If you could only bring 3 out of these down below to a desert island (with electricity) for the rest of your life!
WHICH 3 WOULD YOU CHOOSE?
For me, I'll have to say that this is more or less an impossible mission, but in the end, no matter how much I love Exumer, Violent Force, Protector and the Darkness albums ... I'll have to go with the Kreator, Destruction and Sodom albums!
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Clifford Lee Burton was born February 10, 1962. His father Ray, from Tennessee, worked in San Francisco’s Bay Area as an Assistant Highway Engineer. Ray’s wife Jan was a special needs teacher. Cliff was the youngest brother to Scott David and Connie. When Scott died of a brain aneurysm when Cliff was 13, it had a profound effect on him, reinforcing the idea that life was not to be squandered on trying too hard to make other people happy.
Cliff had played the piano since he was six. Now he told others: “I’m gonna be the best bassist for my brother.” Jan was “totally amazed cos none of the kids in our family had any musical talent.” His early influence was a teacher named Steve Doherty. “He was the one who made Cliff take Beethoven and Bach, made him learn to read music etcetera.”
Speaking in 1987 with Cliff’s old friend Harald Oimeon, Jan described Cliff as “very quiet” and “normal”, except for his insistence from a very early age on being “his own person”. There was also a stubborn, Aquarian side to Cliff. Playing with kids outside was “boring”. Cliff preferred his own company, reading books and playing music. “He was very bright. In the third grade they tested him and he got eleventh-grade comprehension.”
Playing Little League baseball for the Castro Valley Auto House team, he was known as a big hitter. As a teenager, he took a Saturday job at an equipment rental yard called Castro Valley Rentals, where the older workers nicknamed him Cowboy, after the cheap straw hat he always wore to work. It was either that or get his hair cut – and Cliff wasn’t doing that.
Cliff was 14 when he began playing in his first band, EZ Street, named after a strip joint in San Mateo, He later played down the experience, dismissing EZ Street’s music as “pretty silly, actually… a lot of covers, just wimpy shit”. EZ Street afforded him his first chance to play real gigs, performing regularly at the International Cafe in Berkeley.
EZ Street also included guitarist Jim Martin, a likeminded soul who went on to join Faith No More. As Martin once observed: “Most of what you see on stage at a rock show, whether it’s a thrash gig or some heavy hip-hop club, it’s all about fantasy. The thing about Cliff was he was real. He wasn’t acting out the part to be in a band, he really was that guy. He never saw himself as a star. He was just another one of the guys.”
By the time Cliff graduated from high school in 1980, the Burton character was fully formed: an HP Lovecraft-reading, piano-playing homebody who loved beer, Mexican food, pot and acid. A free-thinker who drove a beat-up 1972 VW station wagon nicknamed The Grass-hopper, in which he mixed his Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes with Bach concertos. His favourite pastime was hanging out with his friends Jim Martin and Dave DiDonato, going fishing and hunting, or just sitting around into the small hours playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Enrolling at Chabot College in nearby Hayward, Cliff studied classical music and theory. He hooked up again with Jim Martin, and formed an instrumental trio, Agents Of Misfortune, a short-lived outfit in which Cliff first tried incorporating harmonics into his bass playing and improvising with distortion, a trick learned from Lemmy.
In 1982, Cliff joined Trauma, well-known to Bay Area scene-makers as a theatrical Iron Maiden-style band. He practised four to six hours a day, every day. There’s a wonderful video clip of them on YouTube. Amid billowing dry ice can be seen the incongruous figure of 19-year-old Cliff Burton, unself-consciously headbanging, his playing full of impressively odd jazz timings and psychedelic overtones.
Son & Father
When he decided to quit college to pursue music full-time, his parents were concerned. Jan: “We said: “We’ll give you four years. We’ll pay for your rent and your food. But after that four years is over, if we don’t see some slow progress or moderate progress, if you’re just not going anyplace and it’s obvious you’re not going to make a living out of it, then you’re going to have to get a job and do something else.’ He said: ‘Fine.’”
It was Brian Slagel who recommended Cliff Burton to Lars Ulrich. Slagel’s label, Metal Blade, had issued the first ever Metallica recording, Hit The Lights, on the 1982 compilation Metal Massacre. Trauma was one of the bands he was considering including on Metal Massacre II.
“The band was pretty good,” he recalls, “but the bass player was phenomenal.”
