In a recent interview with Primordial Radio, Creed’s Mark Tremonti recalled hearing Metallica for the first time and revealed how he left Beastie Boys aside for the thrash metal band.
“[‘Master Of Puppets’ is] the album that made me a music fanatic in life. Before that, I was just like everybody else listening to whatever was on the radio at the time,” the guitarist explained. “I think Beastie Boys’ ‘Licensed To Ill’ was the big record that everybody was listening to.”
The rocker mentioned how his brother’s music taste helped him expand his own music taste. “And then one night I couldn’t fall asleep and my brother Dan was always listening to metal upstairs and I could hear it in his room upstairs. I said, ‘Hey man, what’s that song about the sanitarium?’ So he gave me the tape, the ‘Master Of Puppets’ tape with ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ on it, and I just fell in love with the album. And it’s probably the most important record to me for my history of making me wanna do what I do.”
“It’s atmospheric, it’s epic, it’s beautiful, it’s mean, it’s angry — it’s all the things you want it to be… To me, like I was saying, it’s beautifully written,” Tremonti said of ‘Master Of Puppets.’ “You could have a song like ‘Battery’ that has just this intro that draws you right in with how nicely it’s composed, and then all of a sudden it hits you over the head with something.”
He also talked about how Metallica affected his music career. “It did everything I wanted it to do with music when I was listening to it when I was a kid and it made me wanna pick up the guitar and [made me wanna] practice my down strokes like James Hetfield was doing. And I think James’s voice, especially on that record, was just one of the greatest rock voices. It’s just my thing, man. I think it was my thing and millions and millions of other people’s thing, for some reason,” he added.
In a November 2020 interview, Tremonti shared how ‘Master of Puppets’ changed his life and musical journey. He described the album as his ‘favorite record of all time,’ and noted how it transformed him from a casual music listener into a metalhead. “That’s the record that turned me into a music fanatic. Before I heard that record, I was listening to the Beastie Boys, I was listening to the J. Geils Band and whatever was popular on the radio, and I came across that record and from that point on, I’ve been a metalhead, looking for the heaviest thing that I could find.”
He added, “And I think Metallica’s ‘Master Of Puppets’ is Metallica at their best. Every single song on that record is a 10 out of 10.”
Tremonti is playing a show on the 14th of this month in Germany. The band will make stops in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark before playing a handful of shows in the UK.
