall in love with him and then they're like dude you have to come and and and join our band and he's like well i'll i'll consider it but there's no way i want to be a part of a corporate band is that sort of did i get that story right i don't know about the corporate band part that would make sense i mean you have to remember cliff burton famously kind of looks like this disheveled hippie like with his long hair and bell-bottom jeans and he had a mustache he did not look like kind of the like sunset stereotypical hair metal band not at all which i mean this is a new it was sort of developing at the time we weren't at motley crew levels yet although they were around the corner but he definitely looked a little bit out of place although i've since learned that he's got a lot of that it's been described his hair has been described even though it looks in photographs like he's a disheveled hippie apparently it was immaculately combed and very clean and he smelled nice which is a very interesting detail about shout out to clean smelling men so you're right about the formation of the band at a certain point uh dave mustaine who later went on to famously after being kicked out metallica went on to form megadeth he's the original guitar player it's the four of them at a certain point uh he gets kicked out and uh kirk hammett joins the band and they do they go on to record their first album and they're like oh my god i'm so excited to be a part of this first three records kill them all which is originally called metal up your ass uh ride the lightning which i just alluded to that song fight fire with fire is on their second record and then they record this their magnum opus master of puppets which comes out in 86 with this classic lineup and then unfortunately tragedy hits as um we were just discussing earlier yeah i mean like uh burdens on the bus and there's an accident in sweden right yeah they're on a tour promoting a promotional tour and and it just he's dead he like i mean like it's a pretty brutal death too this is before there was a lot of safety measures you know i've done deep dives on this because we all want to know why did cliff die and apparently they're just like the window just he was thrown out the window lands on it it's like almost like comic over it's it's horrible um and it's tragic and this is the last record that he ever made with metallica and sort of the rest of their career you know they're very uh reverent towards towards cliff and and you know how seminal how important he was to the band's dna like all these elements that came together really were cemented with with his musicality and his choices and his he doesn't he plays bass unusually and we'll hear this in a minute not with a pick but with his fingers so all of these great creative choices and a lot of amazing stuff comes from cliff burton this episode is brought to you by state farm listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling smart move another smart move getting help from one of state farm's 19 000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with the personal price plan prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes uh let's build up master of puppets so the first stem you want to play for us where are we starting we're going to hear a little lars ulrich on drums and this is from the pre-chorus section and i'll get into a minute like the significance of calling something the pre-chorus that's a real choice i've made um because there are nine different sections of this song so this is one of these nine sections and here we go lars ulrich raw i'm just gonna rip the band-aid off lars as a person who's not a metallica fan lars comes across as a to the rest of the world like he does not seem like when i think about metal people i'll be honest my opinion has changed over time when i was a kid you know like they seemed like they were the bullies you know quite honestly in school you know that was probably because i was raised on 80s and early 90s movies were like the person who's dressed like metal is inevitably like the drug dealer you run into in an alley and he wants to beat you up that's what hollywood taught me um now i know that people who are into metal are some of the warmest usually like the nicest you know closeted nerds if you will that you can ever run into present company accepted but lars does not seem like that he seems like it is that am i completely wrong to me he's the guy who sued napster and is like way too rich is that fair is lars i'm trying to like stay measured in this show and i know we never come at people at the show we always stay positive i'm just i'm speaking on the behalf of those who've seen him but it's not really a hot take you know let's face it like this is a pretty pervasive feeling he didn't do himself any favors with the whole napster episode where he comes out and as a millionaire and you know sues i need more boots sues children for downloading i mean his song to so he doesn't make that dollar that was not a good move for prs from a pr standpoint i would say and then he doesn't do himself a lot of favors when he's being interviewed and you can tell like i was listening to stern interview them and the interview was over and stern was like thanks for coming on it was a two-hour interview and lars was like i got one more thing to say and then there's a five more minutes of like a soliloquy from lars ulrich so i like that you use stern like that i want to be like to some of our listeners howard stern is the steve harvey of white radio but seriously i mean like between lars and james hepfield are you know that their collaboration is that of legend like are they the are they the metal lennon and mccartney that's a great question and the answer