Enter Night, page 11
By the time Cliff had graduated from high school in 1980, the Burton character was already fully formed: a bell-bottomed, denim-wearing, H.P. Lovecraft-reading, piano-playing, homebody who liked his beer and Mexican food, and loved his pot and acid. A self-contained free-thinker who drove a beat-up 1972 VW station wagon – nicknamed The Grasshopper – in which he liked to mix his Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes with Bach concertos and cantatas, his favourite pastime was hanging out with his friends Jim Martin and Dave Donato, going fishing and hunting, or just sitting round smoking pot and playing Dungeons and Dragons into the small hours. ‘He’d stay up all night and sleep late,’ remembered Jan. Dave and Jim would often be there, too. In the middle of the night Cliff would fix them all munchies-defeating omelettes. ‘He loved to cook all this stuff,’ said Jan, ‘[but] he’d very seldom wake us up. He was exceptionally considerate and loving.’ He was painfully honest, too. ‘Sometimes you’d think, “Oh, Cliff, I wish you weren’t quite so honest.” No little white lies for him and sometimes that was kind of embarrassing,’ she laughed. ‘We were talking about that once, and he said, “I don’t have to lie for anybody. I don’t want to lie.” And that’s how he felt about it. God, I think he hated lying more than anything. He was big on just being yourself.’
Enrolling at Chabot College, in nearby Hayward, Cliff studied classical music and theory. He hooked up again with Jim Martin, who had also joined the college, the pair forming an instrumental trio they named Agents of Misfortune – a short-lived but useful outfit in which Cliff first tried his hand at incorporating harmonics into his bass playing – part of his college studies – and improvising with distortion – a trick learned from Motörhead’s Lemmy. Jim Martin would enter into the spirit of things by using a Penderecki violin bow, although this was an aspect of his talents he’d quietly dropped by the time fame found him in Faith No More. Entering the Hayward Area Recreation Department’s annual Battle of the Bands contest in 1981, their audition was videoed and can still be seen on YouTube today. It’s a fascinating clip to view, not least as the onstage persona Burton was to later make famous in Metallica already appears in motion. Indeed, if you listen carefully you can already hear the bones of two pieces that would later become most associated with his work in Metallica: an early extended bass solo entitled ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’ and the strident intro to a number that would become a cornerstone of the band’s set for many years, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.
In 1982, Cliff joined Trauma, well known to Bay Area scene-makers, in part for their intense musicality, although they are mostly remembered now for their determined theatricality. There is a wonderfully hammy video clip of them which can also still be seen on YouTube, with a dark-haired girl tied to a cross and another blonde girl being ‘sacrificed’ on an altar as the band plays amid billowing dry ice, the singer standing over his sacrificial victim, wielding a silver dagger and singing about being ‘the warlock of the night’. Eventually, an upside-down cross, positioned just behind Cliff, catches afire – the sort of video that looked wincingly out-of-step even back in 1982, all save for Cliff himself, who looks marvellously out of sync with the other band members, in his downbeat clothes and completely unself-conscious headbanging, his bass full of unnecessary but impressively odd jazz timings and psychedelic overtones.
Practising on average between four and six hours a day, every day, even after he joined Metallica, Cliff’s musical philosophy was explained by Jan as: ‘There’s somebody in their garage that hasn’t been discovered that’s better than you are.’ It would be a habit he kept up till the day he died. It was clear he took his music more seriously than anything else. So when Cliff abandoned his classic studies in order to play full-time in Metallica, his parents stood by him. Ray admitted the music his son was now focused on ‘wasn’t the kind of music I would have really liked him to play [but] he wanted to play it. So I wished him all the luck in the world.’ Jan, though, was less equivocal. ‘I didn’t care what kind of music he played as long as he was good at what he did. The fact that it was heavy metal made it kind of exciting to me, rather than some la-di-dah pop or country. It was different to our lives, so I thought it was exciting.’ Ray recalled Cliff telling them, ‘“I’m going to make my living as a musician.” And that’s what he did.’ They set him a goal to aim for, though. As Jan revealed, ‘I [had] never seen that boy give up on anything or anybody. So I knew that when he said that, he one hundred and ten per cent was going to [do] it.’ However, ‘We said, “Okay, we’ll give you four years. We’ll pay for your rent and your food. But after that four years is over, if we don’t see some slow progress or moderate progress, if you’re just not going anyplace and it’s obvious you’re not going to make a living out of it, then you’re going to have to get a job and do something else.”’ She added, ‘He said, “Fine.”’
