Enter Night, page 28
The rest of the ten-show tour continued in high spirits. Jonny and Marsha, as managers of Anthrax, were also there – the first time they had seen Metallica play for nearly two years. ‘They were killing,’ says Marsha now. ‘Just great, and it was really nice to see them again, especially Cliff, who was very sweet and asked all about the family.’ Anthrax were also enjoying themselves, treated as well as Metallica had been by Ozzy. ‘We really felt that we were part of something,’ recalled Scott Ian. ‘The crowds were crazy and we really felt as if there was something happening.’ The feel-good factor extended to Lars calling Brian Tatler when the tour reached the Birmingham Odeon, inviting him up to jam on ‘Am I Evil?’, which now formed part of their encores. ‘I caught the bus up into Birmingham,’ Brian recalls. ‘They took me backstage and Lars introduced me to James. I’d never met any of them before…everybody seemed great, it was nice. Come show-time, Lars said go out front and watch the set then come back at a certain point and come on and do “Am I Evil?” with us. So I thought, ooh, okay. I hadn’t seen that coming.’ Not having his guitar with him he used one of James’. ‘I didn’t really know what was going to happen then James introduced me as “The guy who wrote this song…” Then I went on and it was great.’
Also backstage that night was a young music journalist named Garry Sharpe-Young. He was there ostensibly to interview Lars but ended up also talking to Cliff while waiting for Lars to show up. ‘We talked about bands back in the US, mainly because I was trying to save my real questions for Lars,’ Sharpe-Young later recalled. ‘Cliff found it funny that every backstage area in the British venues was painted in prison colours.’ The conversation also wandered onto the morbid topic of what Metallica would do if one of its band members died or was killed. ‘We were actually talking about Led Zeppelin and John Bonham,’ the latter’s death five years before having been the final nail in the coffin for the already ailing band. ‘What we were actually discussing was the hypothesis of Lars meeting his maker,’ Sharpe-Young continued. ‘Cliff said they would have a big drunken party in his honour, and then get in a new drummer. Fast…’
The following night, a Sunday, was the last date of the UK leg of the tour: their first headline appearance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. As with the Lyceum two years before, all the metal press showed up, their ranks now swelled by various members of the mainstream music press; even some radio and TV people. This, however, as Gem Howard says, ‘was still very much a word-of-mouth thing. If you knew who Metallica and Anthrax were it was probably the biggest gig anywhere in the country that month. But there were still plenty of people that had never heard of them.’ He adds with a smile, ‘Of course, that would change quite soon.’ He also remarks on ‘how far the band had obviously come since they’d last played here. I always say one gig is worth ten rehearsals, and by then they really had it all going on. Touring with Ozzy that summer had turned them into a really slick live machine.’
Before the show, James and Lars actually went next door to the Duke of Cornwall pub for a couple of beers. Among the surprised throng of faces joining them was Kerrang! designer and DJ Steve ‘Krusher’ Joule. ‘For some reason Lars thought I was Bon Scott,’ laughs Krusher now. ‘Or at least the ghost of Bon Scott, though I can’t say anyone else has ever mistaken me for him. The place was full of Metallica fans of course but everybody was being fairly cool about it. James was pretty quiet but Lars was larging it, never stopped talking the whole time. Then I remember walking back into the gig with them. No security in those days, they were just in a world of their own.’
Outside the venue, Gem recalls giving his last pair of press tickets away: ‘Whenever you had a sell-out show like the Hammersmith Odeon I would stay out front, handing out the press tickets to the various journalists and other guests. By the time the band came on, though, that was it, finished. But of course there’s always a couple of people that don’t turn up, and I hated being left with tickets in my hand that were going to waste. So after the band came on I saw these girls outside absolutely sobbing. They were about fourteen and when I asked what was wrong they said they didn’t have tickets and couldn’t afford to buy any off the touts because they were asking their usual silly prices. So I said, never mind, there you go, and gave them my last two tickets. At which point I remember getting knocked to the ground as they smothered me in kisses! Then they ran off into the hall. It was a lovely moment.’
