Mustaine

by Dave Mustaine

  This time I did. And right afterward, Pam began to cry. Several weeks later we found out she was pregnant. The math clearly indicated the miracle had occurred in Paris—a French conception, if you will.

  Fast-forward to January 1997: Pam is about to have the baby, and I get this offer to play at Howard Stern’s party.

  “It’s a great opportunity,” Bud Prager said. “K-Rock determines the way the entire nation puts its pants on. If they play the single, everyone else will follow.”

  I made the trip, but not without serious cost to my family. Pam’s due date was just a few days before the Stern appearance, so I suggested that if she hadn’t delivered by then, maybe we could induce labor.

  Pam graciously agreed, and everything worked out perfectly. Our daughter, Electra, was born on January 28, 1998, without complication. A seasoned dad, I actually performed the delivery. Seriously. As the labor progressed without incident and Electra poked her pretty little head out, the doctor said, “Would you like to deliver her?”

  “Really? Are you kidding?”

  She smiled. “No, sir.”

  Then she stepped aside, and I pulled my daughter into the world. I didn’t just stand there and take a handful of goo; I didn’t just cut the umbilical cord. It was much more than that. I was the first person in this world to touch her. I think that’s part of the reason we have such a close relationship today.

  Two days later we were in New York, playing at Howard’s birthday bash. I was pumped. I was a new dad. I was healthy and sober. I was ready to help “Use the Man” get the boost it needed. Although I wasn’t a “fan” of the show, obviously I knew about it, understood its reach and influence. I knew that Howard sometimes played Megadeth music on the air, and I appreciated that. I certainly did not look at Howard with disdain; in fact, I viewed him with affection more than anything else.

  Our encounter, unfortunately, was less than inspiring. We played our song, then sat on the couch to talk, and right away Howard launched into a typically, antagonistic line of questioning.

  “I hear you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.”

  “Uh, no. My parents were.”

  “Really? Did you kill ’em?”

  Believe it or not, the conversation went downhill from there, in part because I don’t think Howard was particularly interested in talking with me, but also because I wasn’t a very good sport.

  “I hear you beat up James Hetfield.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “Are you gonna beat me up, too?”

  By the time the interview ended, I wanted to grab him and say, “Howard, do you have any idea how much you just let me down?” Here was a guy with whom I hoped to perhaps build a friendship. At the very least, I hoped he would appreciate the lengths we’d gone to in order to be on his show. I mean, I had talked my wife into inducing labor! I had three band members and all the people who worked for us relying on me to make the right decision, to write the right song, to dance and move the right way onstage, so that everyone could make enough money to keep their wives happy and to pay for private school tuition and nannies and braces and, well, everything. I stood there in the dressing room afterward, thinking of what a disaster the show had been, and I felt like I had shit the bed.

  I went downstairs and saw a representative from the record company, and I could tell from his demeanor that it clearly hadn’t gone well. I was hoping that it certainly had nothing to do with Megadeth’s performance; we were on fire. I think we kept our end of the bargain. For whatever reason, though, things didn’t work out.

  WHETHER LIFE IMITATES art or art imitates life, there surely is a point at which the two intersect. I don’t know of a single person in the music business—especially in heavy metal—who doesn’t find the movie This Is Spinal Tap to be both achingly funny and breathtakingly accurate. This is particularly true of Megadeth, as we’ve known more than our share of bickering, drug use, incompetent management, and personnel changes. Spinal Tap drummers spontaneously combusted; Megadeth’s simply proved unreliable or inept or otherwise incompatible with the band’s mission, whatever it might have been at a given time.

