Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [132]
Bobby adds that he never saw any black ice, and notes that it hadn’t been snowing. So was it down to the driver then? He pauses. ‘The driver could have been going too fast. I don’t really recall…Like I said, there’s accidents that happen. We didn’t have any problems with the driver up until then. It’s not like he was reprimanded for driving incorrectly, or he was drinking, or we had any issues to speak of. If I remember right we had only been on the bus a couple of runs. We left London and we drove to Sweden…did a show in Sweden, and we were on our way to Copenhagen…’ The rest of the band, though, will never be wholly convinced it wasn’t because the driver lost control, for whatever reason. He was the only one supposedly awake at the time. The wheel was his. The responsibility was his. And so it remains. As James said, ‘I don’t know if he was drunk or if he hit some ice. All I knew was, he was driving and Cliff wasn’t alive any more.’
With the remainder of the tour cancelled, forty-eight hours after the crash the band and crew were on their way home. Lars briefly joined Mensch at his house in London. The American members of the team were met at JFK Airport in New York by Cliff Burnstein, with James and Kirk taking a connecting flight on to San Francisco. Cliff’s body remained behind in Sweden, where an autopsy would have to be carried out first before the body could be shipped back to America. It took several days, in fact, for all the correct paperwork to go through, which only added to the agony. The official medical examiner, Dr Anders Ottoson, eventually gave the cause of death as ‘compression thoracis cum contusio pulm’: fatal chest compression with lung damage. Cliff’s passport, number, E 159240, was also cancelled and mailed to his stricken parents. It wasn’t until everyone got home that the full force of the tragedy began to really kick in. Big Mick summed up a lot of the band and crew’s feelings when he later observed: ‘You always feel protected on tour; nothing bad can happen like this, it’s not allowed, you know what I mean? This is rock ’n’ roll, man, nobody dies. But they do, and it had happened, and it was hard to grasp.’
Anthrax were already in Copenhagen getting ready for that night’s show when they received word of what had happened. ‘From the first day that I met him to the last one we spent together in Stockholm, Cliff Burton never changed,’ said Scott Ian, speaking less than twenty-four hours later. ‘Even with Metallica’s growing success he remained the same really nice guy I first got to know and like. His mode of dress and his manner never altered and we’re all gonna miss him terribly.’ Also looking forward to the show in Copenhagen that night had been Flemming Rasmussen. ‘I was so proud of the success of Master of Puppets and this would have been the first time I’d seen them play since we’d recorded it,’ he recalls. ‘I was woken up at six in the morning by my mum who said that the bus had crashed. She’d heard it on the radio. I couldn’t believe it! That it happened also on the way to Copenhagen, it was so weird.’
The news travelled fast. But not quite fast enough in those pre-cell phone and email days for Cliff’s girlfriend back in San Francisco, Corinne Lynn. As she told Joel McIver: ‘On the Friday night R.E.M. was playing in Berkeley. Cliff loved that band. He always listened to them and he was jealous that I got to go. So he said, “Call me after the show so I know what it’s like.” I was so excited to see them. They were playing at the Greek Theater, but there was all this lightning and rain and Michael Stipe came out onstage and said, “I’m sorry but they’re not gonna let us play because they’re afraid we might die tonight.