“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

“Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.”

– Carl Jung

 

 

There is a recurring line in Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which was her lacerating account of losing both her husband and daughter in the same year. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant,” she writes. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

The chilly night of September 26, 1986 certainly seemed ordinary for the young members of Metallica. By that time, they were already hailed as the pioneering titans of their genre. Their latest album Master of Puppets had been a major success, selling over a million copies without the aid of a radio single or a music video. But besides the stardom, on that night they were simply experiencing the mundanity of touring from city to city.

They were travelling overnight on a tour bus from Stockholm to Copenhagen. In a friendly contest, the bassist Cliff and lead guitarist Kirk drew cards. The winner could sleep in Kirk’s comfortable bunk by the window.

Cliff drew an ace of spades. “I want your bunk,” he said to Kirk.

“Fine, take my bunk,” Kirk replied. “I’ll sleep up front. That’s probably better anyway.”

In the wee hours of the next morning, the band awoke to a trembling motion and the deafening sound of tires screeching. Supposedly sliding on a patch of black ice, the bus skidded and rolled over. Inside the bus, the band members violently tumbled like pieces of clothing in a washing machine, colliding with objects around them. The singer James had scalding hot coffee from the coffee machine spilled all over his body.

In this state of utter disarray, everybody was heard screaming…Everybody except Cliff.

As they climbed out of the bus, they found Cliff’s legs jutting out from underneath. He had fallen out of the bus through the bedside window, after which he was crushed to death when the bus overturned.

Needless to say, Cliff’s sudden death was very traumatizing for the surviving band members. Not only was he a very close friend, but a role model. “He was always the one who exuded the most confidence — the guy who had the best sense of ethics and morals,” said Kirk. 

To make matters even more difficult, they had no idea how to deal with grief in a healthy way. Especially for James, Cliff’s death triggered deep abandonment traumas, stemming from his father’s leaving his family, and his mother’s dying of cancer, both of which happened when he was in his teens.

They dealt with their grief in the only way that they knew at the time, which was avoiding it entirely. In the following weeks after Cliff’s death, they relied on alcohol to feel nothing, almost constantly drinking themselves to a stupor. James, at times, would be found meandering the streets in a drunken haze in the wee hours of the morning, crying, “Cliff! Cliff! Where are you?”

Rather than taking the time to sit with their grief, they started having auditions for a new permanent bassist during those weeks. And immediately after that, they resumed the rest of their tour. Their new bassist was one Jason Newsted, a bright-eyed musician and die-hard Metallica fan.

At least on the outset, it seemed as though the band had easily moved forward from Cliff’s death, and was enjoying life again. But the truth was much more complicated than that.

Jason was living a fan’s dream come true, only to be crushed by the very people he looked up to. Throughout his 14 years with Metallica, he was never truly accepted as a member. He had to endure plenty of hazing and bullying. And he wasn’t given adequate attention and compensation for the health issues and injuries that he had during his tenure.

Not only that, he hardly had a say in the band’s music. Most infamously, in his first album with the band, …And Justice For All, his bass tracks, which he had worked so hard on, were mixed so low, to the point that they were inaudible. While the subsequent albums improved on this aspect, Jason was still alienated from a large part of the songwriting and recording process.

“There’s a sense of abuse from everyone,” he said in one of his earliest interviews, albeit somewhat light-heartedly. “It’s everybody, it’s not just the band guys, either.” Despite all the harsh treatment, Jason would just grin and bear it. He remained steadfast on proving himself as a capable member. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave at work. And even with the fans, Jason was often the only member who took the time to engage in conversation and sign autographs.

“I had proven myself on the road,” he said. “I would get super sick and still go play anyway. You know, the things you’ve got to do to prove yourself in that kind of a club. And I did.”

But after 14 years on the job, Jason decided that he had had enough.

Jason’s decision to leave was a major shock to the rest of the band, as they even considered calling it quits entirely. It took Jason’s departure for them to realize the extent of the hurt that they had caused him.

The remaining members started working with a group therapist, and James in particular, also checked himself into rehab for his lengthy struggle with alcoholism. During this time, they learned that their treatment of Jason was a displacement of their unattended grief for Cliff as well their attachment traumas, which they had pent up all those years.

“I didn’t really realize how much I missed Cliff until I went into rehab and was dealing with a lot of the loss in my life: my father, my mother and Cliff, as well,” said James. “A lot came out.”

