Security stopped him before he got to the top of the barricade, but the mood for the evening had been established. I ended up going briefly behind the amps while order was being restored, and there I saw Chuck with his drum tech, Nick Menza, the two of them smoking pot and doing a few lines of blow.
I laughed out loud.
“Is this what you guys do back here?”
Indeed, that was exactly what they had been doing back there, for many months, in fact. I didn’t give a shit. I went back to the front of the stage and resumed playing, in front an audience that by now had been whipped into a frenzy. The last thing I remember is grabbing a bottle of schnapps, which Chuck always had nearby, and taking a few big gulps. I do not remember the rest of the show, but I have been told that this is what happened. I introduced the last song of the night, “Anarchy in the UK,” with the following proclamation:
“This one is for the cause! Give Ireland back to the Irish!”
I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was saying. I’m sure I thought it was just something cool to say, a harmless, patriotic rallying cry. A Paul Revere kind of thing: “One if by land, two if by sea!” In other words, ignorant nonsense. Basically, though, my words created a parting of the Red Sea in front of the stage: Catholic kids on one side, Protestant kids on the other. What they had in common was drunkenness and a willingness to fight at the slightest provocation. And I’d given it to them. The show ended immediately and we were quickly escorted out of the area in a bulletproof bus.
Young and not afraid to take off my shirt.
Photograph by Ross Halfin.
The carnival went on, and the next day we did a show in Nottingham, England. By the time we did our sound check, Chuck was too roasted to play.
For some time Nick had been begging for a shot at Chuck’s job. “I’m a better drummer than him,” he would say. “Let me play.” Now he had his chance. Nick jumped behind the drum kit and launched into the opening of a song I had written just hours earlier, a song that would later find its way onto the Rust in Peace album. Tentatively titled “Holy Wars,” it was an outgrowth of my embarrassment over my actions the previous night. Although most people—including me—invariably laugh when they hear the story of Megadeth’s Antrim show, I was mainly embarrassed at the time, so I wanted to write something thoughtful and remorseful. That’s why I took a self-deprecating shot at myself in the lyrics:
Fools like me who cross the sea and come to foreign lands
Ask the sheep for their beliefs
Do you kill on God’s command?
Nick played flawlessly. The job wasn’t his yet, but it might as well have been. From that moment on, there was no need to tolerate Chuck’s lapses, or even to put up with the fact that we didn’t get along very well. We had a perfectly capable, affable drummer waiting in the wings.
Finding a replacement for Jeff Young would prove to be a much more daunting task, but his departure was both necessary and inevitable. Jeff had his eccentricities and insecurities, not all of which blended neatly with mine. There was, for example, the night in Florida when he threw a tantrum and threatened to quit. The reason for Jeff’s anger? After opening one of my suitcases he had discovered an old love letter written to me by a girl named Doro Pesch, the female lead singer for a metal band called Warlock. She was a cute chick and I was flattered by the attention, and so I kept the letter, even though nothing ever came of the flirtation. But Jeff, who had unsuccessfully pursued Doro in the preceding months, was so offended that he felt he couldn’t play with Megadeth any longer. I kind of felt like I was the one who should have been pissed—after all, the dude broke into my gear.
That episode was merely a false alarm. Jeff didn’t quit, but his behavior had become so erratic that I was ready to show him the door. When I found out that Jeff had called my fiancée Diana one night—stoned out of his mind, I presume—and told her that he fantasized about having sex with her while he was screwing his girlfriend . . . well, that was a line you just didn’t cross. You don’t shit where you eat, and you don’t try to fuck your bandmate’s fiancée. Especially when your bandmate is your boss.
So the two of us got on the phone, and I told him he was out of the band. No long sob stories, no explanations. Done. Over. Within minutes he was outside the house I shared with Ellefson, having driven right over in his girlfriend’s pink Yugo, banging on the door and crying his eyes out.
“Dude, please let me in. I’m sorry!”
