Enter Night, page 29
James and Lars shared a room, as usual. Kirk, who would normally have shared with Cliff, stayed in a room with John Marshall. John recalls they were both so shaken they slept with the light on that night. That is, when they could manage to get to sleep. Most of the band and crew had gotten drunk in an effort to combat the shock and dull the rising pain. Bobby recalls getting back to the hotel late that night and ‘there being some damage issues and some other stuff. The guys drinking and just, you know, picking it out and trying to make sense of it.’ No matter how much they drank, though, none could find sleep. Far from numbing his feelings, James simply fell to pieces, grief-stricken one moment, full of inconsolable rage the next. At four in the morning, the others could hear James drunk in the street outside, screaming: ‘Cliff! Cliff! Where are you?’ Kirk couldn’t bear it any more and began crying again.
The local Ljungby newspaper, Smalanningen, reported the crash in its Monday edition, saying: ‘The driver thought that an ice spot was the reason why the bus slid off the road. But there were no ice spots on the road. “For that reason the investigation continues,” said detective inspector Arne Pettersson in Ljungby.’ The report went on: ‘The driver has denied that he fell asleep while driving. “The accident’s course of events and the tracks at the accident location are exactly like the pattern of asleep-at-the-wheel accidents,” said the police.’ However, ‘The driver said under oath that he had slept during the day and was thoroughly rested. This was confirmed by the driver of the other bus.’
The next day, Smalanningen ran a follow-up story, reporting 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.’ It added that the driver was ‘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…’ A further report the following day said the driver was now staying at a local hotel while a technical investigation of the bus took place. The following Monday, 6 October, the paper announced that, ‘There were no technical faults on the bus of the American rock group Metallica. This was established by the National Road Safety Office in a quick investigation.’ A week later it reported that the public prosecutor had lifted the travel restrictions on the bus driver, who would now be allowed to return home. Initially there had been talk of charging him with manslaughter. In fact, within months he was rumoured to be back working, driving bands all over Europe, in buses just like the one Metallica had crashed in. Others said he had changed his name. Whatever the truth, the police investigation into Cliff Burton’s death, although technically still not closed, was effectively over. To this day there has never been an official explanation of why the bus left the road just before dawn that Saturday morning.
Speaking now, Bobby Schneider refuses to lay the blame specifically at anyone’s door: ‘Well…look, you know, if there’s anyone to blame, I guess…it was the driver who was driving the bus. But…people get in accidents. Unfortunately, many of the laws have changed now as to how they build buses…unfortunately it was the perfect storm…what happens when the bus spins like that is that it creates centrifugal force. So it just happened that just where Cliff was sleeping was just at the apex of that. And there was a window right next to him. There was nothing between him and the window of that bus and he went out the window.’ Bobby says that ‘we were told that he was dead before he hit the ground’. But adds: ‘I’m not proposing that that was the case. I think that had it been a purpose-built bus like they are now that he would have been in the accident like everybody else. But that was the way things were done. It was fairly standard. They don’t do that any more and they haven’t done that since then.’ These days there would be some form of protective barrier over the windows, he says.
Bobby adds that he never saw any black ice, and notes that it hadn’t been snowing. So was it down to the driver then? He pauses. ‘The driver could have been going too fast. I don’t really recall…Like I said, there’s accidents that happen. We didn’t have any problems with the driver up until then. It’s not like he was reprimanded for driving incorrectly, or he was drinking, or we had any issues to speak of. If I remember right we had only been on the bus a couple of runs. We left London and we drove to Sweden…did a show in Sweden, and we were on our way to Copenhagen…’ The rest of the band, though, will never be wholly convinced it wasn’t because the driver lost control, for whatever reason. He was the only one supposedly awake at the time. The wheel was his. The responsibility was his. And so it remains. As James said, ‘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.’
