Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (29 page)

‘The set was largely inconsistently balanced,’ the reviewer went on to say, ‘seeming to lag at times – oh, and the mere sight of an acoustic guitar onstage must have made many a Metallurgist throw up!’ With regard to the evening as a whole, O’Mahoney concluded that ‘My friends will be hearing about this because … Anthrax blew the Goddamn [Metallica] muthas away!’

If this was the case in Dublin, it was not a scene repeated on the final date of the United Kingdom and Ireland leg of the Damage, Inc. tour. On Sunday September 21 Metallica’s tour bus pulled up at the stage door of the Hammersmith Odeon. Opened in 1932 as the Gaumont Palace Cinema, by the middle of the Eighties the balconied room had become an iconic venue for live metal due to its patronage by groups such as Iron Maiden and Saxon, the latter act having recorded their 1981 live album
The Eagle Has Landed
at the theatre. The Odeon’s status as a folkloric setting
was further enhanced by another live album, Motörhead’s
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
, which despite not having been recorded in west London – the title actually referred to the final date of the band’s Ace Up Your Sleeve tour of 1980 – became a landmark for its authors and ensured the same status for the venue to which its title referred.

The desire of young American metal bands to perform at the Hammersmith was so strong as to override the simple fact that the venue was entirely unsuited to music of the type. In 2003 the Odeon was renamed the Apollo – an occasion marked by an appearance from AC/DC – and the room renovated to the extent that its dance floor became an unreserved space free of seats. In 1986, however, the Hammersmith Odeon remained more or less unchanged from its days as a cinema, with rows of cramped raspberry velvet seats lining not just the balcony but also the space stretching from the back of the stalls to the lip of the stage. For fans wishing to express their passion for the sounds made by visiting thrash acts by partaking in the new pastime of ‘moshing’ – a phrase coined by Agnostic Front guitarist Vinnie Stigma and popularised by Scott Ian – a seat at the Hammersmith Odeon was no more suitable a location than the inside of a phone box.

Despite this, the sense of anticipation inside the venue in the minutes before an intro tape of the theme music from
The Blues Brothers
announced the arrival onstage of Anthrax was both amphetamined and intense. As a voice from the darkness asked the entirely full room to welcome ‘the heaviest band in the world’ – some claim given that the support act were not even the heaviest band on the bill – more than 3,000 pairs of adolescent eyes were greeted by the sight of a group that at the time were thrash metal’s equivalent of
The Muppet Show
. Dressed in skateboard shorts and T-shirts, in 1986 Anthrax could lay a respectable claim to being American metal’s most energetic live band. Although providers of heat rather than light, over the span of a forty-five-minute
special guest slot the impression made by the East Coast quintet was sufficiently startling (and, for that matter, original) to find support in a room packed with people very much in the market for new kinds of thrills.

But to claim that Anthrax’s hit and run transmission was sufficient to steal Metallica’s evening is nonsense. Even with James Hetfield’s onstage presence impaired by an arm that would remain in its cast for another six days – and with the answer to questions about how best to occupy himself during the lengthy instrumental sections of his band’s songs never fully answered – the sight and sound of a band who were fast becoming the soundtrack to the lives of tens and even hundreds of thousands of people framed in such an iconic context was of proportions sufficient that many in attendance would remember moments of the sixteen-song set for decades to come.

‘Onstage at Hammersmith Metallica looked like a big band,’ remembers
Kerrang!
’s Malcolm Dome, his presence that night as inevitable as the following morning’s dawn. ‘They dwarfed the stage and they looked like they belonged. This wasn’t some small young band who were trying to look tough while wondering, “Oh God, what are we doing here?” This was a band who grabbed the opportunity and said, “We belong here. It’s taken us two years to get here. We should have been here earlier [in our career] but now we are here we’ve sold the place out. Not only that, but we sold out every other date on the UK tour as well.”’