“Get the fuck out of here, Jeff!”
“Come on, man,” he pleaded. “I’m sussed.”
Sussed was not an apology but rather a term we used to describe being flush with drugs. If you were sussed, you had scored. And you were ready to party.
Well, of course, I threw open the door. Jeff walked in, apologized again, then proceeded to split his stash with me and Ellefson.
The next morning we kicked him out of the band.
It’s funny how time can heal these things. Not long ago we all got together—the short-lived Megadeth lineup of 1988 (including Jeff Young, now a clean and sober cancer survivor)—to work on the remix of our catalog and had a good laugh about our year of living acrimoniously. We hugged, apologized, laughed at our own depravity and the general insanity of the whole experience. But at the time, man . . . it was brutal. We wanted to kill each other, and we very nearly did.
Chapter 11
Against Medical Advice
Me with my Dean Angel of Death VMNT.
Photograph by Robert Matheu.
“You are fucking blackballed in this industry! And you know whose fault it is? That drunken cunt mother of yours.”
If you’re going to pick up a DUI, you might as well get your money’s worth. I sure did.
In the summer of 1989, I was driving down Ventura Boulevard, on the way back home, so close to home and so completely wasted that I wasn’t even worried about an encounter with the cops. I was essentially bulletproof at this time, or so I thought. I had one traffic signal to go. That’s it. Just one light between me and another night of freedom. I pulled up and to my left saw someone leaning out the passenger side of his car. He was trying to yell to me, so I rolled down the window to see what he wanted. He looked like a nice enough fellow.
“Pull over, sir,” he said. I could see then that he was waving a badge.
“Okay, officer. No problem.”
I remember him saying something about how they were going to take care of me, call me a taxi, and give me a ride home, and I thought that was incredibly nice of them. The next thing I knew, there were dozens of flashing lights coming at me from all directions.
Wow . . . those taxicabs look a lot like cop cars.
And then I realized they were cop cars.
Uh-oh . . . somebody must be in trouble.
The list of items found in my blood or in my car that night is a pretty fair indication of just how far out of control my life had spun: marijuana, Valium, cocaine, heroin, chloral hydrate (a sleeping medication), alcohol, a spoon, and a syringe. Why the last of these items was in my possession, I’m not even sure; I was not an intravenous drug user. I’ve shot up a handful of times in my life—once far in advance of this arrest, and a few times well afterward, when my heroin use bottomed out. There was no reason for me to have a syringe in the car. But there it was. So what the fuck? The point is, the car was like a rolling pharmacy, and I was both customer and proprietor.
The consequences of my arrest were swift and simple. I was ordered to attend ten meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and enroll in an alcohol diversion program for a period of eighteen months. Didn’t work out that way, though. After the first hour of the first AA meeting, I’d had just about enough. I didn’t know enough about the program to understand that the sign-in process was optional, that I could write “Joe Blow” on the registry rather than “Dave Mustaine” and no one would have given two shits. (It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason.) I presumed that someone was watching, waiting, keeping tabs on all
the drunks facing court-ordered intervention. I came up with an idea. Because I was still writing virtually all of the band’s songs, publishing fees and royalties made me the biggest earner in Megadeth. By a wide margin. So, I figured, why not strike a deal?
“Hey, Junior. What if I were to pay you to attend AA meetings for me?”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Few hundred bucks a shot, maybe.”
“Okay, cool.”
It was that easy.
David went to one meeting . . . then another . . . and pretty soon I was paying him to attend meetings I think he would have attended for free. Something changed. He stopped drinking, stopped doing drugs. And one night I found myself looking at him, clean and sober, and I said, “Holy fuck! I accidentally twelve-stepped Junior!”
