James Hetfield
Pull a thread
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.
Ghost in the Shell's Real Rock Connection Isn't Metallica — It's The Police (and U2)
A stubborn fan myth says “Master of Puppets” was inspired by Ghost in the Shell. The timeline kills that in one move, and the real rock connections buried in this franchise are better than the myth ever was.
The claim, as it circulates, is that Metallica wrote “Master of Puppets” about the Puppet Master, the body-hopping villain of Ghost in the Shell. Puppets, puppet master, control, loss of self: the vocabulary lines up so neatly you can see why people want it to be true.