Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  As one scans the back page of the twelve-page booklet, the image upon which the reader’s eye finally falls is a picture of Metallica that shows Burton with his eyes redacted like the victim of a tragedy, like a corpse.

  On Friday September 26, 1986, Metallica played their final show with Cliff Burton. On the afternoon of the group’s appearance at a busy but not entirely full Solnahallen hall in Stockholm, the visiting musicians were introduced by their Swedish distributor, Alpha Records, to local music journalists that had abetted the group’s cause. As was the case elsewhere in the world, Alpha employee Stuart Ward recalls that ‘the mass media didn’t put [in] much of an appearance. We had a big-selling album, but no one would touch Metallica. Most people thought the band’s music was repulsive. You would see column inch after column inch written about artists who only had a fraction of Metallica’s sales. It was hugely frustrating. I only remember someone being there from [the] youth magazine Okej, which sometimes contained a lot of hard rock, and there were a few guys who wrote for fanzines.’

  Following this formal pressing of the flesh, band and journalists were led into a room stocked with a healthy supply of food and alcohol and a round table around which the Americans and Europeans might sit. Not untypically, Lars Ulrich was noticeable by his absence, preferring to secrete himself away in yet another room, alone save for the voices at the far end of a telephone line. Unperturbed by this, Ulrich’s band mates broke bread and raised glasses in the company of representatives of the lower orders of the Scandinavian music press.

  It was in this company that Burton gave what was to be his final interview, an exchange with the Swedish music journalist Jörgen Holmstedt. The writer is honest enough to remember that his silent reaction upon discovering that he was seated alongside Burton was one of an ‘annoyance’ informed by the fact that ‘in all honesty I was more interested in meeting Lars Ulrich’.

  ‘Frankly, no one was very interested in talking to the normally taciturn Cliff when the other band members were around. In fact, I can’t recall seeing more than a handful of major interviews with Cliff up to that point,’ Holmstedt recalls.

  It is an interesting quirk of the music journalist’s mind that he or she usually desires to speak to the member of a group that enjoys the highest profile in the press, this despite the fact that such a strategy runs the risk that the quotes supplied by this subject will echo the words given to rival publications. True to this trait, Jorgen Holmstedt viewed Cliff Burton not as a untapped source of information, or of one potentially possessed of a fresh insight, but rather as the ‘Quiet One’ to whom journalists rarely spoke.

  ‘He just sat there, sipping a beer,’ recalls the writer. ‘Close up he looked older than his twenty-four years. He had discoloured teeth, a slightly worn and wrinkled face, a tired gaze and the slow, deliberate speech pattern typical of someone who likes a smoke. Cliff was as quiet offstage as he was wild on it. He was wearing a T-shirt with an unbuttoned shirt on top, a battered denim jacket and his legendary old flared jeans which he was alone in wearing during that poodle-head year of 1986, when ball-crushingly tight stretch jeans were de rigueur.’

  Reading the transcribed exchange between Burton and Holmstedt, one is once again struck by the subject’s inscrutable nature, as a canvas of sufficient size and tonal neutrality that listeners and fans are able to register upon it any impressions they choose. To an uncharitable eye, as interviewed on the afternoon of September 26, 1986, Burton appears disinterested and dull, his answers vague to the point of opacity. On his group’s burgeoning level of success, the musician observes that Metallica ‘haven’t become stars overnight’ and that ‘the whole time we’ve just done what felt right’ having ‘never striven for rock-star status or anything like that’. Metallica, he explained, ‘just do what [they] do’ with a sense of insular purpose of sufficient authority that even a contract with a major label is seen as ‘merely an opportunity to buy more equipment and to be able to spend more time in the studio’ – this despite the fact that on Master of Puppets the bassist was of the opinion that his band had spent too much time in the recording studio, ‘You know, to build the whole thing further.’ Elsewhere in the interview Burton spoke of a group that ‘can’t be bothered to worry about the mass media’ either in terms of ‘what they say or what they write’ and that instead improves its station by touring as extensively as possible because ‘that’s how a band like ours gets bigger. Because we don’t get any radio play, we have to play [live] as much as possible.’