AA worked for David. For me? Not so much. The whole idea of hanging out with a bunch of guys in bowling shirts with back hair just didn’t hold much appeal. Everything about AA struck me as cynical and false. Here is a program rooted in Christianity and the healing power of God juxtaposed with the powerlessness of man, a concept that must be embraced in order to understand and overcome addiction, and yet, you’re not supposed to talk about God at an AA meeting. I walked out of the first meeting saying, “You guys are so fucked-up. It’s no wonder you get a hundred newcomer chips for every twenty-year chip. No one in his right mind would stick with this program.”
The truth is, I didn’t think I had a problem. Well, that’s not quite true. I knew I had a problem. I just thought I could treat the problem on my own. I wasn’t serious about getting sober. As for contrition? Yeah, I was sorry—sorry I got caught. I had no remorse about the act itself or about the reckless, self-destructive behavior that precipitated my arrest in the first place. There is a huge difference, obviously. Rehab programs and penitentiaries are filled with men who regret their misdeeds primarily because of the consequences of those misdeeds. But remorse is something else entirely. It stems from something much deeper, something purer. It stems from a desire to be a better person and to stop hurting yourself as well as those around you.
I wasn’t there yet.
LIFE WENT ON, as it must, despite all of the turmoil around us. Nick Menza had stepped in to replace Chuck Behler, but the quest for a new guitar player would stretch on for several months. In the interim, I continued to write songs and continued to drink and smoke heroin and cocaine. It’s twisted the way the music business works—how the machinery of a band, particularly a platinum-level band, keeps chugging along even as the various parts are rusting and creaking.
Personnel changes and personal problems notwithstanding, Megadeth remained a band with great artistic and economic potential, and so work and opportunity kept coming our way. We recorded a cover of Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” for the soundtrack of the Wes Craven film Shocker.* Our lovely friend Penelope Spheeris was hired to direct the video for “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” an experience that was both hilarious and depressing.
I have the utmost respect for Penelope, so I won’t dispute her well-documented recollection that I was basically too fucked-up to play guitar at my usual level on the day of the shoot. In fairness, though, it should be pointed out that this was a particularly challenging job. Penelope had me standing, and playing, on a giant rotating pedestal—like a mammoth turntable. Things might have been easier if the pedestal had at least been flat. But it wasn’t. It was more like one of those things skateboarders use to practice when they’re hanging around the house. Like a seesaw. So there I was, trying to play guitar as everything was spinning and rotating and bobbing up and down.
Jeff Young, me, Chuck Behler, and David Ellefson (SFSGSW lineup, 1987-1989).
Photograph by Robert Matheu.
“Keep playing, Dave!” Penelope would yell. “Keep your eye on the camera!”
More spinning . . . more rising . . . falling.
“Turn around, Dave! Look at the camera. No! Too fast! Over here!”
“Fuck, man! I can’t do this!”
It would have been hard enough to perform and play in the video even if I had been sober and straight. Fucked-up? Forget it. No chance.
WE BURNED THROUGH managers almost as quickly as we burned through drummers and guitar players. Jay Jones, Keith Rawls, and then Tony Maitland, who had guided the Fine Young Cannibals to their fifteen minutes of fame. Tony was with Megadeth for about a nanosecond before turning the reins over to Doug Thaler, a former musician whose management career had taken off thanks to his work with Mötley Crüe, the Scorpions, and Bon Jovi. My first reaction upon hearing that Doug wanted to manage Megadeth was “Fuck, yeah! Now I’ve arrived.”
It proved to be a far more complicated relationship than that. Doug’s assistant manager was a woman named Julie Foley, who also happened to be David Ellefson’s girlfriend. David and I were still living together and supposedly cleaning up our act. He had remained sober; I had not. So one day while I was at home, getting loaded on heroin, Julie and David stopped by. Julie was pissed and immediately called Doug, who went straight into intervention mode. He had no qualms about telling me that I needed help and that my career depended on it. Doug, after all, had been through this sort of thing with the gang from Mötley Crüe. Moreover, this was a period when it had become politically correct for drunken and drug-addled celebrities—actors, musicians, writers—to embrace sobriety in a very public (and often self-serving, cynical) manner. Twelve steps to a better career and all that.
