My Life With Deth

by David Ellefson

  We auditioned all these Sunset Boulevard kinds of singers before Dave became the singer of Megadeth. It happened on New Year’s Eve when we were rehearsing close to downtown L.A. at an old brewery converted to a rehearsal hall, run by a hustling local musician type known as Curly Joe. We rented space from him to rehearse in his facility, and on this night yet another singer flaked out on his audition with us. At the time, Dave wrote all the lyrics, so now it seemed he should sing his own songs. I remember the first time he did it: he was all red-faced afterward because he didn’t know how to breathe properly and sing, but it was obviously going to work.

  I remember being very encouraging to him about this. Dave never viewed himself as a singer, but he is an artist in every sense of the word, and sometimes the quality of a singer’s voice is second to the conviction of their words, especially in metal music. That was a huge lesson for me as I was sowing my own oats as an artist. Perfection is not always needed, but conviction is, and Dave had that quality to his singing.

  We played a few shows with Kerry King of Slayer on guitar in early 1984. He had a B.C. Rich guitar, which we liked because it meant he was thinking like us. We’d considered a few different guitarists, including Jim Durkin from Dark Angel, but Kerry was the only one who came in and nailed the music right away. I remember that Dave showed him some riffs—really complex stuff—and Kerry instantly mirrored it and played it right back at him, note for note. I was flabbergasted. It was like he was part of Dave’s DNA. To this day, Kerry is still one of the best rhythm guitar players that was ever in Megadeth.

  Kerry King (Slayer):

  I met David for the first time a couple of weeks before I played five shows with Megadeth, back in February 1984. I was stoked to do it: I joined them because I’d seen Mustaine play with Metallica, and I was genuinely impressed. I thought the guy could play, and when I heard he was looking for a guitar player, I thought I’d try out because in my eyes he was awesome. Ellefson was a really good bassist. He’s always been a cool guy, and he’s always been genuine. I really liked Megadeth’s early stuff.

  After those first Megadeth shows in the Bay Area in February and April 1984, I could see that the fire to rekindle Slayer was truly alive in Kerry’s eyes. It was as if the Bay Area shows with us opened his eyes to another way of doing it, different from how it was done in L.A. with hairdos, makeup, studded belts, and so on. I truly believe that those early shows with Kerry set a new course for him to reinvigorate Slayer and allowed them to be the global phenomenon they are today.

  So Kerry returned to Slayer, and once again it was just me and Dave. However, by May 1984, we had started to get label and management interest, especially from Brian Slagel at Metal Blade and Walter O’Brien at Combat Records, who would later manage Pantera. In the middle of 1984, we were put in touch with a guy named Jay Jones, who became a kind of quasi-manager to Megadeth. He introduced us to a drummer, Gar Samuelson, because our first drummer, Lee Rausch, had told us he needed to go up into the mountains and find himself—and that was the last we ever heard of him.

  In mid-1984 Gar joined the band. He was a very avant-garde drummer: he did a progressive jazz thing and cited Billy Cobham and Keith Moon as his two main influences. Initially I wasn’t particularly keen on his style—which was a light, wispy kind of fusion drumming—because I’d been visualizing the drum style of Clive Burr of Iron Maiden or Phil Taylor from Motörhead. Gar was formerly in another band called the New Yorkers with a guitarist named Chris Poland. Jay Jones wanted Chris to audition for us because he had fancied himself as a quasi-manager of the New Yorkers a few years prior.

  Chris Poland (ex-Megadeth):

  The first time I met David was at the Waters Club in San Pedro. Megadeth was a three-piece band, and Gar had asked me to come down to see them, because he wanted me to be the second guitarist. I rented a room at Mars Studios, where the two Daves both worked, and I took all my gear down there and played for a couple of hours. Then Dave Mustaine knocked on the door and asked, “You’re Chris, right? Do you want to join the band?” and I said, “Yes!”