  ‘Touring has become more pleasant now that we have a better [tour] bus,’ the bassist observed.

  In the smallest hours of Saturday 27 September, the component parts of the Damage, Inc. tour began the journey from Stockholm to Copenhagen. First to depart the loading doors of Solnahallen was Metallica’s tour bus, a vehicle inside which the four musicians and their road crew would watch a video before retiring to sleep in coffin-sized bunk beds. Forty-five minutes after this, a lorry containing Metallica’s instruments and amplifiers left the Swedish capital en route to its Danish equivalent. Inside the first vehicle Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton drew cards in order to determine which member of the band would that night sleep in the bunk fitted with a window.

  ‘The first card that Cliff picked was the ace of spades and he looked at me and said, “I want your bunk,”’ Hammett recalls. ‘And I said, “Fine, take my bunk, I’ll sleep up front, that’s probably better anyway.”’

  Several hours later, at 6.30 on the morning of September 27, the vehicle was travelling along the E4, a road that passes between the Swedish towns of Ljungby and Värnamo. Two miles north of Ljungby, the tour bus began to drift to the right side of the road, an occurrence to which its driver responded by turning the vehicle’s steering wheel in the opposite direction. This action caused the bus’s back wheels to skid further to the right. At this point, the young men asleep in the vehicle’s interior were woken by the sound of tyres screeching on cold concrete.

  Metallica’s tour bus was engaged in a skid that lasted for as long as twenty seconds, the inertia of which propelled the vehicle from an upright position to one where the bus was lying on its right-hand side in a ditch by the side of the road. In the pitch blackness of its interior, bunks containing startled and semi-naked men collapsed on top of each other. In the stunned confusion that followed, a number of the party were able to navigate their exit into the morning air through the bus’s side door (the vehicle was provided by Len Wright Travel and was British made, which meant this door was on the left-hand side). Tour manager Bobby Schneider remained inside the bus until it appeared that its occupants had been led to safety.

  ‘I got thrown out of my bunk and knocked unconscious for like three or four seconds,’ recalls Hammett. ‘When I came to, I heard everyone screaming, but I didn’t hear Cliff. And I instantly knew something was wrong.’

  Gathered by the roadside, the shocked party attempted to make sense of their situation. Hetfield and Hammett were shaken but had incurred only minor flesh wounds; Ulrich had suffered a broken toe. Quickly the three men’s attention was captured by the sound of shouting from other people, their eyes trained and fingers pointing towards the tour bus’s bottom edge. Like an horrific re-imagining of a scene from The Wizard Of Oz, protruding from beneath the stricken vehicle could be seen a pair of legs belonging to Cliff Burton.

  ‘I saw the bus lying right on him,’ recalls James Hetfield. ‘I saw his legs sticking out. I freaked. The bus driver, I recall, was trying to yank [a] blanket out from under him to use for other people. I just went, “Don’t fucking do that!” I already wanted to kill the guy. I don’t know if he was drunk or if he hit some ice. All I knew was, he was driving and Cliff wasn’t alive any more.’

  In the minutes that followed, Hetfield learned from the driver that the bus had crashed as a result of losing traction due to ice on the road. As the party waited for the first of seven ambulances that would ferry the injured to hospital, Metallica’s front man scoured t
he road for evidence of this claim, but found none.

  ‘I recall, in my underwear and socks, walking for miles looking for this black ice, walking back going, “Where’s this black ice? I don’t see any black ice …”’ says Hetfield. ‘And I wanted to kill this guy. I was going to end him there.’

  As a matter of routine, the bus driver was arrested as soon as Swedish police arrived at the site of the crash, while Burton’s body was removed from the scene in order that it be examined for forensic evidence. His passport – numbered E 159240 – was cancelled and posted to his parents in Northern California.

