Metallica - Cliff's Last Show

This morning I watched the old, 'Cliff 'Em All!' video, which in case you missed, its basically a tribute compilation of old songs of Metallica onstage and goofing around between the years of '83-'86, ya know, the years they actually made music worth listening to. Considering most of the material on that old one is fairly rough in video and audio I figured I'd review something that's equally bumpy and Metallica related, thus we have this old bootleg from an unknown date, which goes by the simple title of, 'Cliff's Last Show.'

As the title of this recording suggests it is legendary Metallica bassist Cliff Burton’s last show before his untimely death that occurred a day after this gig. I’m sure most people are familiar with what happened, but in short: while driving through Sweden to their next gig their tour bus hit some black ice, the driver lost control of the bus, the bus tipped over, Cliff got launched out the window, and the bus fell on top of him crushing him to death. It’s said that the night after the accident, James Hetfield got drunk, tore his hotel to pieces, and ran through the streets for hours, yelling, "Cliff! Cliff! Where are you??"

Cliff’s death was truly one of the most disastrous and heartbreaking deaths in heavy metal history and obviously had a dramatic effect on the other three Metallica members. In a somewhat enigmatic manner there’s a picture on the back of this bootleg of Cliff eagerly smiling holding out his hand toward the camera in a foreboding manner, with the tour bus behind him not even knowing that soon his time would be up. But enough about that let me tell you more about the actual music contained herein.

Taking a look at the tracklisting you can easily see that these are among some of the best songs Metallica ever wrote. ‘Battery’, ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, ‘Creeping Death’, ‘Seek and Destroy’, and my personal favorite ‘The Four Horsemen.’ The band plays each song with such passion, dexterity and energy that it’s hard to believe that a band of this caliber would ever degenerate into the worthless shit that they are today. Production wise this bootleg has the basic bootleg sound. It’s not bad, but it’s far from being great. Most likely this is a soundboard recording or a fan within the crowd captured the audio. While not perfect it is, for example, certainly far superior to those old Mayhem and Darkthrone bootlegs, which for some strange reason people buy. You can hear James and Kirk’s guitar decently enough, Lars drumming is audible and surprisingly enough you can hear Cliff’s bass. Actually one of the real standout tracks is Cliff’s five minute bass solo, which segues right into the high speed thrash classic, 'Whiplash.' Other highlights are, ‘Fade to Black' and ‘Blitzkrieg.’ James between song speeches are kept to a minimum and for the most part the band just plays their hearts out for an hour and thirteen minutes.

Clearly this bootleg is intended just for the avid Metallica and Cliff fans, but in a way it is also the last truly great thing you can hear from Metallica. Personally the bands follow up album, ‘…And Justice for All’ never fully satisfied me and everything there after is just awful. I think this bootleg isn’t to hard to come by as I personally found it in a second hand store some years ago, and I’m sure it can be easily obtained off of ebay too.

So, if you can't get enough of the classic and ‘real’ Metallica in their final moments then you may want to seek out this bootleg. R.I.P. Cliff.