Cliff Burton’s legacy remains, especially through his 92-year old father, Ray Burton. The bassist tragically passed away over thirty years ago, on September 27th, 1986 from a horrific bus accident with Metallica. The band continues to keep his memory alive including on their current WorldWired tour. Ray recently spoke with Alphabetallica and discussed the royalty checks the family are still getting from the band’s first three albums. During this interview, he stated he gives all of them to scholarships for Cliff’s High school, Castro Valley HS.
He stated:
“From the royalties that I get, I give a scholarship to the high school he went to, the Castro Valley High School, for music. So the kids that have won it thank me for it. I think Cliff probably would have done that with his money, because he was not against education by any means. He liked it very much.”
Later, he recalled the first time Cliff received a royalty check from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All and spent part of that money taking his parents out for dinner.
“I had absolutely no idea what that album meant. We realized that things had a possibility of really getting big when Cliff got his first royalty check. I think it was $1,500. He said, ‘Mom and dad, here’s my first check. Come on, I’ll take you out to dinner tonight.’ ‘Okay, let’s go!’ We went to dinner to his favorite sushi place in Hayward, which is right next door to Castro Valley. That was the first thing that I got that maybe there were bigger things down the road.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjYU5iIUUKM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLezYQWwqdE
1986’s Master of Puppets was the final album Burton worked on. Last year, the band celebrated its 30th anniversary with the book release of Metallica: Back to the Front: A Fully Authorized Visual History of the Master of Puppets Album and Tour. Following its success, the group plan to reissue the renowned album. Drummer Lars Ulrich shared the news to Voir. Ulrich was asked if Master of Puppets would follow the recent Kill ‘Em All box set reissue, he replied:
“We’ll try to see if we can get it out at the end of this year. It’s coming soon. We’re working on it. There’s a lot of stuff associated with Master of Puppets; that’s a big project. And we’ve spent so much time looking forward, with Hardwired [… To Self-Destruct] and so on, but Master of Puppets is obviously next.”
In other Metallica news, the band are featured in a brand new Carpool Karaoke trailer, and this time, the teaser includes frontman James Hetfield singing to The Little Mermaid.
Lastly, Kirk Hammett’s horror exhibit It’s Alive! kicks off tomorrow (12) at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and Rolling Stone gave us an inside look. Hammett started his horror and scifi collection since 1987, who now has hundreds of pieces including Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, ghouls etc. The guitarist told Rolling Stone:
“Every room that I had the posters in, I would always make sure I had a guitar and amp in that room for if they inspired me to play.”
He continued:
“When the people from the museum came to my house to check out the pieces, it was supposed to originally be 100, but it soon grew to 135. It’s not just horror posters; it’s also artwork, movie props and related things here and there. For the most part, it was pretty obvious which ones were the most graphically beautiful, which were the most culturally significant and which ones just had to go in because they’re just so fucking cool.”
Not only will Hammett make an appearance on Saturday, August 19th, he will also debut a seven-and-a-half-minute piece he wrote for the exhibition called, “The Maiden and the Monster.”
He explained:
“It’s something that I composed with my wife and it’s a musical horror novel. It plays like a soundtrack. It clearly takes you through a journey that’s very typical of most monster or horror films, where it involves a creature or some sort of protagonist or antagonist who sees a woman and decides to abduct or possess her and then goes through the motions of either seducing her or outright abducting her. It goes through a little bit of an attraction-repulsion sort of thing, a love-hate thing, but then, there’s a definite period where the maiden needs help, tries to get away from the monster, and then the hero comes.
Hopefully, it will answer all the questions on whether this stuff influences me in a musical way or not. The big-ass answer is: ‘Fuck yes, it does, and listen to this track so that I can actually have the proof in the pudding that, yes, I am hugely influenced by this stuff.’ I’m so influenced by this stuff that I’m writing a horror story, but with musical notes.”
The guitarist shared 10 posters to Rolling Stone and explained why he loves them so much. You can view his reasons here.
