Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [129]
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’.
The second bus carrying the rest of the crew arrived on the scene just as the crane arrived to haul the bus back onto its wheels. Mick Hughes watched with horror as the crane ‘put a big chain around the bus’ and began slowly hoisting it upright again. ‘I don’t know if Cliff was dead at this point or not because the bus actually slipped back. They lifted it to pull him out and it slipped back and landed again on the floor.’ If Cliff hadn’t been dead before, he was now. His body was eventually disentangled from beneath the bus and stretchered to a waiting ambulance, at which point a thorough forensic examination of the scene began, searching for any evidence that might explain what had happened. James later claimed he’d smelled alcohol on the driver’s breath; an accusation that was never proved. Others wondered, not unreasonably, if, as John Marshall tactfully puts it, ‘maybe the driver was tired’? There were other mitigating factors. It was a British bus built for left-side driving, i.e. with a right-hand steering wheel. Denmark and Sweden were both right-side driving, which would