My Life With Deth

by David Ellefson

  One of the other brutal jobs was called “walking beans.” On the farm you had rows of soybeans planted up and down the fields. In order to eliminate the weeds, we would employ up to thirty people to line up and walk down the rows to pull the weeds. It was hot, dirty, hateful work. I’d say “This is horrible. I certainly can’t do this for the rest of my life!” and I couldn’t wait to get back inside and plug in my bass and just lose myself in music and the continued thought of rock stardom. Music was my obsession; farm work was not.

  That said, being raised on a farm kept me obedient, and there were times when I took pride in my farm work. A job well done does give you self-esteem. By my midteens I could drive a tractor. I learned to drive a car real young—long before I had a license—and I was responsible for it. I learned many wholesome skills that became helpful later in my life, and as I matured, I was actually proud that I learned them on a farm. But at the time, farm work ethics felt brutal.

  I still managed to get into trouble. I skipped school one day and went over to Sioux Falls with my girlfriend, and we made up some story to tell our parents about staying at friends’ houses so we wouldn’t get caught. Sure enough, by the time we got home the next morning, our parents had put the story together. I was given the sex talk.

  My dad said to me, “Sex is like shaving: once you start, you never stop. If you get some girl pregnant, the rest of your life is just gone, with all your dreams and aspirations.” Again, he saw that I was really into music, having done it for a few years now and devoted every spare moment to it. He didn’t want to see me blow it over getting a girl pregnant. Even more important, sex before marriage was against my church upbringing. To my father’s credit, he started giving me safer farm work that meant there was no chance of losing a finger or getting hurt in machinery. He assigned me to jobs such as cleaning the pool and mowing the lawn, chores that needed to be done but that were quite safe from a career-threatening injury.

  All these years later, when I look back at my childhood, it’s not obvious why I later became addicted to drugs and alcohol. There was nothing in my background that made me predisposed to drink and take drugs. I wasn’t abused and I was a reasonably happy kid with a secure background. But addiction is like Russian roulette. Some people can drink, take drugs, smoke pot, and even go further than that occasionally without much effect. Then they can stop doing those things without damage to their lives. However, for me there was a bullet in the chamber when I drank for the first time. This made it hard for me later on when I tried to face my addictions, because I thought, “I’m a pretty normal, well-adjusted guy: I’m not a screwup, except for when it comes to putting down drugs and alcohol. For some reason I just love to be high—not to escape anything—but just because I like to have a nice little buzz going on.

  Even in my recovery, all these years later, I’ve met people whose backgrounds involved abuse, incest, jail terms, divorce, and so on, but I never experienced any of that, and it’s made me wonder why I was an addict. I realized later that those things don’t really have anything to do with addiction, although for some people they do form part of the road that leads to it. Ultimately the D-day is what happens the first time you put the substance into you, and that’s what you have to deal with from that point onward.

  Back to 1979. Right around this time, my buddies in Toz and I met a guitarist named Jerry Giefer, who came from Windom, Minnesota. He was a tall, lanky guy with long, black hair, and he could really shred on guitar. He was hands-down the most ripping guitarist any of us had heard locally, and he was our age! He could play beyond anything. More than that, he was really in touch with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Iron Maiden, Venom, Tank, and Motörhead. When we first met him, he walked in with Iron Maiden’s first album and Motörhead’s No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, and all of a sudden we lit up. Around this time our drummer, Justin, had just discovered the Scorpions’ Lovedrive album, and we were like, “This is the next new thing!” This music didn’t come from California; it was from Europe. Because it came from overseas, to us it had a certain magic about it. California was a long way away, but it was still attainable, whereas Europe felt like it wasn’t.

  I heard Iron Maiden and realized that Steve Harris was the bass player, the songwriter, and also the leader of the band, which really changed my assessment of a bass player’s role in a band. I’d been listening to Geddy Lee of Rush a lot, and I was playing in the jazz band at school, too. I was taking bass lessons from our high school band instructor, Bob, who was an accomplished jazz head and a pretty good drummer. You could tell he had gigged out before he became a band teacher. He had long hair, and he would show up for jazz band rehearsal at 7 A.M. before school.

  Thus began formal jazz studies for me and a friend, Ethan, with whom I carpooled from the farm on those mornings. Ethan was a great musician, and it was his mother who gave me my early Wurlitzer organ lessons during the fourth grade, which was my first official introduction to playing music. Jazz band actually made me feel better about jazz music in some way, as if it was rock ’n’ roll of a different sort. Bob got me into Spyro Gyra and Weather Report, with their amazing bass player, Jaco Pastorius. I’d seen Stanley Clarke play on The Midnight Special at Greg’s house years earlier, so I was already hip to some jazz bass playing.

  Right about this time, the Rocky movie came out, and Maynard Ferguson, the trumpet player, wrote the theme song for it. One fall evening, Maynard played in the neighboring town of Windom, Minnesota, so Ethan and I went to see him. Even though I was into Rush and progressive music, I had never heard music played like this before. It seemed impossible to me to be this inhumanly good. Everybody in his band was unbelievably great. Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine was in his band, along with the Minneapolis bassist Gordon Johnson, who floored me with his fluid touch. As much as I respected Rush in the rock ’n’ roll realm, they suddenly seemed like kindergarten musicians compared to Maynard’s band.