  Nick Menza started out as a wide-eyed kid living a rock ’n’ roll fantasy. I loved Nick when he came to the band, and I love him today, but there was a period of time, in the mid to late 1990s, when he simply was not manageable. Ours had been a tempestuous relationship for years, but it reached a breaking point when we went out on tour after Cryptic Writings—the road will always exacerbate interpersonal problems within a band. Nick had developed a disturbing habit of hiding gay porno in places designed to provoke the greatest embarrassment when they were discovered. He would, for example, leave mysterious manila envelopes at the front desk of a hotel, so that when the intended target checked in and asked if there were any messages, the clerk would hand him the envelope. The poor bastard would then open the envelope and be treated to some graphic depiction of dude-on-dude fellatio as the unsuspecting desk clerk stood there mortified. This sort of thing happened with alarming regularity. You’d offer a beer to a visitor on the tour bus, and when you opened the cooler, sitting on top would be a picture of some guy fucking another guy up the ass. We all grew tired of this act very quickly. It was just too perverse, even by the depraved standards of heavy metal. Our bus was our home. We were supposed to feel safe there. It wasn’t at all unusual for spouses or children to tag along. I didn’t want to have to worry about Justis opening up a jar of cookies and being exposed to porno just because Nick’s comic compass had gone haywire.

  But that was only part of the problem with Nick. He also developed serious health issues, some of which were surely related to his lifestyle. He became increasingly agitated and distracted. It got to the point where Nick was sleeping most of the day. He’d skip sound check, wake up maybe thirty minutes before the show, throw on his bike shorts and sneakers, and then go out and play. Predictably, his drumming suffered. There was a crescendo in “Trust” that he kept missing. Night after night. This was not the kind of thing that would have happened to Nick when he was younger and hungrier. It was embarrassing for him, and it was embarrassing for Megadeth, to fuck up the biggest hit single in the band’s history.

  I watched Nick’s decline with a mixture of sadness and anger, but not with any great degree of shock. Megadeth had suffered from every idiosyncrasy that could affect a band. There had been problems with drugs, alcohol, women, and money. None of us emerged unscathed. It was simply Nick’s turn.

  The split came in the summer of 1998, during a break in the Ozzfest heavy metal tour. We were supposed to reconvene in Dallas. I flew in from my home in Arizona; Nick was supposed to be flying in from L.A. at the same time. I got to the airport—no Nick. I went outside, where our bus was waiting—no Nick. I went back inside, checked the baggage carousel, the bathrooms—no Nick. After looking around for a while, I went back out to the bus, and there was Nick, slumped in a seat, head tilted toward a window. He was wearing Ray-Bans, but I could tell he had been crying. Nick had taken to wearing makeup in an effort to hide the sores on his face, and there were now pasty streaks running down his cheeks. I sat down next to Nick and asked him what was wrong. At first he didn’t respond, but eventually he began to talk. He had health issues. That much I knew. I did not expect to hear him say that he had cancer.

  Nick had suffered an injury to his knee some time earlier, and the trauma had resulted in the formation of a cyst. Now, Nick told us, the cyst was cancerous. I didn’t know whether Nick was diagnosing this thing himself or not, and frankly I didn’t care. I just wanted him to be safe and healthy.

  “You have to go home,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’ll get somebody else to finish the tour. Our number one priority is to get you well.”

  There wasn’t a lot of time to mourn Nick’s departure or even to fret about his condition. We were out on tour, and we needed a new drummer. Immediately. The first person I thought of was Jimmy DeGrasso, who had done a good job on the MD.45 record. Jimmy is like a
lot of session players: when he wants a job, he is the most cordial, professional guy under the sun. But if you ask him to be in a band, he kind of feels confined. I’ve only experienced this once with Jimmy, so I can’t say it’s a pattern, but it seemed like once he became a member of Megadeth, he changed. In the beginning, though, he was like a breath of fresh air: “Let’s play! Let’s play!” He was great. But that’s the way session musicians are. They’re accustomed to being paid by the day, so they’re always eager to get right down to work. The downside is that they sometimes lack the ability to see the big picture. They’re always thinking about the next paycheck, the next gig, because that’s how they’ve been taught to live. They don’t stow anything for the winter; they live for the day. That’s not all session guys, of course. Some of them are shrewd and smart, but most are impulsive and short-sighted. It’s just the culture.

