October 21, 2025 • 20 mins
Part II of Jonny’s Dead Air picks up on the Master of Puppets tour, where momentum feels like destiny—and the schedule feels like a sentence. Inside the machine: Cliff Burton—red hair like a warning flare—holding the center while James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Kirk Hammett drive Metallica across Europe on diesel, adrenaline, and denial. Load-ins, soundchecks, the soft sermons—earn the heavy, make the pretty cost—and the quiet foreshadow that rides in every night bus.
Then Sweden. Fog like a possession. A deck of cards. A window bunk. What follows is the moment that scarred a generation of fans and musicians—the crash that took Cliff at 24, and the aftershocks that still ring. Through eyewitness texture and reverence for the music—“For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Fade to Black,” and the immortal “Orion”—this episode walks the road from triumph to tragedy, and into the chapel of what remains.
It’s not gore. It’s gravity.
It’s not myth. It’s memory.
And in the hush after the noise, you’ll hear him—still—carved into forever.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Then Sweden. Fog like a possession. A deck of cards. A window bunk. What follows is the moment that scarred a generation of fans and musicians—the crash that took Cliff at 24, and the aftershocks that still ring. Through eyewitness texture and reverence for the music—“For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Fade to Black,” and the immortal “Orion”—this episode walks the road from triumph to tragedy, and into the chapel of what remains.
It’s not gore. It’s gravity.
It’s not myth. It’s memory.
And in the hush after the noise, you’ll hear him—still—carved into forever.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Johnny Heartwell and this is Johnny's Dead Air podcast,
a production of iHeartRadio. Here's a recap of part one.
Some storms don't arrive with thunder. They begin with a vibration,
the kind that turns floorboards into drums and a shy
kid with red hair into a force of nature. Suburbia
(00:22):
shook first metronome as a second heartbeat, fingers hardened to steal.
Then the Bay Area heard it. Clubs that smelled like
beer and electricity, and a scene that learned the bass
could be both spine and spear. The password spread on
Hissy Cassette's Metallica. The name behind the low end that
sang like a warning flare Cliff Burden. He bent speed
(00:45):
into purpose, He made heaviness holy ride. The lightning drew breath.
Master of Puppets arrived with no fat, only fate in
the middle of it all O'Ryan, a constellation written in
low notes, a map.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
No one realized they'd need.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Crowds became congregations, Critics learned the word composition. The quiet
kid became the anchor men leaned on without knowing. But
success runs on a timetable that doesn't care what it's carrying.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Now It's Europe.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Cold breath on the glass, schedules that eat sleep for fuel,
and the bus humming through the fog. The dream is intact,
the price has grown teeth, and somewhere ahead a road
is waiting to collect. This is script number fourteen, The
Last Ride, Pard two, Act five. Fade to black Sweden.
(01:37):
A fog that doesn't sit on the road, it owns
it pines like black teeth, fields sleeping under frost, a
bus with a belly full of gear, and four men
who have shoved their entire youth into a schedule. Backstage,
laughs are still bouncing off memory. When the deck of
cards appears, it's a ritual as old as boredom got.
(01:57):
The card deck snaps faces like the air holds its breath. Cliff,
it's the Ace of Spades, Kirk King of Ah, damn it.
Kirk blinks. Cliff grins, wolfish, boyish, claiming the window bunk
with a nod that says I don't believe in omens,
and also I don't hear them anyway. Bags thump into bays.
(02:18):
Someone slaps the bus's flank like it's a racehorse ready
to ride. The door folds shut schunk. The machine exhales
diesel into the cold inside. The aisle is narrow and
the world is narrower. Someone cracks a joke, someone else
doesn't hear it. Cliff palms a paperback, then stuffs it
(02:39):
into the mesh pocket above the bed, like he's tucking
a thought away for the morning. The bus rolls, the
miles disappear, then another than twenty. He lies in the
window bunk, facing the glass, hair spilling across the pillow,
mouth parted just enough for the breath, The fog, the pain.
