Enter Night, page 10
Brian knew Trauma from San Francisco; they had been one of the bands he was putting onto Metal Massacre II, with a short but surprisingly sweet track titled ‘Such a Shame’. ‘Their manager had sent me a demo with three songs, which were awesome and recorded really well. So we put the band on Metal Massacre II and they came down to play in LA. The band was pretty good but the bass player was phenomenal. Really awesome.’ So when later Lars asked about bass players Brian mentioned ‘the Trauma guy’, who happened to be playing in LA again in a couple of weeks, this time at the Troubadour. ‘I said, “You guys should come see him and check it out.” So him and James came down to the show and Lars came up to me – I can’t remember if it was during the set or immediately after – and said, “That is going to be our bass player!” And when Lars says those sorts of things he seems to make them happen. Sure enough, he was able to make that happen too.’
The Trauma bass player’s name was Cliff Burton – the same guy who’d been to watch Metallica’s show at the Old Waldorf in October – and ‘Such a Shame’ was destined to become the only track Trauma ever released with him on it. Cliff was ‘the strangest-looking dude’ Lars had ever seen on a Hollywood stage. While the rest of Trauma sported the same image, interchangeable with any number of West Coast metal bands then strutting their stuff, Burton took to the stage in bell-bottom jeans and a denim waistcoat. His hair was hippy-long and looked like it had barely seen a comb, let alone been teased and sprayed like his bandmates’ evidently had. Most impressive of all, he really knew how to play the bass, eschewing plectrums for finger-picking, like all the best bass players in his book, from obvious influences such as Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, Rush’s Geddy Lee and Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, to less obvious but equally significant teachers such as American jazz player Stanley Clark, whose use of the electric double-headed bass Cliff was in absolute awe of, and even Lemmy, whose rumbling bass in Motörhead Cliff was in thrall to primarily for the guitar-like way Lemmy played, and the technique he utilised to bring distortion into his heavy-handed riffing. One influence Burton didn’t share with the rest of Metallica, though, was an interest in NWOBHM, not even the machine-gun bass of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, so highly regarded elsewhere. Instead, Cliff was more interested in trying to emulate certain guitar players – most especially Jimi Hendrix, although Hendrix copyist Uli Jon Roth was held in almost equal high regard, as was UFO’s Michael Schenker ‘to a degree’ and Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, who ‘also had an influence’. Like James, Cliff also liked Aerosmith ‘a lot’. As a result, unlike standard rock players, what Cliff did on the bass could be characterised, as Lars says, ‘as playing the bass like a guitar’. Using his wah-wah pedal to create strange ‘washes’ and ‘drags’, as future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett later told me, ‘for someone as great as Cliff was on bass, offstage he mainly played guitar. He had that kind of approach to what he did.’
Henning Larsen, who later became Metallica’s drum tech, was with Lars and James at the Troubadour that first night they saw Cliff play and recalls their pop-eyed reaction. ‘I could just see them go, “Oh my God! Look at that guy!” The thing that struck them most was…here you had a guy playing lead bass! They thought that was great.’ Or as James would tell me in 2009, ‘our jaws fell onto the floor, and we said we’ve got to get this guy. So there was respect because we had searched for him to get him.’ So awestruck were they, in fact, that not even the über-confident Ulrich could summon up the courage to actually talk to Cliff that first night. Instead, he and James went away and talked about it in secret, before returning to the club the following night where Trauma were playing a second show, and approached him then. James: ‘We said: “We’re in this band, we’re looking for a bass player, and we think you’d really fit in. Because you’re a big psycho.” And he knew that. It was no surprise to him. But the music made him feel like that.’ Ever practical, ‘after we’d swapped numbers I started going to work on him immediately’, said Lars.
Patrick Scott recalls being tipped off about Trauma by K.J. Doughton, who’d recently featured them in his fanzine, Northwest Metal. Managed by an expat Englishman named Tony Van Litt, it was through K.J.’s connection that Patrick visited the band on-set during a video shoot in Santa Anna. When Patrick asked Lars if he wanted to come along too he was taken aback at how enthusiastic Lars was for the idea. When he insisted he brought James as well, Patrick started to suspect something was up. ‘He knew of them, and I didn’t know that at the time. He hadn’t mentioned it to me. I think he’d already seen them play. So we went down to this studio and watched them shoot this video. The band almost looked like an LA band – all except for this bass player, who looked like he always did. You know, bell-bottoms and headbanging out of time, that crazy look.’ On the way back in the car, Lars kept talking about the bass player, ‘what a great bass player he was, and did I think he’d be good in a band like [Metallica]?’