  In between playing in the school jazz band and listening to the other musicians I liked, I was exposed to a wide variety of music. I’d come home from school, put the needle on a record, and shred away on bass while listening to it. Toz was playing a lot of gigs. In order for our band to get hired, we had to do three or four sets a night, and we’d get maybe five hundred dollars. My dad bought us a trailer, and he also let us use the family van so we could have a vehicle to get to our shows. He even converted one of his sheds on the farm and put a furnace and insulation in it, so we could rehearse all year round.

  Looking back on it, my father really stepped up to help us with all these band endeavors. He basically gave me a vehicle and a building, and he helped me buy a $5,000 PA system for the band. Those things helped me learn about mixing, EQ, crossovers, power amps, and how all those things in the signal path worked. In fact, I started experimenting with bi-amp and tri-amp bass rigs and even tore my PA apart to take components of it with me to L.A. a few years later. Some of that gear was actually used on Megadeth’s first two studio albums.

  Jerry joined our band, along with a new drummer named Brett Fredrickson, and started exposing us to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Because we had become so enamored with Iron Maiden’s music, we changed the band name from Toz to Killers, as a tribute to Maiden’s second LP. It’s funny that in years to come, younger bands followed suit by naming themselves after Megadeth songs: the principle was exactly the same.

  From playing with my bands, I’d learned that some songs move people on the dance floor and a lot don’t. A lot of Killers’ songs didn’t. At the time a band out of Minneapolis called Chameleon, who had three or four records out, came into the area to perform. They were always on tour in the area, complete with their own original material, albums for sale, road crew, and semitruck. They were the real deal and their keyboard player was actually Yanni—yes, the Yanni who later became the famous New Age solo artist.

  Killers actually opened up for Chameleon for a couple of shows, which was a major achievement, but
showed me how far I still was from making it to the big time. This made me realize even more acutely that there was no way to make it big in Minnesota: I had to get to California.

  I spent the next two years of my high school education filling out college entrance forms, but I didn’t care about them because I knew I was going to California as soon as I graduated high school. I remember filling out a form once with my careers counselor, and it came back saying that due to my interests, I would be a really good forklift driver! I didn’t care. I knew that what I wanted to do couldn’t be measured by academic standards.

  Around this time I had an interesting drug experience in high school. Somebody showed up at school with a bunch of Black Beauties, which are speed. I took a handful of them and got all fired up and excited. It happened to be the day when we were filling out our requests for classes for the next year, and I picked all these really difficult classes, going, “Trigonometry! Geometry! This will be great!”

  At the beginning of the next school year, I got my schedule and I was like, “What in the world was I thinking when I filled this out? I can’t take all these classes; I hate all this stuff!” I realized that it was because I’d been all jacked up on speed. So I immediately started dropping the classes so I could do study hall. That way, I could have an easy schedule and go back to the band room and practice bass in the soundproof practice cubicles every chance I could. I wasn’t trying to be a dropout or a loser, but I wouldn’t allow academics to get in the way of rock stardom. I made my life easy and got rid of the academics.

  Killers split up by the fall of my senior year. I was now a guy without a band. This was when I started to realize that bands have personality problems and musical-direction shifts, and that splitting with your band is just like breaking up with a girlfriend: remaining friends afterward is near impossible. So I got interested in another band called Renegade, out of a little town called Estherville, Iowa, just over the border from Jackson. This band was a covers act with a few original songs. Like Killers, they were young guys from the same hometown but with a more mainstream set list, not so much a metal band. As a result, they did a lot of gigs and got paid well.

  Renegade needed a bass player because their singer wanted to concentrate on vocals rather than playing bass, too. They had a really good guitarist who had just moved up from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, named Bill. He was a cool guy and I liked his style, so I auditioned. It was weird to audition, because I’d had my own band for so many years, but I played really well and got the gig—and next thing you know we’re gigging, opening for Johnny Van Zant and other national bands, including Chameleon.

  Renegade definitely took me to another level. The singer’s dad, who was a high school teacher, was the manager. He was a bit like my dad; he looked after his son’s band and made sure we didn’t get ripped off. We were making money, and bought a school bus and converted it to a tour bus. Bill and I did a lot of drinking together; for a while he even lived at my house. We were always out late at night, drinking and hanging with girls.

  In the fall of my senior year, we did a show, and someone at the show had some cocaine—from the Iowa cocaine cartel, mind you, which was not exactly Peruvian flake. So I snorted some up, but since I was sick with the flu, I didn’t feel any effect. It felt rad, though, to be on a tour bus doing coke while playing in a band. In fact, I remember that the back of the April Wine album Harder, Faster had a band photo, and in it I swear the guitar player is holding a bag of coke in his hand just above the fingerboard. So here I was, living the dream, too.

  Now I was seventeen, nearly eighteen, and there was a part of me that was going, “Okay, I get this. Now I’m an adult.” Over the next couple of months, Bill and I dropped out of Renegade. We didn’t want to be there anymore, which was an interesting lesson for me. I realized that I am not a guy who can just take a gig only to make money, and I can’t take a gig just to be playing: there has to be a means to an end with it. The music has to be intrinsically intertwined into my DNA. Renegade’s music wasn’t metal: it was more like Loverboy than Iron Maiden, and my heart was definitely not into it. Plus, I knew I needed to get to California, so my days in the Midwest were numbered.

  I was completely steeped in Maiden at the time. I went up to Minneapolis to see them play with the Scorpions and Girlschool. It must have been 1982, and I knew that was what I wanted to do. It was definitely my future to play the newer style of metal music. Maiden brought metal home to me. It wasn’t wimpy and glittery; it was cool and accessible. What they did in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was very similar, in that sense, to what Megadeth later did in thrash metal, in that it was music inspired by a real street-level honesty.

  I completed my classes and graduated high school in late May 1983. That month I’d started investigating the Bass Institute of Technology in Hollywood, California, which was really coming of age. A lot of cool guys were teaching there, like bassists Tim Bogert and Jeff Berlin, and it was a hip one-year school for guys like me who wanted a foray into the L.A. music scene. It provided education and, hopefully, the skills required to survive the scene in Los Angeles. I thought this was my ticket to L.A., because I could tell my parents I was going to school there—and what parent doesn’t want their kid to go to school? It was a one-year vocational music course in Hollywood, so it was a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree at a university. I applied and got accepted.

  So that was it. Greg and I, plus two friends, Brad Schmidt and Brent Giese from the neighboring town of Windom, Minnesota, moved to Hollywood together five days after graduating high school at the end of May in 1983. We got into my van, hooked up a U-Haul trailer, and drove off. My parents waved us good-bye. I remember so clearly driving down the driveway of my house on the farm, turning left to go south, and looking back—and there they were, waving. No doubt my mother was crying as her little boy headed west to pursue his dream in the big city of Hollywood. I’ll have that vision for the rest of my life.

  Driving to Los Angeles took four days, and we partied all the way to California. Game on.

  A THOUGHT

  Follow Your Instincts

  A defining moment on my musical journey happened at the age of sixteen on the farm in Minnesota. My band was rehearsing in one of my dad’s work sheds, and out of nowhere the thought hit me that I had to get out to Los Angeles as soon as possible. It was such a powerful conviction that it suddenly precluded everything else in my life. That became the driving force for the remainder of my high school years, and ultimately led me out the door to L.A. upon graduation.

  The events that took place from there can only be described as divine inspiration and guidance. So often, that little voice inside, often in the form of gut instinct, is the one that needs to be obeyed in order for us to know the path we’re meant to follow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  California Dreaming

  “Discipline, not desire, determines the outcome of our lives.”

  —Dr. Charles Stanley

  Man, I hated Los Angeles. I’d seen the city on TV, and it had looked beautiful; but when I got there, I thought it was the pits. There was a ton of traffic and way too many people. To come from a rural farm in Minnesota to Hollywood couldn’t have been a bigger 180-degree shift for me. I was bummed, but I couldn’t go home unless I wanted to suck it up and be a farmer, which I wasn’t prepared to do. I’d never thought of any other career besides music and rock stardom.

  The only connection that any of us had in Los Angeles was a woman named Alvira, from a neighboring town in Minnesota. The Bass Institute of Technology’s apartment referral system had passed us on to her. Alvira was from Mountain Lake, a town about a half hour from Jackson, so there was a nice little connection there. In hindsight, I’d like to think that God somehow lined all that up. She had an apartment building that she managed with her husband at 1736 North Sycamore in Hollywood, at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore, right by La Brea and two blocks from Mann’s Chinese Theatre. That was where Greg
, Brad, Brent, and I moved to straight from the cornfields of rural Minnesota. Greg and I had one apartment and the other guys had the one next door.

  We moved into our apartment around June 1, 1983. We wanted to start meeting some people, and one day Brad said, “I saw this guy walking around. He had long blond hair and he was barefoot, and he looked like a rock ’n’ roll guy!” We decided to try and meet this dude: maybe he could become a buddy.

  A couple of days later, Greg and I woke up in our little studio apartment and started jamming some tunes. I was playing the introduction to “Running with the Devil” by Van Halen at about nine or ten o’clock in the morning, when all of a sudden we heard this loud “Shut up!”

  Something came crashing down on our window air conditioner. We looked out and saw a ceramic flowerpot. We stopped playing. My first thought was, “People in Hollywood aren’t very friendly, are they?” Where we grew up on the farm, we left our keys in the car and our houses unlocked, and people would drop by whenever they wanted. Everybody knew each other, and it was very “come as you are.” Now I’m in Hollywood—and this is my first introduction to my neighbors.

  Within a day or so, Brad confirmed that the blond-haired, barefoot guy he had seen was the dude who lived upstairs from us. So one night, a day or two later, we went upstairs and knocked on the door. We heard some music playing through the door and thought, “That’s got to be him.”