Mustaine

by Dave Mustaine

  Not that I was particularly concerned with looking on the bright side of life at the time . . . or for quite a long period thereafter. At one point I was sitting in the back of the bus, my stomach rumbling, my head throbbing. On the floor I spotted a pamphlet. I picked it up and began reading, just to pass the time, really. It turned out to be a handbill authored by California senator Alan Cranston. The discussion focused primarily on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. For some reason, one line in particular stood out:

  “The arsenal of megadeath can’t be rid no matter what the peace treaties come to.”

  I let that swim around in my aching head for a few minutes—“the arsenal of megadeath . . . the arsenal of megadeath”—and then, for some reason I can’t quite explain, I began to write. Using a borrowed pencil and a cupcake wrapper, I wrote the first lyrics of my post-Metallica life. The song was called “Megadeth” (I dropped the second “a”), and though it would never find its way onto an album, it did serve as the basis for the song “Set the World Afire.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me then that Megadeth—as used by Senator Cranston, megadeath referred to the loss of one million lives as a result of nuclear holocaust—might be a perfectly awesome name for a thrash metal band. But then again, I hadn’t looked that far ahead.

  I just wanted to go home.

  Chapter 6

  Building the Perfect Beast: Megadeth

  This was an unusual sight to me. On a dare from David Ellefson, I became Megadeth’s singer one New Year’s Eve. I have no idea what is happening to my mouth, but here is how the “snarl” started.

  Photograph by Harald O.

  “Dude, if you want to be a great musician, you have to try heroin. You’ll see. It’s like being back in the womb.”

  By the time I got back to California, I was basically shattered. I’d lost my best friends, my band, my livelihood. Practically speaking, I’d lost my identity, which had become thoroughly indistinguishable from that of Metallica. I was the face of the band, and now I had no band. I had nothing.

  With nowhere else to turn, I crawled back to my mother, who by this time was in poor health (she would die of congestive heart failure seven years later). The humiliation I felt upon returning to that house, to the very same room where James and I had briefly lived together, was almost unbearable. Every morning brought a stark reminder of failure.

  For a while, I must admit, there was only self-pity and depression. Mom kept me fed, gave me a place to sleep, and at night I turned to the comfort of old friends and acquaintances. But this, too, was uncomfortable, because the circle had once included the guys from Metallica. Now they were gone, and I was back, and it all seemed a little hard to explain. I was hanging out with my friend Heidi one night, just drowning my sorrows in alcohol, when the conversation turned to Metallica.

  “It’s just as well that I quit,” I said. “Those guys were really starting to get on my nerves.”

  Heidi had known me for years. There was no bullshitting her. She shook her head and laughed.

  “Come on, Dave. You know you didn’t quit. They fired you.”

  I was stunned. “Who told you that?”

  “Lars,” Heidi said. “He called me last week.”

  Even then Lars was an agile spinmeister—when it came to his reputation, or the reputation of his band, he left nothing to chance. And so he had meticulously reached out to the people we had in common, to make sure they got his version of the story. Fair enough, I guess, since I was equally guilty of trying to twist the story in my favor.

  Regardless, the realization that Lars had been criticizing me from afar, while Metallica moved forward with its career, served as a powerful motivating factor. In that moment, sitting across from Heidi, caught in a lie and seeing pity in her eyes, I was ashamed. But I was also righteously pissed off.

  “Okay, you’re right,” I said. “They did kick me out. But I was going to quit anyway. I want to start my own band.”

  That was half-true. I don’t know that I would have quit Metallica, but I do believe we were destined to fracture. And in giving voice to a new dream—“I want to start my own band”—at least I was doing . . . something.

  Over the next few months, the dream would become an obsession, thanks in no small part to a seemingly never-ending stream of fawning publicity surrounding the emergence of a new type of heavy metal, one typified by the sound of a garage band from New York by way of California:

  Metallica.

  Imagine my shock when Metallica’s debut album, Kill ’Em All, was released in the summer of 1983, and four of my songs were included: “The Four Horsemen” (formerly “Mechanix”), “Jump in the Fire,” “Phantom Lord,” and “Metal Militia.” The same four songs that had been included on the No Life Till Leather demo. The writing credits were altered to reflect changes made in the songs during the recording process, and, I can only speculate, to minimize my contribution. Each of these songs was primarily mine, and yet James or Lars (or both) took a share of the credit for all four songs. On each, my name was placed last, so that songwriting credit for “Jump in the Fire,” for example, reads as follows: Hetfield/Ulrich/Mustaine.

  I listened to these songs with a blend of wonder and indignation. I couldn’t believe they would use my songs after throwing me out of the band. They never contacted me, never asked my permission. They just did it. To suggest that the modifications made to these songs somehow reflect a collegial atmosphere or a more balanced division of labor is equally inaccurate. The day after I was dismissed from Metallica, Kirk Hammett was in New York, taking my place at the Music Building, auditioning for my role in the band, and mimicking the blistering lead guitar solos I had created, solos that stand today as the genesis of thrash metal.

  Did they think I wouldn’t notice?

  Did they think I was that easily pushed around?