Looking back at their treatment of Jason, James remarked in an interview, “Psych 101 will tell you that all our anger, our grief and sadness got directed at him. Not all of it, but quite a bit of it. He was an easy target. He was goofy enough to take it, which was a positive for him. He was such a fan, and we hated that. We wanted to un-fan him and make him as hard as we were.”

In the same interview, Kirk gave credit for Jason’s unsung role in the band. “One thing I have to say about Jason is that he was there for us, a hundred percent, in a really, really, dark time,” he said. “He was such a bundle of energy, light and positivity, and forward momentum. And we really needed that at that time.”

Explaining their unhealthy dynamic with Jason, Kirk said, “We were hugging him, but we were also pushing him away at the same time. It was a weird thing: we love you, we hate you, we love you, we hate you, we love you, we hate you.” To this, James added, “You’re not Cliff.”

Ultimately, Jason saved Metallica twice. First by filling in the shoes of someone that could never be filled. And the second time by leaving, forcing the band to look inward.

To quote the drummer Lars, “Jason was caught in no man’s land. So, in a way he sacrificed himself — or had to be sacrificed — in order for us to be able to move to the place we’re at now.”

It is a perennial truth in dealing with grief and trauma, in that whatever we repress or ignore the most are likely the very things that we need to confront and process.

Distracting ourselves from the grieving process may feel immediately gratifying, but it definitely comes out unconsciously in how we behave, especially in our relationships with other people. Without us understanding why, we may find ourselves hurting other people in triggering situations, even if we never intend to.

It’s like that popular saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” We tend to hurt people in the same ways in which we have been hurt.

More often than not, underlying all of our hurtful behaviors are deeply-submerged feelings of insecurity, helplessness, fear, envy, or loneliness, which could be traced back to traumatic events that we experienced earlier. But until we are able to take a step forward in acknowledging and understanding these feelings, they would keep running our lives and hurting our relationships.

The way to move forward isn’t by toughing it out, or ignoring our grief. As I’ve written in many of my articles, there are no bonus points for suffering. There is no benefit to keeping our grief at bay just because we think we can.

Time doesn’t heal our wounds unless we consciously decide to heal.

The way to move forward is to talk about our grief, especially with a professional therapist. It is only by acknowledging our difficult feelings, and understanding their roots, that we are able to heal and carry on with our lives in a healthy way.

Just as the members of Metallica experienced, it was only after braving the decision to commit to therapy that they were able to see where their hurtful and destructive behaviors came from. Their unreasonable treatment of Jason, and their bouts with alcoholism, largely stemmed from their avoidance in grieving Cliff’s death. And especially for James, this also had a lot to do with the absence of caregivers when he was growing up.

Of course, sitting with our grief doesn’t mean that it takes away all of our pain. Because the pain would always be there on some level. After all, the reason we’re grieving is because we did lose someone or something that meant a lot to us. But sitting with our grief does make the pain a lot more manageable over time. It does make it more doable for us to simply acknowledge our pain and let it go.

In separate interviews, the members of Metallica have acknowledged the pain that they have still felt over Cliff’s passing, and would fondly recall their memories with him. James said, “I still miss Cliff, no doubt. I’d love to see him again at some point.”

Lars has opened up about his anniversary reaction to Cliff’s passing, saying, “I’m always aware of the date…September 27th feels like a very significant date. I’m thinking about him all the time.”

For Kirk, it still haunts him to this day that a silly game of cards over sleeping arrangements saved him from an untimely death. But most of all, the little things often remind him of his late friend. “I still think about him every day. Something he said, something he did, just…Something.”

“Cliff loved life, and he lived it to the full,” Kirk yearningly recalled. “He didn’t waste any of his time. If he wasn’t playing music, he was finding other things to do that made him happy. He spent very little time complaining. When he left us he was just as powerful as he could be as a person. He never waned.”

On the other hand, the members of Metallica have a great relationship with Jason today. He remains participative in his support for the band, and being the gentle-natured person that he is, he has never badmouthed any of the members in the media. When asked about the past issues in the band, he is able to graciously open up.

He recently said of James, “I don’t think that James will probably ever recover from the Cliff thing because of his abandonment and separation, (because) of things that happened to him and his family and suffering so far beyond his control. This is the kind of shit that cuts so deep. No matter how many people you’re talking with, it’s still going to be there.”

Jason still cherishes the great times that he did have with Metallica. He would often share about his reaction when he learned that he was their new bassist. They were at a restaurant after his final audition, when Lars told him the good news. He got so excited that he stood up on the table and screamed at the top of his lungs.

It was the best day of his life.