is absolutely they are the lennon mccartney of metal i'm just going to go out on a limb and say that's accurate way they write music from what i understand it starts with james basically making riffs and they make these things called riff tapes and they would just compile riff after riff and again when we get to the guitars you'll hear exactly what i mean because especially their earliest compositions their first three records when you once you know this you're like oh i can see how this song unfolded so james is the riff master and lars is according to what i understand the two of them sit down they listen to the riff tapes and they decide hey this would go well after this one this could go with this hey this is its own song and they kind of arrange things together and the songwriting process really goes down that way and the way they're writing sometimes i'm sure is is large they're playing they're probably performing together as well like large playing drums but the main thing is they come up with all of these individual ideas and then piece them together to form a song together collectively i love that one more thing i just want to say about this whole riff tape idea and their songwriting process is that there's something funny i heard uh i heard lars mentioned an interview that like back in the days before they even had the tape machines or maybe they would be like sitting in front of the tv writing something and they didn't have the tape machine available you know how would they remember the riff was the question was asked and the answer was they would just like kirk would just sit there and he'd play it over and over again to make sure he wouldn't forget and then the next day when they finally had access to a tape machine if they'd forgotten it then it just it wasn't good enough anyway so they would just let it go but like the sign of a good riff was like oh yeah the next day i remembered it so i can record it so i thought that was pretty fun that's pretty fun you know what else i'm realizing i'm realizing you are a metalhead because every single metalhead i know rocks band t-shirts like i've been a fan of so many different genre of music and yet i think maybe i've had a fuji's t-shirt and i might have a vintage dat punk t-shirt somewhere but like only i feel like only metalheads literally will not leave the house without a band t-shirt am i have i just have i stated the obvious i can't think of any other genre that's like that i think that's not only is that nailing it but i'm kind of realizing as you say it that that is totally accurate i definitely wear band shirts because on the cover of this album master metallica's master of puppets james is wearing iconically there's a misfits t-shirt with artwork by puss head who's this iconic punk and metal um you know illustrator and and so is actually i'm noticing now so is cliff he's wearing a different misfit shirt this is how i heard of the misfit i i was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the misfit t-shirt i was about to say i'd never heard the i i heard the misfits music long after i saw those t-shirts the misfits 100 first of all by the time this record came out they were a defunct band glenn danzig had already gone on to do salmon or sawane as some people pronounce it pretentiously and then danzig his regular his his more recent incarnation but they were a tiny like relatively unknown they made their own 45s and they only had 500 copies so these metallica broadcast to the world their influences their influences their influences their influences their influences their influences their inspirations not just with the t-shirts but they also did some really important covers records called the garage days series and so here is the first misfit song i would have heard thanks to metallica covering it on their covers album here's the original this is the misfits and the song is called last caress okay i'm gonna call this out because if you had played that for me on any other episode i would consider that punk i would not consider that metal no no you're right that is that's the misfits that is punk yeah no no no i know yeah yeah but i guess that's my thing is that like and i feel like this is one thing that hip-hop has done i feel like early on and in the hip-hop after the source stopped giving out five mics on stuff like we didn't let the journalists and the musicologists define anything yeah in the genre because i think one of the problems that rock music in general was but also specifically like hard rock heavy metal metal thrash metal like there are too many genres and like there's so much overlap yeah and at the end of the day like a lot of this stuff especially to the untrained ear sounds very similar but then like it gets so it gets so granular that it's hard to talk about any of it you know it's it's but but i think the case you're going to make is that metallica saw themselves as part of the punk lineage before the the sort of term thrash metal comes in but your comment actually leads perfectly into an explanation i'm realizing because really what we've been talking about with the whole like the differences between the genres and like how does it go from hard rock to punk to metal like actually listening to the misfits original and then the metallica cover of it is a perfect way of explaining it so now that we've heard this is a the misfits were a new jersey based punk band from the late 70s here is that was their original song called last caress and here is what metallica did when they covered it i mean it's awful those are some awful lyrics but let's just say we are not here to defend any former lyrics we did not write them the point is is that that's the same song but what metallica does and the reason