After Metallica had bid its audience goodnight with the peacenik-sentiment of the battle-hymn that is ‘Fight Fire with Fire’, hundreds upon hundreds of people surged to the wooden counter of the merchandise stand positioned by the exit doors of the Odeon’s ground-floor foyer. There, in a flurry of activity that itself resembled a concert groaning on the precipice of becoming out of control, fans battled to purchase items such as the Pushead-designed Damage, Inc. T-shirt for £8. Others bought
themselves a tour programme, the pages of which were perused as tube trains ferried concert-goers to other parts of London or to connections to outlying satellite towns. As the reader regarded the programme’s back cover, their eyes would have been met by a strange image positioned at the bottom right corner of the page. It was a picture of Metallica, an image that all members of the group had liked aside from Cliff Burton, who disdained the shot for it having captured him striking a facially comic pose. In order that the picture not be seen by wider eyes, the bass player had torn the original print and blinded his eyes with a sharp instrument. In spite of this – or, perhaps, because of this – as the man who had supervised the design of his band’s tour programme, Lars Ulrich decided to include the image anyway. The photograph’s two pieces were reunited with Sellotape, and the bass player’s disfigured face was hidden behind a black strip.

As one scans the back page of the twelve-page booklet, the image upon which the reader’s eye finally falls is a picture of Metallica that shows Burton with his eyes redacted like the victim of a tragedy, like a corpse.

On Friday September 26, 1986, Metallica played their final show with Cliff Burton. On the afternoon of the group’s appearance at a busy but not entirely full Solnahallen hall in Stockholm, the visiting musicians were introduced by their Swedish distributor, Alpha Records, to local music journalists that had abetted the group’s cause. As was the case elsewhere in the world, Alpha employee Stuart Ward recalls that ‘the mass media didn’t put [in] much of an appearance. We had a big-selling album, but no one would touch Metallica. Most people thought the band’s music was repulsive. You would see column inch after column inch written about artists who only had a fraction of Metallica’s sales. It was hugely frustrating. I only remember someone being there from
[the] youth magazine
Okej
, which sometimes contained a lot of hard rock, and there were a few guys who wrote for fanzines.’

Following this formal pressing of the flesh, band and journalists were led into a room stocked with a healthy supply of food and alcohol and a round table around which the Americans and Europeans might sit. Not untypically, Lars Ulrich was noticeable by his absence, preferring to secrete himself away in yet another room, alone save for the voices at the far end of a telephone line. Unperturbed by this, Ulrich’s band mates broke bread and raised glasses in the company of representatives of the lower orders of the Scandinavian music press.

It was in this company that Burton gave what was to be his final interview, an exchange with the Swedish music journalist Jörgen Holmstedt. The writer is honest enough to remember that his silent reaction upon discovering that he was seated alongside Burton was one of an ‘annoyance’ informed by the fact that ‘in all honesty I was more interested in meeting Lars Ulrich’.

‘Frankly, no one was very interested in talking to the normally taciturn Cliff when the other band members were around. In fact, I can’t recall seeing more than a handful of major interviews with Cliff up to that point,’ Holmstedt recalls.

It is an interesting quirk of the music journalist’s mind that he or she usually desires to speak to the member of a group that enjoys the highest profile in the press, this despite the fact that such a strategy runs the risk that the quotes supplied by this subject will echo the words given to rival publications. True to this trait, Jorgen Holmstedt viewed Cliff Burton not as a untapped source of information, or of one potentially possessed of a fresh insight, but rather as the ‘Quiet One’ to whom journalists rarely spoke.

‘He just sat there, sipping a beer,’ recalls the writer. ‘Close up he looked older than his twenty-four years. He had discoloured teeth, a slightly worn and wrinkled face, a tired gaze and the slow, deliberate speech pattern typical of someone who likes a smoke.
Cliff was as quiet offstage as he was wild on it. He was wearing a T-shirt with an unbuttoned shirt on top, a battered denim jacket and his legendary old flared jeans which he was alone in wearing during that poodle-head year of 1986, when ball-crushingly tight stretch jeans were de rigueur.’

