Metallica: Enter Night (30 page)

It was the same story the following night at St George’s Hall in Bradford, and the Playhouse in Edinburgh on 12 September. Interviewed backstage before the show for
Sounds
magazine, the whole band was clearly on a roll. Even Cliff – who usually did everything he could to avoid taking part in interviews, leaving it to Lars, who revelled in it – sat down and joined in. ‘The difference between the rest of the metal field and Metallica,’ Cliff announced, ‘is the difference between punching your fist in the air rather than at a specific target.’ He was disdainful of any suggestion, however, that the band had anything deeper to impart than whatever one might read into their music. ‘Being in a band puts you in a position to make a statement,’ he mused, ‘but we’re not some kind of fucking message band.’ Pressed on his appreciation of classical music, a baffling subject to his interlocutor, Cliff explained patiently how ‘we all go through periods of listening to classical music’, which was news to James and Lars. ‘I was consumed by it,’ Cliff went on, ‘taking lessons, getting into theory or whatever. It leaves quite an influence. A lot of music will go in one ear and out the other, but you listen to that shit for a month and it stamps you. It leaves its mark.’

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’.