One of the first live shots of me and my best friend for nearly two decades, David “Junior” Ellefson.
Photograph by Harald O.
Anyway, one night while we were having dinner at Dijon’s house, in walked this guy with a bass slung over his shoulder. Just opened the front door, strolled through the house like he owned the place, offered nothing more than a nod of the head and a cursory “Hey, man.”
I looked at Dijon. He seemed uncomfortable.
“Who the fuck is that?” I asked.
“Oh . . . that’s my brother.”
This came as something of a surprise, given that the dude who had just passed through was a black man, and Dijon was supposedly Spanish. And therein was the heart of the mystery with Dijon Carruthers. His brother was Kane Carruthers, the bass player for a band known as the Untouchables. Dijon, it turned out, was of mixed racial heritage.
This revelation proved to be a formidable obstacle in my relationship with Dijon. I don’t know whether he was embarrassed about his lineage or whether he harbored some suspicion that I was racist. Regardless, damage had been done. I couldn’t possibly have cared less whether Dijon was black or white, but I did care that he had lied about something so fundamentally important. This was about who he was and how he presented himself, and if he couldn’t trust me or Junior with this information, then how could we possibly trust him?
Next came a drummer named Lee Rausch, another strange cat who played pretty well but who had some serious personality quirks. Lee’s nickname was Jughead, so you can probably imagine what he looked like, and he talked often about his fascination with Satanism. Now, because of my background and the years I spent dabbling in witchcraft and black magic, I knew what was involved in this sort of thing. And it totally changed the way I looked at this guy. I knew we’d never be able to play together for a long period of time. Even though I wasn’t a Christian, I certainly knew I didn’t want to be a Satanist, or even casually revisit the issue.
I wasn’t exactly militant in my stance, however; thus the band’s brief flirtation with Kerry King. Kerry, of course, was a founding member of Slayer, a thrash metal band that, like Megadeth, came of age in the early 1980s in Los Angeles. Although it had already garnered a substantial underground following by the time I was trying to put together a band, Slayer had not yet received the backing of a major label. I figured Kerry, a talented guitarist, might be open to the possibility of joining us, at least in the short term, while we tried to find a second guitar player. Slayer has often been mislabeled as a satanic band, and Kerry has frequently (and, again, inaccurately) been branded a Satanist. These days he’s more likely to refer to himself as an atheist, although our divergent views on the subjects of religion and music provoked a feud (for lack of a better term) that only recently cooled.
Back in the day, though, I had no problem with Kerry. He was a very young, clean-cut, and ambitious guitar player, the son of a sheriff, who didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs. Yet he was in a band called Slayer. Go figure. While he was in Slayer and I was putting together Megadeth, Kerry and I hung out together quite a bit, and we actually became pretty close friends. I shared with him a bunch of stuff on the guitar, including the infamous Devil’s tritone, a complicated musical interval spanning three tones. The Devil’s tritone requires some dexterity, but it’s cool primarily because of the folklore attached to it. For a period of time in the Middle Ages, the Devil’s tritone was banned by the Catholic Church; supposedly, musicians who disregarded this edict were severely punished and sometimes even beheaded. Whether there is truth to these tales, I do not know, but their existence was enough to inspire legions of heavy metal guitar players to incorporate the tritone into their songs. Kerry had never heard of it; but once introduced to the Devil’s tritone, he became a big fan, and just about every Slayer song now includes that chord progression.
Kerry actually joined Megadeth for a few gigs in San Francisco in the spring of 1984. We were still searching for a new guitar player but didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to play live, so I asked Kerry to sit in with us. Some part of me was hoping he might agree to leave Slayer and join Megadeth on a permanent basis. But that didn’t happen. Far from it, actually.