The fog blooms, fades, blue, bombs again. If you're watching,
(03:02):
you could count it like a tempo. Somewhere past midnight,
the country road becomes an unspooling ribbon of the same
small town over and over. A gas station that's closed,
a farmhouse light that refuses to go out, a road
sign in a language that feels like it was invented
for the winter. The driver's knuckles are dry white on
the wheel. He feels something in the steering column that
(03:24):
he can't name. He tells himself it's nothing. He tells
the road it's nothing. The road does not answer. The
heater rattles, the world narrows even more. You're there, You're
half asleep. The hum of the bus is a blanket somewhere,
a guitar case size against another case. Your brain catalog
(03:48):
smells oil, cold wool, wet, leather, breath, something metallic that
shouldn't be there yet yet. You think I'll sleep ten
minutes in wake brand new. You think the window is
a TV tuned to fog. Then the bus makes a
new sound, not the good sound, the wrong sound, like
a chain yank through a jaw. The wrong sound unzips
(04:09):
the rest of the night. Impact one, it's almost gentle,
like a shiver. Impact two is a correction that doesn't
feel correct. The tire scream dry as a chalkboard. Somewhere
behind you. Someone wakes with a word that never becomes
a word. Impact three lifts the world sideways. Gravity loses
interest in You're part of the map. Time does the
thing it does. It breaks. Cliff floats for a second,
(04:31):
like a saint in a stained glass window. The bunk
gives him up, the glass forgets its job. Sheets turn
into flags, a paperback fans open midair. He reaches pure
reflex for anything to hold his hand closes on nothing.
The window gives away like paper. Cold knife's the aisle
diesel breathes fire. The bus's interior rotates in a slow roll.
That thinks it's a dance, then remembers steel can't dance.
(04:52):
Bodies are like dice in a god size cup. You
hear the sounds, the long scream of steel dragging its
own skin off, glass shattering into spray, a wet wooden
crack that means bone has joined the argument, the fairal
sound of human mouth makes when the words don't work.
Someone shouts a name, but the name is ripped from
the teeth. Cliff goes through the window, a human comet
night swallows him and spits him into a ditch. The
(05:13):
bus follows. There's no proper way for a machine this size.
The fall, It chooses, all of them roof side earth,
side earth, the metal monster rolling into the winter wind.
Inside James is a storm of fists and vows, grabbing, losing,
grabbing again. Lars is a ping pong ball ricocheting between angles,
a metronome set to panic. Kirk is a shadow in
a shadow, blinking like a man trying to choose between
(05:34):
two bad doors. Then, finally, the world stops moving, silence
the size of a house. Then air returns as the
noise you can hear. You're there, the first breath after
Everything you own is heavy, your eyelids, your tongue, your spine.
(05:55):
The cold finds you with expert hands. You crawl towards
it because the side is all wrong. The door is insane,
so you choose a window that has generously removed itself.
You land on ground that does not care about you.
Your feet cut on invisible teeth. You don't feel it yet.
Your hands are a map of other things blood. You
(06:18):
stand because standing seems like a thing people do when
they're alive. The fog isn't fog anymore. It's steam. The
bus is coughing. You hear someone weeping, like a fire
has learned language. James is barefoot in the frost. Glass
slices his soules open and writes him a new line
of pain.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
He edits with rage.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
He circles the bus, animal fast, punching the steel like
it owes him something cliff. He deplores, his throat tears
the word, but he keeps on screaming. Lars wanders and
a broken circle hands up as if to catch something
falling from the sky that offers nothing. No no, no,
no no no no no, takes the rest and shreds it.
(07:02):
Kirk is still in the hole where the window used
to be, hugging the frame like a confession box. His
lips are moving. You lean close enough to hear it.
It It should have been me. Then his voice fails itself.
He swallows the rest like poison, and they see him.
(07:24):
Cliff lies on the earth, folded by forces the human
body wasn't designed to meet. The bus has selected him
as a pillow denim, shredded into ribbon patches, peeled like scabs.
One arm is an angle math does not use. His
chest is a ledger, stamped paid in full. His beard
(07:48):
is jeweled with glass. One eye is half moon of
a winter sky. He is deathly still. Everything that is
in him becomes a ver, screaming, clawing, pounding, promising, bargaining, unmaking.
