Mustaine

by Dave Mustaine

Gar had the routine down to perfection. As soon as we got into a new town, Gar would roll down a window and say to some passerby, “Hey, dude, you know where the red light district is?”

  “Huh?” (This was always the initial response.)

  “I’m looking for some girls,” Gar would say. “Where do I go?”

  It never took long to obtain the necessary information, and pretty soon Chris and Gar were on the wrong side of town, tracking down prostitutes and paying for services, but not having sex with them. The goal was not to get laid—that usually came after the show and did not require any sort of payment. Rather, the goal was to get well, and then to get fed. Always in that order. Gar did this with greater frequency than Chris, and with greater recklessness as well. We had to go into some pretty dangerous neighborhoods to pull him out. We’d be wandering around the projects, offering a detailed description of Gar that must have sounded hilarious: “He looks kind of like a locust, with a black leather vest and multicolor high-tops. You seen him?”

  A substantial portion of every day was devoted to getting well and staying well, sometimes to grotesque comic effect. There was one night in a Florida hotel when Gar had scored, distributed smack to the rest of us, and then gone into the bathroom and shot up. He’d also cleared his bowels, and when I went in to use the toilet afterward, the combination of odors was too much for my fragile state. As I left the bathroom, a wave of nausea came over me, and suddenly I realized I was going to be sick. Not wanting to run back into the bathroom and heave into the pit that had caused my distress in the first place, I tried to find another repository. But there was none to be had. As my stomach erupted, I panicked and stuck my head in the closet.

  Urp!

  Within seconds I felt somebody pushing me from behind, screaming obscenities.

  “Get the fuck out of the way, man!”

  To my utter amazement and disgust, Chris Poland fell to his knees and began digging through my vomit, scooping it up and letting it sift through his fingers. Over and over and over.

  “Jesus, Poland. What the fuck, man?!”

  He looked up, wild-eyed, and then went back to panning for gold.

  “You messed up my shit!”

  Unbeknownst to me, Chris had hidden his own stash of heroin in the corner of the closet, beneath a towel that was now soaked in my vomit.

  So, you see, it all made sense. We had tumbled down the rabbit hole, and there was no easy way out.

  Fighting became so commonplace that we barely gave it a thought. I don’t mean harmless little bitch sessions—I mean serious, bloody, psychedelic fights, often with Chris sustaining the heaviest damage. Even Scott Menzies, who loves Chris to this day, ran out of patience on occasion. One such epic encounter began—as they always did, come to think of it—with the pursuit of drugs.

  “Doood, what do you think? Two fifty? Two fifty?”

  It was Jay Jones talking. We were driving along an interstate in the South, traveling from one show to another in our Winnebago, trying to stay awake, trying to kill time.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Jay?”

  He smiled. “Two fifty a head. That’s all it’ll take.”

  His plan was for each of us to kick in pocket change so we could buy a twenty-dollar piece of heroin. Then Jay would melt it down, draw it up through an eyedropper, and squeeze a few drops of pure liquid smack into our noses as we drove down the highway.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ingenious, as a matter of fact. But we’d also been drinking and snorting cocaine, and the combination made for one hell of a magic bus. Chris, as was his tendency, began talking trash, acting up, and pretty soon Scott pulled out a knife and began stabbing furiously at the console, I guessed out of sheer frustration. The fact that he was also in the driver’s seat only added to the craziness of this act, a point observed, and noted, by Poland, who began making fun of his buddy.

  Scott was, for the most part, a big-hearted guy, but you provoked him at your own risk. The first time I met him he was walking across a stage, carrying a one-hundred-pound amp in each hand. With long curly hair and a barrel chest, he reminded me of Paul Bunyan. He was slow to boil, but once he was enraged . . . watch out.