why what they've done is new and different even though it seems small and subtle is perfectly encapsulated in that you have to remember metallica starts as a cover band they start their career playing songs from england that were a part of a subgenre called the new wave of british heavy metal which lars knows because he's from denmark so he brings over his record collection doesn't really exist in america it's hard to find of course he is of course you know what what a weird name it never occurred to me that dude wasn't born in cincinnati his dad's like a star in denmark and they go out and they play these covers of bands that no one in america has heard of like budgie and diamond head they play four diamond head songs i think and they don't necessarily point out that they aren't their own songs so they're like a cover band and they play the song they're not lying they're not saying this is our new song they're just not saying that it's a cover which is important because they're embodying this material that they love and the only way they're changing it is by crunching the guitars a little more shouting a little more hoarsely and it's a little faster and that is the transition from punk to thrash almost in a nutshell perfectly encapsulated by this last caress before and after from misfits into metallica no this is this is a confessional episode for me first time i heard master of puppets i'm pretty convinced was on stranger things when i was watching with everybody else i think a lot of people i was like oh wow eddie's shredding during this song but like that that was the first time i heard this obviously i knew enter the sandman and some of the other stuff that they had done because i watched the mtv video music awards back in the early 90s but i didn't know master of puppets so this is um this is all metal is fairly insular in part because there isn't a lot of radio play there wasn't any they didn't make any videos like on purpose like metallica for their first four records were like mtv's not going to play this anyway let's not even bother to release singles or make albums we have our own fan base they are tour monsters that's how metal exists really at that time especially it's just being on the road and every time they go to you find you know the metal heads the gutter punks the sort of misfits really no pun intended these are people for whom they're they are kind of outcasts in high school but this music like for me i was a funny version of this type of person but i totally identify with and recognize i do not belong here you know that's interesting that you gravitated to this music because it was aggressive yeah i think that the the prevalence of aggressive coming up was was so stark that we had to find antidotes to that so we would gravitate towards public enemy or we gravitate towards de la soul because there was there was politics there and it was and to a certain extent it was all about improving your community you know what i mean like so it was it was less about i hate my parents you know and it was more about like oh man how are we going to get rid of the drugs how are we going to get rid of the gangs i'm only speaking from a personal experience there are so many african-americans and african-americans that are african-american metalheads out there you know there there are african-americans in groups and and we would be we would be wrong to not mention groups like hyrax uh you know derrick green who is a front man you know he's an amazing front man and and and i remember body count like there are so many uh you know black metal bands for the lack of a better term both in the past and currently yeah uh so i am only speaking for myself i don't want to make it seem like this is a purely white and black thing because there are a lot of people who are black and are into this music and i just want to state that very clear from the top well and i was i'm so glad you said because i wanted to give a shout out at some point to my favorite one of my favorite bands of all time who happened to be black and they are maybe the greatest black heavy metal slash punk band they're more punk than metal but bad brains yeah bad brain makes i think so many people another group that i saw the t-shirt before i heard the music they're one of these bands that they're i mean they have a musicians musician type of band i don't know a single musician who doesn't adore bad brains and if you haven't heard them because it's surprised they do not really get their due in culture in general and they're kind of undersung so i just want to play one of my favorite i feel like musicians know them yeah and hopefully the connection between metallica so again bad brain starts as a punk band and then morphs a little bit into not quite a heavy metal band but they have heavy metal moments such as this one this is soulcraft by bad brains and i like and i like and i like and i like the creation so hard it goes so hard have you heard that before no but i'm i'm i'm immediately intrigued not even because they're black but just because there's something sonically in it that i'm really into they are so unique and bad brains need their flowers in this culture yes i totally agree but getting back to bastra puppets uh you want to play us one more drum yeah here's a little more lars ulrich in the nude i said it like that it's just him playing drums he's not naked so there's he's gone perfectionist it's not perfect it's a little messy it's a little sloppy yeah but that's sort of the goal right but it sounds great and uh in the mix it sounds dope in fact i'll play that part for you in a minute uh with with some of the other sections so you can hear how it all gels together in fact if you'd like to move on to the bass section