  Chris was really good, but now we had a situation where Dave and I were the two metal guys and Gar and Chris were the jazz guys. Initially it wasn’t always a good fit. Chris was the first real jazz musician drug addict I had met.

  My father always told me, “Whatever you do, don’t take cocaine,” so I said, “Of course not, Dad, I would never do that.” But in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Man, I can’t wait to get out there and do some of that coke,” because it just seemed like the L.A., rock ’n’ roll thing to do.

  My relocation to L.A. allowed me to re-create myself in whatever way I wanted. That’s dangerous when you’re only eighteen, and you don’t know exactly who you want to be. I hadn’t been to college, and all of a sudden I was leaping out of the nest for the first time: from the humble, wholesome farm in Minnesota to what is probably one of the most decadent, seedy places on the planet—the armpit of Hollywood.

  As we put the various lineups of Megadeth together and as drug use increased, every lineup became darker and more corrupt and sinister. It started with pot and beer when Dave and I first met, and then guys started coming around with cocaine—and then in 1984 I discovered a new drug, one that would have devastating consequences.

  A THOUGHT

  On the Road

  My move to California was not an easy road to hoe. A lesson I quickly learned is that opportunity is often disguised as hard work. My early days in L.A. were downright painful and horrifying at times, but being young, I was resilient and able to bounce back quickly. I also know now that if you’re going to go after a seemingly impossible dream, you’d better try it while you’re young, especially in the music business. My theory became that eighteen years of age might be too young, but by twenty-one you might be too old.

  While age may not be a factor in many lines of work, showbiz likes the young. I believe this is largely because of looks and agility, but also because young people are idealists and willing to put everything on the line, while naïvely allowing themselves to be manipulated. However, if a threat to your dream is on the line, it’s easy to be motivated. You’ll do things you never thought you were capable of doing in order to see your dreams come true.

  The upside is that as a youngster, you also have time to recover from setbacks. So often, our youthful energy and ideals give us the strength to overcome the obstacles in our path to success.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back to the Womb

  “If you hang out in a barbershop long enough, you’re eventually going to get a haircut.”

  —Anonymous

  I remember clearly the first time I took heroin.

  Dave and I were rehearsing with Gar and Chris, whose jazz background had given them a kind of smoky, barroom mind-set when it came to heroin. Gar warned me not to try it, but I was curious and asked him what it felt like. He said, “Dude, it’s like going back to your mother’s womb: it’s like swimming in a bowl of liver.” I also remember him telling me, half-jokingly, “Hey dude, if you really wanna be great, try some of this. If you wanna be great, you gotta do heroin!” He even made a joke along the lines of “Think about all the people that did it, like Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix.” I was thinking of Janis Joplin and Sid Vicious, who both died of overdoses. Eventually my curiosity won out, and I decided to try some.

  I discovered that snorting heroin brought me down off cocaine. Soon I was doing heroin as often as I was also doing coke. It was like that with a lot of things: the first time I drank I thought, “This isn’t bad—it’s awesome!” Then a couple of months later I tried pot and I was like, “This is awesome, too!” Then I did some cocaine and I thought, “Okay, this feels kinda funny—but I’m not dead, and I’m not in jail, so it can’t be that bad.” They teach you in high school that every drug is a gateway to the next drug, and they’re right, because the next thing I knew, there I was on heroin.

  Chris Poland (ex-Megadeth):

 
David was sober up to the point when there was no way he could be sober anymore, because there was too much bad stuff going on that he got involved with. He wasn’t a bad person, but he got dragged into bad situations.