James rips that steel with bare hands until his knuckles
are bloody. Get off him, Get off him, he orders
(08:11):
the universe. The universe files a quiet objection. Cliff does
not move. The world shifts around his stillness like a
tide around a rock. You're there inside the bell in
the noise, an old sound climbs your spine. Not a voice,
not music, a toll. It rings from nowhere and everywhere.
(08:35):
You swear you hear four notes, marching, ancient, inevitable, like
they've been there the whole time, waiting for this exact second.
You think for whom the bell tolls, You think it's
tolling for us. You think the thought you will never
(08:56):
say out loud. He looks like he belongs to the earth,
and the earth Earth is keeping him. Headlights comb the fog.
Locals arrive, faces wrapped in scarves and fear. A farmer
in a parka whispers hed a good head, a good
h my God. He crosses himself, even though he hasn't
(09:17):
in years. A kid with a bicycle stares at the
red hair like it's a flame someone forgot to blow out.
First Responders do what first responders do. They measure time
in gloves and clips, in questions whose answers are all
the same. A paramedic kneels beside cliff with the posture
of a man entering church the morning after he promised
(09:38):
he never would. Fingers to neck, a look exchanged, lips
pressed thin he covers the face he doesn't want to
remember seeing. He thinks it's the kindest thing he could do. Crane,
someone says, The word becomes Destiny's punctuation. The crane takes
longer than anybody can stand. Dawn starts drawing chalk outlines
(10:02):
around trees. James has run out of knuckles to split.
He is down to shoving the bus with his shoulder,
sobbing profanity that sounds like a prayer. Lars is bargaining
with air, promising the kinds of promises you aren't allowed
to make. Kirk just sits just ten feet from cliff,
rocking with his head in his hands, whispering to no
(10:24):
one who can take the deal. The crane arrives with
chains that clank like a medieval decision. The operator is
all jaw and eyes. He won't meet the bands. He
swings the hook over the carcass of the bus as
if he's moving a whale from a beach. Chains bite,
steel hooks catch ribs of the machine. A gesture from
(10:45):
a man in a reflective vess, A rev, rev, another rev.
The world lifts two inches four six. You can see
him now what the night took and what is left.
Hope is tiny vicious animal. It bites everyone at once. Hold.
Someone yells, the operator holds up. Someone else says, the
(11:07):
operator does. The bus hovers for heartbeat. The world is
a coin on its edge, thinking about how to fall.
Then snap, not one chain but two. The bus drops.
The sound that makes is not a sound. It's a verdict,
a god's fist on a marble table. Bone surrender under tonnage.
Flesh answers with a noise. The living will never forget.
The ground says enough and tries to climb out of itself.
(11:29):
The band makes a sound that breaks parts of the
throat they won't use properly for months. It's almost like
a second death. You're there after the drop. The air
refuses to move, bird calls stop midnote. A man in
a park of whispers something in his hands. You taste iron,
like a penny melted on your tongue. Someone vomits carefully,
(11:53):
like the earth won't allow a mess. You think no
song is worth this. You think he would have said
the same. You think play o'riyon at the funeral, and
then hate yourself for thinking about the programming of a
grief that hasn't earned its steps. The operator gets back
in the cab because that's his job. He doesn't look
(12:15):
towards the red halo in the frost. Again, he lifts properly.
This time, the chains hold like obedient dogs. The weight
comes off the body that will not get lighter. A
blanket appears from nowhere and becomes an altarcloth. Rough hands
are gentle with what's left, because gentleness is the last
thing we get to give. A police officer says words
(12:39):
in Swedish that mean we have to make a report.
He says them like he's apologizing for gravity. The band
gathers three where four were. A triangle with a missing
side is not a triangle, it's a wound. James stands
the way a pillar stands after the roof is gone.
(13:01):
Lars counts breast because numbers are the only thing that
do not lie today. Kirk flinches every time a chain clinks,
as if the sound were rewind. If it can just
find the right part of the tape. No one says metallica.