Knowing Metallica were looking for someone to replace bassist Ron McGovney, when Trauma played LA’s Troubadour club a couple of weeks later Slagel took Lars and James Hetfield there. Afterwards, "Lars came up to me and said: 'That is going to be our bass player!’" Nevertheless, it took months for Lars and James to persuade Cliff to even jam with them. Cliff lived in San Francisco, a cultural quantum leap away from the neon ooze of LA where Metallica lived.
Cliff told them: “I like it up here. So they said: ‘Yeah, well, we were thinking about [moving to San Francisco] anyway.’ So they came up, and we got together in this room, set up the gear and blasted it out for a couple of days. It was obvious straight away that it was a good thing to do, so we did it.”
What they hadn’t realised was that in Cliff, Metallica hadn’t just brought in a supremely gifted bass player, they had also acquired a teacher. As James later told me, as well as turning him and Lars on to artists like ZZ Top and Yes, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, Cliff was also “the most schooled of any of us; he had gone to junior college to learn some things about music, and taught us quite a few things. He had such a character to himself, and it was a very strong personality, he did creep into all of us eventually.”
Lars added: “Cliff was very, very different from James and [me]. He was an interesting mix of the kind of hippie, trippy, non-conformist vibe that was so well-known about San Francisco, kind of in his own head-space, and then also a whole side that was the redneck element – a beer-drinking, hell-raising, listening to ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd type of thing. So he was a very interesting mix of many different types of personalities. I was infatuated with his uniqueness. I was infatuated with his lack of conformity, and his insistence on doing his own thing, even to the point of ridicule.”
Cliff Burton was simply “not your basic human being,” as James, laughing, later put it. “He was really intellectual but very to-the-point. He meant business, and you couldn’t fuck around with him. I wanted to get that respect that he had. We gave him shit about his bell-bottoms every day. He didn’t care. ‘This is what I wear. Fuck you.’”
While Lars and James were clearly besotted with Cliff from the word go, the member of Metallica who grew closest to him was the next to join: Kirk Hammett. In common with Cliff, Kirk had studied classical music. Like Cliff, he still practised every day, based on lessons given to him by Joe Satriani. On tour in their earliest days, when they were stayed in a small motel, James and Lars would share one room, Cliff and Kirk the other.
“We were, in the first few years of the band, living in each other’s back pockets,” Kirk told me. “We were very close.”
At night, after a show, Kirk and Cliff would get their acoustic guitars out. “He didn’t play bass that much away from stage, so he was always playing guitar. And we would just jam. We had similar interests. He was into horror movies and HP Lovecraft, as I was. He enjoyed doing hallucinogenics, and so did I. He would tell me: ‘Hey, man, I just took some acid. Whatever you do don’t tell the other guys.’ I would say: ‘Sure, man.’ I didn’t take acid in any working environment, but it never bothered him.”
LSD, magic mushrooms, weed and pot… in Cliff’s hands these were creative tools, not just tickets to ride. Or as Cliff put it: “You don’t burn out from going too fast. You burn out from going too slow and getting bored.” Kirk continues: “You also have to understand though, on an emotional level, we all tended to look up to him cos he was the guy with the most life experience. He was always the one who exuded the most confidence – the guy who had the best sense of ethics and morals. Whereas we were like slash and burn, seek and destroy, he would take a step back first and think about things and then slash and burn, seek and destroy. This was the guy who would sit around and listen to the Eagles and the Velvet Underground. He turned us on to R.E.M., he turned us on to Creedence [Clearwater Revival]. And he also loved Lynyrd Skynyrd too. Cliff was so far ahead of his time.”
A born leader, when the band’s first manager, Jonny Z, told them that distributors had demanded they change the proposed title of their debut album, Metal Up Your Ass, Cliff “got real mad” and yelled at Jonny: “Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” Jonny laughs as he recounts the incident. “The next thing you know, the album was called Kill ’Em All.”
With Cliff in charge of the on-the-road music, the others got lessons in the history of rock. It was also Cliff who instigated the band’s habit of always doing meet-and-greets after each show, no matter how small. According to their friend Bill Hale, “Cliff was the first one who went out and shook hands with the fans, cos Cliff was a fan. He wasn’t a goody two-shoes, though. Cliff knew how to party. “
We would [all] drink day in and day out and hardly come up for air,” Kirk recalled. Once Metallica began to achieve a level of fame, there were also groupies. “Lars would charm them, talk his way into their pants,” James recalled. “Kirk had a baby face that was appealing to girls. Cliff, he had a big dick. Word got around about that, I guess.”