let's get into that cliff burton magic you i mean that sounds incredibly difficult to play it's pretty hard to play and it's two fingers doing 16th notes like in time to the meter to a very fast tempo uh cliff was kind of a genius in that way and his sound that rumble that low growl is he put a lot of time and effort into getting his sound you know in the mix like he wanted to shape how he sounded i love that and that happens also a little bit more with fingers that's part of the reason why bass players play with fingers is you have more control with you you can control with a pick as well but it's just a different type of control it's more personal you're really getting into the string trying to find a sound yeah i think cliff had a vision for how it all fit in the mix so i'll play you another section this is cliff uh and this is playing along with then i'll add lars's drums in the mix so you can kind of hear how okay we'll build it up i'm gonna play you one more thing this is the slow section in the middle i'll play the whole thing and then i'll show you what cliff's doing it's really incredible you know when you're when you play the the the head fill moments i'm like okay all right this sounds like metal but i feel like the bass is just a welcoming instrument it welcomes you in no matter what genre you're into it's a melody something and it's it's it's it tickles it tickles the pleasure centers because it's doing it's it's playing almost like a singable melody yes and not just sort of laying down the groove like maybe an acvc song that just plays the bone don't don't or van halen i totally agree i totally agree after the break we'll be getting deeper into the meaning of master of puppets and we can't do a metallic episode without talking about some kind of monster the documentary we'll be right back welcome back to one song luxury what could you tell me about your lifestyle determines your death style well the first thing i can tell you is that just hearing those lines together i have a little cringe part of my body just does this like like when you're trying to get the bowling ball to go a certain way i'm like there's a fantastic documentary about metallica right it's called some kind of monster it details the making of the album saint anger which is not my favorite record um it makes me think actually it's so funny you know that have you ever seen that weezer snl uh sketch where leslie jones and matt damon have this wonderful kind of a modern snl classic it's like a dinner table argument about weezer's first three records kind of their first two records um and leslie is taking the position like they were never the same they were never the same after pinkerton and that's a little bit the case i think for a lot of metallica fans myself included it's these i'm related to one it's these first three records it is kill them all it is ride the lightning and it is master puppets and we'll give we'll give and justice for all maybe a little side eye but we like and justice for all all right it has no bass content because cliff burton dies and the new bass player takes over jason newstead and they're like razzing him so much that they turn his bass down on the album this strange cutting off your nose despite your face the sound of the band you know i feel like it's a very different sound record has no bass in it it's a very strange audio experience i was going to say in preparing for this episode i did go and listen to those first three albums and it didn't sound like when i think of metallica yeah it was a different sound yeah the one i was thinking about but for those people who haven't seen the documentary yeah uh some kind of monster can you walk us through what it is and why it's so groundbreaking i think everyone should see some kind of monster even if you're not a fan of the band if you're not a metallica fan if nothing else you will see it's basically that it's a documentary it's a film crew following them as they're making their album which turns out to be saint anger but in the middle of it they happen to capture as the best documentaries do real life happening james quits the band he goes to rehab there's fighting there's arguing there's like a new producer there's a therapist this man with funny shirts excuse me sweaters bill towel they they hire a band psychiatrist because when james comes back there's like this whole new dynamic and you're watching this all the time and you're like oh my god i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry and your jaws on the floor because this is a heavy metal band and they're talking about their feelings and in 2003 2004 when this movie's out that's kind of a revelation right this is a genre that is about just it's like kind of toxic masculinity the sopranos of metal music that's a great analogy this is like this the genre of heavy metal is very much about like aggression and anger and it's not about your feelings and i mean it kind of is buried in there but the outward display it's metal and spikes and you know all of this like gear right and that's meant to convey the sort of protective layer this armor which in this documentary you see james kind of a light bulb go off and he's like all of this anger comes from my past and my mom and we were a christian they were christian scientists so they didn't believe in medicine and his mom dies of cancer and they didn't treat her and he's angry and understandably so so knowing that backstory with james i think gives you kind of some insight into like these first few records where it's just rage and their nickname was alcoholica because they drank all the time and like they're living this hedonistic life and it's fueled by anger and this album they make in the movie is called saint anger