On Master of Puppets' "Damage, Inc.," James Hetfield lays out Metallica's business plan: "Go against the grain until the end," he bellows, gleefully adding, "Life ain't for you/And we're the cure." The target of the band's bottomless rage in the mid-Eighties was Van Halen's party-rock spawn. With their third album, the self-anointed "anti-Motley Crue" did their worst to carpet-bomb L.A.'s Sunset Strip while broadening the thrash-metal palette. "Battery" opens the album with a Spanish-guitar passage. You can almost see the tumbleweeds roll past at high noon before the band rides in on Lars Ulrich's galloping rhythm — Hetfield barking threats, Kirk Hammett zinging off flurries of moaning notes. More or less every song is about death. With hindsight, it is tempting to read Puppets' morbid lyrics as an omen; bassist Cliff Burton died mere months after the album's release in a tour-bus accident. But, really, with music this ferocious, what else was Hetfield going to sing about: dancing the night away?

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.