Metallica: Enter Night (32 page)

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.’

The search for Cliff’s replacement would begin the very next day.

It was hot, late. Too much to drink; too much to smoke…We’d been at it since they’d finished playing some time in the afternoon. Now here we were back in Lars’ hotel room, some outpost by the airport in Tampa. It was a Sunday night. That is, a Monday morning, and in a few hours he would be leaving to go back to the studio to carry on mixing the new album. We were both having trouble keeping it together. Nevertheless, he was insistent.

‘No, no,’ he said, every time I suggested we call it a night, ‘one more…’

He reached over and wound the tape forward, stopped, played a bit, stopped, then wound it back, stopped, played a bit, stopped, wound it forward…eventually he found what he was looking for.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘to this…’

It tiptoed out of the speakers of his ghetto-blaster, got all angry and busy, building quickly like a funeral pyre. Then it was off and running…

I had no idea what to tell him. I mean, on one level it sounded good – fast, heavy, the usual Metallica thing – but on another level it was unlike anything I had heard from them before. For a start, the drums were weird: flat-sounding, tinny, no bounce whatsoever. I rather liked the effect but wasn’t sure if I was getting it right. Had they intended the drums to sound so…off?

‘I like the drums,’ I said loudly over the top of it. ‘No echo…’

‘Reverb,’ he yelled. ‘No reverb. None of that shit…’

I took another gulp of beer and sat there trying to take it in. On and on it went.

‘What’s this one called?’ I shouted.

No reply. I looked around, he wasn’t there. I waited for him to come back. He didn’t come back. I got up to look for him and found him sitting on the crapper, his black jeans around his ankles, the door to the bathroom wide open.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘sorry.’

‘What’s up?’ he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, taking a shit with the door open, me standing there talking to him.

‘Um, this one,’ I said, retreating, ‘what’s it called?’

‘“And Justice for All”!’ he yelled as I found my way back into the noise of the other room.

‘“And” what?’ I yelled back.

‘“Justice…for All…”’

Hmmm. Sounded…black. As in deep-down-at-the-bottom-of-the-well black. They definitely seemed to be going for something, though. A kind of anti-rock, I thought, idly.

I kept waiting for it to end, for him to finish doing his business, close the door and come back in. But it just wouldn’t.

‘Is it deliberate?’ I yelled again.

‘What?’

‘Like…anti-rock!’

He nodded, coming through the door, doing up his belt, but I knew he hadn’t heard me.

It finally finished. ‘Kind of like sort of avant-garde…jazz…thrash…’

He looked at me. ‘You’re stoned.’

‘No. Yeah. But it does sound…sort of…doesn’t it?’

‘I guess,’ he said. But I had the feeling he knew what I was on about. ‘It’s deliberate,’ he said.

Deliberate? I knew it!

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I really like it. You’ve really gone for something…different.’

‘Thanks,’ he said.

He wound it forward-backward to another track. Click, click went the drums, drone, drone went the guitars. Bottom-of-the-well shit, you know? I liked it. I really, really liked it. I really did.

I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any more…

Although it would be years before they were able to acknowledge the fact, the hasty, seemingly perfunctory way in which Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield dealt with the death of Cliff Burton would have lasting ramifications that would go far beyond the story of Metallica. The decision to simply bring in a new bass player and continue on with their plans as quickly as possible may have looked like the right one on paper, but the role Burton played in Metallica was only partly to do with playing the bass. Even with that taken care of, Cliff’s violent wrenching from the group had fatally holed the ship below the waterline. The remaining three hadn’t just lost a member. They had lost their mentor, their older soul-brother; they had lost Metallica’s best friend. The one who would never lie to them; never let them down, the only one who could save them from themselves.

As Malcolm Dome says, ‘Cliff was a great character. Had he lived he may have taken Metallica into some very interesting directions because he was the one with the open mind and he was the one the others looked up to, because he was slightly older, and more mature and commanding. In his own way, he was the leader of the band. Even though it was James and Lars’ band, it was clear they looked up to Cliff as being someone they could go to for advice. He would be the guy saying, “I don’t think we should be doing this, we should do that.” He didn’t look like he belonged in a thrash band and that was the key – he didn’t feel he had to conform.’