you're watching him figure out anger this episode is brought to you by state farm listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling smart move another smart move getting help from one of state farm's 19 000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with the personal price plan prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes guitars obviously play a very prominent role in this song can you walk us through some guitar stems guitars are everything in this band and in this song it's absolutely true interestingly in these guitars you'll hear it there's not a lot of sonic differentiation from one part of the song to the next from one album to the next even like metallica kind of always sounds like metallica they have a guitar sound that's present all the time with slight variations but crunchy guitars that's what the sound of metal is that's the sound of metallica so you'll hear that in a moment when i play for you some of these guitar stems this is james hetfield uh and this is arguably the main riff from master puppets by metallica although it is actually the third riff you'll hear in the song and there's one thing i want to say about that it's been hotly debated on the internet what exactly is the time signature of that guitar because i was just about to ask is this three four time that's a great exactly so i was literally gonna ask that i'll play it for you in the mix so you can hear what's happening one two three four one two three but it kind of comes in early so it could be technically done two three four one two three four one two three four one two three one it could be where they drop one so it's a bar of three so three regular bars of four and then but it's kind of not precise and there's some technical dissections in there so i'm going to play it for you and then we'll talk about it in a minute and there's some technical dissections on the internet where people go in and they're like well actually it's 21 32 yeah no it gets listen the precision you want to see drummers lose their mind is when you start getting into like six eight yeah and and and all these weird like time signatures which you know depending i mean like i you know long-time listeners of the show know that i'm a huge beatles fan happiness is a warm gun is one of my favorite songs because it changes time signature so many times but i'm not going to play it for you because i'm not going to play it for you but uh when you get to changing time signatures the dj me hates you like it's just like people can't we're not playing this stuff but of course people aren't supposed to be dancing to some of this stuff and we're not here to always dance we're not playing any crimson in our sets or you know early genesis it's just impossible in my humble opinion this is four guys playing music and feeling how to have that moment take place yeah it's not precise rhythmically to like the metronome in defense of time signature weirdness uh it does elicit a reaction right you know like and and absolutely like that that it leaves you a little breathless yeah well that that jumping of the last you know beat or whatever it is it is it speaks to the aggression it's like i won't even play that last beat i'm going where i want to go right now you know like it's just it's very visceral right right the anger takes the form of reducing changing the meter by dropping yeah there are no rules that beat man that fourth beat i won't play as you play dad that's metal to me i'm guessing you got more guitar stuff for me hit me with it the hardest part of this song is out of the nine riffs which riffs do i play and which do i not play so there are many riffs there are so many riffs here is technically well i'm just going to call this the pre-chorus we heard this is what i played earlier with the drums and the bass so i'll play you the guitar and then you'll hear how it all fits together this is that come crawling faster section and i'll bring in lars and let's bring flippin okay so i just quickly want to play for you the one and only interpolation potentially in this song this has been widely discussed you know we don't we're not sample snitches on here but this is kind of a fun thing to hear so there's this moment in what would technically be the ninth riff in the song and here it is so that reminds me a little bit of this got a little bit of that david bowie andy warhol it's not exact but you know they heard that song i hear it i hear it i mean like we're not snitching we're not snitching this is out there but but influences look you're gonna wear your influences on your sleeve or on your shirt to me that's an homage that's a shout out that's a shout out to their love of bowie you know that's that's what that is i will say that um yeah i'm seeing more and more the the through line between metal and classical you know maybe jazz is to punk as classical is to metal because i feel like these guys are such technicians yeah it's very precise it's very precise and uh you know you you have to as i think as a creator figure out that balance between what is planned right and what is you know unforeseeable and kind of magical when it happens there's very little spontaneity it sounds like right in this song in the production of it at least or at least in the final like the recorded form it totally yeah it doesn't have that punk or jazz to your comparison right is that is that kind of what you were saying yeah but you know i'm also seeing i'm also seeing between hip-hop and metallica here because as you said like that was like maybe the the ninth riff of the song yeah and like usually if you come up with a cool riff if you come up with nine cool riffs you might come up with nine cool songs and you might put that riff in the spotlight