  I remember very clearly in 1984 when Combat Records put Megadeth under contract. We got an $8,000 advance and went into the studio in December of that year to record our first album, Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good! It was around this time that I finally realized that I had a problem with heroin. I’d been partying a lot, and doing smack and coke for a few days in a row, on and off for several months. Then one day I didn’t do any—and I woke up feeling really crummy. I snorted up some heroin, and all of a sudden I felt great. That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh . . . I think I understand why our guitarist and drummer have to score before they rehearse.” It was about “getting well,” as we called it; or “getting the monkey off my back.” I’d stepped over a line I never thought I would cross. I was becoming a bona fide addict after only a single year in Los Angeles. By mid-1984 I was drinking, smoking pot, using cocaine, and taking heroin. Those became my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  I was never a huge fan of psychedelic drugs. I took acid once and didn’t really enjoy the effects. The next day I was in a very deep, reflective frame of mind: sometimes I wonder to this day if that one trip changed me permanently. I became a much more thoughtful, cautious character afterward, and not in a good way. My one experience with mushrooms was absolutely horrifying. Never again.

  I could feel the drugs interfering with my vision for my life and my passion for rock ’n’ roll. Other people could handle it. I felt as if I’d sold my soul.

  Meanwhile, we made the first Megadeth album. Eight thousand dollars wasn’t a lot to make a record with, even back then, and we probably spent half of it on lifestyle and living expenses. We moved in with our coproducer Karat Faye, who had once been a staff engineer at the famed Record Plant. He had big stories about the rock stars he’d met in the business over the years, which impressed me.

  Scott Ian (Anthrax):

  I think I first met David in the summer of 1984, when Anthrax played in Los Angeles for the first time, at the Country Club in Reseda. I have pictures of us backstage, where Dave Mustaine played me recordings of the Killing Is My Business . . . tracks. Whenever I’ve met Ellefson, he’s always been the nicest guy. He’s a sweetheart and a great bass player. The fact that he was playing with a pick, when most bassists in the genre were using their fingers, and [that] he didn’t simply follow the guitar part like most bass players was really amazing. He really kept it musical.

  We went up to Indigo Ranch Studio in Malibu to do the album and stayed at the guesthouse there, the bummer being that there was just one very narrow dirt road leading to it, and whenever we ran out of drugs we had to either drive back down the hill or call one of our Hollywood friends to bring some drugs up to us, which was a nuisance. I remember one night, when I was very high on cocaine, Scarface was on TV. It scared the living daylights out of me. That’s not a good film to see if you’re high on coke! I saw my future in that film and it looked pretty freaky.

  I was intensely aware of what I was doing to myself, even if I wasn’t honest about it with anyone else. In recovery we talk about rigorous honesty being required in order to get sober and stay that way, and I’d been honest with myself all along—just not with other people. I would call my parents and tell them what was going on with the band, without ever telling them about any drug use. I acted as if I was keeping it all together, even though I was essentially homeless and squatting in people’s houses.

  Chris Poland (ex-Megadeth):

  Ellefson would say, “I know a guy on the other side of town who has some tar, let’s go over there.” We would buy eighty dollars’ worth of heroin and do it right there. I think that was the first time he realized just how bad things had become. Once you’re there, it’s hard to walk away from it. It was tough. It never should have happened. A lot of that pain and anger came out in Megadeth’s music: the drugs really fueled the fire in the band.

  We made Killing Is My Business . . . in December 1984. All of us were strung out to some degree during the sessions—Chris completely so; Gar a little less because he had to keep it together for his job as a general manager at B.C. Rich Guitars. I was the fun, happy partier who was getting in way too deep.

  Making the album was pretty exhilarating, although the sound quality wasn’t great, because we had so little money for it. I liked Killing Is My Business . . . , but I wish some of the tempos had been a bit less extreme. We’d originally rehearsed the songs significantly slower, but Megadeth’s music had suddenly gotten much faster back in the fall of 1983 when Dave received a letter from a fan, forwarded to him by our friend Brian Lew, who was helping us out, acting as a fan-club go-between. Metallica had just released their debut album, Kill ’Em All, and this fan had written, “Dave, I hope your songs are faster than Metallica’s.” The next day we sped up all the songs by about forty beats per minute. Extreme speed was deemed the cool factor in thrash metal back in those days, and that one fan letter changed Megadeth’s sound overnight.

  Our version of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” was a comedy cover, for sure, but I think Jay Jones—whose idea it was—saw the storyteller, raconteur side of Dave and knew that he could do a real tongue-in-cheek version of it. It worked well and lightened the mood of the album a little bit.

  We turned in the record to Combat in January 1985. By then Chris was pretty much out of the band. His addiction had really taken over, and made it impossible for him to remain with Megadeth.

  In the spring of 1985, we were still short a guitarist. We were supposed to hit the road, and our backs were against the wall. Jay Jones introduced us to Mike Albert, a seasoned musician who had played guitar with Captain Beefheart. He became the fill-in guitar player for the Killing Is My Business . . . tour: five or six weeks across the U.S. as the support act to the Canadian band Exciter, who also had a new album out.

  Mike Albert was a seasoned touring musician. He was concerned about the tour income, which we knew was going to be very low from the start. He was in his early thirties, a decade older than Dave and me.

  I was the only guy in the band with a credit card, despite being the youngest member, and believe me, we used every nickel it afforded us. Dave was an optimist, though, and he could see the big picture. Plus, we had no other options anyway. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I felt sure what my destiny was, so we went for it.

  The tour commenced in June 1985 in Baltimore. I remember Gar flew in late from New Orleans, where he was exhibiting with B.C. Rich Guitars at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, his day job at the time. Because of this, Exciter had to go on first, which was a great way to start the tour.

  On the way to the third show, in Cleveland, our van broke down, leaving us by the side of the freeway. Our New York tour manager Frank Pappitto and I hitched a ride for a couple of exits and suddenly saw a National car rental outlet, right there under a streetlight, at eleven o’clock at night. It was surreal. We went in, rented a Chevy Caprice on my credit card, went back to pick up the other guys, and transferred all our stuff from the van into the car. It was a brutal night drive, with all of us squished together.

  Early the next morning, Gar was driving, and at one point he turned around to help me move one of his kick drum pedals, which was crammed behind his seat. As he was doing this, he took his eyes off the road just long enough to lose control of the car, and we went flying off the road at eighty miles per hour. We hit a road sign, which sheared off and flew over us as we careened into a ditch on the side of the road. I thought we were dead; I truly thought that this was the end. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

  The car hit the ditch and came to a screeching halt. We were all freaking out. A boom box sitting in the back window above me had hit me on the back of my neck, which really hurt. I got out
of the car and saw a semitruck, which had stopped to see what had happened. The driver got out and asked if we were okay. I answered, “Yeah, I think there was a deer in the road!” He rolled his eyes with a kind of amused skepticism and helped us pull the car out of the ditch. We had to put the spare tire on the car to carry on. So there we were, driving along with a replacement tire and weeds sticking out of the side of the car, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies, rolling in to gig number three. We’d only been out for three days. The whole tour was like that, one borderline catastrophe after another.

  Farther along in the tour we played a gig in El Paso where we all got good and drunk after the show. Later that evening, I saw Mike Albert in a corner of the backstage area, threatening to use his martial arts skills on one of the security guards. It felt as if the tour was constantly on the brink of disaster, with partying and wild behavior the whole time. I loved it—it was great to be out of Los Angeles and actually touring. It defined us as a band.

  Despite the mishaps, the band’s mood was good, and a couple of remarkable things happened during the tour. At one point we were in a motel in Kansas, sitting around with some girls who were prepared to provide some affection, food, and beer. We were broke—and I mean genuinely flat broke, with no resources except what these fine girls were willing to shell out for us. The girls helped us buy a little barbecue so we could grill some meat out in the parking lot.

  I remember Dave called Steve Sinclair, our artists & repertoire (A&R) person at Combat Records, and told him how broke we were. He said, “We have no money, our credit card is maxed out, and shows are either not happening or being canceled.” Steve replied, “You guys just need to go home and get jobs.” That, more than anything, put the fuel on the fire for us. We knew then that our days at Combat were numbered.