In 1982, at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, two young men from a band nobody had heard of stood in the room while the support act played, and heard a guitar solo that stopped them where they stood. It was not a guitar. It was a bass, run through a wah pedal and a distortion box by a twenty year old from Castro Valley who had decided that the instrument nobody in this music was listening to was going to lead. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich went looking for the guitarist and found Cliff Burton instead, and everything Metallica did for the next four years followed from that mistake.
The man who would not dress for the part
Clifford Lee Burton was born on 10 February 1962 in Castro Valley, across the bay from San Francisco. He formed his first band, EZ-Street, while still at school, alongside two players who would end up in Faith No More, and he joined the professional outfit Trauma in 1982.
Look at what he wore while he was doing it. Long straight hair parted down the middle, a thin moustache, a moth eaten cardigan and bell bottom jeans, in a genre that by 1984 had settled firmly on leather, studs and hairspray. He looked like somebody who had walked out of 1971 and refused to notice. That was not carelessness, it was the same instinct that governed his playing, and Kirk Hammett has put the philosophy behind it into one repeated sentence: Cliff did not give a damn. He cared about the music and about the integrity behind it, and about very little else that the industry considered mandatory.
Underneath the cardigan sat work of a kind almost nobody in this music was doing. Burton studied classical theory, Bach in particular, and practised between four and six hours a day, every day, and he did not stop after joining the biggest band of his generation. Most players in thrash learned by playing fast until it stuck. This one learned harmony properly first and then carried it into a genre that did not yet know it wanted harmony.
The condition
Metallica asked him to join and he said no, and the no is the reason the Bay Area became what it became. Burton would not move to Los Angeles. If the band wanted him, the band would relocate to the Bay Area, and before the year was out that is exactly what happened.
Consider the size of that. A twenty year old bass player with no record to his name moved the whole apparatus of the band that would go on to sell more metal than anyone alive, out of the city that wanted them and into the one that suited him. Los Angeles at that moment was hairspray and stage lights. The Bay was warehouses, a beer soaked room in El Cerrito and a scene about to detonate. He did not join a movement. He relocated one.
A twenty year old with no record to his name moved the whole apparatus of the band out of the city that wanted them and into the one that suited him.
1983, and the argument made in public
Kill 'Em All arrived in July 1983, and buried in the middle of a record built almost entirely on speed sits (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth, which is not a bass solo in the sense the phrase usually means. It is a demonstration, delivered at the front of the stage with the amplifier turned up, that the argument was over before anybody else had noticed it had started. Burton did not accompany. He argued. He took an instrument the genre had been treating as scaffolding and forged it into a second lead voice, distorted, wah driven, harmonised against itself, and he did it without ever letting the low end go slack underneath the songs that needed it.
That same year Kirk Hammett arrived from Exodus, and the two of them became inseparable on the road, sharing rooms and staying up talking about books. Hammett has said since that he learned as much about music from Burton in those years as from anyone he ever played with. The band had acquired not just a bass player but its own resident theorist, and he was passing it on.
On the road with a hammer and a fishing rod
The touring stories his bandmates tell are not the usual ones. Hetfield has described Burton carrying a hammer in his suitcase, for no purpose anyone was ever able to establish, and taking a Pocket Fisherman on tour so that he could stop at any lake the bus happened to pass. Hammett's summary of his two great enthusiasms outside music is beer and breakfast, in that order, and remembers him as relentlessly funny.
Onstage he was something else again. A crew member who joined for the Ride The Lightning tour later admitted spending the first three songs of his first show simply watching Burton, too astonished to work. The head went down, the hair went round, and a man who otherwise gave the impression of being entirely unhurried played as though the instrument had personally offended him.
1984, and the mistake pressed onto vinyl
Ride The Lightning, released in July 1984, is where where he made his name stopped being a fast band and became a band that could construct. The clearest evidence is thirty seconds long and sits at the top of For Whom The Bell Tolls: that grinding, bending, unmistakable figure is Burton's bass through the wah and the distortion, and listeners have been misidentifying it as a guitar ever since, which is the same mistake Hetfield and Ulrich made in a Los Angeles club two years earlier, now pressed onto vinyl and sold by the million.
The influence runs wider than one intro. Fade To Black gave the band permission to write something quiet and structured without losing the audience, and The Call Of Ktulu closes the record as an instrumental with real harmonic movement, which is not a thing thrash bands were doing in 1984. Take the classical ear out of that album and a very good speed metal record remains. Leave it in and you get the moment the genre learned it was allowed ambitions.
1986, and the top of the mountain
Master Of Puppets came in March 1986 and is still, four decades on, the record most often named when anyone argues about the best album the genre produced. Burton is on it everywhere. The clean, harmonised figure that opens Battery is built on his understanding of how voices stack. Orion, the eight and a half minute instrumental at the heart of the record, is his piece more than anyone else's, and its middle section, where the whole band drops away and the bass carries a melody with the phrasing of a string arrangement, is the most complete answer to the question of what he was actually for.
Then they went out and played it, through America and into Europe, opening for Ozzy Osbourne in the spring, and the group that had recorded a long, difficult, unfashionable album found that the audience had come with them. Hammett has said the last show they played together was one of the best they ever did.
27 September 1986
On 27 September 1986, during the European leg of that tour, the band's bus crashed near Dörarp in southern Sweden. Cliff Burton was killed. He was twenty four years old.
The evidence of the absence
Jason Newsted joined within weeks, and what happened next has been argued over ever since. On ...And Justice For All, released in 1988, the bass is mixed so far down that on much of the record it is barely audible at all, and the band has been answering questions about it for the better part of forty years. The explanations offered over time have ranged from decisions taken at the mixing desk to the way a new member was treated, and the members themselves have given different accounts in different decades.
Whatever the cause, the effect is a matter of record, and it is the most eloquent thing anyone could say about what had been lost. A band that had spent three albums letting one man argue from the foundation of the arrangement made its next one with that foundation switched off. Listen to Orion and then to Blackened and the absence is not a sentiment. It is a frequency.
What he left
Three albums in four years, each measurably more ambitious than the last. Most musicians get thirty years to build a case; he made his in three records and it has not needed defending since.
The influence runs further than the sentimental version admits. Every bass player in extreme metal who has been allowed to write rather than follow is working in a space this man cleared, and the specific thing he proved, that theory and violence are not opposites and that the low end can carry an idea rather than merely support one, is now so ordinary in the genre that people forget somebody had to establish it first. Among chapter two of the thrash history, he had the shortest career and one of the largest footprints, and he did all of it in a cardigan.