We prepared for those shows at a rehearsal studio in L.A. run by a guy named Curly Joe. This place was party central. We went back there one night after rehearsal and the studio was jumping with folks who were basically out of their minds on drugs. Remember, this was the early 1980s, when cocaine was not only socially acceptable but seriously strong shit. I’d become a formidable partier by this time, so there wasn’t a lot that I considered shocking. But the scene at the studio was truly disturbing. We walked in and the revelry was at once obscene and terrifying—kind of like something out of the movie Less than Zero (set in the eighties, not coincidentally), where you open the door and some guy wearing a pig mask has his face stuck between another dude’s legs.
“Holy shit!”
We were out of there fast, running down the stairs because we didn’t want to wait for the elevator. At the bottom of the stairs, spray-painted on the wall, was a gigantic swastika, along with the words Curly Joe is a hippie Jew.
Me, Chris Poland, and David. Obviously I am soloing.
Photograph by Harald O.
Fucked-up and running for our lives (or so we thought), we crashed into each other on the way out the door, causing Lee Rausch to stumble and break his foot. Our first show in San Francisco was just a week away, and Lee naturally wanted to cancel, but I talked him out of it.
“When it’s time to do the show, we’ll cut off the cast,” I suggested. “Then you can get it recast the next day.”
The show must go on, right?
But when Lee had the cast removed, his foot was black, just fucked-up beyond recognition.
“Oh, man, that’s nasty,” I said. “You sure you can play?”
Lee nodded, took the stage, and did a commendable job. More than that, actually. I mean, talk about playing in pain. Lee had to be one of the toughest guys I’ve ever known. That incident took its toll on him, though. Or maybe something else did. Regardless, when we got back to Los Angeles, Lee announced that he was going off to find himself, to search for some deeper meaning in life. The last time I saw Lee he was getting into his truck, singing out loud, and acting like the happiest guy in the world.
I never spoke with him again.
SO, ONCE AGAIN, Megadeth needed a drummer. We found him in the person of Gar Samuelson. David Ellefson and I were working together at a place called Mars Studio at the time, and it was there that we “interviewed” Gar. If you can call it that. Gar was an incredibly sweet kid with big, sleepy eyes and full lips—he reminded me of the actor Don Knotts, especially the caricature Don Knotts (like in The Incredible Mr. Limpet, for example). There were differences, of course—Gar had long hair and a slow, almost guttural way of talking. I would soon learn that he was also a heroin addict, and that fact, more than any other, colored his day-to-day existence. But for all his problems, Gar was a genuinely likeable person who had a gift for making people light up.
On the day of his audition and interview, Gar arrived at Mars Studio completely strung out on dope. In order for him even to be capable of taking the meeting, Gar had to go out and score some heroin in advance. Timing, however, is everything in the life of the junkie (as I would later discover). Presumably, Gar had planned to get high earlier in the day and thus achieve a state of relative lucidity by the time he was scheduled to meet his potential bandmates (and employers). But because he hadn’t scored right away, and had probably ingested a little too much, the process had evolved in a slightly different fashion. Gar had quickly gone from “Aahhhh,” to “Whoops,” to “Oh, shit . . . I’m falling asleep.”
When I walked into the room to meet Gar, he was sitting in a chair, head hanging, eyes fluttering, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. The cigarette was down to the filter; I could see that it already had burned his skin. Gar didn’t
even notice.
“Wow, this is going to be fun,” I said to Ellefson. “The guy’s like a sadist or something. What’s next, a cattle prod?”
I walked around the room a bit, looked at Gar, tried to size him up . . . tried to imagine him in Megadeth. The first thing I noticed (after the cigarette, of course) was the footwear. Capezios! The guy was wearing fucking Capezios. I had a flashback to my days in Metallica, when we played at a roller-skating rink with a band called Ratt, and one of their temporary guys had been wearing Capezios. Something about that just struck me as wrong. If you’re a guitar player and you dress up like a chick, you aren’t a metal guy, you’re a metal cross-dresser. You don’t belong in Metallica, you don’t belong in Megadeth. If you’re going to be metal, you have to have the lifestyle, and that lifestyle does not include sitting in front of a mirror and putting on eyeliner and lipstick—and Capezios! It’s like saying you have to wear eyeliner to be a fisherman. It just doesn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen, anyway.