but i'm reminded of how uh a lot of ludicrous songs and a lot of little john songs like you could argue that at least in those two cases they take their verses could all be choruses what's an example i'm going to find it talk about it if you think about get low okay the sort of the the ultimate little john's track back it up back back it up oh snap back back back it up oh snap that's just a verse okay this is not the chorus but this could have been the chorus to a song it's like another idea it's like another idea where they're like you know what let's just do ludicrous said he would actually work on his songs like this like he would be like you know i want people to be chanting along and singing along during the verse so i'm gonna take like verse ideas i mean chorus ideas and make them part of the verse so but you're saying it's the same musical bed but with a new lyrical and melodic i'm just saying you know usually again if you have nine great ideas for a chorus you might try and write nine songs what those two hip-hop artists did and what hetfield i guess batalka did was like no i'm just gonna put all these great ideas into one song because i've got so many great ideas and sometimes it works an interesting connection from that is that that's also a classic max martin technique we were talking about max martin britney spears episode right for toxic totally but think about a lot of his songs like think about uh my loneliness is killing me that's the main chorus but at the end she goes on to with the same musical bed we have my loneliness is killing me i still believe i must confess that my loneliness is killing me now it's like a second idea i guess what we're saying folks is don't don't save anything for the next song throw it all at the wall from the window to the wall just throw it all in all right final part is the vocals you would call it singing your father the the robins in general might call it screaming coming from blake's teenage blake's room but uh but hetfield he apparently really worked on his voice over the years he did but not yet in this song what you're going to hear is pre-work metallica where he really is just shouting it and the anger and the rage has not been matched with technique and saving your vocal cords from destruction at this point this is just you're only hearing the raw young angry christian scientist you know uh upbringing of james hetfield but you're right later in life and actually another shout out to this great documentary um you know that's the beginning of him trying to learn to sing properly and he becomes a really good singer and now when you see them perform live he's still able to perform these songs and they sound the same but you can even in the 60s it's richer isn't it 60 60 now yeah and his voice is richer than ever he's obviously protecting it it's a smart move to learn how to sing properly but at the time these nodules galore i'm sure are going on in those vocal chords well let's hear a little bit okay i'm going to start with the come crawling faster part again there's nine different sections of the song we can't get to all of them but here are some of my favorites your life burns faster obey your master master this might have been the other reason why i didn't want to listen to this song because the white guy's screaming obey your master i'm like nah i want to talk about this just for a minute because like if you watch any live footage of metallica what happens in this song is master master is being chanted by 50 000 mostly white people with mostly males with their arms in the air and spikes on their wrists it looks like master master they have a bunch of songs where there's a fist like there's die by my hand like this is a rally in a way and there's something about it that makes me uncomfortable and it's part of the reason why i took a minute for this show to remember that this is on my short list and to get to the point where i want to do the episode there's enough about this that is meaningful to me from my youth it's still music i like to listen to but there's something about its cultural yeah nis that i'm working through working through working through right can we hear some more vocals let's do it where's the dreams that i've been after master master promised only lies laughter laughter all i hear or see is laughter laughter laughter laughing at my cries so that's all happening during laughter at my cries is this a political song what is master of puppets actually about that's a good i should have asked you this before we did an episode about it what is this song actually about or is there a codified everybody agrees opinion about what this song is james is famously like reticent about like being explicit about what his songs are about he has just talked about what i've heard him say many times is that it's about uh powerlessness it's about addiction and it's about control i hear the powerlessness and by the way i i'm being manipulated actually yes i i made the joke about like no i don't want to hear a white guy screaming obey your master but clearly he is i think oh yeah singing from the point of view of the bad guy like you know whether the 50 000 fans are singing from that point he is singing for the point of view of like you should not like the master it's the untrustworthy narrator voice that you're hearing and i think that's that's clear i don't think i think when you're listening i mean the lyrics are about like being succumbing to drugs or or maybe religion and mind control of many different i'm reminded of the jeru the damages song uh you can't stop the prophet where jeru raps is himself but then there's another voice which is clearly jeru's manipulative voice i believe and uh he's rapping as the purveyor of all the