It took almost four months for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield to persuade Cliff Burton to at least jam with Metallica. Intrigued but far from convinced yet, Cliff began turning up whenever the band played in San Francisco, something that was now happening on a monthly basis. Cliff picked up on two things straight away: how different their approach was to the more staid, far more trad-metal ideals of the cheesy Trauma – and just how much the crowds appreciated that – and how lifeless the playing was of the incumbent bassist, the well-meaning but increasingly out-of-his-depth McGovney. The only thing that put him off was the thought of having to relocate to LA. Why would he want to slum it in a city he instinctively hated, when he still enjoyed all the comforts of home in a city more naturally suited to his sensibilities?
What finally made up his mind to make the jump was the fact that, as he told Harald O, ‘eventually Trauma started to…annoy me’. Specifically, the band was ‘starting to get a little commercial’. ‘Commercial’ was Cliff’s polite word for embarrassing. What the rest of Trauma saw as their inherent theatricality, Cliff saw as trying too hard to attract a wider audience. Metallica seemed to have found a way of attracting a fanatical following in the Bay Area by simply turning up as themselves. There was, however, one condition Cliff made to the band, and it was a deal-breaker: they would have to come to him. No way was he leaving home for LA – not even for the hottest new band in the Bay. He told them: ‘I like it up here. So they said, “Yeah, well, we were thinking about doing that anyway.” So that worked out just right. So, they came up and we got together in this room that we’re sitting in now, set up the gear and blasted it out for a couple of days. It was pretty obvious straight away that it was a good thing to do, so we did it!’
Lars, who had already seen it coming, reasoned that with Ron out of the picture now anyway, and the band left with nowhere to rehearse, it was time to say, ‘Okay, fuck it. LA is pretty shitty for us anyway.’ According to Jan, Cliff ‘was a very loyal person’ who ‘didn’t want to leave Trauma. But Trauma wanted him to go plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. He wanted to play lead bass and they said, “No way.” He really became so frustrated at wanting to express himself musically. Metallica kept calling every week. They’d call him from LA and he’d say, “No, no.” When they finally got together he’d say, “I wanna play lead bass. I want some spot in here where I can go off.” And they said, “You can play anything you want, just come with us.”’
It was a bold move for both sides, but most especially for the three-man Metallica line-up who agreed to relocate from LA to San Francisco. As Brian Slagel says now, ‘It was a very big deal.’ Los Angeles and San Francisco are ‘polar-opposite cities’. Regarding Lars, however, Slagel states, ‘I don’t think it really mattered that much, ’cos he was used to kind of moving around anyway.’ For James, ‘a guy that grew up in LA, and for that matter Mustaine, that’s kind of a big move. But the timing of it was good, too. None of them had any really strong ties to LA. They felt much more at home in San Francisco. It really was day and night…And Cliff was clearly the right guy. I mean, he was just an unbelievable bass player. So they felt it would definitely be a big upgrade for them to get a guy like that, even to consider it.’ Unlike Ron, none of them had girlfriends at this stage either. Says Slagel: ‘They didn’t have those ties. I guess there was a certain family tie with Lars. But I know James didn’t have a great relationship with his family and the same was true of Dave. But Lars’ family was so supportive, it was like, hey, if that’s what you need to do to make you happy we’ll be completely supportive of that. So why not move to San Francisco?’
