Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I by Paul Brannigan, Ian Winwood

and put on his own music. Even when he was a tiny little kid he would [prefer to] listen to his own music and read.” Indeed, such was the young Burton’s affinity with the printed word that when tested in the third grade the schoolboy registered a reading ability commensurate with students eight years his elder.
    With time, however, it would be music that would emerge as the foremost passion in the life of the young Cliff Burton. Initially inspired by his parents’ collection of classical music, soonenough, like countless young men from Castro Valley to Cape Cod, Burton was held enraptured by the hard rock of Lynyrd Skynrd, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nugent and Aerosmith. In this, his formative years in the anonymous suburban sprawl of Northern California were entirely normal.
    However, the Burtons’ pleasant if entirely quotidian suburban lives were soon to be punctured by tragedy. On May 19, 1975, Scott Burton was the victim of a cerebral aneurysm; the sixteen-year -old was taken to hospital but later died. Needless to say, the effect on the family unit was both searing and immediate; friends of Cliff, the insular and quietly defiant remaining son, observed that although the death of his elder brother affected him in a profound manner, this loss was something about which he rarely spoke. Instead, it seems that the enigmatic thirteen-year -old opted to give voice to his grief in the form of actions; actions which, as befits the cliché, spoke louder than words he chose rarely to utter.
    Although Burton had begun playing bass guitar – and prior to that piano – before the tragedy that befell his family, it seems that the loss of a sibling served to focus his mind on the task at his fingers. He studied not only the popular bass players of the day – musicians such as Rush’s Geddy Lee and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler – but also the scales and musical notations heard in Bach and Beethoven, as well as the disciplines of baroque music. As his talents grew, the young player would practise for up to six hours a day, his abilities sufficient to outgrow the tutelage of more than one music teacher.
    ‘Cliff didn’t take music lessons until he was thirteen, after his brother died,’ recalled his mother. ‘He said to a couple of people, “I’m going to be the best bassist [I can be] for my brother.” We didn’t think he had too much talent at all. We had no idea! We just thought he’d plunk, plunk along, which he did at [the beginning]. It really was not easy for him at first … [but] about six months into the lessons, it started to come together. I thought, “This kid’s got real potential.” And I was totally amazed, because none of the kids in our family had any musical talent.’
    As with all fledgling musicians, the point is soon reached when the young player wishes to develop his talents with others. Burton’s first band was named EZ Street, a union which also featured drummer Dave Donato and guitarist Jim Martin. Occasionally the drum stool was manned by Mike ‘Puffy’ Bordin, who alongside Martin would go on to find success with pioneering Bay Area oddballs Faith No More. EZ Street would practise in the hills of Northern California, discovering their sound through the playing of elongated instrumental pieces that owed more to the powerful and hypnotic rhythms of the English cult band Hawkwind than the snappy pop-played-loud anthems beloved of US stadium-botherers Kiss. Away from their instruments, the young musicians dabbled with experimental drugs such as LSD, while Burton himself savoured the flavour of marijuana. But despite such chemically enhanced excursions, elsewhere Burton remained a dependable American adolescent. If his band mates in EZ Street gathered to listen to music in the Burton family home, they did so at a volume considerate of Cliff’s sleeping family. As Jim Martin later recalled, ‘We’d rock out, but real quietly.’ At other times the group would return to the Burton family home