It wasn’t until the band’s second album, Ride The Lightning, in 1984 that Cliff’s influence on Metallica really began to assert itself on record. According to producer Flemming Rasmussen, while it was “Lars and James that were more or less in charge” in terms of pure musical vision, “from an artistic point of view it’d probably be Cliff”. This showed not just in the shape of the HP Lovecraft-inspired monster album closer, The Call Of Ktulu, but also in the encouragement they needed to try the acoustic ballad Fade To Black. Cliff, saw it as a step forward.
Even the bands who opened for Metallica on tour took notice of their bassist. Joey Vera, bassist with Armored Saint, was especially drawn to Cliff. “We had a kinship, Cliff and I, because we also listened to some jazz fusion. He also had this really strong punk aesthetic… I always perceived Cliff as someone who was very strongly opinionated and very much not willing to do anything which would go against what he believed in. It was pretty evident back then that it mattered to the rest of the guys too.”
When Metallica made their first Castle Donington festival appearance, in 1985, just like every band low on the bill they were greeted by a hail of beer cans and plastic bottles of piss. Cliff, though, was unfazed.
“Donington was a day of targets and projectiles,” he told Harald. “I think they liked us, though.” At the Day On The Green festival in San Francisco two weeks later, James ran amok in a Jägermeister fit and trashed the dressing room. Cliff cooled him out with one look. “Cliff was the most mature out of all of us,” said Kirk. “When I’d do something stupid, or Lars or James would do something stupid, he was the guy who would say: ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ He was always the guy to reprimand us.”
When Bobby Schneider became their tour manager in 1985, he says it was clear that “Cliff was the backbone. Cliff was the guy who everybody looked to. If there was something Cliff wasn’t gonna like, it wasn’t gonna happen. No one fucked with Cliff.”
But no one, not even Cliff Burton, can cheat death. Cliff knew that. What he couldn’t have known was how cruelly death would play the game, snatching him away just as it seemed things were reaching their zenith in his life, both musically and personally.
The third Metallica album, Master Of Puppets, released in March 1986 just six months before Cliff died, wasn’t just a new peak for the band, it was a game changer in the history of rock and metal. It was the springboard for the astonishing success Metallica would later enjoy, and it seemed like it would be the start of the most remarkable lineage of albums since Led Zeppelin in their heyday. Instead it became the full stop that nearly finished off the band – the beginning and end of an era all in one.
Although Cliff received co-writing credits on only three of its eight tracks, Kirk feels that “people don’t talk enough about Cliff’s contribution to that album. I remember him playing the intro to Damage, Inc on the Ride The Lightning tour. It has all those bass swells and harmonies on it. I remember him saying, ‘Yeah, it’s based on a Bach piece.’ I asked him which one and I’m pretty sure he said it was Come Sweetly Death or something like that.”
The piece Kirk’s referring to is Come, Sweet Death, from the 69 Sacred Songs And Arias that Johann Sebastian Bach contributed to Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musical Songbook, nearly a thousand song-texts written as musical notation indicating intervals, chords and non-chord tones in relation to a bass note, providing harmonic structure. A very Cliff-like musical preoccupation.
Outside the studio, when Cliff and Kirk weren’t getting wasted in their hotel room, “we’d go out and play poker for eight hours straight after being up for twenty-four hours. We’d find a seafood restaurant that was open, eat raw oysters and drink beer, scream at the natives while we were drunk.” They were, he said, “some of my best memories” from that time.
It seemed nothing could stop Metallica. By summer 1986, Master Of Puppets had sold more than 500,000 copies, giving the band their first gold record and taking them into the US Top 30 for the first time.
Over three decades later, it has now sold almost seven million copies in America alone, and almost as many more around the world. Kirk recalled a meeting on the back of the tour bus when they were told they now had enough money to put down payments on their own houses: “The first thing that Cliff said was:, ‘I wanna house where I can shoot my gun that shoots knives!’ That was like a typical Cliff Burton thing to say.”
For Cliff, success was not an end in itself. This was just the beginning. Backstage at Birmingham Odeon, a young music journalist named Garry Sharpe-Young asked Cliff what the band would do if one of them died.
“What we were actually discussing was the hypothesis of Lars meeting his maker,” SharpeYoung recalled. “Cliff said they would have a big drunken party in his honour, and then get in a new drummer – fast.”
After a final climactic show in London, the band set off for dates in Europe. At the third show, at the Solnahallen in Stockholm, James – who until then had been unable to play guitar since a skateboarding accident three months before (roadie John Marshall had played guitar during James’s convalescence) – played superbly, the band back to their classic four-man shape.