  Scott pulled the motor home to the side of the road and leaped on top of Poland. The two men wrestled briefly, but it wasn’t long before Scott had control of the situation. He grabbed Chris by the ankles, turned him upside down, and walked him down the steps on his skull: Bang! Bang! Bang! Having executed one of the all-time great pile drivers, Scott concluded the match by depositing Chris in a ditch. We thought about leaving him there, just driving off and never speaking to him again. But then, we’d thought about that before. Instead, we all sat in the motor home, in various states of inebriation, and waited for the situation to defuse. After a few minutes the door of the motor home opened and Chris walked in, looking sheepish and sore.

  “Sorry, man,” he said to Scott.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  And off we went.

  On to McAllen, Texas, and one of our first opportunities to use pyrotechnics. McAllen is located just over the U.S. border, so naturally Chris viewed this as an opportunity to score some cheap and exotic drugs.

  My response?

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Not that I was opposed to the score. I just thought the plan was suicidal. I envisioned Chris getting stopped at the border and ending up in a squalid Mexican prison for the next twenty years, picking roaches out of his food and squirting parasites out his ass. Chris apparently had no such concerns. He was, at that point anyway, the most reckless guy I had ever known. Sure enough, he returned a few hours later, safe and sound, armed with something known as Mandrax, which was basically a brand of methaqualone. In other words . . . Quaaludes. They came in a tin pack and appeared to be legitimate, but I was skeptical nonetheless. I’ve lived in Southern California all my life, and I know how they stuff the seats when they reupholster cars down by the border. The drug trade flourishes; not everything is what it’s purported to be. If there were labels, the labels would say INGEST AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  Chris ingested, of course. And, overcoming my initial skepticism, I did too.

  On that night the drugs were comparatively safe and effective, offering a tranquilizing effect before we took the stage. The venue was kind of a shithole, and I was worried about how the performance would turn out. So when a guy who worked for the club asked if we wanted to try a little pyro, I was receptive. Anything for the fans, right?

  “I’ve only got one,” he said.

  “One what? One row, one charge?”

  “A single concussive charge. That’s it. But it’s enough, trust me.”

  I instructed him to hit the charge when I nodded, right before we launched into “Skull Beneath the Skin.” By that point, however, we were all starting to feel the effects of the Mandrax, which was giving no quarter in its effort to render us completely wasted. Combined with what can generously be described as an unusual stage configuration, you had the potential for a disaster. Because the club was relatively small, plywood tables were used as a stage extension. No problem there, except that in an effort to be inventive, the promoter had staggered the tables; instead of being distributed evenly in front of the stage, they were assembled as something of a checkerboard, with several random gaping holes, four feet wide, eight feet long, separating the band from the audience. I admit that it looked kind of cool, but it was a spectacularly bad idea.

  Just as we were about to play “Skull Beneath the Skin,” I gave the signal, and the charge went off.

  BOOM!

  The next sound you were supposed to hear at that moment was the sound of Gar hitting his drum kit. Instead, what you heard was something like the sound of two pencils hitting the floor. I looked up at Gar; he was empty-handed.

  Oh, shit! I forgot to tell him about the charge.

  The explosion had so spooked Gar that he’d dropped his drumsticks. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Most
drummers will keep at least one extra pair of sticks near their kit while they’re onstage. Sometimes two or three. But Gar had gotten so careless with his gear that he was down to his very last set of sticks. The next thing I saw was Gar scrambling down from his kit and running around to the front of the stage to retrieve his sticks.

  It was that kind of night.

  A few songs later I looked to my right, where Chris Poland had been standing, and saw nothing. But his guitar continued to play. All of a sudden Chris popped up in one of the holes at the front of the stage, blood streaming down his arm. Without missing a beat, he clambered back into position and continued playing, like a heavy metal version of Whack-a-Mole.

  As Chris smiled, I could only shake my head in disbelief. I knew it couldn’t go on like this forever. Eventually someone would overdose or die in a car wreck, or maybe even kill one of his bandmates. The potential for catastrophe was almost incalculable. The only question was, which one of us would be the first casualty?

  Chapter 9

  The End of Western Civilization

  The classic Peace Sells … but Who’s Buying lineup: David Ellefson, me, Gar Samuelson, and Chris Poland backstage before a show (or a fistfight).

  Photograph by Harald O.

  “You can’t keep up this pace.