  Discharged from hospital, Metallica’s three surviving members spent the night of September 27 at the Hotel Terraza in Ljungby. As news of the accident spread, a crowd began to gather at the hotel’s front entrance. At the hospital a traumatised Hetfield had been sedated with medication that did little to anaesthetise his pain. Back in his hotel room raw grief gave way to blind rage as the front man began smashing whatever object came to hand. Later that night he found himself on the streets of Ljungby; as he walked without direction, guests in the Hotel Terraza could hear the American screaming ‘Cliff? Where are you, Cliff?’

  With typical efficiency, Peter Mensch immediately flew from New York to Denmark in an attempt to manage the situation. Hetfield and Hammett were dispatched home to the Bay Area while Ulrich remained in his country of birth in order to be with his family. While there Ulrich gave his first interview following the death of his friend and colleague. Speaking to Fia Persson from Sweden’s Expressen newspaper, the drummer spoke of being woken in his bunk as the tour bus skidded and being ‘thrown around in the [vehicle]’.

  ‘It was completely dark and it seemed like it would never stop rolling,’ he recalled. ‘But it did stop eventually, and as soon as it did I scrambled out and started to run clear. I was afraid the bus would explode.

  ‘After a while I heard cries of help from inside,’ he continued. ‘It was Flemming, our Danish drum roadie. I thought about climbing in and helping him, but it was only then I realised that I’d hurt myself so badly I could hardly walk.’

  On the elephant in the room that was the pivotal question as to whether or not Metallica would live on after the death of their bass player, Ulrich was respectful but unequivocal, saying, ‘I don’t know anyone who can play bass like he did,’ and adding, ‘It’s going to feel really strange the first time we stand onstage with a new bassist in the band.’

  On the Monday morning following Burton’s death, the regional Swedish newspaper Smallanniggen ran on its front page the headline ‘Rock Star Killed’. The story beneath told its reader that ‘the European tour of the American hard rock group Metallica ended in tragedy in a fatal accident in Dorarp on the E4 Road on Saturday morning’. The report went on to say that the driver of the bus ‘thought that an ice spot was the reason why the [vehicle] slid off the road. But there were no ice spots on the road.’

  ‘For that reason the investigation continues,’ said Detective Inspector Arne Pettersson, as quoted in the same article. ‘The accident’s course of events, and the tracks at the accident location, are exactly like the pattern of asleep-at-the-wheel accidents.’

  The piece then went on, ‘The driver [swore] under oath that he had slept during the day and was thoroughly rested.’ The following day the same publication told its readers that

  The driver of the tour bus … is now free from arrest. He is forbidden to travel and must contact the police once a week until the investigation is over. The driver was arrested after the accident, suspected of being careless in traffic and causing another person’s death. He said that the bus drove off the way because there was ice on the road. But the technical investigation from the police said that the road was totally free from ice at the time of the accident. The driver is suspected of having fallen asleep at the steering wheel.

  Nine days later the travel ban against the driver of the bus was lifted and no charges were ever brought against the man who will for ever be suspected of bringing to a premature close the life of one of his passengers. In his autopsy report Dr Anders Ottoson concluded that the cause of death of Cliff Burton was ‘compressio thoracis cum contusio pulm.’ – or in layman’s terms, a fatal compression of the chest cavity with correlating damage to the lungs. In even shorter terms, the bass player was crushed to death.

  Were such a scenario to occur today, the events would be played out to the wider world only seconds behind real time. A tweet from one of the party would shine the first light into the morning gloom on the back roads of northern Europe. Calls from the scene would be placed to management, who in turn would field queries from the press and release online a prepared statement containing details of what had occurred. News of the event would echo over the rooftops of cyberspace from Aberdeen to Adelaide, propelled by the constant drumbeat that is social media.

  But news of the death seeped out slowly, like blood into soil. To many who knew him, hearing about the bassist’s death is an event that seems as if it happened only yesterday. But while this cliché carries with it a certain emotional resonance, the unfolding of the drama as it occurred at the time affords the story a quality that belongs squarely in a bygone age. First hours and then even a day passed by before even those professionally equipped to gather details managed to lay in place what journalists sometimes describe as ‘the blood and guts’ of the story.