The word feels like a suit. In a hospital, they
say cliff because that is the only word that means
(13:23):
anything now. A medic asks a question that no one
hears somebody signs something. The sun commits to the horizon
like it's making a dangerous promise.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
You're there. The walk away.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
You step back because becoming close is starting to feel
like stealing your shoes. Print the frost with curves you
won't see again. Behind you, the bus steams like an
animal that lost the fight. Ahead of you, the road continues,
neutral and infinite, ignorant of the names it just learned.
(13:59):
You hear under everything else four notes, low, patient, eternal,
like a consolation you can only see when you look away.
You don't know whether the sound is coming from memory
or mercy, but you know you know it's him. Later,
(14:21):
headlines will decide which words are worth ink. Fans will
argue with rumored strangers making bars. Interviews will edit out
the feral noises grief makes because microphones don't know what
to do with them. But here on the frost cut road,
truth is plain and unadorned. Cliff Burton is dead, twenty
(14:43):
four years old, crushed beneath the machine that carried his dream.
Men will spend decades trying to become old enough to
stand next to this hour without shaking. The bell keeps
tolling anyway.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Out.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
A single, sustained low no grows out of the dark,
like a star scene from the bottom of a lake.
Hold it, hold it longer than it feels safe, Let
it fall into the first bar of Orion. Act six,
(15:22):
Cliff Burton's epilogue, Orion. Next Act six, Cliff Burton's epilogue, Orion, California.
The fog here is different, golden, rising from the coast
in slow breaths, not a killer's fog, a mourner's. A
(15:44):
crowd gathers, not thousands, not millions, just enough to hold
the silence. Musicians, family, strangers who already knew him without
ever meeting him. They sit and pews with eyes swollen
from the impossible fact that they are here for this reason.
His parents sit in the front, still dignified, bearing the
unbearable with the same quiet strength that raised him. They
(16:07):
do not weep loudly, They do not collapse. Their son
demanded discipline, and discipline is how they love him.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
The band is broken, faces hollow, hands trembling. They stand
as men who have been through battlefields, stand not victorious,
not even defeated, just the live in a way that
feels wrong, And then through the speakers. His voice returns,
not words, not a speech.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
The music.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Orian, his masterpiece, his requiem. The notes arrive like comments
across a black sky. Movements fold into each other, Harmonies
climb and crash. The bass takes its rightful place, not behind,
not beneath, but above, carrying the weight carrying him. Every
(17:05):
person in that room feels it. The song he built
for eternity is now Eternity's gift back to him. It's
a hymn and a haunting, a farewell and a promise.
You're there the funeral hall, the air smells faintly of
(17:26):
wax and salt. The lights are dim, but you can
see his picture on the altar, red hair, denim, vest
a smile that looks like it was meant to last longer.
The music surges. You close your eyes, and for a
moment you swear he's in the room, just out of reach,
head banging in the back, hair whipping, cigarettes, smoldering. The
(17:49):
song climbs, you feel your throat catch. Then it falls quiet,
like the ocean pulling away, and you understand, you understand,
this is good bye. The band almost ends there. How
could it not? The center was ripped out the anchor,
cut loose, but grief has its own gravity. They continue
(18:11):
not because it's easy, but because to stop would be
another death. Another basis takes his place, and then another.
But to the faithful, there is always the whisper. It
just isn't the same Without Cliff, years, stretch albums, pile
generations change. His name does not for musicians. He remains
(18:33):
the proof that bass could be poetry, that heaviness could
be holy. His vest becomes legend, his solo scripture, his story,
a warning carved into every tour bus windshield.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
It's decades later you sit.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
In a dark room, headphones pressed tight, You press play
on Orion. The bass swells, mournful, infidite. The world around
you fade, and for a few minutes, he's alive again,
And every vibration, in every silence between chords, you realize
he has never left. He's here, hiding in the sound,
(19:13):
waiting for anyone brave enough to listen. The final words,
so close, no matter how far, And here we are,
hands over hearts, heads bowed to the hush between notes.
The memory remains not as marble or ink, but as
(19:34):
a low, eternal frequency that knows our names forever trusting
who we are. You taught us that to earn the heavy,
to make the pretty cost for whom the bell tolls.