  You’re going to burn out or die.”

  It was supposed to be an intervention, but it felt more like I’d been summoned to the principal’s office.

  This was early 1987, and in one of those intergenerational pairings that can sometimes go terribly awry, Megadeth was supporting Alice Cooper on his Constrictor tour. In this case, though, it was a shrewd marketing move all the way around. Alice, who had been one of the more popular rockers of the 1970s, was in the process of rebuilding his career after a handful of artistic miscalculations and personal travails. Although past his commercial peak, Alice still had a large and fervent following and a lot of respect within the industry. Personally, I’d been a big fan of his ever since I was a kid, when Welcome to My Nightmare was in heavy rotation around my house, so I was excited about touring with him and his band. It was an opportunity for us to reach a bigger audience; for Alice, it was a chance to tap into a new and younger demographic. Megadeth’s core audience, after all, was not unlike Alice Cooper’s had been fifteen years earlier: adolescents with a taste for loud, fast, dangerous music.

  Alice had been through his own challenges where drugs and alcohol were concerned but had rather famously cleaned up his act. There was no shortage of party animals in his entourage, including a snake wrangler whose job was to care for the boa constrictor that joined Alice onstage. This guy had a box of syringes that he would use to sedate the snake so that it could be handled safely, but he would sometimes skim a few off the top to use on himself. Alice, however, was sober and healthy, with a generally laid-back attitude about the whole scene, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the music. In other words, he was a total pro.

  After we’d been out on the road for a while, however, Alice became concerned about the antics of Megadeth. Whether he believed my behavior was worse than anyone else’s, I don’t know. I think he probably just liked me and saw me as the band leader, and therefore held me accountable for the craziness that surrounded Megadeth. Anyway, one night he asked me to stop by his tour bus for a little chat. He wasn’t confrontational or condescending. He didn’t treat me like a child, but rather like a friend.

  “I’ve seen it all, I’ve done it all,” Alice said. “And it just doesn’t work. You can’t keep up this pace. You’re going to burn out or die.”

  I listened, nodded in all the right places, thanked him for his concern and support, and basically ignored everything he had said. I had too much respect for Alice to argue with him, but I was far too deep in denial—and having too much fun—to consider the merits of his advice. It’s pretty simple, really: when you’re an addict, you don’t listen to people. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does. Very rarely will you find someone with a drug or alcohol problem who is easily influenced.

  Very rarely does the conversation go like this:

  “Hey, man, you should stop drinking. Clean up your act.”

  “Really? You mean I shouldn’t get high and plow through this line of Swedish bikini models? Okay, you’re right. I’ll stop. Thanks for looking out for me, bro.”

  It isn’t enough for someone else to want you to change. It isn’t even enough for you to want to change. You have to want to want that change.

  A subtle but important distinction. At the time, I wasn’t even close.

  I ENJOYED THE party, but I also liked the sex, and the power that came with it. For me, standing up onstage, with a sea of guys chanting my name and their girlfriends eager to take off their clothes for me, was the ultimate vindication. After all those years of being the invisible, skinny redhead in school, I had become the coolest guy in the room. And I loved it.

  I bought into every aspect of the rock ’n’ roll life, drugs and alcohol being merely the most dangerous and debilitating. When Ellefson and I were living together, sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and the first thing I would see, through blurry, bloodshot eyes, was Junior sitting on the side of my bed.

  “Hey, Junior.”

  “Hey, Dave. Want some blow?”

  “Uhhh . . . sure.”

  And that was it. Gone, baby, gone. Two, three days at a time. Ellefson was my buddy and running mate, but he was also shrewd. He knew if he got me loaded first thing in the morning (and let’s be honest—he didn’t exactly have to twist my arm), I’d pay for everything the rest of the day. I didn’t really mind, since Junior was my partner in crime. Getting fucked-up and chasing chicks was a lot more fun when you were doing it together.

