“I’m pulling your strings”: When Metallica faced off with the scourge of drug addiction on ‘Master of Puppets’
In a candid capture of rock and roll drug taking up there with The Rolling Stones’ Cocksucker Blues, 2011’s Fix: The Ministry Movie features the industrial juggernaut’s frontman, Al Jourgensen, in the throes of his heroin habit during the notorious Sphinctour era.
Filling the needle with smack and plumping his veins, Jougensen remarks to the cameraman behind him, “You use it while it’s fun, and the second it stops being fun, and it’s using you instead of you using it, then stop”.
Easier said than done; the line where hedonistic recreation slides into joyless dependency is a pernicious one, a fraught grey area Jourgensen knows all too well after another six years of using. Ever since the dawn of the whole rock business, drugs of all stripes have lurked around the corner of every arena backstage or tour bus, offering a chemical high to carry over the euphoria of a live show once you’re off the stage.
Metallica entered a world where booze and coke reigned supreme. It wasn’t just the music industry itself, ‘promotional expenses’ doled out to many a band and their entourage as an essential drug advance recouped from later royalty cheques, but heavy metal’s 1980s heyday revelled in chemical excess as a core part of its identity.
Van Halen performing US Festival ‘83 with a heavily intoxicated singer, heroin overdoses and fatal car crashes in the Mötley Crüe camp, and Ozzy Osbourne’s feral blitz both on and off the stage all provided metal’s essential branding during their MTV pomp, no matter how destructive.
The Los Angeles thrash pioneers always straddled a cautious waver on metal’s edge. Metallica’s very founding was burnished by a rejection of hard rock’s veer into spandex buffoonery and glossy pop sheen, looking back at the hard-nosed heroes of the new wave of British heavy metal when committing their Kill ‘Em All debut to record. When it came to booze, however, Metallica more than shared a common interest.
In fact, they were dubbed ‘Alcoholica’ by their equally party-hard peers. James Hetfield had developed an especially heavy drinking problem that would still stick its hook in the frontman as late as 2019, and respective drummer and lead guitarist Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett relied on vodka, beer, and Jägermeister alongside a steady taste for cocaine during the creation of 1986’s Master of Puppets.
Those pitfalls where drugs and drink soon start pulling their strings long after the fun has stopped were spotted by Hetfield. Only three years earlier, original guitarist Dave Mustaine had become drawn to heroin, fuelling his volatile behaviour and eventual dismissal in 1983. Amid the chaos of the backstage party that surrounded Metallica’s rise and rise, his and his bandmates’ struggling grip on their vices was lyrically poured into Master of Puppets’ sole single and title track.
“[The song] deals pretty much with drugs,” Hetfield explained to Thrasher in 1988, “How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you’re taking and doing, it’s drugs controlling you”. After detailing a pretty grim party in San Francisco where much of the crowd was shooting up, Hetfield is asked if he felt scared by such a sight.
“Yeah, hella,” he frankly responded.
“Come crawling faster / Obey your master,” Hetfield spits on the ‘Master of Puppets’ pre-chorus. Whether his booze, Hammett’s coke, or Mustaine’s smack, the Metallica frontman was able to witness those hovering hands corralling their addiction demons closer to the precipice where substances rule all day, every day. It would take years for the band to conquer such goblins, but the bleak road ahead wasn’t lost on the band, ending their ‘Master of Puppets’ opus with the fiery cavern of the puppet master’s mocking laughter, a reverberation that would echo among the band for decades to come.
