Day 24: "Master of Puppets" - Metallica (1986)

Is there a band who more embodies the difference between being 'real' and obscure, and being huge and 'selling out'?  You can pretty easily identify the pivot point for them;  in 1991, they released their self-titled 'black' album, Enter Sandman and Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters became crossover hits, and suddenly they had gone from a respected metal band with a cult following to the Biggest Rock Band In The World at the time.  Fans screamed that they had sold out, and they had - to borrow a line from the Hardcore Legend Mick Foley - they'd sold out arenas, they'd sold out stadiums, they'd sold out record stores in their thousands.  This is not that story.  Instead, I am going to talk about teeshirts.

Listen to me here

The problem with talking about this album, and Metallica in general, is that this is what I can probably safely call a "back catalogue backfill" purchase.  That's not a comment on the quality of the album in any way, but more a comment on the reason that I bought it in the first place, that being that I knew it was an early album by a band I liked, it was on sale (hence the sticker still on the case) and it seemed like it was something I should own.  

I take great pride in the fact that I wasn't one of the 1991 converts to Metallica when the black album started making the rounds on MTV;  a few years before that, my friend from school Colin (or Col for short), who was the person in our social group I lived closest to for a long time, owned a copy of "...And Justice For All", and I'd heard that with him enough to own it for myself.  But somehow it was only many years later that I tracked down this album, and probably listened to it a dozen times before consigning it to the dusty shelf of those CDs not regularly in rotation.  Then still years after that, I'd heard the tracks from this album in their "S&M: Symphony & Metallica" configuration, and I went back to listen to the original version again, and appreciated how good a companion piece this is to "...And Justice For All" in the late 80's Metal Pantheon.  

But I said I was going to talk about teeshirts, and I have a very specific reason why.  As an individual, I'm what you would probably call sartorially challenged.  I find clothes shopping tedious and expensive;  I have no eye for what looks good on people, and very early in my life I decided to settle far more for routine and comfort over looking remotely stylish - the one exception to this being my goth days when it turned out that the black cargo slacks, black t-shirts, and long black coats that I owned fit into that aesthetic particularly well anyway.  

Band shirts in particular comprise probably over 50% of my upper body clothing wardrobe today.  I did my washing yesterday, and when I hung my teeshirts out on the line to dry it looked like the kind of festival lineup poster a particular uninspired marketing executive might concoct - just band logo after band logo, twisting in the wind.  I kinda wish I had taken a photo of it now.

Also, band shirts are the one item of clothing I generally don't ever throw away.  I have band shirts in my clothes drawers right now which are old enough to rent a car by themselves.  Here, let me prove it:-

Antichrist Superstar shirt is from '96;  Pretty Hate Machine is from 1992.  25 years old.  Jesus.

The first band shirt I ever owned was a Metallica shirt.  Back in the late 80's, we were travelling around the world as a family due to my Dad's job working with the British Foreign Office as the RAF Attache to the British embassy;  when our time in Warsaw, Poland came to an end, we spent some time in the United States briefly, during which, we went to Florida, and went to Disney...land? world? Whichever one of those is in Florida, we went to it, spending two weeks down there, and going to Universal Studios and doing the tourist thing.  I'd spent 3 years being educated in an American school already at that point, and had a strange hybrid accent which was more American than British, but really just an unpleasant chimera of both.  There are still parts of my speech which Catherine tells me are infected with my American education, mainly grammatical now rather than accent-wise, but I don't notice them because they are obviously so ingrained into my psyche that removing them would take hypnosis or years of aversion therapy.  

One of the things I remember my parents finding amazing when we went to Florida was how cheap clothes were in the US by comparison to the UK at the time;  the Pound vs the Dollar at the time was something like 2:1 in favour of the Pound, and prices were already lower in Dollars than in Pounds for things like jeans and teeshirts.  We went down there with empty suitcases, and came back with full ones.

On one fateful mall trip, shopping for clothes, I was bored and wandering the aisles while my parents oohed and aahed about how cheap everything was, and looked for stuff for themselves.  My parents were probably slightly shocked when I reappeared with a clothes hanger.

"I want this one", I told them, holding it out for them to see.

Thirteen year old me didn't know who Metallica were, or what it meant, but even at that young age, I knew when something was awesome.

I guess it was a combination of shock and the desire to encourage me to think at all about how I dressed which meant my parents bought it for me without question.  Maybe it was just too cheap to pass up.  But regardless, I had my Ride The Lightning shirt and wore it with great pride.  When we returned to the UK in 1991 and I started attending school with my terrible hybrid Southern England-meets-New York-by-way-of-Florida accent, I'd wear my Ride the Lightning T-shirt, back in the days before logo shirts were banned and school uniforms rigidly enforced.  

Now, I was never really bullied at school, despite my massive weirdo outsider new kid vibe, mainly because I knew people at the school before I went there, and they, while not part of the cool kids, were accepted and not messed with.  That, plus the practice I had had fitting in at new schools having moved to a different town every 2-3 years as my Dad got posted around the country, meant that I quickly managed to fit in well enough to be left alone.  But not all the time, and one day my beloved Ride The Lightning shirt would be my undoing.

It was 1991, and listening to metal was cool.  I had friends who were metal fans, and I was quickly getting an education, which mainly consisted of badly labelled or unlabelled tape copies of albums people had done for me.  I'd listened to a great deal of metal music at that point, but my knowledge was very light on the specifics.  One day, while wearing my Metallica shirt on the playground, local school teen jerk David Bowley came up to me, while I was with a group of my school friends.

Pointing at my shirt, he said "Huh, I bet you don't even like Metallica."

"I do" I responded, defensively.

"Oh yeah?" he replied, no doubt sensing my fear and security, "name another one of their albums."

I froze up.  I went blank.  I tried to think of the names scrawled across the tops of all the tapes people had made for me.  I took a shot.

"Powerslave."

A swing and a miss.

People started laughing, and I was done.  Exposed, revealed as a fraud, I slunk away in humiliation at having failed the credibility test in front of my peers.  Strangely, to this day, this incident has taken on something of a legendary status by the people I call my friends.  On occasion, they will still laugh and say "oh, like Powerslave by Metallica" whenever I am trying to make a point about something.

I never wore my Ride the Lightning shirt to school again.