REMEMBERING THE RAGER
The major rager on the four-string motherfucker”, as the late Cliff Burton was approvingly described during his first gig with Metallica on March 5, 1983, is a revealing phrase. It’s a very California-in-the-Eighties thing to call a musician, one part Bill & Ted and one part Spinal Tap, but at the same time it’s completely perfect.
The “major rager” tag was bestowed on Cliff by Metallica’s then-guitarist Dave Mustaine, something of a rager himself, and it has gone on to represent an era of heavy metal—and specifically, the beginnings of garage-level thrash metal—that still entrances a tribe of metalheads, even those too young to witness it in person.
Nowadays, Metallica are huge, with a brand as powerful as that of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, and they’re in their fourth decade of playing arenas. Back then, Cliff plus the other three members James Hetfield (vocals, guitar) and Lars Ulrich (drums), and either Mustaine or his successor Kirk Hammett, were young, broke, and feeling their way into a new sound that was influenced equally by classic metal and hardcore punk.
Thrash metal was fast, obnoxious, and unsophisticated at first, but soon evolved into a more polished sound. Many of you will already know all the historical details, so I won’t go too deeply into the chronology here, but with their first three albums Metallica established an influential template that, purists argue, even the band themselves have not surpassed.
Cliff was a huge part of this, even though he was only a(1983).