It told once in the cold, But the echo keeps
shaping us, softer than grief, stronger than time, fade to
(19:55):
black the world bag that night we refused. We kept
the lit where the lines still breathe, wherever I may roam.
And there you are, in the tremor of a crowd
and the patience of arrest, in four notes that arrive
like mercy off to never never Land. No, not you.
(20:16):
You stayed in the living air between chords, in Orion's
slow heartbeat, in the spine of every song that dares
to be both thunder and prayer. Nothing is the same
without you, and still nothing else matters. I hope you
(20:37):
enjoyed Scrip fourteen, The Last Ride, the Cliff Burton Story.
I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you so much for listening.
And welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Johnny Heartwell and this is Johnny's Dead Air podcast,
a production of iHeartRadio. Here's a recap of part one.
Some storms don't arrive with thunder. They begin with a vibration,
the kind that turns floorboards into drums and a shy
kid with red hair into a force of nature. Suburbia
(00:22):
shook first metronome as a second heartbeat, fingers hardened to steal.
Then the Bay Area heard it. Clubs that smelled like
beer and electricity, and a scene that learned the bass
could be both spine and spear. The password spread on
Hissy Cassette's Metallica. The name behind the low end that
sang like a warning flare Cliff Burden. He bent speed
(00:45):
into purpose, He made heaviness holy ride. The lightning drew breath.
Master of Puppets arrived with no fat, only fate in
the middle of it all O'Ryan, a constellation written in
low notes, a map.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
No one realized they'd need.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Crowds became congregations, Critics learned the word composition. The quiet
kid became the anchor men leaned on without knowing. But
success runs on a timetable that doesn't care what it's carrying.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Now It's Europe.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Cold breath on the glass, schedules that eat sleep for fuel,
and the bus humming through the fog. The dream is intact,
the price has grown teeth, and somewhere ahead a road
is waiting to collect. This is script number fourteen, The
Last Ride, Pard two, Act five. Fade to black Sweden.
(01:37):
A fog that doesn't sit on the road, it owns
it pines like black teeth, fields sleeping under frost, a
bus with a belly full of gear, and four men
who have shoved their entire youth into a schedule. Backstage,
laughs are still bouncing off memory. When the deck of
cards appears, it's a ritual as old as boredom got.
(01:57):
The card deck snaps faces like the air holds its breath. Cliff,
it's the Ace of Spades, Kirk King of Ah, damn it.
Kirk blinks. Cliff grins, wolfish, boyish, claiming the window bunk
with a nod that says I don't believe in omens,
and also I don't hear them anyway. Bags thump into bays.
(02:18):
Someone slaps the bus's flank like it's a racehorse ready
to ride. The door folds shut schunk. The machine exhales
diesel into the cold inside. The aisle is narrow and
the world is narrower. Someone cracks a joke, someone else
doesn't hear it. Cliff palms a paperback, then stuffs it
(02:39):
into the mesh pocket above the bed, like he's tucking
a thought away for the morning. The bus rolls, the
miles disappear, then another than twenty. He lies in the
window bunk, facing the glass, hair spilling across the pillow,
mouth parted just enough for the breath, The fog, the pain.
The fog blooms, fades, blue, bombs again. If you're watching,
(03:02):
you could count it like a tempo. Somewhere past midnight,
the country road becomes an unspooling ribbon of the same
small town over and over. A gas station that's closed,
a farmhouse light that refuses to go out, a road
sign in a language that feels like it was invented
for the winter. The driver's knuckles are dry white on
the wheel. He feels something in the steering column that
(03:24):
he can't name. He tells himself it's nothing. He tells
the road it's nothing. The road does not answer. The
heater rattles, the world narrows even more. You're there, You're
half asleep. The hum of the bus is a blanket somewhere,
a guitar case size against another case. Your brain catalog
(03:48):
smells oil, cold wool, wet, leather, breath, something metallic that
shouldn't be there yet yet. You think I'll sleep ten
minutes in wake brand new. You think the window is
a TV tuned to fog. Then the bus makes a
new sound, not the good sound, the wrong sound, like
a chain yank through a jaw. The wrong sound unzips
(04:09):
the rest of the night. Impact one, it's almost gentle,
like a shiver. Impact two is a correction that doesn't
feel correct. The tire scream dry as a chalkboard. Somewhere
behind you. Someone wakes with a word that never becomes
a word. Impact three lifts the world sideways. Gravity loses
interest in You're part of the map. Time does the
thing it does. It breaks. Cliff floats for a second,
(04:31):
like a saint in a stained glass window. The bunk
gives him up, the glass forgets its job. Sheets turn
into flags, a paperback fans open midair. He reaches pure
reflex for anything to hold his hand closes on nothing.