With the remainder of the tour cancelled, forty-eight hours after the crash the band and crew were on their way home. Lars briefly joined Mensch at his house in London. The American members of the team were met at JFK Airport in New York by Cliff Burnstein, with James and Kirk taking a connecting flight on to San Francisco. Cliff’s body remained behind in Sweden, where an autopsy would have to be carried out first before the body could be shipped back to America. It took several days, in fact, for all the correct paperwork to go through, which only added to the agony. The official medical examiner, Dr Anders Ottoson, eventually gave the cause of death as ‘compression thoracis cum contusio pulm’: fatal chest compression with lung damage. Cliff’s passport, number, E 159240, was also cancelled and mailed to his stricken parents. It wasn’t until everyone got home that the full force of the tragedy began to really kick in. Big Mick summed up a lot of the band and crew’s feelings when he later observed: ‘You always feel protected on tour; nothing bad can happen like this, it’s not allowed, you know what I mean? This is rock ’n’ roll, man, nobody dies. But they do, and it had happened, and it was hard to grasp.’
Anthrax were already in Copenhagen getting ready for that night’s show when they received word of what had happened. ‘From the first day that I met him to the last one we spent together in Stockholm, Cliff Burton never changed,’ said Scott Ian, speaking less than twenty-four hours later. ‘Even with Metallica’s growing success he remained the same really nice guy I first got to know and like. His mode of dress and his manner never altered and we’re all gonna miss him terribly.’ Also looking forward to the show in Copenhagen that night had been Flemming Rasmussen. ‘I was so proud of the success of Master of Puppets and this would have been the first time I’d seen them play since we’d recorded it,’ he recalls. ‘I was woken up at six in the morning by my mum who said that the bus had crashed. She’d heard it on the radio. I couldn’t believe it! That it happened also on the way to Copenhagen, it was so weird.’
The news travelled fast. But not quite fast enough in those pre-cell phone and email days for Cliff’s girlfriend back in San Francisco, Corinne Lynn. As she told Joel McIver: ‘On the Friday night R.E.M. was playing in Berkeley. Cliff loved that band. He always listened to them and he was jealous that I got to go. So he said, “Call me after the show so I know what it’s like.” I was so excited to see them. They were playing at the Greek Theater, but there was all this lightning and rain and Michael Stipe came out onstage and said, “I’m sorry but they’re not gonna let us play because they’re afraid we might die tonight.” I remembered that quote later.’ Instead, Corinne went for drinks with a friend. Then at ‘about midnight or one in the morning’ tried calling the hotel in Copenhagen where Cliff should have been staying. ‘The lady kept saying no, they hadn’t checked in yet. I was like, “That’s weird.”’ She thought maybe Cliff had checked in under the pseudonym he now used occasionally, Samuel Burns, but again no dice. ‘Bobby Schneider always checked in under his own name, and he wasn’t there either. I thought, this is so weird – and then I couldn’t sleep. I would call every hour: “No, they haven’t checked in.” I was thinking, “What the fuck?” But I eventually went to bed.’
Eight hours ahead, it wasn’t until the following morning that news of Cliff’s death reached California. Still Corinne heard nothing. She had spent the morning at a friend’s house and with no cell to find her it wasn’t until that evening she finally got the message when her housemate, Martin Clemson, also returned home. ‘Martin says, “I need to talk to you.” I go, “What? What is it?” and he says, “Cliff’s dead.” I said, “No, he’s not! What are you talking about?” He said, “There’s been an accident…”’ Corinne immediately phoned Cliff’s parents, who confirmed the news. ‘I went up first thing the next morning. I don’t think I left for maybe two weeks, except to maybe go home and get more clothes.’
