In honor of Narcotic Wasteland guitarist Dallas Toler Wade's birthday, coinciding with the 10-year anniversary of their self-titled debut album, the band is summoning fans to a series of skull-shattering parties throughout their tour.
Wow I was 16 at the time, skipping school and going to the arcade almost everyday. Remember Pac-Man and all those good ones.
Probably me and a few other people in my school actually knew who Metallica was and I remember this one kid who wore a Master of Puppets jacket to school each day. At the time he seem so outta place and I remember the stare he used to get when people spotted him.
That was back when it was Metallica who? Hardly anybody knew of this band. We didn’t have phones and iTunes and all that good shit that was coming. We actually had to go to the record store and buy the damn thing or find out about new Metal by looking through Hit Parader or Metal Edge magazines. No radio station dare to play Metallica. The band was a bunch of fucking rebels. It was us vs the world kinda attitude back then.
Sometimes after buying a vinyl record peeling off the plastic and looking inside and seeing all the cool stuff with pictures and the lyrics was almost as important as the music.
But this album was different, from the first time dropping the needle and hearing the loud crunchy sound coming out I knew that was going to be something special.
From the opening track Battery until the last one Damage, Inc. this album was exactly what we needed as metal fans.
Remember this was the same year as Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet came out. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was in theatres. We were looking for something heavy as fuck and Metallica delivered on that.
And now about the album…
Master of Puppets peaked at number 29 on the Billboard 200 and received widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its music and political lyrics. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential metal albums of all time, and is credited with consolidating the American thrash metal scene. It was certified six times platinum by the RIAA in 2003 for shipping six million copies in the United States, and was later certified six times platinum by Music Canada and platinum by the BPI. In 2015, Master of Puppets became the first metal recording to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
It was the band’s last album to feature bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a bus accident in Sweden during the album’s promotional tour.
