Metallica: Enter Night (31 page)

The second bus carrying the rest of the crew arrived on the scene just as the crane arrived to haul the bus back onto its wheels. Mick Hughes watched with horror as the crane ‘put a big chain around the bus’ and began slowly hoisting it upright again. ‘I don’t know if Cliff was dead at this point or not because the bus actually slipped back. They lifted it to pull him out and it slipped back and landed again on the floor.’ If Cliff hadn’t been dead before, he was now. His body was eventually disentangled from beneath the bus and stretchered to a waiting ambulance, at which point a thorough forensic examination of the scene began, searching for any evidence that might explain what had happened. James later claimed he’d smelled alcohol on the driver’s breath; an accusation that was never proved. Others wondered, not unreasonably, if, as John Marshall tactfully puts it, ‘maybe the driver was tired’? There were other mitigating factors. It was a British bus built for left-side driving, i.e. with a right-hand steering wheel. Denmark and Sweden were both right-side driving, which would make a left-hand bend at night hard to see, especially in the absolute darkness of the countryside, or if not paying adequate attention, exactly the kind of thing that falling asleep at the wheel – or even momentarily losing concentration – would make especially dangerous. Drifting off for a few seconds while going in a straight line might be survivable, but it would be fatal on a sudden bend. The driver, who was also British but who has never been named, had been driving for around six hours at that point.

Apart from the police and emergency services, the only other people to arrive on the scene that morning were – miraculously – a doctor, who happened to be passing in her car and stopped to administer first aid, and a forty-one-year-old photographer named Lennart Wennberg, then working for the Swedish newspaper
Expressen
. The bus had already been hoisted back up by the time Wennberg arrived. ‘I was at the scene of the accident for maybe half an hour,’ he told Joel McIver. ‘I took about twenty pictures. I can’t recall speaking to anyone. The police didn’t mind me taking pictures, but there was someone in the band’s entourage who felt I should stop taking pictures.’

Had he noticed any ice on the road?

‘It was said that this may have been a cause of the accident. Personally, I consider that out of the question. The road was dry. I believe the temperature had probably been around zero degrees Celsius during the night, but slippery? No.’ At the police station in central Ljungby, the driver, who Wennberg describes as ‘around fifty, well built, normal height’, was grilled for several hours by police investigators but later released without charge. Wennberg also took pictures of the band when they arrived by police car from the hospital and entered the Hotel Terraza in Ljungby. He recalled: ‘The manager came down to me and the
Expressen
reporter in the hotel lounge to do an interview. But after a few minutes he got a phone call and never came back.’

Bobby Schneider had already given the reporter his version of events at the hospital. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating. ‘We were asleep when the crash happened…when I managed to get out of the bus I saw Cliff lying there in the grass. He must have died immediately, because he went right through the window. It all went so quickly that he couldn’t have felt anything, and that’s a kind of comfort.’ He added, ‘None of the guys in the band is able to play now. We just want to get back home as quickly as possible and make sure that Cliff gets a decent funeral.’ John Marshall, lying in a bed next to Bobby in the Emergency Room, was equally dazed, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. ‘I remember Bobby lying next to me as they were taking blood pressure and stuff, and saying, “Cliff’s gone, you know?” All of a sudden, the reality of everything hit me. Right then, I looked above, at the ceiling, and thanked whoever was up there that nobody else had been seriously hurt, and that it hadn’t turned out even worse than it was.’ James Hetfield wasn’t about to say thank you for anything. When Bobby began rounding everybody up after they’d been patched up by the doctors, saying: ‘Okay, let’s get the band together and take them back to the hotel,’ all James could think was: ‘The band? No way! There ain’t no band. The band is not “the band” right now. It’s just three guys.’ For once, Lars had nothing to say. He just couldn’t take in what was happening. ‘I remember being at the hospital and a doctor coming into the room that I was staying in, telling us that [Cliff] had died. We couldn’t grasp it; it was too hard, too unreal…’

By now both Peter Mensch and the Danish promoter for the Copenhagen show, Erik Thomsen, had also arrived at Hotel Terraza. Bobby Schneider was arranging for the whole party to travel to Copenhagen the next day, the nearest major city with an international airport, while he stayed on an extra day. ‘Something about staying and dealing with the body or something like that,’ he says now, sifting through the confusing memories of that day. ‘And I also remember I stayed on in Copenhagen another day to make sure that that happened.’ Meanwhile, Metallica had their first Saturday night without Cliff to get through.