Gary Holt says he was ‘moving a twenty-five-gallon fish tank’ when he heard Cliff had died. He was in the process of moving it out of his parents’ house and into his own apartment. ‘It was pretty shocking news, to say the least. You don’t think about that shit happening on tour. Usually when you hear about a musician dying, it’s at his own hand – you know, drugs overdose, chokes on his vomit, shit that would have been old hat to hear. But dying in a bus crash? That was the first I’d ever heard of that, you know?’ Joey Vera was also at home when he received the phone call. ‘I was just completely stunned and devastated, shocked and saddened. Just complete disbelief, ’cos we had just done some shows with them on the Master of Puppets tour. You get that sense of “This can’t be right, I just saw Cliff six or eight weeks ago…” You just don’t get those calls when you’re younger and that’s part of the shock. One minute he’s there and one minute he’s not and you can’t put two and two together. It must have been just god-awful for the band. I can’t imagine what they all went through. I just can’t imagine seeing that, going through it.’
One of Cliff’s closest friends, Jim Martin, then touring in rising stars Faith No More, recalled Cliff’s mother Jan phoning him with the news: ‘I was home at the time, in between tours. My heart sank.’ Cliff, he said, ‘was part of the think-tank’. Jim was due back on the road the next day but ‘travelled home in between tour dates to attend his funeral. It was a pretty rough time, especially for his folks.’ Another old friend, Dave Mustaine – estranged by circumstances, but recently reacquainted when Cliff had attended a Megadeth show in San Francisco, just before leaving for Europe – was devastated first by the news, then by the fact that none of the band had thought to let him know personally. It had been Maria Ferraro, then working for Jonny Z’s Megaforce label, who had called him with the news: ‘No one else from Metallica or their management did. I went straight to the dope man, got some shit and started singing and crying and writing this song. Although the lyrics have nothing to do with [Cliff], his untimely passing gave me this melody that lives in the hearts of metal-heads around the world.’ The song was ‘In My Darkest Hour’. It would form the centrepiece, and longest track, on the next Megadeth album, So Far, So Good…So What!
As chance would have it, Jonny and Marsha Z were in San Francisco when they heard the news. They were there to check out a new thrash metal band called the New Order, soon to change their name to Testament, whose first Metallica-influenced album, The Legacy, would be released on Megaforce the following year. ‘We were in our hotel, pretty excited about finding this new band,’ Jonny says now. ‘It was about three in the morning when the phone rang. It was Anthrax’s tour manager Tony Ingenere. I was like, “What’s wrong? Why are you calling us in the middle of the night?” He was like, “Cliff Burton is dead. There’s been a terrible accident.”’ Unable to get back to sleep, Jonny and Marsha went for a long walk down towards the Bay, consoling each other.
Looking back now, Marsha says she is grateful she had the chance to spend a bit of time with Cliff in England just before he died: ‘Not knowing that would be our goodbye, it was such a lovely afternoon we spent together that I felt somehow comforted by it when he did go.’ That had been in London, the day after the Hammersmith Odeon show with Anthrax. ‘It was a day off and so we all had gone out to Carnaby Street. He had a [skull] ring that he had being made at [the specialist jewellery store] The Great Frog. So we went over there and he picked up his ring and we just went out and had lunch and sat and just caught up. He was always respectful, I think, of what Jonny and I had taken from our lives to give them that time. We just sat and reminisced about the old days when they lived in the house and the things that had been done and then of course we parted ways and Jon and I got on a plane and came back to the States.’ The memory of receiving the dreadful early-hours phone call from Tony Ingenere still makes her shudder: ‘That was just devastating beyond our wildest dreams that [Cliff] of all of them – that warm, settled soul – should be the one who lost his life in that episode.’
There was a special Cliff Burton Tribute section in the following week’s issue of Kerrang!, in which several condolence messages were also placed, including one from Music for Nations, a single white page with Cliff’s name and date of birth and death inscribed on it and, most strikingly, a black double-page spread from Jonny and Marsha that read simply: ‘The Ultimate Musician, The Ultimate Headbanger, The Ultimate Loss, A Friend Forever’. There were also some touchingly light-hearted contributions, notably one from Anthrax: ‘Bell-Bottoms Rule!! Laugh it up, We Miss You’.