After the show, the band spent over an hour sitting at trestle tables set up in a backstage corridor signing autographs and talking to the fans. Then Lars took it upon himself to invite the band’s various guests back to Peter Mensch’s house in Warwick Avenue, where he was spending the night. Says Krusher Joule, ‘I remember being thrown into a car with Lars and possibly James, and being driven to this very plush place somewhere near Holland Park, I think, which was Mensch’s house, where I met his wife Sue, who was absolutely stunning. It was quite an amazing place, gold records all over the walls and in one of those streets where there are policemen posted at each end of the street.’ Malcolm Dome, who was also there, recalls the party at Mensch’s ‘only going on for a couple of hours’, then James, Kirk and Cliff went back to the Columbia Hotel, where the last few stragglers joined them and the partying went on till nearly dawn.
Fortunately, they had the next couple of days off – enough time to recover from their hangovers, had they actually stopped drinking long enough to get hangovers. These were party times, though, and apart from Cliff – who preferred weed to wine – James and Lars, in particular, were intent on enjoying themselves. They had barely slept when the band boarded the tour bus on Tuesday morning, for the drive, via cross-Channel ferry, to Sweden, ready to begin the European leg of the tour. Master of Puppets had sold more than 45,000 copies in Sweden alone – huge numbers for such a modest record-buying territory – and their first date, on 24 September, was to be at the prestigious Olympus arena in Lund. James was hoping to be able to strap on his white Gibson Explorer again but his wrist, now out of plaster but still hurting, felt weak. Nevertheless, he tried it out at the second date of the tour in Oslo and felt encouraged enough to tell John Marshall he wouldn’t be needed onstage to play any more. The following night at the Solnahallen in Stockholm, James wore his guitar from the start, playing superbly, the band back to their classic four-man shape for the first time since the accident three months before. Surging with renewed confidence, the band outdid itself, Cliff in particular hitting new heights as he added a typically bizarre yet weirdly affecting version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ to his usual bass solo showcase, both the crowd and the rest of the band agape as he headbanged around the stage, his right arm windmilling. Previously he had been complaining again of back pain, brought on by his uninhibited playing style, but you’d never have known it from his performance.
There was no hotel that night. The next show was in Copenhagen, another home from home for Metallica, especially Lars, and they looked forward to some off-time after the show there. Instead, they all piled onto the tour bus straight after signing autographs at the Solnahallen, still sweating, white towels around their necks to keep them warm. It was no longer summer in Scandinavia and although the days were still light the nights were already getting cold and dark. It would be a long journey and the drivers were in a hurry to get the little convoy going: two tour buses, the lead bus housing the band, Bobby the tour manager, and the backline crew; the second bus the crew; the third the equipment truck. The trip involved several minor roads through hilly countryside. The band bus was the first to leave, most of its occupants electing to watch a video, drinking and smoking until the buzz from the gig finally wore off. There was a half-hour break at a roadside truck stop in Odeshog but by 2 a.m. most of the band was asleep in their bunks.
The bus was cramped, uncomfortable, a conventional English coach owned by Len Wright Travel, converted into a sleeper, its back seats removed and replaced with eight plywood bunks upon which were placed thin black foam mattresses. ‘We had a really bad bus,’ Kirk later recalled. Some bunks were more comfortable than others. John Marshall, in particular, had trouble fitting his tired six-foot seven-inch frame into one of them. Kirk and Cliff cut cards to see who got a more comfortable window-side bunk, Cliff winning by drawing the ace of spades. He and James were the last to hit the sack, though, James knocking back the vodka, Cliff smoking spliff. Their bunks were at the back, next to each other. They had both nodded off, the whole bus silent, when it first began to leave the road.