There was, at the time, a renowned “sober cop” named Bob Timmons whose specialty was working with entertainers, primarily musicians. Doug already had a relationship with the counselor dating back to Timmons’s work with Mötley Crüe. If anyone could straighten me out, Doug figured, it was Timmons.
I agreed to enter rehab and begin a relationship with Timmons, more to get people off my back than anything else. Certainly it would be a stretch to say that I was prepared to invest any emotional capital in the rehabilitation process. I just wanted to placate the folks who were nagging me to death. It all happened very quickly, which is typically the way it works with interventions:
We’re going. Right now. Don’t even pack. The car is on its way.
In my case, the car was a limo. As I waited for its arrival, I polished off a balloon of heroin and then rolled a joint. Last one for a while, I figured. Might as well enjoy it. A few minutes later Timmons showed up. We talked a little, got in the limo, and drove off to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. A few blocks from the house I cracked a window and lit the joint I had rolled before leaving.
“What are you doing?” Timmons said.
“Hey, it’s okay, man. I’m just going to smoke a joint on the way. You know, say good-bye to getting loaded.”
I laughed, thinking a guy like Timmons had probably seen and done it all and would appreciate the joke.
He didn’t. “No chance, bro.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean no. We’re already on our way.”
In a heartbeat my attitude changed from resignation—tinged with just the slightest bit of optimism—to indignation.
“Fuck you! You’re on your way. I’m going home. Turn the fucking limo around.”
“Can’t do that, bro. Trip has begun.”
Whatever positive energy I had brought to the proceedings (and it wasn’t much, I admit) evaporated. I didn’t want to be in that limo, didn’t want to be anywhere near Bob Timmons, didn’t want to go to rehab.
Timmons, not surprisingly, had been through this sort of thing before; he was accustomed to hard cases, and so he just talked his way through the whole thing, basically told me his life story. He said that when he was a hell-raising youngster he’d been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. You never know about someone, I guess, but to be perfectly honest, I just couldn’t see this guy in the AB. He didn’t seem like he had it in him. Well, once I got sober, some years later, and started doing a little sponsorship work of my own, I got to know some recove
ring alcoholics and drug addicts who had done some seriously scary, heinous shit. Many of them, not surprisingly, had been in gangs, including the Aryan Brotherhood. And a few claimed to have come across Bob Timmons in their travels.
“Bad motherfucker, right?” I said.
“Uh . . . not exactly.”
The way they told it, Timmons had survived his time in prison by providing sexual favors for the AB. The gang, in turn, provided protection. Was this true? I have no way of knowing, but it certainly seems plausible. Timmons died a couple years ago, and I never asked him about it. Our relationship soured rather quickly after the drive to La Jolla. Indeed, by the time we got there, I was already thinking about leaving. I lasted a little longer than I had the first time, but not much.
Easing the discomfort of my stay was a cute young lady who was covered with tattoos. We got to know each other early and discovered we had a lot in common. Well, enough, anyway.
“You like heroin? Me too!”
“You’re a Megadeth fan? Holy shit! I’m in Megadeth!”
There was a patient revolt one day, with inmates running all over the place, pissed about the food, the counseling sessions, almost anything you can think of. In the chaos that ensued my little punk girlfriend sneaked out of rehab and took a cab up to Via De La Valle, near the Del Mar racetrack, a good ten miles away. There, she dashed into a restaurant, procured some heroin, and brought it back to the treatment center, where the two of us promptly got loaded.
As was the case with my first trip to rehab, I was shocked at how easy it was to smuggle in drugs. By the time I sobered up, I had lost all interest in embracing the program. I just wanted to go home. So I called the one person who would ask no questions, the one person who loved me unconditionally and would do whatever I wanted, even if it was unreasonable and not necessarily in my best interests.
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