Over the years, the legend of Cliff Burton has grown. The man is a heavy metal diety at this point. But did you know that Burton wasn't really a metalhead? Anybody who looks at old photos can see the dude was more of a punk rocker. I mean, he wore bell-bottoms, not the most metal of attire, not that he seemed to give a fuck what people thought.
But on a recent episode of Talk Is Jericho, drummer Lars Ulrich revealed that Burton didn't care for the big metal bands of the time, namely Iron Maiden and Diamond Head and would much rather listen to The Police:
“If you listen to the difference between Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, obviously there was this huge … the pallet was expanded. We’ve never experimented with harmonies, melodies … If you take ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ that melody, ‘Fade to Black,’ the super-melodic outro—that was all stuff [Cliff] brought to the table. The intro of ‘Fight Fire with Fire,’ that was more or less his. There was this whole thing that came from the classical upbringing that he had.
“He studied classical music and he could sit down and talk with you about Bach and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. In 1981, James Hetfield and I didn’t sit there and talk a lot about classical endeavors, you know? [Laughs] We had a little more narrow-minded outlook. So Cliff—he loved the energy, he loved the aggression, but I don’t think he was a big fan of like, Iron Maiden. I remember early on when we started traveling on the tour bus, I’d put on some Maiden or something—he didn’t get out of his seat to start banging up and down. [Chuckles]
“I’d play some Maiden, some Diamond Head, and then he’d put on [ZZ Top’s] Rio Grande Mud or Degüello or some Yes album I’d never heard of, and I was like, ‘Huh?’ He’d sit there and fly the flag for Jethro Tull or … one band he loved was the Police, he’d always play the Police.
“His whole net was just really wide and really unencumbered by how it was supposed to be if you were in a metal band, which obviously James and I hadn’t quite graduated to at that time.
“Cliff, hands down, was the one that was the most musically varied at that time. Anybody that sits and goes, ‘Cliff wouldn’t have done this, Cliff wouldn’t have done that,’ it’s just a nonstarter of a conversation, because we don’t know. If you take like, ‘Enter Sandman,’ it’s a great riff and we tried a lot of stuff with [Jason] Newsted and it was just sort of like, just thumping straight eighth notes—it just works for the song! I don’t think Cliff would have said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not doing that!’ His thing was just what’s best for the song.”
I think if anything this shows what a great variety of musical tastes can do to create a band's sound. Cliff's tastes were completely different than Lars' or James' and they all brought their influences to the table to create something new.
That's why I think it's so silly when kids say they can't be friends with somebody because they don't listen to metal. If you only listen to metal, how do you know that there isn't other stuff out there that you might like as well? Cliff knew!