The window gives away like paper. Cold knife's the aisle
diesel breathes fire. The bus's interior rotates in a slow roll.
That thinks it's a dance, then remembers steel can't dance.
(04:52):
Bodies are like dice in a god size cup. You
hear the sounds, the long scream of steel dragging its
own skin off, glass shattering into spray, a wet wooden
crack that means bone has joined the argument, the fairal
sound of human mouth makes when the words don't work.
Someone shouts a name, but the name is ripped from
the teeth. Cliff goes through the window, a human comet
night swallows him and spits him into a ditch. The
(05:13):
bus follows. There's no proper way for a machine this size.
The fall, It chooses, all of them roof side earth,
side earth, the metal monster rolling into the winter wind.
Inside James is a storm of fists and vows, grabbing, losing,
grabbing again. Lars is a ping pong ball ricocheting between angles,
a metronome set to panic. Kirk is a shadow in
a shadow, blinking like a man trying to choose between
(05:34):
two bad doors. Then, finally, the world stops moving, silence
the size of a house. Then air returns as the
noise you can hear. You're there, the first breath after
Everything you own is heavy, your eyelids, your tongue, your spine.
(05:55):
The cold finds you with expert hands. You crawl towards
it because the side is all wrong. The door is insane,
so you choose a window that has generously removed itself.
You land on ground that does not care about you.
Your feet cut on invisible teeth. You don't feel it yet.
Your hands are a map of other things blood. You
(06:18):
stand because standing seems like a thing people do when
they're alive. The fog isn't fog anymore. It's steam. The
bus is coughing. You hear someone weeping, like a fire
has learned language. James is barefoot in the frost. Glass
slices his soules open and writes him a new line
of pain.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
He edits with rage.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
He circles the bus, animal fast, punching the steel like
it owes him something cliff. He deplores, his throat tears
the word, but he keeps on screaming. Lars wanders and
a broken circle hands up as if to catch something
falling from the sky that offers nothing. No no, no,
no no no no no, takes the rest and shreds it.
(07:02):
Kirk is still in the hole where the window used
to be, hugging the frame like a confession box. His
lips are moving. You lean close enough to hear it.
It It should have been me. Then his voice fails itself.
He swallows the rest like poison, and they see him.
(07:24):
Cliff lies on the earth, folded by forces the human
body wasn't designed to meet. The bus has selected him
as a pillow denim, shredded into ribbon patches, peeled like scabs.
One arm is an angle math does not use. His
chest is a ledger, stamped paid in full. His beard
(07:48):
is jeweled with glass. One eye is half moon of
a winter sky. He is deathly still. Everything that is
in him becomes a ver, screaming, clawing, pounding, promising, bargaining, unmaking.
James rips that steel with bare hands until his knuckles
are bloody. Get off him, Get off him, he orders
(08:11):
the universe. The universe files a quiet objection. Cliff does
not move. The world shifts around his stillness like a
tide around a rock. You're there inside the bell in
the noise, an old sound climbs your spine. Not a voice,
not music, a toll. It rings from nowhere and everywhere.
(08:35):
You swear you hear four notes, marching, ancient, inevitable, like
they've been there the whole time, waiting for this exact second.
You think for whom the bell tolls, You think it's
tolling for us. You think the thought you will never
(08:56):
say out loud. He looks like he belongs to the earth,
and the earth Earth is keeping him. Headlights comb the fog.
Locals arrive, faces wrapped in scarves and fear. A farmer
in a parka whispers hed a good head, a good
h my God. He crosses himself, even though he hasn't
(09:17):
in years. A kid with a bicycle stares at the
red hair like it's a flame someone forgot to blow out.
First Responders do what first responders do. They measure time
in gloves and clips, in questions whose answers are all
the same. A paramedic kneels beside cliff with the posture
of a man entering church the morning after he promised
(09:38):
he never would. Fingers to neck, a look exchanged, lips
pressed thin he covers the face he doesn't want to
remember seeing. He thinks it's the kindest thing he could do. Crane,
someone says, The word becomes Destiny's punctuation. The crane takes
longer than anybody can stand. Dawn starts drawing chalk outlines
(10:02):
around trees. James has run out of knuckles to split.
He is down to shoving the bus with his shoulder,
sobbing profanity that sounds like a prayer. Lars is bargaining
with air, promising the kinds of promises you aren't allowed
to make. Kirk just sits just ten feet from cliff,
rocking with his head in his hands, whispering to no
(10:24):
one who can take the deal. The crane arrives with
chains that clank like a medieval decision. The operator is
all jaw and eyes. He won't meet the bands. He
swings the hook over the carcass of the bus as
if he's moving a whale from a beach. Chains bite,
steel hooks catch ribs of the machine. A gesture from
(10:45):
a man in a reflective vess, A rev, rev, another rev.
The world lifts two inches four six. You can see
him now what the night took and what is left.
Hope is tiny vicious animal. It bites everyone at once. Hold.
Someone yells, the operator holds up. Someone else says, the
(11:07):
operator does. The bus hovers for heartbeat. The world is
a coin on its edge, thinking about how to fall.
Then snap, not one chain but two. The bus drops.
The sound that makes is not a sound. It's a verdict,
a god's fist on a marble table. Bone surrender under tonnage.
Flesh answers with a noise. The living will never forget.
The ground says enough and tries to climb out of itself.
(11:29):
The band makes a sound that breaks parts of the
throat they won't use properly for months. It's almost like
a second death. You're there after the drop. The air
refuses to move, bird calls stop midnote. A man in
a park of whispers something in his hands. You taste iron,
like a penny melted on your tongue. Someone vomits carefully,
(11:53):
like the earth won't allow a mess. You think no
song is worth this. You think he would have said
the same. You think play o'riyon at the funeral, and
then hate yourself for thinking about the programming of a
grief that hasn't earned its steps. The operator gets back
in the cab because that's his job. He doesn't look
(12:15):
towards the red halo in the frost. Again, he lifts properly.
This time, the chains hold like obedient dogs. The weight
comes off the body that will not get lighter. A
blanket appears from nowhere and becomes an altarcloth. Rough hands
are gentle with what's left, because gentleness is the last
thing we get to give. A police officer says words
(12:39):
in Swedish that mean we have to make a report.
He says them like he's apologizing for gravity. The band
gathers three where four were. A triangle with a missing
side is not a triangle, it's a wound. James stands
the way a pillar stands after the roof is gone.
(13:01):
Lars counts breast because numbers are the only thing that
do not lie today. Kirk flinches every time a chain clinks,
as if the sound were rewind. If it can just
find the right part of the tape. No one says metallica.
The word feels like a suit. In a hospital, they
say cliff because that is the only word that means
(13:23):
anything now. A medic asks a question that no one
hears somebody signs something. The sun commits to the horizon
like it's making a dangerous promise.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
You're there. The walk away.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
You step back because becoming close is starting to feel
like stealing your shoes. Print the frost with curves you
won't see again. Behind you, the bus steams like an
animal that lost the fight. Ahead of you, the road continues,
neutral and infinite, ignorant of the names it just learned.
(13:59):
You hear under everything else four notes, low, patient, eternal,
like a consolation you can only see when you look away.
You don't know whether the sound is coming from memory
or mercy, but you know you know it's him. Later,
(14:21):
headlines will decide which words are worth ink. Fans will
argue with rumored strangers making bars. Interviews will edit out
the feral noises grief makes because microphones don't know what
to do with them. But here on the frost cut road,
truth is plain and unadorned. Cliff Burton is dead, twenty
(14:43):
four years old, crushed beneath the machine that carried his dream.
Men will spend decades trying to become old enough to
stand next to this hour without shaking. The bell keeps
tolling anyway.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Out.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
A single, sustained low no grows out of the dark,
like a star scene from the bottom of a lake.
Hold it, hold it longer than it feels safe, Let
it fall into the first bar of Orion. Act six,
(15:22):
Cliff Burton's epilogue, Orion. Next Act six, Cliff Burton's epilogue, Orion, California.
The fog here is different, golden, rising from the coast
in slow breaths, not a killer's fog, a mourner's. A
(15:44):
crowd gathers, not thousands, not millions, just enough to hold
the silence. Musicians, family, strangers who already knew him without
ever meeting him. They sit and pews with eyes swollen
from the impossible fact that they are here for this reason.
His parents sit in the front, still dignified, bearing the
unbearable with the same quiet strength that raised him. They
(16:07):
do not weep loudly, They do not collapse. Their son
demanded discipline, and discipline is how they love him.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
The band is broken, faces hollow, hands trembling. They stand
as men who have been through battlefields, stand not victorious,
not even defeated, just the live in a way that
feels wrong, And then through the speakers. His voice returns,
not words, not a speech.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
The music.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Orian, his masterpiece, his requiem. The notes arrive like comments
across a black sky. Movements fold into each other, Harmonies
climb and crash. The bass takes its rightful place, not behind,
not beneath, but above, carrying the weight carrying him. Every
(17:05):
person in that room feels it. The song he built
for eternity is now Eternity's gift back to him. It's
a hymn and a haunting, a farewell and a promise.
You're there the funeral hall, the air smells faintly of
(17:26):
wax and salt. The lights are dim, but you can
see his picture on the altar, red hair, denim, vest
a smile that looks like it was meant to last longer.
The music surges. You close your eyes, and for a
moment you swear he's in the room, just out of reach,
head banging in the back, hair whipping, cigarettes, smoldering. The
(17:49):
song climbs, you feel your throat catch. Then it falls quiet,
like the ocean pulling away, and you understand, you understand,
this is good bye. The band almost ends there. How
could it not? The center was ripped out the anchor,
cut loose, but grief has its own gravity. They continue
(18:11):
not because it's easy, but because to stop would be
another death. Another basis takes his place, and then another.
But to the faithful, there is always the whisper. It
just isn't the same Without Cliff, years, stretch albums, pile
generations change. His name does not for musicians. He remains
(18:33):
the proof that bass could be poetry, that heaviness could
be holy. His vest becomes legend, his solo scripture, his story,
a warning carved into every tour bus windshield.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
It's decades later you sit.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
In a dark room, headphones pressed tight, You press play
on Orion. The bass swells, mournful, infidite. The world around
you fade, and for a few minutes, he's alive again,
And every vibration, in every silence between chords, you realize
he has never left. He's here, hiding in the sound,
(19:13):
waiting for anyone brave enough to listen. The final words,
so close, no matter how far, And here we are,
hands over hearts, heads bowed to the hush between notes.
The memory remains not as marble or ink, but as
(19:34):
a low, eternal frequency that knows our names forever trusting
who we are. You taught us that to earn the heavy,
to make the pretty cost for whom the bell tolls.
It told once in the cold, But the echo keeps
shaping us, softer than grief, stronger than time, fade to
(19:55):
black the world bag that night we refused. We kept
the lit where the lines still breathe, wherever I may roam.
And there you are, in the tremor of a crowd
and the patience of arrest, in four notes that arrive
like mercy off to never never Land. No, not you.
(20:16):
You stayed in the living air between chords, in Orion's
slow heartbeat, in the spine of every song that dares
to be both thunder and prayer. Nothing is the same
without you, and still nothing else matters. I hope you
(20:37):
enjoyed Scrip fourteen, The Last Ride, the Cliff Burton Story.
I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you so much for listening.
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