Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [135]
Although he was cremated, there was a commemorative headstone, engraved on it the words: IN LOVING MEMORY. Then below that a head-and-shoulders picture of Cliff taken not long before he died. Underneath: CANNOT THE KINGDOM OF SALVATION TAKE ME HOME, then at the bottom, finally:
CLIFF BURTON
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
BEAUTIFUL MUSIC
FEBRUARY 10, 1962
SEPTEMBER 27, 1986
Although they didn’t know it then, the aftershocks of Cliff Burton’s death would continue to reverberate around Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett for the rest of their own lives. As Kirk Hammett told me in 2009, ‘When I first joined the band there was a huge infusion of new energy and up until Cliff died we were just so psyched about everything and life in general, but that kind of ended when Cliff left.’ He paused, then added, ‘I still think about him every day. Something he said, something he did, just…something.’ It was one of those things that could never be put right, said Kirk – a sentiment Lars also expressed just a few weeks after Cliff’s funeral when he said, ‘I wasn’t too angry in the beginning. I was obviously grieving, but the anger started setting in when I realised that it’s not new that people in rock ’n’ roll die, but usually it’s self-inflicted in terms of excessive drink or drug abuse. He had nothing to do with it. It’s so useless. Completely useless…’
The question was where did Metallica go from here? Says Joey Vera, echoing the thoughts of many back then: ‘I thought it would be the end of the band. Then you think, well, what will they do?’ Lars and James already knew, and had instructed Peter Mensch accordingly, who called a meeting with Bobby Schneider and other key crew members within hours of the funeral. As Cliff had told Harald O just a few days before Metallica set out on their first arena tour with Ozzy Osbourne, six months before, when asked what advice he might have to pass on to any aspiring young musicians, Cliff had shrugged and said, ‘When I first started, I decided that I would devote my life to it.’ Devotion, he said, was the key, although he was sensitive enough to add the following caveat: ‘I imagine there’s a lot of people that devote their lives to it and don’t achieve the success they want. I mean, there’s many factors involved here, but that would be the main one: to absolutely devote yourself to that, to virtually marry yourself to that – what you’re going to do – and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit that life has to offer.’
The search for Cliff’s replacement would begin the very next day.
Nine
Blackened
It was hot, late. Too much to drink; too much to smoke…We’d been at it since they’d finished playing some time in the afternoon. Now here we were back in Lars’ hotel room, some outpost by the airport in Tampa. It was a Sunday night. That is, a Monday morning, and in a few hours he would be leaving to go back to the studio to carry on mixing the new album. We were both having trouble keeping it together. Nevertheless, he was insistent.
‘No, no,’ he said, every time I suggested we call it a night, ‘one more…’
He reached over and wound the tape forward, stopped, played a bit, stopped, then wound it back, stopped, played a bit, stopped, wound it forward…eventually he found what he was looking for.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘to this…’
It tiptoed out of the speakers of his ghetto-blaster, got all angry and busy, building quickly like a funeral pyre. Then it was off and running…
I had no idea what to tell him. I mean, on one level it sounded good – fast, heavy, the usual