Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [131]
James and Lars shared a room, as usual. Kirk, who would normally have shared with Cliff, stayed in a room with John Marshall. John recalls they were both so shaken they slept with the light on that night. That is, when they could manage to get to sleep. Most of the band and crew had gotten drunk in an effort to combat the shock and dull the rising pain. Bobby recalls getting back to the hotel late that night and ‘there being some damage issues and some other stuff. The guys drinking and just, you know, picking it out and trying to make sense of it.’ No matter how much they drank, though, none could find sleep. Far from numbing his feelings, James simply fell to pieces, grief-stricken one moment, full of inconsolable rage the next. At four in the morning, the others could hear James drunk in the street outside, screaming: ‘Cliff! Cliff! Where are you?’ Kirk couldn’t bear it any more and began crying again.
The local Ljungby newspaper, Smalanningen, reported the crash in its Monday edition, saying: ‘The driver thought that an ice spot was the reason why the bus slid off the road. But there were no ice spots on the road. “For that reason the investigation continues,” said detective inspector Arne Pettersson in Ljungby.’ The report went on: ‘The driver has denied that he fell asleep while driving. “The accident’s course of events and the tracks at the accident location are exactly like the pattern of asleep-at-the-wheel accidents,” said the police.’ However, ‘The driver said under oath that he had slept during the day and was thoroughly rested. This was confirmed by the driver of the other bus.’
The next day, Smalanningen ran a follow-up story, reporting that ‘the driver of the tour bus is now free from arrest. He is forbidden to travel and must contact the police once a week until the investigation is over.’ It added that the driver was ‘suspected of being careless in traffic and causing another person’s death. He said that the bus drove off the way because there was ice on the road. But the technical investigation from the police said that the road was totally free from ice at the time of the accident. The driver is suspected of having fallen asleep at the steering wheel…’ A further report the following day said the driver was now staying at a local hotel while a technical investigation of the bus took place. The following Monday, 6 October, the paper announced that, ‘There were no technical faults on the bus of the American rock group Metallica. This was established by the National Road Safety Office in a quick investigation.’ A week later it reported that the public prosecutor had lifted the travel restrictions on the bus driver, who would now be allowed to return home. Initially there had been talk of charging him with manslaughter. In fact, within months he was rumoured to be back working, driving bands all over Europe, in buses just like the one Metallica had crashed in. Others said he had changed his name. Whatever the truth, the police investigation into Cliff Burton’s death, although technically still not closed, was effectively over. To this day there has never been an official explanation of why the bus left the road just before dawn that Saturday morning.
Speaking now, Bobby Schneider refuses to lay the blame specifically at anyone’s door: ‘Well…look, you know, if there’s anyone to blame, I guess…it was the driver who was driving the bus. But…people get in accidents. Unfortunately, many of the laws have changed now as to how they build buses…unfortunately it was the perfect storm…what happens when the bus spins like that is that it creates centrifugal force. So it just happened that just where Cliff was sleeping was just at the apex of that. And there was a window right next to him. There was nothing between him and the window of that bus and he went out the window.’ Bobby says that ‘we were told that he was dead before he hit the ground’. But adds: