THE FOURTH HORSEMAN
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-fluffc’tache; the tee with some obscure band on it. At a time when poodle-hair, 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
