On September 26, 1986, Metallica walked onto the stage at Solnahallen in Stockholm.
They were touring Master of Puppets. The album had pushed them further than ever before, and the four musicians on that stage — James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton — seemed to be standing at the beginning of something enormous.
During the show, Cliff played (Anesthesia) — Pulling Teeth.
It would be the last time.
During the overnight journey through Sweden, Metallica’s tour bus crashed. On September 27, Cliff Burton was killed.
He was 24 years old.
Forty years later, the remarkable part of Cliff Burton’s story is not simply how young he was when he died.
It is how much of him never left.
THE BASS PLAYER THEY HAD TO HAVE
Before Metallica became one of the biggest bands in the world, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich saw Cliff Burton performing with Trauma.
They wanted him immediately.
But Cliff was not interested in moving to Los Angeles to join their band.
So Metallica moved north.
Burton joined them in late 1982, and the band established itself in the San Francisco Bay Area. They had found an extraordinary bass player, but they were about to discover that they had brought something else into Metallica.
A musical education.
Cliff had studied music and brought influences that stretched far beyond the young thrash scene surrounding the band. Classical harmony sat beside punk, Southern rock and heavy metal.
Lars Ulrich would later recall that Cliff could talk about composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky — territory far removed from the musical world in which he and Hetfield had started Metallica.
That difference mattered.
Cliff did not simply play underneath the guitars.
He expanded what the band thought heavy music could contain.
YOU CAN HEAR IT HAPPENING
The change becomes obvious on Ride the Lightning.
The delicate acoustic passage that opens “Fight Fire with Fire” came from Cliff. Kirk Hammett later recalled that Burton had written the piece and that his understanding of classical modulation was behind it.
Then there is “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
That huge opening passage that sounds almost like a distorted guitar?
Cliff’s bass.
Hammett remembered hearing Burton play the idea during soundchecks and thinking how strange it sounded.
And then there was “Orion.”
On Master of Puppets, Metallica created an instrumental in which Burton’s bass was no longer merely part of the foundation. It became one of the voices carrying the composition itself.
These were not decorative additions.
Cliff was helping widen Metallica’s musical vocabulary.
Even Metallica’s own official history describes his influence on the band’s musical growth as enormous — the result of someone who combined experimentation with a serious understanding of musical theory.
The aggressive young band had acquired a musician who kept asking what else their music could become.
SEPTEMBER 1986
By 1986, the possibilities seemed almost limitless.
Master of Puppets had been released in March. Metallica had toured with Ozzy Osbourne and were reaching audiences far beyond the underground scene that had created them.
Then came Stockholm.
September 26.
One more show.
One more performance of (Anesthesia) — Pulling Teeth.
Nobody in the building could have known that they were watching Cliff Burton play it for the final time.
The following morning changed Metallica permanently.
There is no need to turn the accident into the centre of the story.
The date tells us enough.
September 27, 1986.
Cliff Burton was gone.
BUT CLIFF NEVER QUITE LEFT METALLICA
Metallica continued.
Jason Newsted eventually took the impossible position behind the bass. Albums became bigger. Arenas became stadiums. Metallica became something the four young men travelling through Sweden in 1986 could scarcely have measured.
But Cliff remained inside the band.
Not metaphorically only.
Musically.
James Hetfield has described Burton as the most musically educated member of the early group and someone who taught the others things they simply did not know.
Lars Ulrich has similarly credited Cliff with opening new worlds of harmony and melody for himself and Hetfield — ideas that helped shape the way they learned to write together.
And decades later, the question still exists inside Metallica:
Would Cliff like this?
Hetfield has said that he still asks himself that while creating music. Cliff remains a standard against which an idea can be tested.
Think about what that means.
Burton spent less than four years as a member of Metallica.
He never saw the Black Album.
He never saw the stadium tours that followed.
He never saw Metallica become a global institution.
He never grew old with the band.
Yet almost four decades after his death, the people who did are still mentally bringing him into the room.
24 YEARS
There is a temptation with musicians who die young to write their story around everything they never had the chance to do.
What would Cliff have written?
Where would he have taken Metallica?
What would the later albums have sounded like?
Nobody knows.
And perhaps those are the wrong questions.
Because Cliff Burton’s legacy does not need an imaginary future.
It already exists in the music.
It is there in the strange bass figure opening “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
It is there in the unexpected acoustic beginning of “Fight Fire with Fire.”
It is there throughout “Orion.”
It is there in the musical vocabulary he helped introduce to three young musicians around him.
And, forty years after that road in Sweden, it is still there whenever Metallica ask themselves one deceptively simple question:
What would Cliff think?
Cliff Burton only lived for 24 years.
Metallica have now spent forty years carrying pieces of him forward.
Maybe that is the more important anniversary.
SOURCES & LINKS
Metallica — History
Metallica — (Anesthesia) – Pulling Teeth song / live-performance archive
Metallica — Museum: Orion — A Tribute to Cliff Burton
Louder — James Hetfield on Cliff Burton’s continuing influence