Metallica: Enter Night (11 page)

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.’

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.”’