Personal
Metallica
My music lineage went from stuff my parents liked to stuff my peers liked when I was in elementary school. When I was asked what music I liked, “The Beach Boys, I guess” was not an acceptable answer, and I was immediately exposed to Def Leppard and Quiet Riot, which I loved.
Before leaving elementary school after grade 7, my friend comes over to my house and hands me a tape he’d bought. “They listen to heavy metal in Jr High” he tells me. “We’d better learn to like it.”
The tape was Judas Priest’s Defenders of the Faith.
Defenders of the Faith album cover
I fell in love with it immediately. My friend did not. He let me keep the tape, and our paths diverged soonafter.
Metallica’s Master of Puppets album came out while I was in Jr High. I heard it for the first time when I was on a school skiing trip, and my fellow passengers convinced the bus driver to play their tape.
I was scandalized.
Master of Puppets cover
The title track was playing, and I mis-heard the lyrics. Instead of a song about addiction and loss, I heard a pro-drug rage that freaked me out.
Master! Master!
Where’s the dreams and acid after?
The real lyrics, of course, are where’s the dream that I’ve been after?.
I was young, on a bus, in the dark, sitting alone with kids I barely knew, who all knew the song and were having the time of their lives celebrating the drugs every part of society had been warning me about my whole life.
I closed my eyes for the rest of the trip.
I love Master of Puppets now. It is a brilliant album, the best work Metallica has ever done. But that bus trip was awful.
I remember pretty clearly the kid with the tape was busted one night at a school dance for trying to sell drugs.
He should have listened to the lyrics.
--NFG
[ Jun 17 2026 ]
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