  When Jimmy joined the band, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. We all knew he was talented and energetic, but whether he would be able to quickly digest the Megadeth catalog was another matter entirely. It wasn’t like he had a lot of time to prepare. I still remember the first night Jimmy played live with us, in Fresno, California, and some of the guys from the other bands in Ozzfest were standing by the stage, waiting gleefully for a train wreck. But Jimmy pulled it off. And he did it without a sound check! This was an outdoor festival, with several bands in the lineup, so we all made do with nothing more than a line check—just to make sure the instruments were working properly. Then we went back to our dressing room, pulled out a big ghetto blaster, and played our songs for Jimmy, who sat there playing air drums, flailing away at nothing, and committing the moves to memory. It was a herculean feat that he pulled off an entire Megadeth set with as few mistakes as he did.

  By the time Nick had surgery and got the test results back on his biopsy a couple weeks later, I had already made a decision to hire Jimmy on a full-time basis. I made the call from a hotel room in Portland, Maine, with Bud Prager on another line—I wanted an extra set of ears, because I knew it would be a difficult conversation.

  “Hey, Nick, how are you?”

  “Good, man. Listen, I got my test results back, and it’s malignant—I mean, benign!”

  It seemed odd that he would mix up the words like that, especially on something so important. But then, Nick’s behavior was generally erratic in those days, his demeanor unpredictable, so you never knew what to make of him or what to believe.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Hey—how are things going with Jimmy?”

  I took a deep breath. “Actually, that’s why we’re calling. Bud’s on the line, too, and we want to talk to you.”

  “Hi, Nick,” Bud said, chiming in.

  A pause, like he knew something bad was about to happen. Then, “Hi, Bud.”

  I went on. “So here’s the thing, Nick. Things are working out well with Jimmy, and we’re going to stick with this lineup for now. Okay?”

  Man . . . looking back on it now, I almost cringe. I remain suspicious about Nick being diagnosed with cancer. He evidently had lost his enthusiasm for playing in the band and seemed to want time off. So the timing was convenient and left us all wondering. Still, my handling of the situation was undeniably callous. The truth is, I’m not very good at letting people go. You trim a dog’s tail quickly, right, with a single, swift cut? You don’t extend the agony. I know that some people will point to the irony of my firing so many band members after I was unceremoniously dumped by Metallica, but there is a difference. I have never fired anyone without warning. I’m a firm believer in second chances. Some people even deserve a third or fourth chance. Nick had used at least that many.

  I expected that Nick would accept his dismissal quietly; on some level, I thought, he wanted this to happen. He had grown tired of Megadeth—or at least he had grown tired of the work required to retain his position. But I was wrong.

  “That’s not going to happen, guys,” he said. “This is my band, too, and I’m going to fight for it.”

  I thought for a moment before speaking. “Nick, you should have started fighting a long time ago.”

  By that, I meant that Nick should have thought about what he really wanted. He should have stopped with the jack-in-the-box porno. He should have abandoned all the side projects after we told him to narrow his focus and start taking his job more seriously. God only knows what Nick was thinking when he said he started an Internet business called NiXXXpix, featuring exactly the sort of content you might imagine. The World Wide Web was still the Wild West at this time, and I’m sure Nick saw dollar signs with this venture. I’m not averse to making money. I’m not even necessarily opposed to musicians banging strippers and porn stars on the road.* But I do know one thing: I don’t want to be associated with porno. Toss morality out the window for a moment, and consider it purely from a business and professional standpoint. Porn is the ultimate dead end for an artist. The public is more forgiving of drug addicts and criminals than it is of those in the sex trade. Career-wise, you just don’t come back from it. When you go down that road, you don’t ever go mainstream again. End of story. Well, maybe if you’re just the drummer, and people don’t know you all that well, then you can come back from it. Megadeth was my band, and to have my drummer selling content to habitual masturbators was not something I viewed as good for business. Or for me, personally.