Instead, Lars and James – so vocal always about doing things their own way, according to their own personal feelings – now found themselves scurrying to do the right thing professionally to save their careers. In this they had the always-reliable advice of Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein at Q Prime, who counselled a swift regrouping, a smoothing over of the cracks, a united public face and the resumption of Metallica’s medium-term plans as speedily as possible. This, after all, was an absolutely crucial juncture in the band’s career, for which James and Lars had worked so hard the previous five years to get to: the very moment when they were poised to become a big-time act in their own right. Not just ‘inventors’ of thrash, more than just potent second-stringers to bigger, more commercially adept rock outfits, but an actual mainstream headliner themselves. At any other point in Metallica’s career trajectory they might have been able to afford to take the time they needed to come to terms mentally, emotionally and spiritually with the huge loss they had just suffered. But not right now. Burnstein and Mensch had been here before enough times to know just how important – and fleeting – such moments in a rock band’s career can be; how one false move could destroy the work of a lifetime. Burnstein had been one of the leading lights at Mercury Records in the late 1970s, forced to stand by impotently and watch as Thin Lizzy’s career in America fizzled out in the wake of serial tour cancellations when various members left abruptly. No one had died – too many early-morning drugs and late-night fights had been Lizzy’s downfall – although it could be argued that the slow, painful demise of singer Phil Lynott, dead barely five years after Lizzy’s last, ill-starred US tour, could be traced back to his band’s inability to make the most of their luck while it was still riding high. Mensch, meanwhile, had been key in overseeing the impossibly swift resurrection of AC/DC when their singer Bon Scott had died in 1980. Like Metallica, AC/DC had just had their first breakthrough album in America, with
Highway to Hell
. Any delay in its follow-up could have been fatal to their chances of long-term success there. Under Mensch’s tutelage, however, they achieved the seemingly impossible and almost immediately found a replacement for Scott, their first album with new singer Brian Johnson,
Back in Black
, being released within months of his arrival and subsequently becoming the biggest, multi-million-selling success of AC/DC’s career.

Sitting with Peter the night before Cliff’s funeral, James and Lars had already made up their minds about wanting to continue with Metallica. They just needed their brilliant, all-seeing manager to spell out the reasons for them, to make it all better. Mensch put it to them succinctly. It wasn’t just a case of not throwing in the towel; it was absolutely essential they understood they had not a second to spare. The cancelled European tour could be rescheduled for the new year. Mensch had already looked into that, he told them. But the Japanese tour in November – their first visit to the country, the third largest record-buying territory in the world and another important milestone on the route map to success – should not be delayed. Could they meet that deadline? Lars and James decided they could.

Professionally, it was absolutely the right thing to do, they all agreed. The human cost of this hurriedly made decision, however, would be immense, not just for the three remaining members of Metallica, but also for the poor unfortunate whose job it would be to attempt the impossible and somehow replace Cliff Burton.

‘I don’t understand how anyone who knows what Metallica is about could honestly think that we’d give up,’ Lars would tell
Sounds
journalist Paul Elliot three months later. ‘The question was not, “Are we gonna pack it in or not?” It was, “How fast can we get the whole thing back on its feet again?”’ He added, ‘We have to do it for Cliff…If he knew we were sitting around in San Francisco feeling sorry for ourselves, he’d come round and kick us in the ass and tell us to get back out on the road and continue where we left off.’ This was to become the prevailing theme, repeated like a mantra, whenever the question of how they came to the decision to carry on without Cliff Burton came up. It was, as Kirk later told me, ‘Because that’s what Cliff would have wanted.’ Uh huh…