Flying high again, Metallica outdid themselves, Cliff hitting new heights as he added a bizarre yet affecting version of The Star Spangled Banner to his usual bass solo, headbanging around the stage, his right arm windmilling. Lately he’d complained again of back pain. Not that night, though.
Afterwards, they climbed aboard the tour bus for the drive to the next day’s show in Copenhagen. It would be a long journey and the bus was cramped. Kirk and Cliff cut cards to see who got a more comfortable window-side bunk, Cliff winning when he drew the ace of spades. He and James stayed awake a little longer, James drinking vodka, Cliff smoking a spliff. Their bunks were at the back, next to each other. They both nodded off. The whole bus was silent when it began to leave the road…
As we now know, Cliff died in the crash, his body thrown through the bunk-side window and crushed by the weight of the bus falling on him. Back at the hotel that first night without Cliff, they got drunk. No matter how much they drank, none could find sleep. James fell to pieces, grief-stricken one moment, full of rage the next.
At four in the morning, the others could hear James drunk in the street outside, screaming: “Cliff! Where are you?!” Kirk couldn’t bear it and burst into tears.
The news travelled fast. Gary Holt of Exodus was “moving a twenty-five-gallon fish tank” out of his parents’ house when he heard. “Usually when you hear about a musician dying, it’s at his own hand – you know, drug overdose, chokes on his vomit, shit that would have been old hat. But dying in a bus crash? That was the first I’d heard of that.”
Jim Martin heard from Cliff’s mother, Jan. “My heart sank.” Cliff, he said, “was part of the think tank.” Jim was due back on the road the next day, and travelled home in between tour dates to attend his funeral.
Dave Mustaine turned to drugs: “I went straight to the dope, man, got some shit and started singing and crying and writing this song…” The song was In My Darkest Hour, the centrepiece of the next Megadeth album, So Far, So Good… So What!
There was a memorial service back in San Francisco during the first week of October. Cliff’s funeral was held on Tuesday, October 7, at Chapel Of The Valley in Castro Valley, where he had lived with his folks most of his life. As well as Cliff’s immediate family, his girlfriend Corinne and best pals Jim Martin and David DiDonato were there, along with the rest of Metallica, plus Bobby Schneider and their co-manager Peter Mensch.
Other mourners included all of Exodus, Trauma, and Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin. Cliff’s ashes were taken and spread at the Maxwell Ranch. As DiDonato later recalled: “We stood in a large circle, with Cliff’s ashes in the centre. Each of us walked into the centre and took a handful of him and said what we had to say… Then he was cast on to the earth, in a place he loved very much.”
Gary Holt recalls: “It was a sombre affair, to say the least. But then you gather up at someone’s house after and you get drunk and share a laugh, you know?”
A commemorative headstone was laid, engraved: IN LOVING MEMORY OF and below that a picture of Cliff taken not long before he died. Underneath: CLIFFORD LEE BURTON CANNOT THE KINGDOM OF SALVATION TAKE ME HOME, then finally: FEBRUARY 10 1962 SEPTEMBER 27 1986.
The aftershocks of Cliff Burton’s death would continue to reverberate around Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett for the rest of their lives. Kirk: “When I first joined the band there was a huge infusion of new energy, and up until Cliff died we were just so psyched about everything and life in general. But that kind of ended when Cliff left.” He paused then added: “I still think about him every day… Something he said, something he did, just… something.”
Photo after Cliffs last concert in Solna, Sweden on September 26, 1986. It’s claimed to be the last one every of Cliff Burton.
A few months before he died, Cliff was asked what advice he had for aspiring young musicians. He replied: “When I first started, I decided that I would devote my life to it.” Devotion, he said, was the key. “To absolutely devote yourself to that, to virtually marry yourself to what you’re going to do and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit that life has to offer.”
Metallica’s search for a new bassist began almost immediately – Jason Newsted was appointed within weeks of Cliff’s funeral. No real replacement for Cliff Burton has ever been found, though. Instead his spirit lives on in Metallica. Speaking now, James Hetfield says that whenever Metallica are involved in new, exciting projects, “there’s always thoughts, when we’re doing things, in the back of our minds: ‘Wow! Cliff would just love this’, you know?”
Certainly there’s little doubt that Cliff – the guy who turned the others on to Lou Reed’s 60s band the Velvet Underground – would have been stoked by the Lulu album, released in 2011.
