Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ Selected for Preservation by U.S. Library of Congress

Right on.

I love that album.

I have been a metal head since long before the term was coined and I can remember when I first ever even heard of a band named Metallica way back in the early 80's.

I was living in San Jose and working as a road mechanic for an outfit that rented construction equipment in Santa Clara. There was a big blond kid working kind of as a yard boy/ office helper there in his late teens, early twenties. I can't remember his name now but I can kind of still see his face.

He wasn't too bright as I recall but one thing that I'll never forget about him was that his Dad was an Undertaker.

We were out in the equipment yard one day bullshitting about nothing much and the subject of music came up. I told him that I liked heavy metal and his eyes lit up like little neon signs.

He told me to hold on and that he would be right back.

He went out to his car and came back with a cassette tape and told me that I needed to listen to it.
I asked who it was and he said it was some local band from the Bay Area that he had seen in some nightclub a few weeks before called Metallica.
He had a friend of a friend who had gotten him the tape.

That tape is probably worth some serious money right now if it still exists, it was a Pirated tape of some of their early gigs at the local night clubs.

I stuck it in the tape player at home and started listening to it and pretty soon I had that fucker cranked up and was loving it.
This was right before they hit it big and released their first album.

I was a huge Metallica fan for a lot of years but they did what a lot of big rock and roll bands do and started playing around with their style and doing gigs with symphonies and shit and it kind of turned me off. I liked their early stuff a lot but the last few albums just didn't do it for me.

Master of Puppets and Ride The Lightning have always been a couple of favorites of mine and it does my heart good to see that they have been included in our National history officially now.
They changed the music scene dramatically when they first came out and left a lasting imprint.

Master of Puppets is the one that started the ball rolling.