Reading the transcribed exchange between Burton and Holmstedt, one is once again struck by the subject’s inscrutable nature, as a canvas of sufficient size and tonal neutrality that listeners and fans are able to register upon it any impressions they choose. To an uncharitable eye, as interviewed on the afternoon of September 26, 1986, Burton appears disinterested and dull, his answers vague to the point of opacity. On his group’s burgeoning level of success, the musician observes that Metallica ‘haven’t become stars overnight’ and that ‘the whole time we’ve just done what felt right’ having ‘never striven for rock-star status or anything like that’. Metallica, he explained, ‘just do what [they] do’ with a sense of insular purpose of sufficient authority that even a contract with a major label is seen as ‘merely an opportunity to buy more equipment and to be able to spend more time in the studio’ – this despite the fact that on
Master of Puppets
the bassist was of the opinion that his band had spent too
much
time in the recording studio, ‘You know, to build the whole thing further.’ Elsewhere in the interview Burton spoke of a group that ‘can’t be bothered to worry about the mass media’ either in terms of ‘what they say or what they write’ and that instead improves its station by touring as extensively as possible because ‘that’s how a band like ours gets bigger. Because we don’t get any radio play, we have to play [live] as much as possible.’

‘Touring has become more pleasant now that we have a better [tour] bus,’ the bassist observed.

In the smallest hours of Saturday 27 September, the
component
parts of the Damage, Inc. tour began the journey from Stockholm to Copenhagen. First to depart the loading doors of
Solnahallen was Metallica’s tour bus, a vehicle inside which the four musicians and their road crew would watch a video before retiring to sleep in coffin-sized bunk beds. Forty-five minutes after this, a lorry containing Metallica’s instruments and amplifiers left the Swedish capital en route to its Danish equivalent. Inside the first vehicle Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton drew cards in order to determine which member of the band would that night sleep in the bunk fitted with a window.

‘The first card that Cliff picked was the ace of spades and he looked at me and said, “I want your bunk,”’ Hammett recalls. ‘And I said, “Fine, take my bunk, I’ll sleep up front, that’s probably better anyway.”’

Several hours later, at 6.30 on the morning of September 27, the vehicle was travelling along the E4, a road that passes between the Swedish towns of Ljungby and Värnamo. Two miles north of Ljungby, the tour bus began to drift to the right side of the road, an occurrence to which its driver responded by turning the vehicle’s steering wheel in the opposite direction. This action caused the bus’s back wheels to skid further to the right. At this point, the young men asleep in the vehicle’s interior were woken by the sound of tyres screeching on cold concrete.

Metallica’s tour bus was engaged in a skid that lasted for as long as twenty seconds, the inertia of which propelled the vehicle from an upright position to one where the bus was lying on its right-hand side in a ditch by the side of the road. In the pitch blackness of its interior, bunks containing startled and semi-naked men collapsed on top of each other. In the stunned confusion that followed, a number of the party were able to navigate their exit into the morning air through the bus’s side door (the vehicle was provided by Len Wright Travel and was British made, which meant this door was on the left-hand side). Tour manager Bobby Schneider remained inside the bus until it appeared that its occupants had been led to safety.

‘I got thrown out of my bunk and knocked unconscious for like three or four seconds,’ recalls Hammett. ‘When I came to, I heard everyone screaming, but I didn’t hear Cliff. And I instantly knew something was wrong.’

Gathered by the roadside, the shocked party attempted to make sense of their situation. Hetfield and Hammett were shaken but had incurred only minor flesh wounds; Ulrich had suffered a broken toe. Quickly the three men’s attention was captured by the sound of shouting from other people, their eyes trained and fingers pointing towards the tour bus’s bottom edge. Like an horrific re-imagining of a scene from
The Wizard Of Oz
, protruding from beneath the stricken vehicle could be seen a pair of legs belonging to Cliff Burton.