It's safe to say that Metallica would never have risen to the heights the thrash-metal kingpins have hit if it wasn't for Cliff Burton.

From the moment he was hired, the bassist brought a new level of musical sophistication to a band that was always loud and aggressive, but not as skilled as it would later become. Metallica wasn't much more than a garage band when Burton arrived. With Burton, who was hired away from the band Trauma in the early '80s, Metallica became an unstoppable force in the world of heavy metal, leaving the garage behind for good.

Author Joel McIver (visit www.joelmciver.co.uk/ for more on the writer) explores Burton's impact on Metallica in an upcoming book titled "To Live Is To Die: The Life And Death Of Metallica's Cliff Burton," to be put out by Jawbone Press. Burton played in Metallica from 1983 to 1986, when he died in a tragic tour bus accident on a mountain road in Sweden. Fueled by Burton's songwriting acumen and a playing style influenced as much by classical music as it was by punk, Metallica plowed through the early classic LPs Kill 'Em All (1983), Ride The Lightning (1985) and the seminal 1986 masterpiece Master Of Puppets.

Questions still remain about what actually happened to cause the accident that cut short Burton's life. What isn't up for debate is how important he was to Metallica's growth and its most fertile period of creativity — though the band would go on to unleash massive-selling records. Burton was a bassist who viewed the instrument as a lead instrument, not as merely rhythmic support for the pummeling riffs and soaring solos of the guitar. But he was more than that. He helped raise awareness among critics and the public of metal's sonic possibilities, and for that — and his contributions to some of the finest metal albums ever — he'll forever be adored.

McIver, who also writes for Total Guitar, Metal Hammer and other publications and is probably best known for the 2004 book "Justice For All: The Truth About Metallica," took time out to talk to Goldmine about Metallica and Burton. A portion of the interview ran in the May 8 print edition of the magazine. The rest of the interview is included below:

What did the guys say about that first show with Burton at The Stone in 1983?
Joel McIver: Obviously, they loved it and realised that they had stepped up to a new and exciting level of professionalism. Ron McGovney was a good guy and a perfectly adequate bass player, as anyone who has heard the No Life Til Leather demo will know, but Cliff had a certain swagger and dexterity that made him practically one of a kind. He forced the other guys to improve their songwriting and performance skills, just by doing what he did best.

Dave Mustaine’s departure from the band was a pretty bitter split. Can you pinpoint the moment when the rest of the band figured it was time to let him go?
JM: It was either during the band’s journey from San Francisco to New York City in April 1983 or immediately after they arrived. He’d been drinking a lot and acting like a moron, and they’d had enough. Yes, it was bitter, and perhaps a little merciless in retrospect — but they couldn’t have done as well as they have since if he’d remained with them. Metallica has had a turbulent history with two dominant personalities in the band; can you imagine what it would have been like with three?

Talk about how the band developed from Kill ‘Em All through Ride The Lightning. How did the band see the difference between the two?
JM: Like night and day. Kill is raw, poorly-produced and lyrically juvenile; Ride is professional, musicianly and thematically serious (if not quite what we’d call "mature"). The differences between the two albums are a mirror to the evolution of the band. James [Hetfield], Dave [Mustaine] and Lars [Ulrich] wrote the songs for Kill when they were between 17 and 19 — still kids, in effect. The couple of years which passed before the Ride sessions were crucial ones, as they are for all of us. By the time Ride was recorded, they were all much more advanced musicians and much more serious about their careers.

What do some of the members remember about being signed to Elektra?
JM: My impression is that Metallica’s relationship with Elektra has been insignificant compared to the relationship which they have with their managers at Q-Prime. Ask Lars about Elektra now and he’ll tell you how the band sued the company in 1994 for ownership of their master recordings — a move which no major recording act has made before or since.

Master of Puppets was such a monumental album for Metallica. Was the feeling among the guys that this was going to be the one that broke them?
JM: I don’t think so. They’ve been quite clear in interviews ever since that they simply made the best album they could at the time, not knowing that it would be regarded as a genre classic in later years. I think they appreciated the bigger recording budget which Elektra gave them and had a more focused sense of songwriting and better musicianship, but (quite understandably) they didn’t know how enduring the results would be.

It’s been over 20 years since Cliff Burton died. Do you get the sense that it still haunts James, Kirk and Lars?
JM: It haunts Kirk to an extent, because he was Cliff’s closest friend in the band (as he explains in his foreword to my book). I think the three of them have spent many years processing their loss, though, and I think they still feel a sense of sadness but are able to look back at the good times, too.

How close were they to ending Metallica after his death?
JM: Not really that close — it was obvious, and correct, for them to assume that Cliff wouldn’t have wanted them to quit after all the work they’d put into the band. They were much closer to splitting up in 2002, as documented in "Some Kind Of Monster."

In what way was Metallica a different band after Burton died?
JM: This is one of the central themes of my book. What most people fail to realise is that Metallica was not solely Lars’ and James’ band in the early days. Because Cliff was so musically literate and a strong personality in the band, they assigned a degree of power to him, perhaps involuntarily. Important decisions weren’t taken without his say-so, and not just musical ones — matters of Metallica’s career strategy, too. When he died, Lars and James took over the running of the band, aided by the fact that they were the primary songwriters. This is not meant as a slight to the other musicians, but the degree of influence that Kirk has had over the band has always been lesser than that of Cliff, James and Lars — and in the case of Jason [Newstead] and Robert [Trujillo], lesser still.

What kind of guy was Cliff and how did he relate to the other guys? He seems like he was so beloved by the rest of the band.
JM: I interviewed dozens of people who were close to the band for this book, and the consensus is that they loved him like a brother – which is to say they had ups and downs, like any family which goes through difficult times. They respected him for his musicianship and also for his refusal to do anything that he didn’t want to do (which, if you really think about it, is a rare quality), and occasionally argued with him when he overplayed his bass parts. They understood that he was a great, great musician and composer and gave him the space he needed to express himself.