Cliff Burton's bus crash at 40: the Metallica guitar tech in the bunk above him tells his side

Every retrospective of 27 September 1986 tells the story from the swapped bunk. Aidan Mullen was sleeping directly above Cliff Burton, went through the same window, and told it on a podcast in August 2026.

The scene everyone knows, minus one person

The bunk story is the one part of that night every Metallica fan can recite. The band picked sleeping spots on the tour bus in Stockholm, Cliff Burton won the choice, took Kirk Hammett’s bunk, and Kirk went to sleep at the front. A few hours later the bus went over and Cliff was dead at 24.

The band itself tells the pick two ways. Kirk, on VH1’s Behind the Music, says it was cards: “The first card Cliff pulls out is the Ace of Spades, and he looks at me and says, ‘I want your bunk’” (quoted via Far Out and the Wikipedia entry on Burton). Lars Ulrich has said they drew straws and Cliff pulled the long one, so there are two memories of the same outcome. Nobody at the bar is going to settle that one, and this piece won’t either.

The retrospectives skip one person. There was a bunk above Cliff’s, and someone was in it. His name is Aidan Mullen. He was a guitar tech, new to the crew on that leg of the Damage, Inc. tour, and he went out through the same hole in the bus that Cliff did. Forty years later he sat down with the Beardo and Weirdo podcast (episode 83, 27 August 2026, hosted by comedian Craig Gass and Five Finger Death Punch bassist Chris Kael, on Apple Podcasts) and walked through the whole morning. Loudwire picked up the account the next day, and Wikimetal ran the rescue details.

The last night in Stockholm

On 26 September 1986 Metallica played the Solnahallen in Stockholm. The last song of the set, per the accounts collected on Wikipedia, was “Fight Fire with Fire.” It was the European run behind Master of Puppets, the band’s first tour on a real bus with bunks, and by every account the bunks were bad.

Mullen’s memory of that evening is the detail no band-side telling has. He and Cliff had been out together. In his words to Beardo and Weirdo, quoted by Loudwire: “he and I were hanging out with a few locals having a few drinks and having a great time.” The new tech and the bassist were starting to click. Then everyone climbed on the bus for the overnight drive toward Copenhagen, and Mullen took the bunk over Cliff’s.

Two men through one window

Just before 7 a.m. on 27 September, near Dörarp, roughly 20 kilometres north of Ljungby in Kronoberg, the bus left the road, spun around and came down on its side.

The window next to the bunks broke. Mullen, to Loudwire: “when it hit the ground, that window broke and the two of us went through the window holes.” Both men were thrown out through the gap, and the bus came down on top of both of them.

The version everyone carries is “Cliff was thrown from the bus.” From the bunk above, two people went out the same way, in the same second, and the bus landed on two bodies. What separated the one who lived from the one who didn’t was where each of them ended up under it. Cliff died there. Mullen was pinned, with Cliff lying across his arm.

Under the bus

Mullen could not breathe and could not move. “I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move… I realized I’m not gonna make it out of this,” he told the podcast, per Loudwire.

The person who got him out was Bobby Schneider, the tour’s production manager. Schneider climbed out through the roof hatch of the overturned bus, saw Mullen’s legs moving, got a jack under the vehicle and lifted it. Mullen describes the moment from underneath: “Things were being pulled off of me… I could breathe… I heard Bobby’s voice saying, ‘Take it easy. We got you.’”

According to Wikimetal’s account of the episode, Mullen’s first instinct once he had air was to help the man on top of him. “Bobby, I’ll help Cliff. Help me get him out of here.” Schneider’s answer: “Don’t worry about Cliff.”

Schneider was standing in the dark on a Swedish roadside, holding a jack, with one crew member alive under the bus and the bassist already gone. He had to decide, in that second, what the man underneath needed to hear, and he chose four words. That exchange is the crew’s version of the morning, and it has never been in the band’s version.

Ice or no ice

Mullen’s account and the driver’s have one thing in common: black ice. That is what it felt like from inside the bus, and it is how the driver explained it at the time.

The record on the ground says something else. As collected on Wikipedia, Swedish police recorded a dry road at around 2 °C, called ice “out of the question,” and found marks consistent with a driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. James Hetfield walked the stretch of road himself looking for ice and found none. The driver was never charged.

The two statements answer different questions, so there is no side to pick. The police measured the road. Mullen is describing what a 1986 tour bus did under him at 7 in the morning. Both can stay true, and a survivor still calling it ice four decades later belongs in the story.

What he carried off the bus

The injury list is short and it hides the cost. Broken fingers, broken toes, a dislocated shoulder. Then the long tail, per Loudwire: anxiety on tour buses, occasional shortness of breath, and back pain from decades of sleeping in what he calls a defensive posture. He kept working on tour buses, and never slept on one the same way again.

The episode follows him from that morning to becoming Hetfield’s guitar tech, and on through the bass auditions that ended with Jason Newsted joining. It also gets into the bus itself. Mullen, quoted by Loudwire: “there were no laws on how tour coaches were designed, particularly on the inside.” He says the crash changed how tour coaches are regulated in Europe. That claim comes from the episode alone; I have not found an independent source for it, so take it as his view until someone documents it.

Cliff’s ashes were scattered at the Maxwell Ranch with “Orion” playing, per the Wikipedia entry. That is where the band-side retrospectives end. The crew-side version ends with a guitar tech who still braces himself when the bus pulls out.

The thread to pull next

The connection here is small and it took 40 years to surface. The bunk draw is famous because it saved Kirk. Nobody asked who took the spot above the one Cliff chose, and the answer was a man on the crew who lived the same second Cliff didn’t, from ten inches away.

So the open question, and I would like an actual answer: has Mullen’s side appeared anywhere before August 2026? Joel McIver’s To Live Is to Die and Mick Wall’s Enter Night both interviewed people around the band, and I have not been able to check whether he is in either one. If you have a copy, tell @realrocklab on X or Threads. The crew always has the other half of the story, and this is the first time this half has been out loud for me.