The Japanese tour, just five weeks away, would give them a deadline to work to. Rejecting the suggestion of getting in a veteran simply to help them through the tour, they decided to go for broke and find a full-time replacement. ‘We wanted someone young, hungry, someone new and a bit unknown,’ said Lars at the time. ‘Not someone that people would associate with another band.’ Bobby Schneider recalls, ‘Everybody got completely trashed at Cliff’s funeral. And I can remember Mensch looking at me and saying, “I told you guys not to get fucked up” because we had to have this meeting afterwards. Not me and the band but Mensch and me, and I think one other.’ The plan, as outlined by Peter, says Bobby, was, ‘“Okay, the guys want to keep going, you’re gonna move to San Francisco, you’re gonna set up this rehearsal, we’re gonna start auditioning bass players. You’re gonna run the whole thing, you’re gonna look after the guys here.” So I moved out.’ Rich enough to no longer have to put up with the garage at El Cerrito, Lars and James had planned to buy their own properties at the end of tour. Now, back in San Francisco suddenly, they didn’t have anywhere to live. ‘We all got apartments down by Fisherman’s Wharf and they started the process,’ says Bobby.

They didn’t have to search hard. Every young bass player in America seemed to be dreaming suddenly of replacing the irreplaceable. The same night they’d heard about Cliff’s death, Jonny and Marsha Z had wandered down to Testament’s rehearsal space. ‘It was like every band in the Bay Area was there,’ Jonny recalls. ‘Every rehearsal space in the building was filled with bass players trying to play “Pulling Teeth”. It was kinda nuts.’

Among the personal effects returned to his family after his body had been shipped back to the USA were the two skull rings that Cliff always wore, one of which the family now gave to James. Although they had only really become close in the last year of his life, of everybody in the band, James had looked up to Cliff the most. Says Schneider, ‘I think of everybody, James was [most affected]. Because if you’re in with James and you’re part of James’ family, you’re part of James’ family for the rest of your life. James is as true blue and loyal a person as they come and I think he was very freaked out.’ He and Cliff had ‘identified with each other’, said James – not just through their shared love of southern rock and bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, but also the whole outdoorsman lifestyle both were drawn to, ‘hiking, camping, shooting guns, drinking beers…’ More importantly, James looked upon Cliff as a big brother figure, very much the wise older head. Onstage, where James had always felt most insecure as frontman, yet been forced to grow into the role in the aftermath of the sacking of Dave Mustaine, Cliff’s almost supernaturally confident demeanour had been a huge inspiration to him. Look now at some of the early live footage of their first shows and you’ll see James habitually glancing to his right, to the space on the stage dominated by Cliff’s huge presence. Seeking approval; needing validation; and getting it. It may have been Lars and James who formed Metallica, may still have been James and Lars who wrote together, but by 1986 in James’ mind Metallica had become far more about how he and Cliff saw things. They had even reached a point where they had apparently begun discussing seriously the prospect of replacing Lars as drummer.

How serious this suggestion should be taken remains a hot topic for debate among Metallica aficionados. As the years have gone by there are few left who will talk openly about it – except, of course, for Dave Mustaine, who was still talking about it 2008 when he told viewers of Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro’s
Spread TV
show, ‘James and I had planned on firing Lars so many times. And [Lars] won’t ever cop to this but he was getting canned when the guys were coming back from the European tour, before Cliff died. They planned on getting rid of him.’ It was a claim he repeated during an interview with
Rolling Stone
the following year. ‘That’s what Scott [Ian of Anthrax] told me. He said that when Metallica got home, that James, Cliff and Kirk were going to fire Lars.’ A posting on Anthrax’s Twitter feed immediately issued a denial, saying, ‘Story’s not true. Little does anyone know but Lars actually owns the name, good luck ever kicking him out.’

It’s tempting then to dismiss this as a typically provocative Mustaine aside. However, Marsha Z remains tellingly reticent to comment on the subject when I ask now how much she knew of this. She certainly doesn’t deny the story is true. Malcolm Dome is less inhibited on the subject and claims he heard about it at the time from both Ian and drummer Charlie Benante. ‘I remember after the crash Scott and Charlie were in London and we went out for drink at the pub near the
Kerrang!
office and Scott actually said, in so many words, [Cliff’s death] may have actually saved Lars’ job ’cos they were ready to fire him. He said it, absolutely said it. I think he’d been told by James or Cliff that they’d had enough of Lars. He was holding them back. I don’t think now Metallica could actually work with a really good drummer because they’ve adapted to what he doesn’t do. But at that point, with the
Master of Puppet
s era when they were really starting to move forward and change and look at different ways to present music, they could have replaced him.’