But while not even Ron McGovney would argue he was anything other than at best workmanlike on the bass – as he says, ‘James would show me what to play’ – musical chops were only part of the reason why the others originally began plotting to replace him with Cliff Burton. Behind the scenes, things had steadily been going from bad to worse. ‘It was difficult for me to have to be in the middle between my parents, who owned the house we were living in, and the band members,’ he says. ‘Of course there was drinking and girls among other things at the house and my parents didn’t like it. I had to be the bad guy many times. We used my father’s truck to haul us and our equipment, and that was another difficulty I had to deal with. It was like trying to be a road manager and the Metallica bass player at the same time. Yes, I did have an attitude because I didn’t think all of that should be my sole responsibility.’ Then there were his ongoing personality clashes with Dave: ‘Dave Mustaine didn’t like me at all. He started stealing things from me and even arranged to have my bass stolen at one of our gigs. He poured a beer into the pickups of my other bass and I got an electric shock. I became more upset about the way things were going and the attitude showed even more.’
It wasn’t just Mustaine’s antics that were starting to get Ron down. As he revealed in an interview with Bob Nalbandian’s Shockwaves website in 1996, he and Lars also ‘butted heads’ during this period. ‘I hate when people show up late and use you all the time and that’s just what Lars did. I would have to drive all the way down to Newport Beach to pick him up.’ In the end Ron grew so tired of the situation he told Lars he would have to arrange his own transport. Then there was the general attitude of the others towards him. Using his Visa card to pay for everything while the others frittered away what little cash they had on partying ate away at him until he could stand it no longer and he became the misery of the band. ‘They couldn’t understand why I was mad. They said, “Well, you’re getting the cheque after the gig,” and we were only getting paid a hundred dollars per gig at the most, which [in San Francisco] didn’t even cover the hotel room. Plus we drank a couple hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol. I always said to them, “If I’m a part of this band, why is it up to me to pay for everything while you guys get the free ride?”’ Ron suggested they get a manager to help shoulder the financial burden, but the others just laughed at him, told him to lighten up. ‘Dave, at the time, was an asshole, and Lars only cared about himself. But what really hurt me was James, because he was my friend and he was siding with them and I suddenly became the outcast in the band.’ Speaking now, Ron has a cooler perspective but the hurt is clearly still there buried not so deep inside. ‘I suppose they all became tired of me and they started looking elsewhere for a bass player. When they saw Cliff perform with his band Trauma, I guess they decided that he was the one. I saw the writing on the wall and I knew that my days were numbered when we played in San Francisco in November of 1982. Cliff was there hanging out with the guys while I was loading equipment. When we got back to LA, I quit. It was probably a relief to the rest of the guys as well.’
That final show with Ron on bass had been at the Mabuhay Gardens, on 30 November – a bitter-sweet occasion, as it was also one of the best shows Ron had played with the band. ‘Of course, the more popular we became the more I liked playing in the band,’ says Ron now. Although he admits, ‘We had to get liquored up to get on stage so obviously we could have been better,’ the fact is, ‘People who saw us in the clubs, especially in San Francisco, probably say the line-up with Dave and me in the band was fantastic.’ The setlist that night – again, built almost entirely around the seven-song No Life ’til Leather cassette, plus ‘No Remorse’ and Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ – also contained one of the first truly authentic new numbers the band had worked up as a four-piece: ‘Whiplash’ – punk-fast but with added bones stuck in the throat of the melody. Ron would later look back on the writing and performing of that particular number as among his happiest memories from Metallica, rightly describing it as ‘the most ultimate headbanging song. Every time we played that song it totally kicked ass.’ Loading up the gear after the show, Ron McGovney espied Cliff Burton, the man who would soon replace him, standing outside in the rain. Ron, ever the practical one, went over and introduced himself, then offered the sodden bassist a lift home. After that, the drive back to LA was hellish, the others forcing him to stop at a liquor store where, according to Ron, ‘they got a whole gallon of whisky. James, Lars and Dave were completely smashed out of their minds. They would constantly bang on the window for me to pull over so they could take a piss, and all of a sudden I look over and see Lars lying in the middle of Interstate 5 on the double yellow line. It was just unbelievable! And I just said fuck this shit!’