James and Lars shared a room, as usual. Kirk, who would normally have shared with Cliff, stayed in a room with John Marshall. John recalls they were both so shaken they slept with the light on that night. That is, when they could manage to get to sleep. Most of the band and crew had gotten drunk in an effort to combat the shock and dull the rising pain. Bobby recalls getting back to the hotel late that night and ‘there being some damage issues and some other stuff. The guys drinking and just, you know, picking it out and trying to make sense of it.’ No matter how much they drank, though, none could find sleep. Far from numbing his feelings, James simply fell to pieces, grief-stricken one moment, full of inconsolable rage the next. At four in the morning, the others could hear James drunk in the street outside, screaming: ‘Cliff! Cliff! Where are you?’ Kirk couldn’t bear it any more and began crying again.

The local Ljungby newspaper,
Smalanningen
, reported the crash in its Monday edition, saying: ‘The driver thought that an ice spot was the reason why the bus slid off the road. But there were no ice spots on the road. “For that reason the investigation continues,” said detective inspector Arne Pettersson in Ljungby.’ The report went on: ‘The driver has denied that he fell asleep while driving. “The accident’s course of events and the tracks at the accident location are exactly like the pattern of asleep-at-the-wheel accidents,” said the police.’ However, ‘The driver said under oath that he had slept during the day and was thoroughly rested. This was confirmed by the driver of the other bus.’

The next day,
Smalanningen
ran a follow-up story, reporting that ‘the driver of the tour bus is now free from arrest. He is forbidden to travel and must contact the police once a week until the investigation is over.’ It added that the driver was ‘suspected of being careless in traffic and causing another person’s death. He said that the bus drove off the way because there was ice on the road. But the technical investigation from the police said that the road was totally free from ice at the time of the accident. The driver is suspected of having fallen asleep at the steering wheel…’ A further report the following day said the driver was now staying at a local hotel while a technical investigation of the bus took place. The following Monday, 6 October, the paper announced that, ‘There were no technical faults on the bus of the American rock group Metallica. This was established by the National Road Safety Office in a quick investigation.’ A week later it reported that the public prosecutor had lifted the travel restrictions on the bus driver, who would now be allowed to return home. Initially there had been talk of charging him with manslaughter. In fact, within months he was rumoured to be back working, driving bands all over Europe, in buses just like the one Metallica had crashed in. Others said he had changed his name. Whatever the truth, the police investigation into Cliff Burton’s death, although technically still not closed, was effectively over. To this day there has never been an official explanation of why the bus left the road just before dawn that Saturday morning.

Speaking now, Bobby Schneider refuses to lay the blame specifically at anyone’s door: ‘Well…look, you know, if there’s anyone to blame, I guess…it was the driver who was driving the bus. But…people get in accidents. Unfortunately, many of the laws have changed now as to how they build buses…unfortunately it was the perfect storm…what happens when the bus spins like that is that it creates centrifugal force. So it just happened that just where Cliff was sleeping was just at the apex of that. And there was a window right next to him. There was nothing between him and the window of that bus and he went out the window.’ Bobby says that ‘we were told that he was dead before he hit the ground’. But adds: ‘I’m not proposing that that was the case. I think that had it been a purpose-built bus like they are now that he would have been in the accident like everybody else. But that was the way things were done. It was fairly standard. They don’t do that any more and they haven’t done that since then.’ These days there would be some form of protective barrier over the windows, he says.