Whatever trepidation I might have had about Gar, though, melted away after he woke up and started playing. Within just a few seconds I knew he was the right guy to take over for Lee Rausch. Gar created these amazing jazz-influenced drum fills that immediately and instinctively challenged my guitar playing. Technically he was a marvel—using both hands to create a crossover technique that was at once flashy and effective. Gar’s style, informed by years of jazz training, became a big part of the first couple Megadeth records. For a while, in the early days, when people would ask me to describe the type of music we played, I’d say, “We’re a jazz-oriented punk band with some classical influences.” I’d say it to mess with people’s heads, but it really was close to the truth.
GAR CAME TO Megadeth’s attention through Jay Jones, a cocaine dealer who became our manager. Jay was an extraordinarily odd character with a skull that was grossly disproportionate to his body (think Fred Flintstone) and a voice like Ratso Rizzo. All twisted vowels and nasal twang. Every sentence, it seemed, began with “Hey, dooood.”
I don’t mean to imply that Jay was incompetent or that we failed to do any due diligence before turning our career over to him. We did some research. Not a lot. Jay was not entirely without street cred. He’d been involved with a few reputable punk bands, including the Circle Jerks, as well as some artists who were on the cutting edge of what would come to be known as hip-hop. Jay had some interesting ideas; he was more than just a drug dealer and a junkie.
But he was both of those things.
We were frequently together, traveling from the studio out to where Jay would go to score heroin. He’d get cheap Mexican heroin that had been cut with shoe polish or something. It had a purple tint to it, so that when you’d snort it and then run your hand across your nose, you’d get a shit-colored snot line on your hand. Jay’s hands were always streaked with these lines, and he didn’t even seem to care or notice. Why, you might ask, did we allow an acknowledged cocaine dealer and drug addict to be our manager? Simple: he had the sales pitch, baby. He had the patter.
Also, he had easy access to cocaine and heroin, which meant Megadeth had easy access to cocaine and heroin, a fact that took on great importance as the band evolved.
Jay, incidentally, is deceased now, and the way he expired was just as outrageous as the way he lived. His father had been in the military and had been involved in some sort of explosive accident that had left him permanently disabled. Jay and his brother had never left the family home, and indeed shared a bedroom into middle age. With bunk beds, no less. They had two big, sloppy, mange-infested dogs that shared the room with them. And a barrel of kibble in the corner. So you can imagine how this room smelled when Junior and I would pay a visit. We’d go over to get Jay, and he’d be in his room, and he’d tell us to wait a second, and we’d have to wait outside the house, which was like a kennel, or worse, in his bedroom, which smelled like the service entrance of a veterinary clinic; you’d gag just walking through the door.
Some years later, long after he and Megadeth had parted company, Jay Jones was stabbed to death with a butter knife during—rumor has it—a fight over a bologna sandwich. That’s not funny, of course. But, if you knew Jay, neither is it particularly surprising.
Thanks to Jay, though, Megadeth had its drummer. In the months after he signed on, we found out quite a bit about Gar Samuelson—some of it good, some of it not so good. On the positive side, he was, as advertised, an absolute virtuoso on drums. On the negative side, his drug addiction was even more pronounced than I had suspected. Gar and Jay made for a formidably fucked-up tandem, and with the two of them now so deeply ingrained in the band, it was only a question of time before cocaine and heroin surpassed alcohol as the drugs of choice in Megadeth.
I remember being at Gar’s house one day, hanging out, when the conversation turned to recreational drug use and a philosophical debate over the merits of particular substances. Chemically speaking, I was far from a virgin. I could best be described as a functional alcoholic who also liked to smoke weed, snort the occasional line of coke, and experiment with other drugs. There was little I hadn’t tried. But heroin?
Never.