When Ron discovered the next day that Dave had contemptuously poured beer onto the pickups of his Washburn bass, while loudly disclaiming, ‘I fuckin’ hate Ron,’ it was the final straw. ‘I confronted the band when they came over for practice and said, “Get the fuck out of my house!” I turned to James and said, “I’m sorry, James, but you have to go too.” And they were gone within the next couple of days. They packed all their gear and moved to San Francisco.’ Ron was ‘so disgusted’, he sold his equipment soon after, including his amps, guitar cases, even his beloved Les Paul guitar. ‘I was just so pissed with the whole thing.’ By now he had also discovered the others had been talking behind his back about getting Cliff Burton into the band to replace him. These days, he claims to be sanguine about the situation. But at the time he felt ‘double-crossed’. Others from the Metallica camp also felt Ron was treated badly. Says Bob Nalbandian, ‘Ron got a raw deal, no doubt. Okay, he wasn’t as great a bass player as Cliff Burton but he was a really nice guy who did a lot for that band and he deserved better, for sure. I mean, you look at where they went musically with Cliff in the band and you say, well, okay, you know? But they kinda used Ron and it wasn’t nice.’
Perhaps the most telling judgement, however, on how well or badly Ron McGovney was treated in Metallica lies in the fact that he never felt compelled to resume his career either by forming his own band, or joining someone else’s. It could be argued he was lucky to have been in the band at all. His one and only foray back into the world of rockdom came four years later when he was momentarily persuaded to give it another go with a new outfit he had more of a say in called Phantasm – which he now describes as ‘progressive punk’ – with singer Katon De Pena. But despite investing in a new Fender P bass and a Marshall half-stack bass amp, it never went anywhere. ‘I just kept getting bombarded with the Metallica thing and the band got sick of it,’ he later told Bob Nalbandian. ‘A lot of kids came to our gigs just because I had been in Metallica. When we went to play Phoenix all the guys from Flotsam and Jetsam were jumping off the stage and after the show everyone bombarded me for autographs. So it just faded away after that and I haven’t been in a band since.’
That was a quarter of a century ago now. These days Ron McGovney is a single dad living in North Carolina. He still goes to Metallica shows, though, whenever they are within reach and the guys still leave him tickets and backstage passes. The last time we spoke, in October 2009, he had just been to see them play on the Death Magnetic tour. ‘I just saw them a couple of weeks ago,’ he emailed me, ‘and they are so cool. The backstage is very businesslike, but very comfortable as well.’ The band ‘were very cool to me and my kids when we went to their shows in Atlanta and Charlotte. James even dedicated the song “Phantom Lord” to me, and Lars let my kids and me stand in the sound-mixing area next to the stage. As a cool gesture to me [current bassist] Rob [Trujillo] took off his bass on stage and was going to hand it to me to play during “Phantom Lord” and “Seek and Destroy”. Now I haven’t played those songs in twenty-seven years, and relearning them onstage in front of seventeen thousand people could be a little embarrassing!’
McGovney may have gone relatively quietly from Metallica, but persuading Cliff Burton to leave Trauma and throw in his lot with the band was harder than Lars had imagined it was going to be. At first, Burton proved seemingly impervious to the fraught overtures of this strangely accented newcomer. Uncomfortable in the sleazy neon ooze of LA, the simple fact that Metallica lived there was enough on its own for Cliff to shrug off their initial advances. Lars, though, as Cliff was about to discover, was not so easily dissuaded. For a while it looked like he might have met his match in the inscrutably attired bassist with the moth-eaten cardigans and bum-fluff moustache. The son of first-generation hippies, who had instilled in him many of the ideals that were to define his character, even as a wild-hearted youth, Cliff, as everyone who ever knew him, even only briefly, as I did, will tell you, was clearly not like the others.
