Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [133]
Eight hours ahead, it wasn’t until the following morning that news of Cliff’s death reached California. Still Corinne heard nothing. She had spent the morning at a friend’s house and with no cell to find her it wasn’t until that evening she finally got the message when her housemate, Martin Clemson, also returned home. ‘Martin says, “I need to talk to you.” I go, “What? What is it?” and he says, “Cliff’s dead.” I said, “No, he’s not! What are you talking about?” He said, “There’s been an accident…”’ Corinne immediately phoned Cliff’s parents, who confirmed the news. ‘I went up first thing the next morning. I don’t think I left for maybe two weeks, except to maybe go home and get more clothes.’
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