  Whenever I tried to address this subject (and others) with Nick, he responded with anger and insecurity. He should have stopped fucking with me all the time—the incessant backtalk and threats, the wiseass overtures about getting in the dojo and sparring.* He should have outgrown the sophomoric behavior and realized, after repeated warnings, that he had one of the best jobs a drummer could hope to land.

  HARMONY IS A hell of a thing to chase in a band—metaphorically and literally. Jimmy’s integration was nearly seamless. Everybody liked him. He picked up the songs quickly and generally brought some excitement and professionalism to the drum kit. Unfortunately, even as we patched this position, we all began to feel some distance from Marty Friedman. Marty’s commitment to Megadeth had waned, primarily because of a disinclination to play the type of music Megadeth had become famous for playing, the type of music our fans wanted to hear. In short, I think Marty had an artistic crisis.

  Like Chris Poland, I don’t think Marty ever really saw himself as a thrash metal guitarist. He was good at it—hell, Marty could play anything—but I don’t know that it ever really touched his heart or inspired him. Almost from the time he joined Megadeth, Marty had been unsatisfied with simply playing guitar in the band. To a degree, I tolerated his outside interests, because he was just so talented, but there was a perpetual tug of war—me trying to rein him in, and Marty always pushing, exploring other opportunities. He had done a solo record shortly after joining Megadeth, because he was still under contract to another label.

  At the studio in Arizona with my Jackson King V Anarchy model.

  Photograph by Ross Halfin.

  “When your contract is up, please don’t do any more of those, okay?” I had said. “It’s important that we look like a band.”

  Marty initially agreed to exclusivity but then did another solo record anyway. And then another one after that. Additionally, he was always doing guitar clinics. He’d go out and get paid thousands of dollars for showing people how to execute Megadeth songs—music that I had written! If I’d been greedy, I would have demanded a portion of that income, but I never did. I let it go, although privately it nagged at me. There was something weird and disconcerting about us not being able to connect on a spiritual level, and yet the guy was out there working and profiting from my art. That’s not cool.

  When you got right down to it, though, I think Marty’s dissatisfaction with Megadeth, and his eventual departure, can be attributed primarily to the fact that he lost interest in the music. You can play the charade for a while, especially if you’re as accomplished a
musician as Marty. You can stand up onstage and go through the motions, hammering out blistering solos and playing the role of a heavy metal god. The money is good, the girls are good, the drugs are good. Like all of us, Marty enjoyed the fruits of his labor.

  Being in a band, living on the road, leading that decadent lifestyle—it can do strange things to people. A few years earlier, when we were making Countdown to Extinction, there was one day when a band member brought a video to the studio. It had come to him indirectly from one of the guys in another major act.

  “You have to see this,” he said mischievously. Then he cued up the video and waited for our reaction.

  I’d been around the block a few times; there wasn’t much that I found shocking. But the images that flashed across the screen nearly caused me to vomit: some dude in black leather and other bondage accoutrements getting beaten by a fat, naked chick armed with whips and what appeared to be giant knitting needles.

  “Holy shit!” I yelled as she drove one of the needles through the guy’s nipples, and then through his penis!

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Near the end, as the guy was sitting there, beaten and bleeding, the chick took a big, steaming shit on the floor, then grabbed the guy by the back of the head and instructed him to start eating. And he did! At that point I had to leave the room. Marty freaked out as well. It’s all of a piece, of course: the lifestyle, the drugs, the sex, the devaluing of human life, and the subsequent debasing of yourself. After a while you just get numb to all of it. Nothing seems too outrageous; nothing seems particularly abnormal. It’s all just . . . boring.

  I think Marty had reached that point by the time we recorded Risk. He began advocating slower, more melodic songs, encouraging a continued progression toward the pop-oriented approach displayed on Cryptic Writings. At the same time, he adopted a personal approach to style that reflected a changing attitude toward metal. He cut his hair, dressed differently. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that Marty had reached the end of his rope with Megadeth. Rather than quit, however, he tried to get the band to adjust to his sensibilities. And with the assistance of Bud Prager and Dann Huff, he nearly pulled it off.