“I’m still close with Jim Martin, who was an extremely great friend of Cliff’s,” James said at the time of that record, “and he is unbelievably excited about this Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration. We talked a bit about Cliff, and about him being alive in our spirit around the whole thing, in the studio when we were doing it. It’s raw, it’s loose, and there’s a lot of floor takes. It’s kinda extreme jamming.” Something Cliff always encouraged.
“Absolutely,” agrees James. “Oh, he loved to jam and just go crazy with sounds. He loved soundscapes, but in a heavy way. He was a big fan of that and a big fan of Pink Floyd and some of the really deep but heavy stuff. Lou’s lyrics were very intense and dark, and that was something that Cliff turned us on to as well. He was a unique kind of guy, and Lou is too.”
Cliff Burton – the uncompromising soul and conscience of Metallica, in life and, still, in death. We salute you. There was never a metalhead like you before, there will never be a metalhead like you again.
By Mick Wall Published in Metal Hammer #224
MICK WALL & KIRK HAMMET REMINISCENT For Kirk Hammett it was late afternoon in the US. For me it was early morning in England. But for both of us time was moving backwards as we recalled the fallen soldier who put the metal into Metallica: their former bassist Cliff Burton.
“Cliff had a lot of integrity,” Kirk said, quietly. “And his way of expressing that integrity was in one stock sentence which I still use to this day, and it was: ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ He really just cared about the music and the integrity behind the music. He was just very, very real.”
He certainly was. You only had to look at him to see that. The long, straight hair, parted down the middle; the moth-eaten cardigan and bell-bottom jeans; the weird little bum-fluff ’tache; the tee with some obscure band on it. At a time when poodlehair, Spandex and make-up were the norm in rock, these were all signifiers of what made Cliff Burton different, signposts to a soul born old that didn’t know how to compromise. That truly didn’t give a fuck.
Kirk sighed. “I don’t know if he knew somehow that his time was limited, but he really lived it like it was his last day, because he just wouldn’t settle for anything other than what he believed in. And that taught me a lot. To this day there are situations that I’m going through, and I can just picture Cliff saying: ‘What’s real to you? What really matters?’ And he would go through a bunch of points that didn’t really matter. He would name them off, and at the end of each one he’d say: ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ He was a very, very strong guy. Stubborn at times, and because of that he and I would clash sometimes. But we really were just bros, and he was a big influence on all of us.”
He remains so to this day. The legend of Cliff Burton has been the biggest unifying influence on all subsequent generations of heavy metal bands, whatever their stripe. Being true to yourself may have been the founding tenet of the original rock and metal giants, but by the time Metallica came along to redraw the musical map in the 80s, metal had become codified. The rules had straightjacketed the music’s essential, freewheeling spirit. Cliff Burton made it his mission to break those codes. Every musician since who has tried to do the same owes him big-time. Cliff was the fearless one, the guy who stood his ground, holding up his middle finger saying: “What’s real to you? I don’t give a fuck.”
A memorial plague at Marshall Elementary School in Castro Valley, CA
The memorial stone in Dörarp, Sweden. Erected by Swedish fans in 2006.
An interview from the best old school metal magazine that's still releasing print issues. It's a real beauty in full color. Please support them! Check them out here: oldschool-metal-maniac.com/eng/index.php
Live recording from March 28, 1978 Budokan Hall, Tokyo, Japan released by Zodiac in lossless WAV format.
PATREON / DIGITAL SHOP
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German Black Metal band from Grossbettlingen, Baden-Württemberg. They started up in 1992, and down below you can listen to their 5th demo tape released in 1996.
Gotham City The Beginning (Interview by Janne Stark from The Early Years CD booklet)
The story takes place in the far north of Sweden, in and around the big city of Umeå (in the northern part of Sweden). Going back to 1978 when guitarist Mårten Edlund and drummer Jonas Östman formed the band Attityder (Attitudes) together with guitarist/singer Tomas Nilsson, bass player Nils Granered and guitarist Thomas Persson.
Mårten: It's hard to describe our style, but it was some kind of melodic rock, sort of jazz rock with lots of guitar harmonies, while Tomas was more of a punk singer. We only played our original songs and there is some rehearsal recording, but we never did any proper demo. Then Tomas wanted to play more punkish, and I wanted to play heavy metal so we split up.
Jonas: Mårten was really into metal, and we used to sit at his place and listen to records by Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and all the things that were cooking at the time. I came from a more varied background musically. I listened to Kansas, ABBA, Led Zeppelin and punk. Björn Melander and I grew up on the same backyard, so we knew each other from when we were kids. He moved away and we drifted apart. Then we met again when we were at high school, and we found out he was playing guitar and bass. With Attityder we used to rehearse in our summer house, but it was horrible having to drive 45 kilometres just to rehearse and it didn't work. When Björn joined we could rehearse at his place, and we could practice as late as we wanted. I remember I ruined his floor with my drums. I ruined my parents' floor as well.