  Probably not. More likely, they just figured I’d never amount to anything and thus would not present any sort of a challenge to them.

  But they were way the fuck wrong.

  BUILDING THE PERFECT beast—in this case the perfect band—takes time. I didn’t want to rush into it and take the first few people I met, without regard to personality or commitment. Given what I knew about the music business and what I would later learn, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid conflicts and clashes within the structure of a band. Over the long haul, there are bound to be problems, as there are in any family. At the very least, though, I wanted to find a group of musicians who were talented and ambitious. I was out for blood. I wanted to kick Metallica’s ass, and I couldn’t do that with amateurs. The mission was too important for dilettantes.

  At the first Megadeth show in 1983 at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley, California. I had bullet belts and dummy hand grenades on for this show. I wanted to make a statement.

  Photograph by Harald O.

  To gain a measure of self-esteem and independence, I dived back into the workaday world, a place I hadn’t visited in a very long time. Rather than returning to the soul-sucking (and frankly dangerous) life of a drug dealer, I went to work as a telemarketer: phone sales. This would be my last “real” job, and it’s now been in the rearview mirror for more than a quarter century. It was an awful job, about as boring and depressing as you might imagine, and made tolerable only by the “colorful” people with whom I worked. My supervisor was a woman named Marjorie. Marjorie, bless her heart, understood instinctively that the people in her charge were there primarily because they had no other options. Not one of us aspired to telemarketing greatness. We just needed a paycheck. Marjorie was a demanding but fair boss. She walked around the office in a generally perturbed state almost all of the time, but you got the sense that she was actually a decent person. She was just . . . cranky. But funny, too, in a militant feminist (think Janeane Garofalo) sort of way.

  Half the time I showed up high or got high on my “smoke break.” Marjorie knew it, sort of expected it, didn’t really care one way or the other. I mean, how luci
d do you have to be to dial a phone and have someone hang up on you? Marjorie was fascinated by the culture of pot that permeated her office, and on one of my last shifts she even pulled me aside and said, “Can you get me some weed, man?”

  Indeed I could. And did. A bunch of us got baked together, and then I went off to be a guitar player again. Full-time.

  Although I was far from a telemarketing whiz, I did make enough money to get back on my feet and into my own apartment, on Vernon Avenue in Hollywood. The first two guys in my new band—which briefly carried the name Fallen Angels—were named Robbie McKinney and Matt Kisselstein. Robbie, who had helped me get the telemarketing gig, played guitar. Matt, another telemarketer, played bass. They were both nice kids with some talent, but I could tell our venture wasn’t going to last. We lacked the chemistry, the energy, the spark—or whatever you want to call it—that gives a band life in its infancy. But that’s okay. It was through my friendship with Robbie that I met a young woman named Diana Aragon, with whom I would fall in love and carry on a relationship that lasted more than seven years.* My goal at the time was to assemble a band, at any cost necessary, and then upgrade the parts as needed until I had the leanest, meanest fighting machine possible. It’s taken a while, but I think I’ve finally done that. And this band, like the first incarnation of Megadeth, was a necessary step in that journey.

  I WOKE ONE morning, hungover as usual, to the rhythmic pounding of a bass guitar. Not to the recorded sound of a bass coming out of a stereo or boom box, but an actual bass, coming from the apartment beneath mine. When you’re a musician—actually, even if you’re not a musician—you know the difference; you can feel it in your bones, especially when you’ve been out late the night before and your head is throbbing and all you want to do is sleep it off.

  Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . .

  I rolled out of bed, pounded the floor with my foot, and screamed, “Shut up!”

  Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . .

  On and on it went, one of the simplest and most famous bass lines in the history of rock music: the opening of Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil.”

  Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . .

  I pounded the floor again. Still no response. I staggered into the kitchen and threw open a window.

  “Hey! Shut the fuck up!”

  Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . . Bwomp . . .

  Enough was enough. I picked up a potted plant from the windowsill and heaved it downward. It exploded on the air-conditioning unit of the offending apartment. And that did it. The music—such as it was—stopped.

  I shambled back into the bedroom, pulled up the covers, and prepared to sleep for a few more hours, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Oh, man . . . these guys are really asking for trouble.

  I marched back into the living room and threw open the front door. There, before me, were two of the least imposing kids you’d ever want to meet. Both wore bell-bottom jeans and canvas high-tops, with cheap leather jackets that looked like the kind you’d pick up on QVC for $29.95—you know, the ones with the belt around the middle, so you can attach the optional tackle box or Trout Unlimited patch. The younger-looking of the two had long brown hair. The other kid was going prematurely bald, with only a tuft of hair on the crown of his head, and had a protruding Adam’s apple that reminded me of Beaky Buzzard, the sad-faced cartoon vulture of Looney Tunes fame.

  Before I could yell at them, the one with the long hair smiled.

  “Hey, dude. You know where we can get some cigarettes?”

  I slammed the door, barely getting out the words, “There’s a store on the corner,” before it closed in their faces.

  Not more than two minutes passed before there was another knock at the door. Now I was really getting pissed. I sauntered back into the living room and answered the door again, this time fully prepared to hit one of them in the face.

