Hear Cliff Burton isolated bass track on “For Whom The Bell Tolls”

Cliff Burton unfortunately left us too soon in 1986 after an accident with Metallica’s bus in Sweden. He was an important part on the band’s rise to success and now you are able to hear all his amazing isolated bass track on the classic “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Hear the isolated bass track below:

The song

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” was first released on the group’s second album, Ride the Lightning (1984). In 1985, Elektra Records released it as a promotional single, with both an edited and full-length versions. The song is generally regarded as one of their most popular; by March 2018, it ranked number five on Metallica’s live performance count. Several live albums and video albums include the song.

The song was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel of the same name about the process of death in modern warfare and the bloody Spanish Civil War. Specific allusions are made to the scene described in Chapter 27 of the book, in which five soldiers are obliterated during an airstrike after taking a defensive position on a hill.

Cliff Burton plays the bass guitar introduction, which is often mistaken for an electric guitar, with heavy distortion and a wah pedal. Burton wrote the intro before joining Metallica and first played it during a 12-minute jam at a battle of the bands with his second band Agents of Misfortune in 1979.

Hear more Isolated Tracks