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Björn: In the late 70s/early 80s I played guitar and sang in a band which was more of a jam type Cream/Hendrix type blues rock band. The drummer was Anders Zackrisson (who would later be Gotham City's lead singer). We did a few gigs but mostly spent our time rehearsing. Jan-Olov "Janne" Persson who plays bass on the Krogen show in 1985 played guitar in the jam band.
Ola: I was born in 1962 and me, Mårten, Thomas Persson and Nils Granered went to high school together, and then we ended up in the same class at the third year when we studied civil engineering. Me and Mårten used to sit next to each other and work on lyrics and draw logos at school. I came from the small town of Teg on the other side of the river and the others were from Grubbe, so I didn't know them from before. I was an elite swimmer for the Swedish national team, so I was sort of a local celebrity. When I wasn't picked for the Olympics team in Moscow in 1980, I lost interest in swimming. So, we got to know each other, and they saw I liked heavy metal. My dad worked for an air company, so I used to fly down to Stockholm to see concerts. That year, 1980, I went down to Stockholm to see Thin Lizzy with Snowy White at Hovet on their "Chinatown" tour and also Def Leppard opening for Scorpions. Not many from Umeå used to fly down to Stockholm so I had lots of things to talk about with these guys. It also turned out they were playing in a band, and I was really into it, but I didn't play guitar or anything. But they said I could try and sing and see how it went, so I did.
The band now featured Ola Ohlsson on vocals, Mårten Edlund and Tomas Persson on guitar, Nils Granered on bass and Jonas Östlund on drums. The band only did one gig before Nils decided to leave the band.
Ola: Nils left late 1980/early 1981 because he was playing basketball and didn't really want to commit to the band. One of my swimming buddies knew of a guy who was a great bass player, Björn Melander, who was a year younger than us. Björn's parent had a guest house where we could rehearse. I remember we started out by playing "The Green Manalishi", UFO'S "Doctor Doctor" and some Motörhead song.
Björn: As I remember it, Jonas came up with the name Gotham City in the autumn of 1981. I lived on the countryside just outside of Umeå and I had very understanding parents who let use their baker's cottage to rehearse in.
Jonas: Yeah, I came up with the name, but I'm not sure where I got it from. It's not like I was a Batman fan. It probably sounded cool, and we went – Yeah, let's go with that. I also did some graphic stuff. I mean, when you're that age you always sit there and doodle, and I made drawings of how the stage would look, guitars over there, drums in the middle and that sort of thing. Unfortunately all of those drawings got lost through the years.
Ola: Jonas wrote the song "Gotham City" and we thought it was a cool song and it would be a great name for the band, too. That year I went to a lot of concerts. I also got to know the fellow Umeå guy Lars Ekeberg who was president of the Swedish Motörhead fan club - Motörheadbangers. So, I started the Saxon Militia Guard. I remember we went to Finland to see Saxon and then we went to the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival in Port Vale, Stoke On Trent. Motörhead were the headliners, and then there was the newly formed Blizzard of Ozz, Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush, Riot, Vardis and Triumph. We were over there for three weeks and saw a ton of concerts. When I came back, we were all very stoked to become rock stars.
It shall also be noted that Ola also ran the heavy metal fanzine Monsters Of Rock together with Lars Ekeberg in 1981-1982, one of the first in Sweden.
Björn: I remember in 1981 the cassette porta studio had just arrived, a Tascam 244, and I bought one and we recorded a demo with our first two songs "Gotham City" and "Killer Angels" in our rehearsal room. We really didn't know what we were doing but we were very proud of it. Then we played it to Anders Östman, Jonas' cousin who is a very famous dance band musician, and he said - "But, you've recorded it in mono!". In December 1981, we played a big live show at a Lucia fest at the Dragonskolan gymnasium. In January-February of 1982 we finally got the money together to record at a proper studio, Tonteknik, which was a 24-channel studio owned by Per Sörlin. The only studio around.
Jonas: Björn was a real entrepreneur and initiated a lot of stuff. One day that porta studio was just there. I remember we recorded something, but it didn't turn out well. Tonteknik was the only studio around and the guy who owned it was the engineer, but he really didn't have a clue. He was mostly worried that the lights on the mixer went red when we recorded the guitars!
