Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [45]
That was a quarter of a century ago now. These days Ron McGovney is a single dad living in North Carolina. He still goes to Metallica shows, though, whenever they are within reach and the guys still leave him tickets and backstage passes. The last time we spoke, in October 2009, he had just been to see them play on the Death Magnetic tour. ‘I just saw them a couple of weeks ago,’ he emailed me, ‘and they are so cool. The backstage is very businesslike, but very comfortable as well.’ The band ‘were very cool to me and my kids when we went to their shows in Atlanta and Charlotte. James even dedicated the song “Phantom Lord” to me, and Lars let my kids and me stand in the sound-mixing area next to the stage. As a cool gesture to me [current bassist] Rob [Trujillo] took off his bass on stage and was going to hand it to me to play during “Phantom Lord” and “Seek and Destroy”. Now I haven’t played those songs in twenty-seven years, and relearning them onstage in front of seventeen thousand people could be a little embarrassing!’
McGovney may have gone relatively quietly from Metallica, but persuading Cliff Burton to leave Trauma and throw in his lot with the band was harder than Lars had imagined it was going to be. At first, Burton proved seemingly impervious to the fraught overtures of this strangely accented newcomer. Uncomfortable in the sleazy neon ooze of LA, the simple fact that Metallica lived there was enough on its own for Cliff to shrug off their initial advances. Lars, though, as Cliff was about to discover, was not so easily dissuaded. For a while it looked like he might have met his match in the inscrutably attired bassist with the moth-eaten cardigans and bum-fluff moustache. The son of first-generation hippies, who had instilled in him many of the ideals that were to define his character, even as a wild-hearted youth, Cliff, as everyone who ever knew him, even only briefly, as I did, will tell you, was clearly not like the others.
Clifford Lee Burton was born 10 February 1962. His father Ray was from Tennessee, but now worked in the Bay Area as an Assistant Highway Engineer. His wife Jan was from northern California, and worked as a teacher for the Castro Valley school district, working with students with disabilities and special needs. Baby Clifford was their third and last child, younger brother to Scott David and a sister, Connie. Scott died of a brain aneurysm when Cliff was thirteen, expiring in the ambulance that was rushing him to hospital. A huge blow to the family, it had a profound effect on the teenage Cliff, reinforcing the idea that life was not to be squandered on trying too hard to make other people happy. Time was short and the day was long. Whatever you had in mind, it was best done today, not tomorrow, which really might not ever come.
Cliff only began taking music lessons seriously ‘after his brother died’, his mother Jan later recalled. He told others, ‘I’m gonna be the best bassist for my brother.’ Jan was ‘totally amazed ’cos none of the kids in our family had any musical talent’. Cliff took lessons ‘on the boulevard for about a year, and then he totally outgrew [the teacher] and went to another place for a couple of years and outgrew him, too’. His biggest tutorial influence was a school teacher named Steve Doherty, who also happened to be ‘a very good jazz bassist, a very fine musician. He was the one who made Cliff take Bach and Beethoven and baroque [music], and made him learn to read music and stuff like that.’ Cliff would eventually outgrow Doherty, too, but not before his interest in Bach was cemented. ‘He really did sit down and study and play Bach,’ said Jan. ‘He loved Bach.’
In 1987, Harald Oimoen, an old friend of Cliff’s known better to him as budding Bay Area metal photojournalist Harald O, spent an evening at their Castro Valley apartment interviewing Jan and Ray Burton – the only time the couple spoke openly on the record about their