Metallica Bassist Cliff Burton Bio Released

This is the cover to the official Cliff Burton Biography
This is the cover to the official Cliff Burton Biography

This week the official Cliff Burton Biography
entitled To Live Is To Die was released. For those of you not acquainted with Cliff, he was the bassist for Metallica in the early 1980s until he died tragically in a tour bus accident in 1986.

Burton was know for a larger than life personality, his bell bottoms and his amazing bass guitar compositions. Though he suffered from being woefully low in the mix on all of his Metallica recordings, he was impossible to miss live with his black and white Rickenbacker, flailing long ginger-brown hair and the aforementioned bell bottoms. He managed to take the wah and distortion effects from bassists like Geezer Butler and Motorhead’s Lemmy and make them his own with his bass solo called Anasthesia: Pulling Teeth and with the bass intro to For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Cliff Burton was a huge influence on me learning the bass guitar because of his presence on stage and the awesome bass solos. He was the first bassist that i discovered that made the bass just as cool as the electric guitar. So I’m very excited about this book dedicated entirely to him. I haven’t had the chance to buy it yet, but it’ll just be a matter of time.

For anyone looking find out more about Cliff Burton, check out the video tribute called Cliff ‘Em All
and the albums Kill ’em All, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets – all by Metallica.

Look for a book review about Cliff Burton Biography
on Bass Guitar Rocks within a few months and a more in depth post on Cliff Burton and his legacy as perhaps the most popular of Metallica’s bass players.

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