Certainly it was something the band felt they had to do. As Lars would tell me, in San Francisco, Metallica simply ‘connected to a whole different level of energy and vibe [than in LA] and there was much more passion…there was much more of a scene. People were passionate about music, people were curious, people were open. I think in LA we had always felt like outcasts, like we never belonged. It seemed like the music was secondary to the partying. Up in San Francisco there was just a different level of passion and people reacted differently to the music. So when we decided to not only pursue Cliff but to offer ourselves to Cliff, when I told him we would be glad to leave behind LA, and when I realised that it actually became conditional for him, that the only way he would even consider joining the band would be if we moved to San Francisco, it was a no-brainer. Of course we would relocate to the Bay Area because we felt from those shows in the fall of ’82 much more of a kinship, we felt like we belonged there.’
Leaving for San Francisco, they stopped off at Patrick Scott’s house. ‘They came over to tell me goodbye,’ he says. It was a poignant moment for the school friends. Patrick knew he ‘probably wasn’t going to see Lars again any time soon. They said goodbye and hung out for a while and then they left.’ He remembers how, ‘Lars once asked my dad for ten thousand dollars to invest in the band but who in their right mind would have done that? My dad said, “How would anybody rationalise ten thousand dollars in [an unknown] rock band? How many of them make it, you know?”’ When they drove off, Patrick realised that ‘James had left his high school letterman jacket at my house. I called James and told him he left his jacket there and he said, “Just throw it away; I don’t really want it any more.” But I kept it, I still have it actually. It says “J. Hetfield” on the neck and in embroidery on the front it says “James”. I told him about it maybe five years ago and told him he could have it back if he wanted it for like his kids or whatever and he was like, “No, but keep it. Don’t sell it, just keep it.” And I still have it.’
So it was in the week between Christmas and New Year 1982, that Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine packed as much of their gear as they could onto another trailer – this time paid for with their own money and not Ron’s – and drove north up the California coast road to San Francisco, where they had arranged to stay temporarily at their friend Mark Whitaker’s house at 3132 Carlson Boulevard in El Cerrito, in the East Bay. Whitaker was a well-known face on the SF club scene. Having taken on the role of manager for local boys Exodus, he had also helped out recently at several Metallica gigs, now becoming their full-time live sound engineer and general dogsbody. When he agreed to let James, Lars and Dave stay for a few days over the Christmas holidays of 1982, he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. By February 1983 all three had moved in permanently and Whitaker’s El Cerrito house was quickly nicknamed the Metallimansion. It would become the band’s HQ for the next three years – the place where they would not only write the material that would comprise some of the greatest albums of their career, but where they began to live the rock ’n’ roll life they had only previously fantasised about. Or: ‘every cliché that you could muster up’, as Lars put it. ‘Me and James each had a bedroom. Dave Mustaine slept on the couch. Dogs running around. We had the old garage converted into a rehearsal room with egg cartons. It was the refuge, the sanctuary for everybody in the neighbourhood. People would come over and live there, hang there. It was a lot of fun – when you’re nineteen.’ It was also the place where they would forge the ‘gang mentality’ they would need to keep them strong through the testing times ahead – ‘this tiny little situation. Nobody can stray outside of…the thing you do.’
As Ron Quintana recalls, ‘The Carlson pad was a fairly normal first pad away from home for three young LA transplants, but quickly things got wilder! The three of them would have nothing to do in El Cerrito but drink vodka most days and practise those days Cliff made the hour drive north from his comfortable Castro Valley parents’ pad. Most nights they would hang out and drink or go to Exodus’ practice studio and party or an occasional Berkeley Keystone metal show or Metal Mondays at the Old Waldorf or shows at Mabuhay or Stone.’ Weekends would be spent cadging drinks at Ruthie’s Inn ‘or an occasional house party’ where the three would join well-known party animal and Exodus vocalist Paul Baloff and guitarist Gary Holt ‘and destroy someone’s living room’.
