last night i got home from a small road trip with my sister. checked the mail. awesome! 'cliff 'em all' the metallica documentary came in from netflix. it's on! i rented this because everybody hated this and i wanted to know why. it's metallica from 1983 through 1986, what's there to hate?

answer: not a god damn thing.

when i was a kid i spent a long summer in the old country and i went prepared. went to gemco and hooked up a sanyo walkman. no reverse though. lots of tape flipping action. i made a few tapes before i left. i was nine years old so a mix tape consisted of waiting for a song to come on the radio and then taping it. you never could get a whole song, there was always a verse missing and some asshole d.j. talking though the outro. so anyways.... i had a few sweet mixes. combine that with a whitesnake tape my mom borrowed from my aunt and my sister's tiffany tape, and its looking like a pretty sweet summer jam. my cousin got a look at my new tape setup and let me borrow a couple of his tapes. echo and the bunnymen, the 'colors' soundtrack and metallica's master of puppets. as a nine year old, echo and the bunnymen sounded like adult music and colors was a good song but not so good as a soundtrack. master of puppets ruled so hard. and i'd like to talk about this for a second.

the opening track is so weird. spanish guitars into what sounds like a queen song and then some thrash metal. this record still sounds expensive to me compared to the big budget metal that was coming out around the same time even though they probably had like a week to finish it. the whitesnake tape ruled and so did the bon jovi tape (i forgot to mention), but master puppets sounded so dry and precise. it's so american. and the fact that you couldn't ever hear it on the radio made it like a gem. it's still perfect as i listen to it now. it took me years to shake off it's influence in everything i was writing when i started my first few bands. metallica should of sued me at age 15.

when my cousin took back the tape and replaced it with ride the lightning i was bummed. i can't take any other metallica record no matter how hard i try. kill em all was o.k. let's be honest. ride the lightning sounds sloppy. and in justice for all has no grandiose qualities to it. puppets is like the dark side of the moon of metal.

so getting back to watching the movie. it's a bunch of bootleg footage from fans and metallica's own footage of the band getting drunk. it's a perfect movie. it captures that moment in time perfectly with it's sloppy vhs footage and clock radio sound. all these bad reviews because of the quality. its like saying a world war 2 documentary sucked because it wasn't in color and in 5.1 sound. what's wrong with these people on netflix? anyways, that record blew my mind and bettered my life. here is the first song on the album, battery. and then some random clip of jason newsted falling.