Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [50]
It was also at 3132 Carlson Boulevard that, on 28 December 1982, Metallica held their first all-night jam session with Cliff Burton. The impact was immediate. Cliff liked everything from Bach to Black Sabbath, from Pink Floyd to the Velvet Underground, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to R.E.M. As Lars told me in 2009, ‘Cliff turned me and James onto a lot of stuff at the time. From Peter Gabriel to ZZ Top to a lot of stuff that we really didn’t [know]. He flew the flag for bands like Yes. We’d never really experienced a lot of that type of stuff. Of course, at the same time, he had never heard that much Diamond Head or Saxon and Motörhead, or anything like that. So there was definitely a cool give and take there.’ Or as James told me, ‘Besides introducing us to more music theory, [Cliff] was the most schooled of any of us, he had gone to junior college to learn some things about music, and taught us quite a few things.’
Cliff, who ‘had a really bad back because he was always bent over thrashing his head’, was to become an influence in many other, entirely unexpected ways, too. James again: ‘He was the kind of guy, you know, him and I aligned a lot closer as friends, as far as our activities, music styles that we liked, bands that we liked, politically, views on the world, we were pretty parallel on that wavelength. But, yeah, he had such a character to himself, and it was a very strong personality, he did creep into all of us eventually.’ Says Lars: ‘Cliff was very, very different from James and Dave and Ron and anybody else. I mean, Cliff lived a whole different life up in the Bay Area. He was an interesting mix of the kind of hippy, trippy, non-conformist kind of vibe that was so well known about San Francisco and kind of…in his own headspace. And then also, a whole side that I’d never really experienced in America yet, was kind of what we call the redneck element. You know, he lived out in Castro Valley. It’s a good thirty- or forty-minute drive from San Francisco [and] there was a different kind of vibe out there, a little bit in the suburbs, a little bit sort of beer-drinking, hell-raising. Listening to ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd, type of thing. A little bit of that kind of vibe. So he was a very interesting mix of many different types of personalities and so on. When me and James met him I was just infatuated with his uniqueness. I was infatuated with his lack of conformity, and his sole insistence on doing his own thing, even to the point of ridicule. I mean, even at that time. Me and Hetfield were wearing as tight pants as possible and Cliff was wearing the famous bell-bottoms. There was a lot of contradictions about him.’ Within ‘the uniqueness’ there was also ‘a little bit of a rebellious attitude and energy, and obviously I could really relate to [that]. Being an only child from a very bohemian upbringing in Denmark and stuff, I could really relate to…really just doing your own trip and not kind of being caught up in what everybody else wanted from you. So we really hit it off on that level.’ Cliff Burton was simply ‘not your basic human being’, James later laughingly recalled. ‘He was really intellectual but very to the point. He taught me a lot about attitude.’ Cliff, said James, was ‘a wild, hippy-ish, acid-taking, bell-bottom-wearing guy. He meant business, and you couldn’t fuck around with him. I wanted to get that respect that he had. We gave him shit about his bell-bottoms every day. He didn’t care. “This is what I wear. Fuck you.”’
The four of them saw in 1983 by sitting round in the garage at Carlson Boulevard getting wasted on beer and pot and talking up their plans for the future. That was when Burton gave them his philosophy in typically Cliff-like shorthand. As he later told Harald O, ‘When I started [playing music], I decided to devote my life to it and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit