Dave Mustaine cracked the door open, with the chain still on it, looked out and gave us the infamous Mustaine smirk. He had a glass of wine or cognac in his hand and said, “Who is it?”
I said, “Hey, er, we live downstairs. Do you know where we can buy some cigarettes?” He gave us a snarl and said, “Down the street on the corner,” and slammed the door in our faces.
We stood there and Greg said, “That was definitely the guy—but that didn’t go very well. Let’s try a new approach.” So we knocked again.
He cracked open the door again. “What?” Mustaine asked, clearly annoyed.
We were like, “Hey, do you know where to get any beer?”
He paused for a minute. Then, realizing that although we looked like hoodlums, we were pretty harmless guys who just wanted to hang out, he finally unlatched the chain and said, “All right, come on in.”
Though at first Dave appeared skeptical, he made us feel at home. There was a singer there named Lor, a big, tall, black-haired, sunglasses-wearing, Nikki Sixx look-alike—a guy Dave was working with on some new songs. He was dark and menacing in appearance, but he was actually a friendly guy. Dave’s roommate, Tracy, was there, too. Music was playing, and it wound up being a very casual, sociable evening.
We decided to go down to the corner liquor store, right on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore, where Dave—who was the California legal drinking age of twenty-one, while the rest of us were eighteen—picked up a case of Heineken for all of us. I noticed as we walked back to the apartment that with his flip-flops and blond hair, Dave had this typical California surfer look. He had the case of beer up on his shoulder as he was walking, and he told us stories about some band he’d been in called Metallica, which none of us had ever heard of, but he was a good storyteller, and we were wide-eyed with wonder.
Although his tone was angry and resentful when he mentioned Metallica, you could tell he was proud of his achievements with them and that he had been around the block a time or two in show business. I was intimidated but impressed. Having had my own experiences over the last several years gigging in the Midwest bar and ballroom circuits, I was intrigued to learn how the scene operated on the bigger stages, where I soon learned that Dave was a budding celebrity rock star.
In the apartment Dave had two Marshall half-stacks and a B.C. Rich Bich guitar, which he’d brought back on the bus from New York after his stint with Metallica a couple of months before. He played a couple of songs for us. They included an untitled song, which would go on to be “Devil’s Island” on the Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying? album, and essentially his first post-Metallica song, “Megadeath.” That song was later retitled “Set the World Afire” but it didn’t get released until the So Far, So Good . . . So What! record in 1988. It had been inspired on his bus ride home from New York, when he’d seen a quote on a handbill from California senator Alan Cranston, who said, “The arsenals of megadeath can’t be rid,” meaning that America had built up so much nuclear firepower that we couldn’t get rid of it, no matter what we did. That was the basis of the song.
I remember hearing those songs and going, “Wow!” It was really heavy, unique music, and scary-sounding because it was so dark. Immediately, there was something extremely compelling about Dave and his music. While he carried himself with the air of my teenage idol David Lee Roth from Van Halen, he had modern-day skills that went a step beyond the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that had inspired me just a few years prior. Clearly, he was the real deal.
The next day, Greg was really enthused. He was like, “We gotta play with that guy! We should go back up there and hook up with him.” But I was thinking, “Man, I’m way out of my depth here.” I knew I was a good bass player, but playing with this guy would mean taking a huge leap in my life, which was not simply about playing the notes on a bass. I’d be taking a step up to a whole new level, in terms of my lifestyle as well as musically.
But Greg pushed back. He was a loudmouth with an attitude: rebellious toward his parents, and he’d always been in trouble in school. Simply put, he was the perfect fit for rock ’n’ roll. I, on the other hand, was more mild-mannered because I’d been raised in a very different home. Without Greg, I don’t know that I would have had the fortitude to go up and knock on Dave’s door.
BIT wasn’t scheduled to start for about eight weeks, which allowed me some time to find my way around L.A., find part-time employment, and give my life some stability. But this move to hook up with Dave was like starting a crash course in showbiz only a week after high school, and it instantly changed the direction of my life, possibly forever. I wanted in, but I knew it would be immediate and that there would be no summer vacation. This would be the beginning of the rest of my life. As scared as I was, I knew I had to do it.
As for Dave, he was sizing us up. He is a quick study in people’s character, and as much as we thought we were ultra-cool hoodlums, I think he quickly knew we were pretty harmless young lads doing our best to dress the part of rural metalheads.
But there was no going back. A couple of days later, we were hanging with Dave and playing some songs together. Dave had another guy there named Matt Kisselstein, a kid from Beverly Hills who was playing bass. Matt had been a bassist for about a year and I liked him, but he eventually conceded that it made sense for me to be the bass player. In fact, when we went through Dallas on the Risk album tour in 1999, at a radio station we visited, Matt was in upper management. He got to do what he was good at, and so did I. We had a good laugh about how things turned out.
Right from the beginning, Dave was earnestly formulating ideas for a new band, his first post-Metallica venture. This wasn’t just some random jamming hangout situation. Dave was creating something totally new, and he was determined to call the shots and be in charge. In most of my bands in Minnesota, I had been largely in charge; but this move now required that I be subordinate to Dave, which was not easy, due to my take-charge attitude. But this was not music that you could hear at the time from any other band. I had been mostly playing bass with my fingers, even though I had been a pick player as well. I’d honed my chops on Steve Harris’s playing in early Iron Maiden and Bob Daisley in Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne’s band—both of whom were different stylistically from what Dave’s music required. Despite the learning curve, Dave said, “You’re definitely a good bass player. You’ve got chops, and you know what you’re doing”—which translated to “I can work with you.”
Another incentive for bringing me into the band was that I had a van, so now Dave had transportation. I don’t fault him for it, and to his credit, he was resourceful, a skill I quickly learned from him in order to survive in big-city show business. Dave’s persona cast a big shadow over me. Because the band was his vision, and we were together as a team in the early days, I was pretty much at the beck and call of the band and my duties to it, which was sometimes tough on my self-esteem. Often I wished for my own life, so I could grow up a bit on my own; but as long as we were forging the cast for the group, that wasn’t going to happen. My life was simply not going to be my own at this point in the game.
I smoked lots of pot and drove around L.A. with Dave directing the way, which is how I learned the streets and freeways of the area, completely stoned out of my mind. I went wherever Dave needed me to go. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: I had something he needed, and he was the equivalent of a big brother and mentor to me—someone who could show me the ropes and someone with a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve with his band and music. We moved forward together.
We jammed through the month of June. After a couple of weeks, Dave had Lor as the singer, me as the bassist, and Greg as the other guitar player: the beginnings of a real group. Dave’s original working title of the band was Fallen Angel, although you could tell he wasn’t sold on it. One day, after we’d been rehearsing over by Forest Lawn Mortuary in Burbank, we were in our downstairs apartment trying to think of a band name. Either Greg or Lor said, “Why d
on’t we call ourselves Megadeath?” That’s what turned the corner, and because Dave had some experience with numerology he figured out that by dropping the a in Megadeath, you’d have eight letters, which was the perfect number, because 8 is the symbol of infinity, rotated 90 degrees. Every single thing in our band was very much thought out, very methodical. No details were left to chance, from the guitars we played to the shoes, stretch jeans, and leather jackets we wore.
Even our names were carefully thought out. Right from the beginning Dave said, “We can’t have two Daves in the band. What’s your middle name?”
“Warren,” I said.
“Maybe we should call you War?” Lor suggested, but I didn’t think that was cool and neither did Dave. I agreed that we needed to do something about this name thing, though. We were friends with a guy named Peyton, who shared an apartment with his sister and her husband just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. He had been to BIT and was a driven and creative sort of character who was also a fantastic paint artist. One day we were at the grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard, and Peyton said something about how I’d just come from the farm or just arrived on the turnip truck, and therefore I was “Junior Dave,” as if I was just a naïve farm boy.
Dave started cracking up. “Junior! That’s great. Junior!” And the name stuck. I hated it. I felt it was completely condescending, and even though I accepted it as my new moniker, it bothered me for the next twenty years. I didn’t like being labeled a wet-behind-the-ears farm boy. I don’t look at it the same way now, but it irritated me at the time.
I knew my place was with Dave. I certainly didn’t consider going home an option. What was I going to do—help my brother on the farm? I never had a backup plan, but I look on that as a blessing. I had a calling to go forward and do this music thing. I knew I had to do it. Ironically, as much as I had family and other financial resources upon which I could have drawn, I never did. I never moved back home, I never called home for money: I figured if I was there to stake my claim, then I had to suck it up and make it work. Years later my mother disclosed to me that she and my dad realized that they had never had to put me through college, so giving me the family van and a credit card with a five-hundred-dollar limit, which I always paid off myself, was a pretty light load for launching their son into the adult world.
When we met Dave, Greg and I needed jobs to make some money. I had brought seven hundred dollars of savings with me to California, and I had the credit card my dad had given me, but little else. Dave had a job in phone sales at an office down in Culver City, setting up appointments for solar energy companies to sell solar panels. Dave helped me, Greg, Brad, and Brent all get jobs there to get on our feet with our relocation. It was a staggered, commission-based gig—if we set up an appointment, we’d get twenty-five dollars, and if that led to a sale there’d be another fifty dollars in the back end—and probably a scam job. Since we could all talk on the phone, we were each pointed to a cubicle and told to pick up the phone and start “smiling and dialing.” Our new employment worked out well for Dave, too, because now he had an easy way to get to work—in my van.
During my interview, the guy who ran the company said to me, “Look, man, if you’re gonna be in the music business you’re gonna be selling yourself, and that’s why this phone sales thing is good for you. It’s a great way for you to learn how to sell yourself. I realize you’re not going to do this forever, but it’s a chance for you to come out of your shell.” I hated this, perhaps because I knew it was true. I also hated trying to make people buy something they didn’t want. I wasn’t an extrovert, unlike so many people I saw in L.A. But Dave was really good at it. With his California street smarts, his storytelling, and his gift for gab, he could go from having two appointments on the wall to fifteen or eighteen by the end of the day. He was definitely a survivor. In any situation, he could turn on the charm to provide for himself.
After that, we took jobs in another phone sales place, run by an aggressive little guy whom we really looked up to because he was a kind of father figure. We worked a few of these phone sales jobs, but by August, Brad and Brent had turned around and headed back home to Minnesota. They were like, “This is not for us: we’re not meant to be here.”
After a while, Dave and I realized that Greg wasn’t working out in the band either. Although he was a nice guy and could play reasonably well, he didn’t look the part and was too laid back to to be a productive member of a group. What he was really after was a summer vacation. We’d party and have fun together, but the band was the band, and we were focused on world domination. So one day we went down to the apartment and Dave delivered the news to him. It was hard. I don’t think I said much at all, other than that I’d go and get my stuff together because I was moving out of the apartment we shared on Sycamore.
Greg Handevidt (school friend):
David and Mustaine came down to the apartment. I remember Mustaine telling me that I was out, and David just looked down at his feet. I was angry and resentful. The funny thing was that a couple of weeks later Mustaine came over and asked me to come back. I did a couple more rehearsals with them, but it didn’t feel right. Anyway, I don’t hold grudges—I’m not that kind of person—and my resentment didn’t last. I wasn’t going to let something like that destroy my friendship with David, whom I’d known since I was a little kid. It would have been really petty to do that.
It was sad, but it needed to happen. He went back to Minnesota and played in a band called Kublai Khan before joining the navy and living in San Diego. He’s a lawyer now and one of my best friends.
After that, we moved out of our apartment and in with Peyton, his sister, and her husband—although they weren’t exactly thrilled about it. Dave and I developed a habit of just moving in with people, and then we’d use their phone and split the groceries. We didn’t want to squat, but we had to—it was musician survival stuff. We were essentially homeless for about two years as we got the band off the ground. We hated it, but we did what we had to do.
Now I was the only remaining Minnesota guy out there in California, out of the four of us who’d headed west, which definitely took me out of my comfort zone. This gave me the liberty to decide that if we were going to make this band happen, I needed to pay attention. Making Megadeth work professionally was a job: you showed up on time, you put on a uniform, and you obeyed the rules, as any good employee should.
Even at that young age, I was starting to get my Megadeth act together on every level: how I talked, how I played, even what I thought. That year, 1983, was a serious wake-up call in my life. I had to jump into the shark tank and learn to swim with the best of these guys—or be eaten myself. It was that simple.
Dave recognized that he had street smarts and I didn’t, and while I think in his heart he wanted to be friends before bandmates, his street-smart drive told him that the band’s success had to be the priority. In the early days, I could see that people were really attracted to Dave and genuinely interested in the status of his developing band. I remember going down to the Troubadour with Dave one night, where W.A.S.P. was playing with a band called Hellion, who were coming up the ranks and had a female singer named Ann Boleyn. Dave introduced me as Junior, his new bass player, which led to an onslaught of questions about whether or not I was as good as Cliff Burton, Metallica’s bassist.
Cliff was a very innovative player in metal, and Dave knew I’d be compared to him, so he had high standards for me. I had to be more than just good, I had to be great. Fortunately, having had some formal jazz studies, I understood and appreciated Cliff’s skills. Specifically, I think what endeared metal fans to Cliff was his use of arpeggios and a distorted wah pedal: it was a cool combination of shred meets virtuoso.
My approach, however, came more equally from a rock and jazz perspective, influenced by bassists such as Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. To my mind, what those guys were doing was inhuman—stuff from another planet altogether. Regardless, as bassists like Cliff and me started
to incorporate other styles and genres into our bass playing, the metal fans loved it. This enthusiastic response to my playing from the fans fueled my and Dave’s drive to really put the bass out front in our songs. To some degree, I think Dave didn’t just see me as worthy of being compared to Cliff; he saw me as a secret weapon that he could deploy to show the world that his new band could live up to, and even be better than, anything Metallica could do, even with regard to innovative bass playing.
Ultimately, I had to take everything I’d ever learned from playing in a jazz band, learning Iron Maiden licks, and playing in a cover band—all the things I’d done back in Minnesota—in order to partner up with Dave and create something different. This was no time to be a lone wolf. Shortly thereafter, we recruited a new drummer, Lee Rausch.
Just prior to this, Megadeth had another drummer in 1983 named Dijon Carruthers, who was really into Ritchie Blackmore and Deep Purple. His dad was an actor named Ben Carruthers, who had been in films like The Dirty Dozen. Dijon was a solid double-bass drummer, heavily into British drum god Cozy Powell. He had a twisted sense of humor but did not do any drugs. His offbeat sensibilities helped him pen the original lyric to the song “Black Friday,” which appeared on the Peace Sells . . . album. At one point Dijon tried to convince me to move to England with him, which I thought was bizarre. Still, we got on well together, although he didn’t stay in Megadeth for long.
I remember Dave and I went over to Dijon’s apartment in the Fairfax and Santa Monica area of Hollywood on my nineteenth birthday in November 1983, and I attempted to drink nineteen shots of tequila. I think I got as far as thirteen. I was hungover for two days, and that was the last time I ever drank that stuff.
Dave was writing songs all the way through 1983, and after some early rehearsals at a little room off Sunset Boulevard, right opposite the Chateau Marmont, we had the beginnings of “Looking Down the Cross,” “Devil’s Island,” and “Set the World Afire.” Dave was also working on “The Skull Beneath the Skin,” which had the original working title of “Self Destruct.” The tempos were slow, with a cool, groovy feel. They had a heavy, Black Sabbath kind of vibe, which caught the attention of everyone who heard them.
My Life With Deth Page 5