Bobby adds that he never saw any black ice, and notes that it hadn’t been snowing. So was it down to the driver then? He pauses. ‘The driver could have been going too fast. I don’t really recall…Like I said, there’s accidents that happen. We didn’t have any problems with the driver up until then. It’s not like he was reprimanded for driving incorrectly, or he was drinking, or we had any issues to speak of. If I remember right we had only been on the bus a couple of runs. We left London and we drove to Sweden…did a show in Sweden, and we were on our way to Copenhagen…’ The rest of the band, though, will never be wholly convinced it wasn’t because the driver lost control, for whatever reason. He was the only one supposedly awake at the time. The wheel was his. The responsibility was his. And so it remains. As James said, ‘I don’t know if he was drunk or if he hit some ice. All I knew was, he was driving and Cliff wasn’t alive any more.’

With the remainder of the tour cancelled, forty-eight hours after the crash the band and crew were on their way home. Lars briefly joined Mensch at his house in London. The American members of the team were met at JFK Airport in New York by Cliff Burnstein, with James and Kirk taking a connecting flight on to San Francisco. Cliff’s body remained behind in Sweden, where an autopsy would have to be carried out first before the body could be shipped back to America. It took several days, in fact, for all the correct paperwork to go through, which only added to the agony. The official medical examiner, Dr Anders Ottoson, eventually gave the cause of death as ‘compression thoracis cum contusio pulm’: fatal chest compression with lung damage. Cliff’s passport, number, E 159240, was also cancelled and mailed to his stricken parents. It wasn’t until everyone got home that the full force of the tragedy began to really kick in. Big Mick summed up a lot of the band and crew’s feelings when he later observed: ‘You always feel protected on tour; nothing bad can happen like this, it’s not allowed, you know what I mean? This is rock ’n’ roll, man, nobody dies. But they do, and it had happened, and it was hard to grasp.’

Anthrax were already in Copenhagen getting ready for that night’s show when they received word of what had happened. ‘From the first day that I met him to the last one we spent together in Stockholm, Cliff Burton never changed,’ said Scott Ian, speaking less than twenty-four hours later. ‘Even with Metallica’s growing success he remained the same really nice guy I first got to know and like. His mode of dress and his manner never altered and we’re all gonna miss him terribly.’ Also looking forward to the show in Copenhagen that night had been Flemming Rasmussen. ‘I was so proud of the success of
Master of Puppets
and this would have been the first time I’d seen them play since we’d recorded it,’ he recalls. ‘I was woken up at six in the morning by my mum who said that the bus had crashed. She’d heard it on the radio. I couldn’t believe it! That it happened also on the way to Copenhagen, it was so weird.’

The news travelled fast. But not quite fast enough in those pre-cell phone and email days for Cliff’s girlfriend back in San Francisco, Corinne Lynn. As she told Joel McIver: ‘On the Friday night R.E.M. was playing in Berkeley. Cliff loved that band. He always listened to them and he was jealous that I got to go. So he said, “Call me after the show so I know what it’s like.” I was so excited to see them. They were playing at the Greek Theater, but there was all this lightning and rain and Michael Stipe came out onstage and said, “I’m sorry but they’re not gonna let us play because they’re afraid we might die tonight.” I remembered that quote later.’ Instead, Corinne went for drinks with a friend. Then at ‘about midnight or one in the morning’ tried calling the hotel in Copenhagen where Cliff should have been staying. ‘The lady kept saying no, they hadn’t checked in yet. I was like, “That’s weird.”’ She thought maybe Cliff had checked in under the pseudonym he now used occasionally, Samuel Burns, but again no dice. ‘Bobby Schneider always checked in under his own name, and he wasn’t there either. I thought, this is so weird – and then I couldn’t sleep. I would call every hour: “No, they haven’t checked in.” I was thinking, “What the fuck?” But I eventually went to bed.’

Eight hours ahead, it wasn’t until the following morning that news of Cliff’s death reached California. Still Corinne heard nothing. She had spent the morning at a friend’s house and with no cell to find her it wasn’t until that evening she finally got the message when her housemate, Martin Clemson, also returned home. ‘Martin says, “I need to talk to you.” I go, “What? What is it?” and he says, “Cliff’s dead.” I said, “No, he’s not! What are you talking about?” He said, “There’s been an accident…”’ Corinne immediately phoned Cliff’s parents, who confirmed the news. ‘I went up first thing the next morning. I don’t think I left for maybe two weeks, except to maybe go home and get more clothes.’