  “Hey,” the younger one said, still smiling. “Uhhhhhh . . . are you old enough to buy beer?”

  They were simultaneously endearing and irritating. And what the hell? A little hair of the dog didn’t sound half-bad at that point.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling. “Now you’re talking.”

  We went down to the corner and got a case of Heineken, and over the next few hours began cultivating a friendship that would evolve into a partnership. The one with the long hair was named David Ellefson, the son of a farmer from Jackson, Minnesota. David had come to Los Angeles ostensibly to study music at a place called the Musicians Institute, which was located just a block away from my apartment building. The Musicians Institute might have been held in high esteem in some circles, but to me it was worthy of scorn—the kind of place where you went to learn how to play Toto covers at wedding receptions and graduation parties. For David, though, it might as well have been Juilliard. Or so he told his parents. While his brother, Elliott, stayed home in Minnesota to help run the family farm, David went off to California to pursue his dream of becoming a musician. They gave him their blessing, along with a credit card, and turned him loose. It couldn’t have been easy for them, but I suppose they were reassured by the knowledge that at least their son had enrolled in a respectable academic program at a fine institution of higher learning.

  Except he hadn’t. David never took a course at the Musicians Institute. Instead, after driving the family van all the way to Hollywood, he and a few of his high school buddies (including Greg Handevidt, the one with the hefty Adam’s apple) went about the lonely business of trying to make it in the music business. At the time that I met them, they were barely eighteen years old and utterly clueless. But likeable as hell.

  We sat around for hours that first day, tossing back Heine-kens, talking about playing, sharing some of our musical likes and dislikes. David and Greg had been in a band called the Killers back in Minnesota (for some reason, I guess there was a small but thriving metal scene in the Upper Midwest), which was influenced, of course, by Iron Maiden, so I knew some of the stuff they’d been playing. I copied a few of the licks, showed them what I could do. I could tell they were impressed. I was a little older and, despite my recent setbacks, more experienced in the music business. It might be a stretch to say that I was like a big brother to these guys, but I definitely became the leader of our odd little melting pot of a band: Mustaine and the Minnesota boys.

  Not long afterward I asked both David and Greg to join my new band. They both happily accepted the invitation. David and I were good friends right from the beginning, and the fact that he was a really good bass player made the transition even easier. Greg was a little more problematic. A nice guy, and not a bad guitar player, but he was such an awkward and unusual-looking character. Not in a bad way—he was just a guy desperately in need of a rock ’n’ roll makeover. Half the battle would have been trying to cultivate hair. That might not sound like a big thing, but it was to me. I had a very precise image of what my band would look like—what any real heavy metal band should look like—and it did not include bald heads and leather. Yeah, I know, fans of Judas Priest might cry foul, but the fact remains that skinheads and leather signify something I wasn’t crazy about embracing. To each his own, you know? I wanted a more traditional look to go along with our decidedly unconventional, hard-assed sound. We were going to be the fastest, loudest, most dangerous band in history, and we had to look the part.

  Greg didn’t look the part.

  Greg developed a friendship with a guy from the telemarketing firm and drifted off into obscurity.

  So Greg was out. He remained a part of our circle of friends for some time to come, before eventually returning to Minnesota and joining another band. Much later, after giving up the dream, as almost everyone does eventually, he became some sort of mortician. Or so I heard.

  And then it was just the two of us, me and Junior. “Junior”—that’s what I called David Ellefson. I had decided shortly after inviting him into the band that we co
uldn’t have two guys named Dave. Too confusing.

  “What’s your middle name?” I asked.

  “Warren.”

  “Oh, man. That’s not going to work. How about we shorten it? We can call you ‘War.’ You know, play off your Scandinavian heritage. All that Viking shit.”

  I thought it sounded pretty cool. David disagreed.

  “All right then. But I’m not calling you Dave. From now on, you’re Junior.”

  And that’s what I called him for the better part of twenty years.

  In the beginning I was skeptical about my own singing ability, so we brought in a vocalist named Lawrence “Lor” Kane. Lor wasn’t in the band long, but give credit where credit is due: it was Lor who suggested Megadeth as the band’s name. It happened when we were driving around one night, talking about finding exactly the right moniker. Lor knew I had already written a song entitled “Megadeth” and thought it would work equally well as a band name.

  And he was right. So, thanks for that, Lor.

  We kept a revolving door for drummers as well. The first was Dijon Carruthers, whose father was a journeyman actor named Ben Carruthers, whose credits included, most notably, The Dirty Dozen. Dijon was tall and lanky, with a smooth complexion and a very relaxed demeanor. It was hard to tell much of anything about him, aside from the obvious fact that he was a fantastic drummer, since he was such a weird and mysterious guy. Dijon described himself as being of Spanish descent, but he really didn’t look Spanish. He’d write lyrics occasionally that were truly twisted and sadistic, not at all what you’d expect from a guy whose favorite musician was the Italian violinist Paganini. Once, at rehearsal, he showed up wearing a Pilgrim’s hat and what appeared to be a wig; no explanation was offered. Then again, none was expected.