Metallica THE FLAME BURNS ON!

Metallica THE FLAME BURNS ON!

Richard Hogan

Metallica’s spirits were riding sky-high on the Scandinavian leg of the Master Of Puppets tour last fall. Drummer Lars Ulrich, the expatriate Dane, eagerly looked forward to a Copenhagen homecoming marked by swarms of fans—their arms open, their pockets bulging. Singer James Hetfield, minus his guitar since July, when he’d fractured his wrist in Indiana, had begun to crank out the power chords again, his arm strengthening with each show from Oslo to Lund to Stockholm. Bassist Cliff Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett basked in the glow of sales of their third album which was creeping up on the 800,000 mark worldwide and doing it with almost no airplay.

The band’s momentum snowballed as 4,000 Swedes crammed the Skedsmosehallen in Stockholm September 26 to hear the masters of doomsday metal. It was the first European show to feature Hetfield’s full-scale return to his instrument. It also proved to be Cliff’s last appearance.

Recalls Lars, 23: “James being back on guitar gave everyone incentive and drive to kick out. The gig was so good that we played a fifth encore, ‘Blitzkrieg,’ a song we hadn’t done together in a year. We did it anyway, and almost made it through without fuck-ups!”

Metallica signed autographs for some 90 minutes after the show, then climbed aboard the tour bus with seven of their employees. “On the bus,” Lars remembers, “the band—everyone including Cliff —watched a video of the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night At The Opera. Then we went to sleep,” headed for Copenhagen and glory.

What happened next was as nightmarish as one of Metallica’s most funereal songs, like “Trapped Under Ice” or “Damage, Inc.” “We were all sleeping in our bunks,” says Lars, “and the bus skidded out of control and flipped around. When we came to a stop, the bus was on its side. Everyone got out as fast as possible.” At about 5:00 a.m. in Ljungby Sweden, on September 27, ten of the eleven on board emerged from the bus and were taken to a local hospital. A roadie named Aidan was treated for minor injuries. Ulrich, who sustained a broken toe that kept him off his drum kit for three weeks, still isn’t sure exactly how the accident happened.

“It was chilly that night,” Lars explained. “There were questions whether he [the bus driver] slid on an ice patch or not. It was just around freezing temperature, but you gotta remember it was five in the morning, so yeah, there could have been ice on the ground.

“We all went to the hospital,” he continues, “and everyone but Cliff was there. We were fearing the worst. One doctor told us the situation.” Cliff Burton had been thrown by the impact through an open window and killed by the overturning bus. “But it became quite apparent what had happened when everyone else was around and he wasn’t.” Burton was only 24.

It’s clear that Ulrich, cocky and goodnatured as he usually is, is having some trouble staying on the subject. "I’m not interested in why there was a crash," he says shortly. “There was talk about the Swedish police doing this, that and the other. But I don’t really give a shit whether the bus skidded or [whether] he [the driver] was sleeping: it's not gonna change anything."

The accident changed a lot of things for Metallica, who were faced with almost four months of tour commitments they had no immediate way of honoring. The surviving band members spent the week after the crash in three different cities, trying to relax with their girlfriends. They reconvened at their Bay Area base on October 5 to decide the future of the group.

“We met up in San Francisco the night before Cliff’s funeral,” says Lars. “We had a talk there about what we wanted to do: we all felt the same about getting back to our music as soon as we could. Because once we’d talked, it just seemed like it was the thing to do.” Metallica, of course, didn’t really have the luxury of calling it quits the way Led Zeppelin did after John Bonham’s death, for the band owed Elektra Records the option on at least six more albums, and huge sums hinged on completing the tour dates previously booked and then pushed back. Adding to the pressure was a week of Japanese shows that Metallica’s booking agency and their managers had left on the schedule for mid-November. The Japanese tour effectively forced Lars, James and Kirk to secure Cliff’s replacement in a matter of weeks. Says Lars, simply: “It was incentive for us to keep playing.”

While Cliff Burton’s family said prayers for him in San Francisco, Jason Newsted’s bandmates from Flotsam & Jetsam wondered nervously whether their bassist would stay in Phoenix. It was no secret in Flotsam that Newsted, now 24, practically worshipped Metallica and would go to the forbidden site of the Great Old Ones—or at least to the Golden Gate Bridge—for a chance to play with the group. “They were easily in my top three favorite bands,” Jason allows, “and had been ever since the No Life Till Leather demos. I did look up to Cliff Burton a lot, and it was really a weird thing when people around Phoenix nudged me and went, ‘So you’re going to take his place, right, man?’ ” This was before the auditions were announced.

