Photo: Morten Børøsund/hetfield9@gmail.com

On the 16th December of 2003 a guy named Mathias Ekberg posted a message at the Swedish Metallica message board (metallica.nu) on how it would be great to do something in memory of late Cliff Burton. He suggested doing something close to the scene of the buss accident and it to be finished in connection with Metallica’s concert in May 30th 2004. Another guy named Johan Halvorsen instantly came up with the idea of a memorial stone. The discussion went on in that direction and soon a non-profit organisation was started with its purpose to raise funds for this project.

The project took quite some turns before something really happened. The website cliffinourminds.com took shape after a few months, the donations started via PayPal and even a couple of newspapers started to write about this. We had the location set to be close to the restaurant “Gyllene Rasten” (the accident occurred on the highway that runs by), later on we even got the thumbs up from Metallica themselves. Soon we realized that the date of May 30 was too soon. There was simply too much work that had to be done (including a bunch of jurisdiction c.r.a.p). The new date we agreed on was 27th of September, the same year, on the day of Cliff’s death. At first we were fairly optimistic but not before long we once again had to realize that there’s no way the project would come together at that time.

And this is how it would be for a year or so. We approached people that could help us, things again started to look good and once again we kind of reached a dead end. During this time the organization exchanged a couple of members, but still “the core” of three people would always stay active. These three persons (who still are active) are Johan Mörling, Tony Asplund and Erik Lysén. Another problem of course was that we all were situated in different places around the country of Sweden. With all these setbacks it wasn’t easy get anywhere.

A couple of days before the 27th of September 2005 we decided that it just couldn’t go on like this and that we had to pull our selves together and really try make it work. Once again the crazy train started to roll and we were on the way once again. We contacted a stone maker we’d been in contact with earlier; Eric K. Olsen who’s situated in US of A and really was interested in doing this gig. Furthermore we also kept continual contact with Jesper Knöös, the owner of the restaurant “Gyllene Rasten”. Everything was going pretty well when we started to have some trouble with the Swedish road administration. There had to be a certain distance from the highway to the memorial stone and since we didn’t know the area well enough in order to make the right decisions we once again hit a dead end.

During the late the summer of 2006 Johan received a phone call from Jesper at “Gyllene Rasten” who said that he was planning on making some kind of happening around the 27th of Sept, and that dealing with the road administration was no problem. Later on he also told us that he himself had gotten in contact with a stone maker from Chile (who has been living in Sweden for quite some years now), named Manuel Pino. We quickly decided to run with it.

We started to spread the word around and soon media got a hold of it. A while after that something odd happened. Everything just went still. Johan tried to get hold of Jesper, but he couldn’t be reached. For a long while we thought that everything was off but suddenly, not long before the 27th of Sept, our luck turned. Jesper called Johan and told him that everything had been arranged. The only thing we had to do was to create a visual description of the stone and perhaps get a hold of a couple of bands to play in the evening of the day of the ceremony. At this moment we have to give a lot of credits to Johan who automatically got in the centre of everything and did a great job.

Saturday the 30th of September 2006 was the date when everything was going to come together. Manuel Pino (the stone maker) had literary worked his ass off to be able to finish the stone in time. Jesper actually went to collect the stone late just the day before. Erik and Johan represented Cliff In Our Minds at the ceremony. It all was a huge success and a big relief... It had taken us more than two years to pull this off. Believe us when we say that we’re proud of what we’ve achieved.

Erik Lysén, Manuel Pino, Johan Mörling

Still there’s more work to be done. Read more here.

People worth mentioning/Thanks to

Asplund, Tony
• Stayed with the organization all this time.
• Helped out a lot with the organization and the website.
• Really helped out a lot with everything.
• Was like the chairman for the organization.
• Tony met Metallica backstage (Gothenburg 2004) and got the cliff in our minds flyer signed.

Ekberg, Mathias
• Brought this subject up for discussion
• Won a meet and greet-pass and explained this backstage (Copenhagen, 2004) to Metallica themselves and got the thumbs up.
• James told Mathias that he would tell Cliff dad about the project.

Halvorsen, Fredrik
• Helped out a lot with the old website.

Halvorsen, Johan
• Helped out a lot in the beginning.
• Registered the cliffinourminds.com-website.
• Was seen as a leader figure for a while.

Karlsson,Christoffer
• Helped us to ducument the area around "Gyllene Rasten" long before the stone even was made.

Knöös, Jesper
• Owner of “Gyllene Rasten” were the memorial stone is situated.
• Helped us a lot. Without him we would never have pulled this off in time. Thanks a lot.

Lysén, Erik
• Stayed with the organization all this time.
• Came up with the idea of starting a non-profit organization for this purpose.
• Helped out with the organization and A LOT with the new website.

Mörling, Johan
• Stayed with the organization all this time.
• Helped out with the organization.
• Towards the ceremony he was in the centre of everything and did a great job.

Pino, Manuel
• The person who created this wonderful piece of art –by hand!
He put down his soul in the work with the stone and he told us that he got to know Cliff more and more during his work. Thanks a lot.