“I don’t understand why you guys like to do that shit,” I said.
Gar laughed. “You mean smack?”
“Yeah. What’s the big deal?”
He nodded, smiled knowingly. “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.”
Back in the womb . . .
That sounded pretty cool. And, shit . . . I wanted to be great. Next thing you know I was bent over a table, pulling a line of heroin into my nostril. It was a small amount, so there was no great rush, just a warm sensation, followed by a short nap.
When I woke up, Gar and his brother were hunched over the kitchen stove, bleary eyed and silent, and smoking crack. I remember seeing them and thinking, Wow, this is really stupid.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Gar said, giggling like a child.
Full disclosure: I had smoked cocaine once before, back when I was playing in Panic. There was one night when we were scheduled to play a gig, and I wasn’t feeling well. One of the guys in our little entourage (not a band member, I should point out) liked to freebase, and he suggested I give it a try. Better than Tylenol, he said. One hit and my headache would be gone. But that was freebase, not crack; I didn’t know there was much of a difference until I joined Gar and his brother at the stove.
I took a single hit and immediately felt as though the whole world had been pulled out from under my feet. The room began to spin furiously, and suddenly I found myself lurching awkwardly toward the bathroom. I threw open the door, fell to my knees, and vomited into the toilet. I stayed there on the floor for a few minutes, retching, sweating, trying to regain my equilibrium.
Never again. I swear to God . . . never again.
And then it passed. The nausea and dizziness were gone, replaced by the most amazing euphoria I’d ever experienced, and at that very moment . . . I got it. I understood exactly why Gar and his brother had their faces over the stove. I understood heroin and why you might want to mix it with crack. It all made sense to me now. These guys were jazz guys, and in the jazz world . . . well, anything goes. Not every jazz musician is a drug addict, obviously, but in my experience there is no corner of the music universe where hard-core drug use is more commonly found—and accepted. That includes heavy metal. As I said, in metal we liked to drink; in jazz, smack was everywhere. And now I had been indoctrinated.
I don’t recall any regret about this transition, at least not in the beginning. Quite the contrary. This was in some ways just another notch on the holster. Rock stars did drugs, and I was a rock star. Now I’d smoked crack and snorted heroin—on the same day, no less!—which in my estimation put me one step closer to being Jimi Hendrix or Keith Richards. Forget for a moment that Hendrix was dead and Keith looked worse than dead. The thing about being a drug addict is
that it is not all piss and puke. Sometimes it’s actually a lot of fun, in a very twisted, Trainspotting sort of way. Until it gets out of hand, which it invariably does, and then it takes your fucking heart and soul, and everything else you have to give.
The descent was slow, in the beginning, mainly because Gar and Jay (like the rest of us) were always broke and so there was never enough smack or crack to go around, never an opportunity to really go nuts with it. It wasn’t unusual to arrive at rehearsal and see Gar kind of moping around sadly, hands stuffed in his pockets. Then you’d realize that his cymbals were missing. Or his drumsticks. Or even his whole drum kit.
“Gar, man, where the hell is your gear?” I’d say.
He’d just shrug in that innocent way that made you want to hug him and take care of him, rather than slap him for being so stupid.
“Sorry, Da-vey,” he’d drawl. “Had to pawn it so I could get well.”
“Well” was a euphemism. It was the word we used to describe getting over being dope sick. If you had heroin, you would be well; if you knew where to find heroin, and had the money to purchase it, you could get well. We had a guy—a dealer, or a “conduit”—called the Rug Doctor. For the longest time, I didn’t even understand the nickname, didn’t particularly care, as long as he could deliver, or made house calls, or however you want to put it. Later, I found out the name stemmed from his ability to get people well, to get them “up off the rug,” which is where you were when you were sick and going through withdrawal. When you’re a heroin addict, that’s pretty much every day. You spend each waking moment chasing, snorting, smoking, shooting. Anything to get rid of the withdrawal symptoms.
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