Clifford Lee Burton was born 10 February 1962. His father Ray was from Tennessee, but now worked in the Bay Area as an Assistant Highway Engineer. His wife Jan was from northern California, and worked as a teacher for the Castro Valley school district, working with students with disabilities and special needs. Baby Clifford was their third and last child, younger brother to Scott David and a sister, Connie. Scott died of a brain aneurysm when Cliff was thirteen, expiring in the ambulance that was rushing him to hospital. A huge blow to the family, it had a profound effect on the teenage Cliff, reinforcing the idea that life was not to be squandered on trying too hard to make other people happy. Time was short and the day was long. Whatever you had in mind, it was best done today, not tomorrow, which really might not ever come.
Cliff only began taking music lessons seriously ‘after his brother died’, his mother Jan later recalled. He told others, ‘I’m gonna be the best bassist for my brother.’ Jan was ‘totally amazed ’cos none of the kids in our family had any musical talent’. Cliff took lessons ‘on the boulevard for about a year, and then he totally outgrew [the teacher] and went to another place for a couple of years and outgrew him, too’. His biggest tutorial influence was a school teacher named Steve Doherty, who also happened to be ‘a very good jazz bassist, a very fine musician. He was the one who made Cliff take Bach and Beethoven and baroque [music], and made him learn to read music and stuff like that.’ Cliff would eventually outgrow Doherty, too, but not before his interest in Bach was cemented. ‘He really did sit down and study and play Bach,’ said Jan. ‘He loved Bach.’
In 1987, Harald Oimoen, an old friend of Cliff’s known better to him as budding Bay Area metal photojournalist Harald O, spent an evening at their Castro Valley apartment interviewing Jan and Ray Burton – the only time the couple spoke openly on the record about their son. Harald has kindly allowed me to use the interview here. In it, Jan describes Cliff as ‘very quiet’ and ‘normal’ except for his insistence, even from a very early age, on being ‘his own person’. Playing with kids outside was ‘boring’. Cliff preferred his own company inside, reading books and playing music. ‘Even when he was a tiny little kid he would listen to his music or read. He was a big, big reader and he was very bright; in the third grade they tested him and he got eleventh grade comprehension.’ Ray said their only major concern was when Cliff didn’t start walking until he was a few weeks shy of his second birthday. ‘But the doctor said, “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just smart enough to know that mom and dad will carry him around.”’ He laughed.
Already musical – he had begun plonking away at his parents’ piano when he was just six – Cliff was a quiet, studious youngster, good at most things, though never a show-off. There was also a typically stubborn, Aquarian side to Cliff. Even as a small boy he knew what he was prepared to stand still for and what he wasn’t – and nobody was going to persuade him otherwise. Says Jan, ‘He was always popular and had a lot of friends. He was a very kind, very gentle kid but always his own person.’ Playing Little League baseball for the Castro Valley Auto House team, he was known as a big hitter for a boy his size. Later, at Earl Warren Junior High, and then Castro Valley High School, he worked at weekends at an equipment rental yard called Castro Valley Rentals, where the older workers took to calling him Cowboy after the cheap straw hat he always insisted on wearing (it was either that or get his precious hair cut and Cliff wasn’t doing that at any price).
Cliff was just fourteen when he began jamming with his first semi-official band, EZ Street. Named after a strip joint in San Mateo, Cliff later characterised the music EZ Street made as ‘pretty silly, actually…a lot of covers, just wimpy shit’, as he told Harald. It was invaluable experience for the teenager, though, the band performing often at the International Cafe in nearby Berkeley. EZ Street also featured guitarist Jim Martin – visually and personality-wise something of a cross between Cliff’s outside-the-box musical scientist and James Hetfield’s raw, frontiersman persona – who would later go on to become the musical lynchpin in late-Eighties rock-rap innovators Faith No More. As Martin once observed: ‘Most of what you see on stage at a rock show, whether it’s a thrash metal gig or some heavy hip hop club, it’s all about fantasy. The thing about Cliff was he was real. He wasn’t acting out the part just to be in some band, he really was that guy. He never saw himself as a star. He was always just another one of the guys.’