  As for Gar and Chris, I guess I should clarify something: it was not their drug use that got them fired from Megadeth; the consequences of their drug use got them fired. For much of the band’s early years, drug use was rampant in Megadeth. Each of us paid a price for the choices we made. How steep a price depended largely on how well—or how poorly—we were able to balance self-destructive behavior with the legitimate and sometimes exhausting work of being in a platinum-selling heavy metal band. I won’t minimize my own contributions to the downward spiral, but the truth is this: Gar was the least equipped to deal with his own drug abuse, followed closely by Chris. Junior and I were a distant third and fourth (okay, maybe not so distant). We were also the founding members of the band, the dominant creative force, and thus burdened with a degree of responsibility not shared by Chris and Gar. I felt this more acutely than David, I’m sure, because I also wrote the vast majority of the band’s material, and the pressure contributed to episodes that others have referred to as manic, but that I simply recall as drug-and-alcohol-fueled insanity.

  Gar lost his spot in Megadeth slowly, and then all at once. We had picked up a new drum tech during a stopover in Detroit, before playing at a punk rock club called Blondie. While there, I was approached by a kid wearing a dirty yellow T-shirt and ridiculously tight jeans. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair long and matted.

  “Hey, man, you need help setting up your drums?” he asked.

  I had no idea who he was, but the truth was, yeah, we usually did need help setting up drums.

  “Check with Gar,” I said.

  So the guy shambled off and struck up a conversation with Gar, and next thing you know he was a drum tech for Megadeth. Well, actually he didn’t refer to himself as a “drum tech,” but rather just as a roadie. Didn’t matter—the job description was more important than the title, and it turned out that this guy, whose name was Chuck Behler, knew his way around a drum kit. He was twenty-one years old and already a veteran of a couple different punk bands. And although he had grown up in the Midwest, he had no qualms about jumping on the bus with Megadeth that very night. So if you want a job in rock ’n’ roll, kids, here’s a word of advice: be ready to answer when opportunity knocks.

  The cool thing
about Chuck was that not only could he set up Gar’s drums, he could also jump right in and play. This meant that on the many nights when Gar was indisposed at or around the time of our sound check, we didn’t have to wait for him to show up. As a result, we actually began to sound better when we performed. Instead of just getting to the venue and setting up on the fly because the drummer was off in the red-light district (and the guitar player was doing the breaststroke through my vomit), we were able to properly prepare for each performance—at least from a technical standpoint.

  And that’s how Chuck Behler became the drummer for Megadeth. Gar continued to fuck up, and Chuck was simply there, waiting in the wings. As much as his talent, it was his presence—his reliability—that earned him the job.

  Gar and Chris were dismissed from the band in the same week, in the summer of 1987, right after we concluded a tour with a trip to Hawaii. I’d gone out on that last leg thinking the situation might be salvageable, but it wasn’t. We got back to L.A. and more gear went missing. And then Chris began agitating to a degree that I simply couldn’t handle any longer. For a while, both he and Gar had been harmless, pawning bits of equipment to pay for their addictions. Now it had become a ceaseless, soul-sucking battle. Toward the end, it was just insane. Nothing was right, everything was wrong. Gar’s addiction had stolen his ability to commit to the band, and Chris . . . well, I don’t think Chris wanted to be a part of Megadeth any longer. I’m not sure he ever wanted to be in Megadeth, or any other heavy metal band. He was a jazz virtuoso who saw an opportunity to be part of something big, and I think he remained conflicted the entire time.

  Regardless, Gar and Chris were now gone. They had come in as a virtual package deal, and that is the way they went out.

  Filling Gar’s spot was pretty seamless, since Chuck was only too eager to move from Detroit to L.A. and become a full-fledged member of the West Coast metal scene. He knew our songs, knew the personalities, and brought something different to the band: a straightforward dynamic that contrasted sharply with Gar’s free-flowing style. Gar would use his kick and snare, then throw in a couple snare drum rolls for each measure. Chuck would just stay on the kick and snare, with a lot of high hat; it was more of a punk rock type of approach. Neither style was necessarily “better,” but there’s no question that having Chuck in the band was invigorating. It was almost a breath of fresh air to get back to straightforward, block-headed heavy metal.