  Malcolm Dome recalls being in the Kerrang! office and of ‘having heard a rumour that someone in Metallica had died in a tour-bus crash’. As startling as this unsourced and entirely unconfirmed Chinese whisper may have been, its very existence was typical of the kind of fanciful hot air that propelled music journalists through a working day in an age before the advent of the Internet. As Dome remembers, ‘At the time there were always rumours going round, “Oh, such and such a person has just died,” and stuff like that.’

  Nonetheless then as now Dome’s nose for a story was acute, and he placed a call to the Music For Nations office in Germany. From a voice on the other end of the line, he learned that Burton really was dead.

  ‘I believe I was the first in the office to find out,’ he recalls today. ‘But in terms of the Kerrang! office as a whole, it was the most depressing day of our lives, because we’d all met Cliff and we all liked him very much. So we heard the news and then we all went to the pub, strangely enough with Scott Ian [whose band were attempting to navigate their way back to New York, via London]. But I remember it being such a strange day, because it was the first time we’d all been confronted with what it felt like to have someone that we all knew die.’

  As news of Burton’s death shifted from casual conjecture to concrete fact, those who had known him began to attempt to make sense of the ending of a life that seemed to have been robbed not only of so many years now destined to remain unlived but also of the rewards of success that the bass player had, along with his band mates, worked so hard to achieve. More than a generation on, the death of a musician in a rock band tends to excite the kind of theatrical emotion witnessed following the death of Diana Spencer, an odd state of affairs given that metal in particular spends so much of its time concerning itself with, and even glorying in, the subject of human mortality. With the death of Cliff Burton, however, matters were tastefully restrained. In the pages of Kerrang! a one-page memorial paid for by Music For Nations read, simply, ‘Cliff Burton 1962–1986’. In the same issue, Johnny and Marsha Zazula had booked a double page spread, entirely black aside from the couple’s names and the epitaph, ‘The Ultimate Musician, The Ultimate Headbanger, The Ultimate Loss, A Friend Forever’.

  Following the conclusion of the investigation by the Swedish authorities into the bus crash of September 27 – at least as it related to the remains of the one killed as a result of this event – Burton’s body returned to the Bay Area, and was laid to rest on October 7, 1986, with a service at the Chapel of the Valley in his home region of Castro Valley. Having been informed by Cliff Burnstein on the morning of the
crash that Burton was dead, Michael Alago subsequently travelled from his home in New York to California to attend the musician’s funeral and cremation. He sat on a wooden pew and listened as the stirring, and by now piercingly poignant, ‘Orion’ was played through the chapel’s stereo system. Burton’s ashes were then scattered at the Maxwell Ranch, where along with his teenage friends the adolescent bass player had discovered his love of making music in concert with others. As the day drifted on, Alago found himself in the company of Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett, musicians and Elektra executive united as nothing more than young men attempting to make sense of both grief and Metallica’s suddenly obliterated circumstances.

  ‘At one point [during the day], the band and myself made our way over to the Burton’s home,’ remembers Alago. ‘When we got there, we all sat in Cliff’s room and drank and cried and spoke about it.’

  ‘It was’, he recalls, ‘really incredible.’

  Just like that, everything changed. The remaining members of Metallica were robbed of their de facto father figure, while the group’s audience were gifted a martyr rendered incorruptible and silent by the violent suddenness of his death. With time the memory of the bass player would inevitably fade; Metallica’s music would change and the group’s growing appeal would attract the attentions of an emerging audience for whom the name Cliff Burton had only ever been uttered in the past tense; and for some, not at all. For the never insignificant number of older fans who viewed not only increasing levels of success but any stylistic deviation from the blueprint laid down by Master of Puppets as signs of artistic betrayal, the questions often asked were, ‘What would Cliff do?’, or ‘What would Cliff make of it all?’ The answer, invariably, being that the dead musician would have agreed with members of the group’s audience who viewed themselves as being ‘defenders of the faith’ and as such would have been suitably outraged by whatever actions had been taken by Metallica’s surviving members.