What happened next has long been shrouded in a degree of uncertainty and, it must be admitted, some of it remains so, not least the identity of the bus driver. Nobody I spoke to who was on the bus, including tour manager Bobby Schneider, seems to recall the driver’s name – or if they do they are not telling for reasons it is difficult to ascertain. Nearly a quarter of a century on, nobody from the Swedish police or local press seem to have a record – or at least one they are prepared to divulge – of the driver’s name, either. What is known, though, is that travelling south between junctions 82 and 83 of the E4 highway, they were about two miles north of Ljungby when it happened; the startled driver desperately trying to pull the bus back onto the two-lane highway, its tyres already chattering as the bus began to skid. The bus then toppled over onto its side.
The first James Hetfield knew of it was being wakened by hot coffee pouring over him from the upturned coffee machine. It was the yells and screams that snapped Kirk Hammett out of his sleep; the sharp pain in his back as his large huddled body was bundled out of his cramped bunk that alerted John Marshall. Lars Ulrich’s body reacted before his mind did, sheer adrenalin propelling him through the nearest opening, the pain of a broken toe not even registering until he had stopped running down the road and begun limping back.
John Marshall was next to scramble free from the overturned bus, sitting on the grass verge, shivering in his underwear. On the bus he’d heard a noise that sounded like running water and was terrified it had fallen into a creek: ‘But the noise was only that of the motor still running.’ The driver was already out there, too, running around in the road, yelling and shouting, hysterically. He was the first person James saw as he jumped free from the rear escape hatch, ‘freaking…frantic’. The second person he saw was Cliff; his skinny white legs poking out from under the bus. James couldn’t take in what he was seeing, the full horror of the scene yet to unfold in his mind. In the crash, Cliff had been thrown against the window, which shattered, leaving him half in, half out of the bus as it collapsed onto its side, coming to rest on his head and upper body. James ran over, tried pulling Cliff free. No use. Cliff wasn’t moving. That’s when it began to sink in. Talking about in Rolling Stone seven years later the shock was still palpable: ‘I saw him dead. It was really, really terrible.’ When the bus driver then tried yanking out the blanket still tangled round Cliff’s body, to give to one of the others shivering by the frozen roadside, James went insane, screaming, ‘Don’t fucking do that!’ He ‘already wanted to kill the guy’, he said. Kirk, one eye blackened, sobbing, also began yelling at the driver. ‘What did you do? What did you do?’ Suddenly everybody was talking and yelling at once. James recalls the driver saying the bus had hit black ice, then ‘walking for miles’ in his underwear and socks, searching for the black ice. The sun wasn’t up yet but it was no longer dark and visibility was good. But there was no black ice. At which point, ‘I wanted to kill this guy. I was gonna end him, there.’ Meanwhile, his guitar roadie Aidan Mullen and Lars’ drum tech Flemming Larsen were still trapped on the overturned bus, buried beneath the rubble of the flimsy broken bunks, with Bobby Schneider, who’d broken his collar bone but didn’t know it yet, frantically trying to free them. ‘Aidan had a blanket over his face and was in shock, and was freaking out,’ says Bobby. ‘And I remember calming him down and pulling the blanket off and he finally made his way out.’ Flemming was less fortunate. It would take the rescue crew nearly three hours to free him.
When the Swedish police eventually arrived on the scene, they arrested the driver as a matter of course – normal procedure in cases like this. By now the scene had quietened down as the first of seven ambulances arrived and the walking wounded were able to receive treatment. Mostly, it was cuts and bruises. The real wounds were all underneath, out of sight, for now anyway. Everyone was sitting around, freezing, in their underwear. John Marshall was given a pair of Lars’ trousers, ‘but of course they only came halfway down my legs’.