It was also at 3132 Carlson Boulevard that, on 28 December 1982, Metallica held their first all-night jam session with Cliff Burton. The impact was immediate. Cliff liked everything from Bach to Black Sabbath, from Pink Floyd to the Velvet Underground, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to R.E.M. As Lars told me in 2009, ‘Cliff turned me and James onto a lot of stuff at the time. From Peter Gabriel to ZZ Top to a lot of stuff that we really didn’t [know]. He flew the flag for bands like Yes. We’d never really experienced a lot of that type of stuff. Of course, at the same time, he had never heard that much Diamond Head or Saxon and Motörhead, or anything like that. So there was definitely a cool give and take there.’ Or as James told me, ‘Besides introducing us to more music theory, [Cliff] was the most schooled of any of us, he had gone to junior college to learn some things about music, and taught us quite a few things.’
Cliff, who ‘had a really bad back because he was always bent over thrashing his head’, was to become an influence in many other, entirely unexpected ways, too. James again: ‘He was the kind of guy, you know, him and I aligned a lot closer as friends, as far as our activities, music styles that we liked, bands that we liked, politically, views on the world, we were pretty parallel on that wavelength. But, yeah, he had such a character to himself, and it was a very strong personality, he did creep into all of us eventually.’ Says Lars: ‘Cliff was very, very different from James and Dave and Ron and anybody else. I mean, Cliff lived a whole different life up in the Bay Area. He was an interesting mix of the kind of hippy, trippy, non-conformist kind of vibe that was so well known about San Francisco and kind of…in his own headspace. And then also, a whole side that I’d never really experienced in America yet, was kind of what we call the redneck element. You know, he lived out in Castro Valley. It’s a good thirty- or forty-minute drive from San Francisco [and] there was a different kind of vibe out there, a little bit in the suburbs, a little bit sort of beer-drinking, hell-raising. Listening to ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd, type of thing. A little bit of that kind of vibe. So he was a very interesting mix of many different types of personalities and so on. When me and James met him I was just infatuated with his uniqueness. I was infatuated with his lack of conformity, and his sole insistence on doing his own thing, even to the point of ridicule. I mean, even at that time. Me and Hetfield were wearing as tight pants as possible and Cliff was wearing the famous bell-bottoms. There was a lot of contradictions about him.’ Within ‘the uniqueness’ there was also ‘a little bit of a rebellious attitude and energy, and obviously I could really relate to [that]. Being an only child from a very bohemian upbringing in Denmark and stuff, I could really relate to…really just doing your own trip and not kind of being caught up in what everybody else wanted from you. So we really hit it off on that level.’ Cliff Burton was simply ‘not your basic human being’, James later laughingly recalled. ‘He was really intellectual but very to the point. He taught me a lot about attitude.’ Cliff, said James, was ‘a wild, hippy-ish, acid-taking, bell-bottom-wearing guy. He meant business, and you couldn’t fuck around with him. I wanted to get that respect that he had. We gave him shit about his bell-bottoms every day. He didn’t care. “This is what I wear. Fuck you.”’
The four of them saw in 1983 by sitting round in the garage at Carlson Boulevard getting wasted on beer and pot and talking up their plans for the future. That was when Burton gave them his philosophy in typically Cliff-like shorthand. As he later told Harald O, ‘When I started [playing music], I decided to devote my life to it and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit life has to offer.’ Wise words the rest of Metallica would do their utmost to try and live by – even after Cliff had left them.
Four
Nightfall at the Halfway House
Time was getting on and we were only halfway through the show. I looked up at the big studio clock.
‘Where are the guests?’ I asked the floor manager.
‘In the toilet,’ he grimaced.
‘Still?’
‘Yeah. I think they’re…you know…’
Because we recorded the show so early in the morning it didn’t happen often that one of the bands actually turned up drunk or stoned. But just occasionally, you got one or two, usually from one of the younger bands, who felt the need to vanish into the loos and lock the door behind them before sauntering onto the set ready for their close-up.
Then here they came, strutting, frowning, faking. The two Daves from…I checked my crib sheet…Megadeth. Right. I took a guess and held my hand out to the one in front with the long curly hair and the painted-on sneer.
‘Dave Mustaine,’ I said, acting pleased to see him. ‘Welcome to the Monsters of Rock show.’
