Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [47]
Enrolling at Chabot College, in nearby Hayward, Cliff studied classical music and theory. He hooked up again with Jim Martin, who had also joined the college, the pair forming an instrumental trio they named Agents of Misfortune – a short-lived but useful outfit in which Cliff first tried his hand at incorporating harmonics into his bass playing – part of his college studies – and improvising with distortion – a trick learned from Motörhead’s Lemmy. Jim Martin would enter into the spirit of things by using a Penderecki violin bow, although this was an aspect of his talents he’d quietly dropped by the time fame found him in Faith No More. Entering the Hayward Area Recreation Department’s annual Battle of the Bands contest in 1981, their audition was videoed and can still be seen on YouTube today. It’s a fascinating clip to view, not least as the onstage persona Burton was to later make famous in Metallica already appears in motion. Indeed, if you listen carefully you can already hear the bones of two pieces that would later become most associated with his work in Metallica: an early extended bass solo entitled ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’ and the strident intro to a number that would become a cornerstone of the band’s set for many years, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.
In 1982, Cliff joined Trauma, well known to Bay Area scene-makers, in part for their intense musicality, although they are mostly remembered now for their determined theatricality. There is a wonderfully hammy video clip of them which can also still be seen on YouTube, with a dark-haired girl tied to a cross and another blonde girl being ‘sacrificed’ on an altar as the band plays amid billowing dry ice, the singer standing over his sacrificial victim, wielding a silver dagger and singing about being ‘the warlock of the night’. Eventually, an upside-down cross, positioned just behind Cliff, catches afire – the sort of video that looked wincingly out-of-step even back in 1982, all save for Cliff himself, who looks marvellously out of sync with the other band members, in his downbeat clothes and completely unself-conscious headbanging, his bass full of unnecessary but impressively odd jazz timings and psychedelic overtones.
Practising on average between four and six hours a day, every day, even after he joined Metallica, Cliff’s musical philosophy was explained by Jan as: ‘There’s somebody in their garage that hasn’t been discovered that’s better than you are.’ It would be a habit he kept up till the day he died. It was clear he took his music more seriously than anything else. So when Cliff abandoned his classic studies in order to play full-time in Metallica, his parents stood by him. Ray admitted the music his son was now focused on ‘wasn’t the kind of music I would have really liked him to play [but] he wanted to play it. So I wished him all the luck in the world.’ Jan, though, was less equivocal. ‘I didn’t care what kind of music he played as long as he was good at what he did. The fact that it was heavy metal made it kind of exciting to me, rather than some la-di-dah pop or country. It was different to our lives, so I thought it was exciting.’ Ray recalled Cliff telling them, ‘“I’m going to make my living as a musician.” And that’s what he did.’ They set him a goal to aim for, though. As Jan revealed, ‘I [had] never seen that boy give up on anything or anybody. So I knew that when he said that, he one hundred and ten per cent was going to [do] it.’ However, ‘We said, “Okay, we’ll give you four years. We’ll pay for your rent and your food. But after that four years is over, if we don’t see some slow progress or moderate progress, if you’re just not going anyplace and it’s obvious you’re not going to make a living out of it, then you’re going to have to get a job and do something else.”’ She added, ‘He said, “Fine.”’
It took almost four months for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield to persuade Cliff Burton to at least jam with Metallica. Intrigued but far from convinced yet, Cliff began turning up whenever the band played in