Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (30 page)

‘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 the 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

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.

‘I think about Cliff all the time,’ says Ulrich. ‘It’s not something that goes away, and it’s not something that I want to go away. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t look at a glass and see it as being half-empty or half-full, I see it as being overflowing. So when I think of Cliff, I think of the three albums we were able to make together, and the friend I was able to have in him. You could hear his influence on the band in songs like “Orion”, and I suppose there is always the question of how that influence would have continued had we been able to make more music together, but I suppose that’s something we’ll never be sure of.’

A largely unheard response to the question ‘What would Cliff do?’, however, is, ‘Conspire with James Hetfield to remove Lars Ulrich from Metallica’s ranks.’ In the years since the bass player’s death, it has become something of a badge of honour for those associated with Metallica at the time to have been privy to the rumour that the group’s Danish member was keeping a beat to borrowed time. The whisperers have it that Hetfield and Burton were tired of playing with the drummer, and that it was believed by both men that their colleague’s uneven technical abilities were holding back their band. Offstage this still smouldering rumour asserts that front man and bass player had grown weary of their drummer’s relentless energies with regard to the business aspects of Metallica’s operation and had come to view their colleague’s drive for matters other than the music itself as being characteristic of a calculating and career-minded rock star. As the story goes, such was the tinnitus-like insistence of the Dane’s shtick that it had been decided that following the conclusion of the group’s bookings for 1986 – the final date of which was originally scheduled to take place at Selina’s in Sydney on November 27 –
Ulrich’s position as a member of Metallica would be terminated.

Reviewed today such a plan seems fanciful, and for reasons that go beyond the simple truth that Ulrich owns the legal rights to the very name ‘Metallica’. It may have been that prior to Burton’s death both the bassist and Hetfield – and to an unspecified degree, presumably Hammett as well – were foolhardy enough to believe that the attentions of their audience could be attracted to a similar-sounding group with a different name, but had this folly been realised the musicians would quickly have had cause to consider their absent drummer with fondness. Ulrich had taken charge of Metallica’s offstage operation to such a formidable degree not only because his temperament and outlook were suited to this role, but also because his band mates had allowed him to do so; in many cases Ulrich’s partners could not be bothered to sully their hands with matters more routine than the writing, playing and recording of music. Such was the level of Hetfield’s inattentiveness to such exterior details that the front man would often fall asleep during business meetings; this it was safe to do because elsewhere in the room sat another man possessed of such attention to detail that it is difficult to imagine him falling asleep at any point in his life.