Ola: I remember we made that first studio recording, and we copied it on cassettes, and I wrote so many letters on my dad's old typewriter and sent to record labels, but no response. Then we figured we may as well do it ourselves, like many other local bands had done. We printed it in around 300 copies, and it cost, together with the studio, 5000 SEK (500€). I remember we secured the money through friends. It was sold at the local shops Akademibokhandeln and Burman's Music. The front cover was made by my old swimming teacher Hans-Anders Molin. He took the photo of the bat and made it look cool.
Björn: I remember we also sent some of the singles to the Heavy Sound store in Stockholm and we were very proud when they had featured us on the answering machine news message.
Jonas: I made the back of the cover together with a classmate of mine, Christer Gustafsson. We put it together with rubon letters. He was pretty good at drawing. Now, here's a perfect example of how little we knew about things. We did know that there was supposed to be stuff written on the cover, and since Christer helped me with the cover, well, let's put him down as producer. He helped me produce the back side of the cover, that's all.
Björn: After the single, in 1982, we went into the same studio and recorded the demo for what later became the "Black Writs" EP. The songs were "Spitfire", "Black Writs”, “1995”, “No Chance To Go", a cover of "The Green Manalishi", "Borderline", "Head On", "Midnight Hunter" and "Born To Rock Hard". Ola was incredibly enterprising and called around to a lot of people, including yourself, to get tips for gigs and stuff. Thomas played live with us at Hagagården and he was also on the demo, but then he left in the middle of 1982, and started playing with the punk band The Pinheads.
Mårten: I remember the gig at Hagagården where Jonas spit fire, so the fire alarm went off! He loved spitting fire! He used to do a drum solo and then he went up and started spitting fire. There was also another gig at a sports hall in Nordmaling where the audience carried around Ola!
Ola: We rehearsed every Tuesday, and sometimes twice a week at Björn's place 15 kilometres south of Umeå. There were nights we could hardly get home because of all the snow. One time I wasn't home until 3 in the morning and my mum wondered if I shouldn't give this rock music up and get back into swimming. I also remember Heavy Load were playing in Umeå in 1982 and we really wanted that support gig, but since the band Mogg had won the Rock SM band stand they got the gig, and we were pretty disappointed about that.
Björn: Yes, Jonas would always spit fire! I remember he used to do it in the song "Spitfire". I was also a nerd when it came to technology and I bought some pyro stuff, took a pen which I emptied, filled it with powder, put on the cap, taped it on my bass and put on a triggering device which I activated with a 9-volt battery, so during my bass solo there was a fireball coming out of the bass for 6-7 seconds. I had an Aria bass which I had cut the horns off and glued on sheepskin. We also did a gig in Vännäs, where my car wouldn't start after the gig, and it was minus 30 degrees Celsius. We had to be towed.
Ola: I remember before recording "Black Writs" my brother had given me an echo unit for my vocals. He had leukaemia and I made a bone marrow transplant, I think we were number seven in Sweden to do that. As a thank you he gave me the echo unit and helped finance the EP. Around this time we did our military service. Jonas received a discharge, but me, Mårten and Thomas did. Björn is a year younger than us, but he also got a discharge. I was granted a three day leave from the army to record the EP and we entered the studio in February 1983 to record. When we were finished in March, we were gonna be big rock stars! For "Black Writs" a friend of mine from the army, Anders Sellberg, did the artwork. The photo on the back, what you can't see is that we are standing knee deep in snow!
Björn: I remember we got some type of distribution deal with SOS Records. Back then we didn't know much about the music business and did most of the things wrong. We paid for the recording. A friend of ours, his father had a print shop, and he printed the covers, but they were only folded in the back, so we had to sit in the rehearsal room and fold and glue them ourselves. We received the discs in packs of 30 from Grammoplast press plant and had to put them in the sleeves ourselves. We printed 2000 copies, and we didn't receive a cent from SOS.