bad things of the black community he's like oh you think you're gonna defeat me prophet you know like that that is almost like a hip-hop version right of what i think you know yeah but that's an interesting comparison they're doing on master because also we just kind of heard that like low voice that was layered in there saying master there's also like a master like you know he's overdubbing the regular series this is not the the good guy voice yeah that's the good guy voice yeah that's the good guy voice yeah that's yeah famously this song has this moment we were just coming out of the slow section with the solo into the fast section with the faster solo so james does a little slow one kirk's about to do a fast one and this is how he introduces it so what is he saying in this moment well it turns out many years ago free steak i'll play one more time before i play for you isolated free steak is what i hear there's a really really great story behind this moment. So the story goes that Anthrax metallica are touring together many years ago and it's they're having breakfast and it's it's charlie from anthrax and cliff from metallica and charlie says to cliff like okay i've always wondered this what exactly is james saying in that moment before the big solo before kirk takes his big solo what does he say and apparently uh cliff burton turns him and goes pancakes and so now for the rest of metallica's career they say pancakes in that moment i'll play that for you guys pancakes go is what he says to this day because of what charlie and cliff talked about this is an inside joke for many years i'll play one more time pancakes go so now at long last here is what james is actually saying in the famous pancakes go moment fix me it's me fix me fix me fix me wow so he let fix me go to say pancakes go now it's just an inside joke for 30 years which i think is pretty awesome that actually is you know hey you learned something new and you i feel like people are really learning something new on this episode it's the whole goal we are here to fix me is now pancakes go pancakes go fix me now you know now what does charlie from anthrax didn't even know that so now you know it even i know even i know that uh one thing about metallica is that they still play live and they're like 60 i think we mentioned this earlier what is it like for you as a fan to see these emblems of angry youth get old i think it's great so i think we grew up in an era when like rock and roll was still like relatively new in a weird way like you know it's rock and roll begins arguably in the early 50s by the time you're in the early 50s you're like oh my god i'm gonna be you know we when i remember when mick jagger turned 40 and it was on the radio like mick jagger is 40 and like that was a big deal because we have in the 70s because we have this idea right from from the who in the late 60s i hope i die before i get old there's this whole idea that rock and roll is a club of 27 and all that stuff there can only like rock and roll equals you i think what i'm literally investigating in this episode of this show in the same way that the existence of this band is investigating and kind of that documentary is investigating is what happens with this music yeah as a maker of it listener of it fan of it like when you're no longer a teenager right when you're no longer even in your 20s when you're no longer pushing like in your third like what does it get embarrassing to rap kind of thing about the things that you thought were great when you were 17 and had no kids i think the short answer is a little bit a little bit embarrassing because but here's the thing to be really vulnerable and to answer you in real time it's because it evokes that teenager who's still in me yeah and who i want to honor and like i'm so much happier and i'm happier at the age i am it does get better as they say yeah yeah i'm a much happier grown-up and father and like life has gotten better so i kind of want to reach out to that and maybe by when i literally bring in the album that i had when i was a teenager and just think back with this physical object i want to embrace that you know teenage me and say you know it does get better but those feelings are also okay to have and it's okay to grow with anger and rage and kind of reconfigure it they're still singing angry songs with angry music but they are happy people and that is okay yeah that's a beautiful thing in fact embracing that maybe is what we should all aspire to okay luxury uh to end this discussion is there anything else that needs to be said about master of puppets i think we've said enough uh let's let mr hetfield himself have the last laugh if you will i think they got the whole band in there wait i heard something funny in there did you hear and then there's like a high pitch went it's feeling like halloween uh luxury help me in this thing i am producer dj and songwriter luxury and i am actor writer director and speaks for all black people diallo riddle and this has been one song remember you can find us on socials i am at luxury l u x x u r y on instagram or l u x x u r y xx on tiktok and what about you i am at diallo at dia ll on instagram or at diallo riddle on tiktok this has been one song we will see you next time one song one song one song one song close your eyes exhale feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying to today well i'm letting go of the worry that i wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class i got them delivered free from 1-800 contacts oh my gosh they're so fast and breathe oh sorry i almost couldn't breathe when i saw the discount they gave me on my first order oh sorry namaste visit 1-800 contacts.com today to save on your first order 1-800 contacts