Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [128]
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