Aidan Mullen, a Metallica tech in 1986, has described being trapped beside Cliff Burton after the bus crash.
Forty years on, one of the people who was inside Metallica‘s tour bus when it went off the road in Sweden has given a first-hand account of what happened. Aidan Mullen, a guitar tech on the “Damage, Inc.” tour, was thrown through the same window as Cliff Burton and was pinned in the wreckage beside him until crew pulled him clear.
Mullen spoke on the “Beardo And Weirdo” podcast, hosted by Five Finger Death Punch bassist Chris Kael and comedian Craig Gass. He had joined the crew only weeks before the crash.
“Long story short, the bus hit some black ice, spun around and flipped on its side facing the opposite direction it was traveling in. It did a 180 [degree turn]. I’m a light sleeper on buses more now than before that, but I woke up before the darn thing did what it did and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live,” Mullen said (via Loudwire).
He described a vehicle that would not be legal today, and said the accident led to changes in how tour coaches are built.
He recalled: “Back then there were no laws on how tour coaches were designed, particularly on the inside. And in this case they had started with a bus that had windows all the way down the sides and then they put plywood walls up against the windows… but when the bus flipped, I was in a bunk above Cliff and the force of the bus leaning over and hitting the ground not at speed, but it was moving when this happened, so there was more force to it than if it had just laid over on its side. So when it hit the ground, that window broke and the two of us went through the window holes.”
“The way it worked out was that Cliff was laying on my arm,” he continued. “And I was laying length wise within the rectangular window hole that was big enough to accommodate me…and Cliff was laying on me at an angle. And he didn’t survive obviously because the bus came down on top of us.”
Debris and belongings from inside the bus had come down on both men.
“I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. I barely knew at that point what had happened. I did not know what was going on with Cliff, who was next to me. I didn’t know who, what, where, when, how. I was struggling to breathe, couldn’t breathe, but I remember when it seemed like it dragged on for minutes and minutes but it was only probably 30 seconds or so, but I realized I’m not gonna make it out of this. I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating. I thought of my folks, my friends and thought what a sh**ty thing to happen. And then all of a sudden, things began moving around me. Things were being pulled off of me in a frantic way.”
The band’s production manager, Bobby Schneider, had climbed in through a roof hatch to check whether anyone was still inside, and spotted Mullen‘s legs moving under the pile.
“Things were being pulled off of me and all of a sudden I could breathe and then more stuff got pulled off and I heard Bobby‘s voice saying, ‘Take it easy. We got you. Hopefully you’re going to be okay,'” Mullen said. “I couldn’t feel my arm. I couldn’t move my arm. And I looked over and I realized someone was laying across my arm next to me. And I realized after a minute, it was likely Cliff. He wasn’t moving, but neither was I at that point. Bobby said, ‘Just take it easy, we’ll get you out of there.’ And I said, ‘Bobby, I’ll help Cliff. Help me get him out of here.’ And I just remember Bobby saying quietly, ‘Don’t worry about Cliff.’ It didn’t dawn on me. I didn’t understand what he meant by that.”
A jack was eventually used to lift the bus enough to free him. Mullen came out with broken toes and fingers and a dislocated shoulder, and made a joke about coming round in a Swedish hospital with two nurses over him and wondering whether he had in fact survived. He says he still gets anxious as a bus pulls away, and still sometimes wakes up unable to breathe.
Mullen was new enough to the crew that he had barely spoken to Burton before the tour reached Sweden. The one long conversation they had was on a flight; the other was the last night of the bassist’s life.
“Cliff, I remember him being kind of quiet. I didn’t have much interaction with him until the night that he passed. After the show that we did that night, he and I were hanging out with a few locals having a few drinks and having a great time — laughing, carrying on, hooting and hollering. And it was amazing that that was my last night with him and his last night with us.”
That show was at Solnahallen in Stockholm on 26 September 1986, the last Burton ever played.
The crash happened shortly before 7am on 27 September 1986 on the E4, around 12 miles north of Ljungby near the village of Dörarp in Kronoberg County. Metallica were travelling overnight from Stockholm to Copenhagen. Burton was 24. James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett came out with minor injuries.
The black ice Mullen refers to is the driver’s account, and it has never been settled. Hetfield searched the road afterwards and found none, police reported finding no ice, and the temperature was recorded above freezing. No charges were brought.
Hetfield‘s own recollection of the scene, given to Metal Hammer, describes what Mullen has now told from the inside: “Coming out and finding your buddy under the bus is not something you want to go through. Our first reaction was anger – one of the things we were good at. ‘Why did this happen? Where’s the driver? Let me smell your breath.’ I walked for miles looking for this black ice in my underwear, when it’s 20 below. There were screams from the crew who were still trapped in there, screaming in pain – broken collar bones, toes, all that.”
A memorial stone stands at the site. In May 2022 the bus stop beside it was formally renamed Cliff Burton‘s Memorial Stone.
Mullen has spent four decades as a guitar tech and stage manager, working with Def Leppard, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Phil Collins, Peter Frampton, Faith No More, Disturbed, Paramore, Taylor Swift, INXS, Cheap Trick, Hall & Oates, Kid Rock, Tim McGraw and Aaron Lewis, among others.
Schneider, the man who found him, went on to production-manage Rush, David Bowie, Judas Priest, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé.