The second bus carrying the rest of the crew arrived on the scene just as the crane arrived to haul the bus back onto its wheels. Mick Hughes watched with horror as the crane ‘put a big chain around the bus’ and began slowly hoisting it upright again. ‘I don’t know if Cliff was dead at this point or not because the bus actually slipped back. They lifted it to pull him out and it slipped back and landed again on the floor.’ If Cliff hadn’t been dead before, he was now. His body was eventually disentangled from beneath the bus and stretchered to a waiting ambulance, at which point a thorough forensic examination of the scene began, searching for any evidence that might explain what had happened. James later claimed he’d smelled alcohol on the driver’s breath; an accusation that was never proved. Others wondered, not unreasonably, if, as John Marshall tactfully puts it, ‘maybe the driver was tired’? There were other mitigating factors. It was a British bus built for left-side driving, i.e. with a right-hand steering wheel. Denmark and Sweden were both right-side driving, which would make a left-hand bend at night hard to see, especially in the absolute darkness of the countryside, or if not paying adequate attention, exactly the kind of thing that falling asleep at the wheel – or even momentarily losing concentration – would make especially dangerous. Drifting off for a few seconds while going in a straight line might be survivable, but it would be fatal on a sudden bend. The driver, who was also British but who has never been named, had been driving for around six hours at that point.
Apart from the police and emergency services, the only other people to arrive on the scene that morning were – miraculously – a doctor, who happened to be passing in her car and stopped to administer first aid, and a forty-one-year-old photographer named Lennart Wennberg, then working for the Swedish newspaper Expressen. The bus had already been hoisted back up by the time Wennberg arrived. ‘I was at the scene of the accident for maybe half an hour,’ he told Joel McIver. ‘I took about twenty pictures. I can’t recall speaking to anyone. The police didn’t mind me taking pictures, but there was someone in the band’s entourage who felt I should stop taking pictures.’
Had he noticed any ice on the road?
‘It was said that this may have been a cause of the accident. Personally, I consider that out of the question. The road was dry. I believe the temperature had probably been around zero degrees Celsius during the night, but slippery? No.’ At the police station in central Ljungby, the driver, who Wennberg describes as ‘around fifty, well built, normal height’, was grilled for several hours by police investigators but later released without charge. Wennberg also took pictures of the band when they arrived by police car from the hospital and entered the Hotel Terraza in Ljungby. He recalled: ‘The manager came down to me and the Expressen reporter in the hotel lounge to do an interview. But after a few minutes he got a phone call and never came back.’
Bobby Schneider had already given the reporter his version of events at the hospital. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating. ‘We were asleep when the crash happened…when I managed to get out of the bus I saw Cliff lying there in the grass. He must have died immediately, because he went right through the window. It all went so quickly that he couldn’t have felt anything, and that’s a kind of comfort.’ He added, ‘None of the guys in the band is able to play now. We just want to get back home as quickly as possible and make sure that Cliff gets a decent funeral.’ John Marshall, lying in a bed next to Bobby in the Emergency Room, was equally dazed, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. ‘I remember Bobby lying next to me as they were taking blood pressure and stuff, and saying, “Cliff’s gone, you know?” All of a sudden, the reality of everything hit me. Right then, I looked above, at the ceiling, and thanked whoever was up there that nobody else had been seriously hurt, and that it hadn’t turned out even worse than it was.’ James Hetfield wasn’t about to say thank you for anything. When Bobby began rounding everybody up after they’d been patched up by the doctors, saying: ‘Okay, let’s get the band together and take them back to the hotel,’ all James could think was: ‘The band? No way! There ain’t no band. The band is not “the band” right now. It’s just three guys.’ For once, Lars had nothing to say. He just couldn’t take in what was happening. ‘I remember being at the hospital and a doctor coming into the room that I was staying in, telling us that [Cliff] had died. We couldn’t grasp it; it was too hard, too unreal…’
By now both Peter Mensch and the Danish promoter for the Copenhagen show, Erik Thomsen, had also arrived at Hotel Terraza. Bobby Schneider was arranging for the whole party to travel to Copenhagen the next day, the nearest major city with an international airport, while he stayed on an extra day. ‘Something about staying and dealing with the body or something like that,’ he says now, sifting through the confusing memories of that day. ‘And I also remember I stayed on in Copenhagen another day to make sure that that happened.’ Meanwhile, Metallica had their first Saturday night without Cliff to get through.
