You couldn’t pick a less likely spot to celebrate a fallen thrash metal icon than Laganland, a gathering of buildings by a remote country road in rural Sweden. Drive right in, though, and you’ll see a hotel, a petrol station, a hunting store, a moose reserve (really) and now the Cliff Burton Museum, dedicated to the Metallica bassist who lost his life in a nearby coach crash on September 27, 1986.
There’s quite a back story here. The memorial stone – installed nearby in 2006, 20 years after the accident – was the initiative of a group of Swedish fans called Cliff In Our Minds, primarily Mattias Ekberg, Tony Asplund, Erik Lysén and Johan Mörling, together with the owners of a nearby pub, Gyllene Rasten. The funds to create the stone were raised privately.
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Sixteen years later, the Cliff Burton Museum has been created as a meeting-place for the fans who visit the memorial stone. The project initiated at the local tourism department – in Swedish, föreningen Bergabygdens Kultur och Turism – and primarily their associates Krister Ljungberg, Anna-Lena Ljungberg and Magnus Strömberg. Funding for the museum installation came from the Swedish National Heritage Board, which assisted the Museum with a grant of SEK 300,000 (around $30,000).
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