Gem Howard remembers: ‘I had a late holiday that year. I’d been gearing up for the UK dates then when they were over I left the following Saturday for a few days in Cornwall, thinking: they’re off to Europe now; they won’t need me again this tour. Then on the Wednesday morning I bought a copy of Sounds and it was on the front page. I got a hell of a shock. Then I called the office and that’s when I heard what had happened. It was the first Metallica European tour I hadn’t been the tour manager on and, yes, I could have been on that bus with them. But I don’t do any of that “if only I’d been there it might have been different” stuff, because I don’t believe in it. It was an accident, accidents happen. It was just one of those things. I do remember going straight to the pub, though, and drowning my sorrows. Cliff was such a huge part of who Metallica were as a band, it seemed inconceivable he had gone. It wasn’t just about his bass-playing. I sat there thinking of the times Cliff would be in the front seat of the van while I was driving, he’d be pounding away on the dashboard one moment listening to The Misfits, the next minute he’d be playing “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel, the whole band singing along.’
There was a memorial service back in San Francisco during the first week of October, at which ‘Orion’ was played. His funeral was held on Tuesday 7 October, at Chapel of the Valley in Castro Valley, where he had lived with his folks most of his life. As well as Cliff’s immediate family, his girlfriend Corinne and best pals Jim Martin and David Di Donato were there, along with the rest of Metallica, plus Bobby Schneider and key members of the American crew, and Peter Mensch, who had flown in especially. Other mourners included all of Exodus, Trauma, Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin, and others who knew Cliff well. After Cliff’s coffin had been cremated his ashes were taken and spread at the Maxwell Ranch, a place that had held many fond memories for Cliff and his friends. As Di Donato later recalled, ‘We stood in a large circle with Cliff’s ashes in the centre. Each of us walked into the centre and took a handful of him and said what we had to say. Then he was cast onto the Earth, in a place he loved very much.’ Recalls Gary Holt: ‘It was a sombre affair, to say the least. But then you gather up at someone’s house after and you get drunk and share a laugh, you know?’
Although he was cremated, there was a commemorative headstone, engraved on it the words: IN LOVING MEMORY. Then below that a head-and-shoulders picture of Cliff taken not long before he died. Underneath: CANNOT THE KINGDOM OF SALVATION TAKE ME HOME, then at the bottom, finally:
CLIFF BURTON
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
BEAUTIFUL MUSIC
FEBRUARY 10, 1962
SEPTEMBER 27, 1986
Although they didn’t know it then, the aftershocks of Cliff Burton’s death would continue to reverberate around Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett for the rest of their own lives. As Kirk Hammett told me in 2009, ‘When I first joined the band there was a huge infusion of new energy and up until Cliff died we were just so psyched about everything and life in general, but that kind of ended when Cliff left.’ He paused, then added, ‘I still think about him every day. Something he said, something he did, just…something.’ It was one of those things that could never be put right, said Kirk – a sentiment Lars also expressed just a few weeks after Cliff’s funeral when he said, ‘I wasn’t too angry in the beginning. I was obviously grieving, but the anger started setting in when I realised that it’s not new that people in rock ’n’ roll die, but usually it’s self-inflicted in terms of excessive drink or drug abuse. He had nothing to do with it. It’s so useless. Completely useless…’
The question was where did Metallica go from here? Says Joey Vera, echoing the thoughts of many back then: ‘I thought it would be the end of the band. Then you think, well, what will they do?’ Lars and James already knew, and had instructed Peter Mensch accordingly, who called a meeting with Bobby Schneider and other key crew members within hours of the funeral. As Cliff had told Harald O just a few days before Metallica set out on their first arena tour with Ozzy Osbourne, six months before, when asked what advice he might have to pass on to any aspiring young musicians, Cliff had shrugged and said, ‘When I first started, I decided that I would devote my life to it.’ Devotion, he said, was the key, although he was sensitive enough to add the following caveat: ‘I imagine there’s a lot of people that devote their lives to it and don’t achieve the success they want. I mean, there’s many factors involved here, but that would be the main one: to absolutely devote yourself to that, to virtually marry yourself to that – what you’re going to do – and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit that life has to offer.’