Ola: One Saturday in May 1983 we had a band meeting and at that meeting the other guys said - "We wanna be rock stars, so we have decided that Anders Zackrisson is going to be our new singer and we want you to be our manager”. I was so upset I just left and didn't talk to them again. They always used to talk about this guy Anders Zackrisson who was a great singer, so I should have seen it coming. I was really driven back then. I had quit swimming and I had the Saxon fan club and music was my passion. I had left the army and had no idea what to do so music was my priority. After that I got a job as a swim teacher for Ving Travel on Rhodes, Greece. I was going abroad for six months, and that's 42 years ago! From 1983-1991 I worked with Ving and SAS and lived in Greece, France, one winter in Gambia, the Canary Islands, two summers on Ibiza and in 1989 I moved to Majorca and lived there for 25 years. SAS was part owner of Spanair where I started working. I lived in Panama for a couple of years and now I live in Barcelona, working with airport contracts for Volotea airlines. It wasn't until 2002 I found out there was an interest in Gotham City! I haven't been into music since I left in 1983, but I didn't really have the talent, so I guess that was OK. I will admit I was a bit surprised and pissed off when I saw all the bootlegs so I'm happy they are being properly released now!
Björn: The way we handled the situation with Ola is really my bad conscience, but you didn't have any good people skills back in those days. At the same time as Gotham City, I was jamming a lot with Anders, who was originally a drummer but during one session he started singing and then I heard there was really something there. When he joined, he was supposed to rehearse the back catalogue, and we did a re-recording of the song "Gotham City". Just before we were going to record, someone played a prank on me. I was checking the speakers on the PA system and when I had my ear close to the tweeter, the PA was set to feedback. I went completely deaf and felt terrible. I remember the day after in the recording studio I had to stop playing in the middle of songs because of the pain in my ears. I couldn't hear anything, so that wasn't particularly pleasant, but at least it was documented.
40 years ago today ... September 26, 1986 Metallica visited Solnahallen, just outside of Stockholm. This was Cliff Burtons last concert. The next day Cliff died following a bus crash in the Southern parts of Sweden.
AUDIO: Audience recording (Aud+)
PHOTOS:
Before the show!
Exiting the stage for the last time with Cliff
After the show and claimed to be the last photo of Cliff
ADVERTISEMENT:
Ad in Swedish newspapers about the concert
TICKET:
SETLIST:
0:00:19 The Ecstasy Of Gold
0:02:04 Battery
0:06:30 Master of Puppets
0:14:19 For Whom the Bell Tolls
0:18:17 Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
0:24:18 Ride the Lightning
0:30:32 (Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth
0:35:22 Whiplash
0:39:42 The Thing That Should Not Be
0:45:29 Fade to Black
0:52:47 Seek and Destroy
0:59:08 Creeping Death
Encore #1:
1:07:16 The Four Horsemen
1:11:49 Kirk's Guitar Solo
1:15:03 Am I Evil?
1:18:36 Damage, Inc.
Encore #2:
1:25:02 Blitzkrieg
1:30:20 Fight Fire with Fire
REVIEWS:
Not a review but an anecdote from the concert. A part from an interview with Pär Fontander, a Swedish Metal Radio DJ/Journalist at the time.
Fontander did an interview with Lars Ulrich of METALLICA, the night before the band had an accident and their bassist Cliff Burton died.
— I met Lars before their gig at Solnahallen in November -86 and the following night they were going to play in Copenhagen. When I sat down and talked to him, I asked him what he was going to buy with him from Copenhagen back home to the USA and he told me that he had a big suitcase that he was going to fill with candy and stuff. He was incredibly excited to meet old friends again and to play in his childhood town. Then, when I was editing the interview on Saturday morning, a friend who worked at their record company called me and told me that one of their buses had overturned. A member was dead but they didn't know who. I told him to call me back as soon as he found out who it was. Then it was a rush, because I was allowed to re-edit the entire interview and tone down all the lustful things and just focus on the conversation about the new album. Just a few hours before the broadcast, I found out that it was Cliff Burton who had died, so I was the first to break the news about who had died. Afterwards, I received letters to the program where people said that they had cried when they heard the news. Of course, it came as a shock to many.
This rare video was created in the Propast studio on the occasion of the recording of the album "Schizofrenie!" The video was probably recorded in the months of January to March 1991.
Arakain is a Czech Thrash metal band, which was founded in 1982. Its founders were singer Aleš Brichta, guitarist Jiří Urban and drummer Miroslav Nedvěd. Performed at rock festivals in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Poland. In the same year, Daniel Krob briefly replaced Miroslav Mach on guitar, before joining Kreyson a few months later, upon which Mach returned.With the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Arakain began building a reputation for themselves as their freedom to perform without censorship increased. In the beginning of 1990, their third single, "Ku-Klux-Klan/Orion", was released, followed shortly after by their debut album, "Thrash The Trash" and it's English version album!
An interview from the best old school metal magazine that's still releasing print issues. It's a real beauty in full color. Please support them! Check them out here: oldschool-metal-maniac.com/eng/index.php
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