Although Metallica was about to try out some 60 aspiring bassists, Newsted was determined to have the edge on all of them. “I got references from people at Elektra and Metal Blade Records, and from different agencies; so, when Lars finally called me, I was convinced there was no way I wasn’t going to get the job.

I locked myself in my room with all their tapes and my amp, and a lot of coffee, and just went for it the whole five days before my audition. I had some inside information on the set list, and when I gave ’em my list of eleven songs, it just happened to be every song of the set. It was worth some extra points that I did what I did.”

Meanwhile, Metallica had ‘‘asked around,” says Ulrich, ‘‘who the hot young bass players were. The name Jason Newsted probably came up the most.” On October 23, less than four weeks after Burton’s death—and one of the first days that Lars could return to his drum kit— Newsted tried out for the open job. Metallica had to make a decision by the 31st, so there would be time for rehearsals, club warm-up dates, and preparations for the trip to Japan only two weeks ahead. No play, no pay.

‘‘Jason and one other guy were the two people who really stood out,” notes Lars. ‘‘We invited both of them back and spent a full day with each of them.”

“For my final test,” says Jason, ‘*we went out drinking after the callback. No, it wasn’t vodka”—the band’s reputed pet poison. “We did heavy malt ale. We had dinner, then hung out for hours discussing the writing. The three of them ended up together in the bathroom of this restaurant, Tommy’s Joint, and I was just sitting there. It was two in the morning when they came out and Lars said, ‘So, do you want a job or not?’

“I stood up in the middle of the restaurant and screamed at the top of my lungs. I just had to let it out.”

It was October 31 in the wee hours, Jason remembers. He was getting the nod on Halloween, which was not only the deadline for the group’s decision, but the perfect choice of a day to make Metallica whole again. It’s atmosphere fit right in with the type of material they do at their spooky best: “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” “The Call Of Ktulu,” and “Creeping Death.”

Jason played his farewell show with Flotsam & Jetsam that evening, Halloween night. (Flotsam is apparently continuing with Michael Spencer of Sentinel Beast in Newsted’s old spot.) Within days, Metallica was rehearsing intently with it’s new skinny, long-haired bassist, a visual as well as a musical replacement for the unfortunate Cliff Burton. Like Cliff, Jason favors denim clothes. He even plays Burton’s own Aria Pro bass on “The Thing That Should Not Be,” which, he points out, was not his idea, but the band’s.

“I’m playing Cliff’s bass lines,” conceded Newsted, “but I’m steering away from the Morley wah pedal he was famous for. I get to throw in my own ideas as well, because I don’t want to be known as ‘the kid who took Cliff Burton’s place’; I want to be known as Jason Newsted.”

After looking over Newsted’s slim figure and long grown hair, Lars Ulrich was tactful enough to say to the young bassist that “we’re not looking for a Cliff Burton clone.”

“That helped me out a lot,” confides Jason, who otherwise might have felt impelled to brush up on all the music theory Burton knew, then straighten his hair and get a shoulder tattoo of a death’s head to complete his transformation into a new Cliff.

At press time, Newsted had played only about a week of dates with Metallica, but his position seems secure. “It gets more comfortable with each show,” he says. Metallica were slated for a month of European shows in January and February, starting with the Copenhagen make-up date. After that, the band begins writing and rehearsing for the sequel to Master Of Puppets, with recording likely for late summer-early fall. “We’ll have been on the road a year promoting Master Of Puppets,” says Lars. “In terms of real touring, I don’t think we’ll do anything till the next record comes out”—hopefully by Christmas. “Though," he teases, “it could be fun going out and doing a three-week tour of tiny toilets, under a different name, when we finish the songwriting.”

Jason Newsted is expected to help with that writing—on the musical end, anyway. (‘‘James gives me shit about my lyrics every day.”) And overall, the band is pleased with its hastily acquired new member.

‘‘No disrespect to Cliff,” Lars pipes up, ‘‘but we just think ahead. We’re young, we have lots of energy, and we didn’t want to stagnate. If the period had been too long, we could really have gone downhill. So now we’re back to where we left off— just playing and having the, urn, occasional drink.

‘‘Only now,” Lars adds, “we have one more reason why we have to see this thing through: we have to honor Cliff’s memory. Cliff would be the first one to want us to get back to it. If he could see us sit around and feel sorry for ourselves, he’d get pissed off—I know he would.

‘‘So we’re coming back, even harder and more determined. There’s no stopping us now, ’cause the whole thing has given us a kick in the ass to get back out there.”