Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [42]
The Trauma bass player’s name was Cliff Burton – the same guy who’d been to watch Metallica’s show at the Old Waldorf in October – and ‘Such a Shame’ was destined to become the only track Trauma ever released with him on it. Cliff was ‘the strangest-looking dude’ Lars had ever seen on a Hollywood stage. While the rest of Trauma sported the same image, interchangeable with any number of West Coast metal bands then strutting their stuff, Burton took to the stage in bell-bottom jeans and a denim waistcoat. His hair was hippy-long and looked like it had barely seen a comb, let alone been teased and sprayed like his bandmates’ evidently had. Most impressive of all, he really knew how to play the bass, eschewing plectrums for finger-picking, like all the best bass players in his book, from obvious influences such as Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, Rush’s Geddy Lee and Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, to less obvious but equally significant teachers such as American jazz player Stanley Clark, whose use of the electric double-headed bass Cliff was in absolute awe of, and even Lemmy, whose rumbling bass in Motörhead Cliff was in thrall to primarily for the guitar-like way Lemmy played, and the technique he utilised to bring distortion into his heavy-handed riffing. One influence Burton didn’t share with the rest of Metallica, though, was an interest in NWOBHM, not even the machine-gun bass of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, so highly regarded elsewhere. Instead, Cliff was more interested in trying to emulate certain guitar players – most especially Jimi Hendrix, although Hendrix copyist Uli Jon Roth was held in almost equal high regard, as was UFO’s Michael Schenker ‘to a degree’ and Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, who ‘also had an influence’. Like James, Cliff also liked Aerosmith ‘a lot’. As a result, unlike standard rock players, what Cliff did on the bass could be characterised, as Lars says, ‘as playing the bass like a guitar’. Using his wah-wah pedal to create strange ‘washes’ and ‘drags’, as future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett later told me, ‘for someone as great as Cliff was on bass, offstage he mainly played guitar. He had that kind of approach to what he did.’
Henning Larsen, who later became Metallica’s drum tech, was with Lars and James at the Troubadour that first night they saw Cliff play and recalls their pop-eyed reaction. ‘I could just see them go, “Oh my God! Look at that guy!” The thing that struck them most was…here you had a guy playing lead bass! They thought that was great.’ Or as James would tell me in 2009, ‘our jaws fell onto the floor, and we said we’ve got to get this guy. So there was respect because we had searched for him to get him.’ So awestruck were they, in fact, that not even the über-confident Ulrich could summon up the courage to actually talk to Cliff that first night. Instead, he and James went away and talked about it in secret, before returning to the club the following night where Trauma were playing a second show, and approached him then. James: ‘We said: “We’re in this band, we’re looking for a bass player, and we think you’d really fit in. Because you’re a big psycho.” And he knew that. It was no surprise to him. But the music made him feel like that.’ Ever practical, ‘after we’d swapped numbers I started going to work on him immediately’, said Lars.
Patrick Scott recalls being tipped off about Trauma by K.J. Doughton, who’d recently featured them in his fanzine, Northwest Metal. Managed by an expat Englishman named Tony Van Litt, it was