At the same time a booking agent named Andy Somers came on board with us, and offered to ensure that the remaining shows went ahead and that we would get paid. He became our booking agent for the next several years, through the Countdown to Extinction tour, and was largely responsible for getting us signed to Capitol Records a year after we hired him.
I was drinking and smoking but using much less coke and heroin. I’d learned that most road coke was usually pretty bad, and heroin was harder to come by, so there wasn’t much use trying to score on tour. Besides, there was always some beer on the rider, and someone, somewhere would usually have weed. I wasn’t strung out on smack, but the smokes and libations kept me going and I still had a good time.
When we came home off the tour, Mike Albert quit, and we were fine with that. He wasn’t the right long-term fit for us anyway. He didn’t play the guitar parts in a Megadeth fashion, although he played the part of the fourth member onstage well enough. Chris Poland returned after that. He was on methadone as a way of detoxing from heroin, so we knew he would be able to tour.
We spent the fall of 1985 rehearsing just south of L.A. in an old warehouse that had been turned into rehearsal rooms. I slept there a few times, and so did Dave, because we were essentially homeless. It was a landing pad where we could hang out, drink beers, and write a new record, which we called Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?
I remember Dave picking up my B.C. Rich Eagle bass, off of which I had ripped the frets and made it into a fretless, and composing a loose version of the introductory riff to the song “Peace Sells.” We picked up Gar in Pasadena for rehearsal that night and while I was driving, Dave wrote the lyrics to that song. By the next day, the whole song was musically written. We already had “Devil’s Island,” and a bunch of the other songs were written pretty fast. The following year, it was an amazing thrill to hear my performance of the “Peace Sells” line as the intro to MTV News. They used it for something like ten years during that segment.
Dave and I were then living over in Echo Park, which is just east of Hollywood, close to Dodger Stadium. We rehearsed at a place called Mars Studios in East Hollywood, and I took a job there, eventually managing the place. It gave me an opportunity to sell pot out of there from time to time, because, like any good musician, I didn’t want to get a job but needed to make money somehow. The idea was that we could take some of our merchandising advance money, buy some pot and sell it, and that would help us to continue to make more money. Of course, we made very little profit, because I became my own best customer.
The only real job I ever did in L.A. was selling appointments at the solar energy company, which I mentioned earlier. Eventually I realized that I didn’t have time to work because I was too busy with the band, which was fine with me; the sacrifices would be worth it one day.
All this was happening as we were recording the Peace Sells . . . record. We were still essentially homeless. I’d even joined the Holiday Health Club at the corner of Sycamore and Hollywood Boulevard for a hundred dollars a month, so I’d have somewhere to shower each day. Chris had a wealthy girlfriend who was taking care of him. Gar was still working at B.C. Rich Guitars, so he had a good day job, although eventually he had to quit in order to go on tour. He started working for his girlfriend’s father in carpentry to make money during his downtime.
Dave and I were the ones running Megadeth. He quarterbacked all the plays, of course, but I was the center or the wide receiver, essentially his vice president. It was always us doing the grunt work. We were the ones who made the lifestyle sacrifices to keep Megadeth alive.
Back home, my father was going through a lot of hardship with the farming business. He lost one of his farms and had to turn another one into the bank, because, like a lot of other farmers, he’d taken out high-interest-rate loans on expensive farmland a few years prior, when times were good. My mother went back to work as a caregiver at a nursing home in Jackson, and my father had to work out a way of handing the farm over to my brother so he could get out of farming. It was great that my brother was there to take over; it was unnecessary even to discuss my coming back to run it.
Dave knew a girl named Nancy whose friend Mercedes was a model for pornographic magazines. Mercedes took a liking to me and I moved in with her. Now I had a home, albeit a cockroach-infested hole in the wall. Mercedes once did a photo shoot with the legendary porn star John Holmes, and I thought, “Now I’m done for, I can’t possibly compete with him!” But it all worked for me, because I had a place to live where I could do heroin and have a good time with her. She liked to do drugs and cocaine, too. My drug use really accelerated during this period because she had access to really high-quality Persian heroin, mostly from a local taxi driver who would deliver it right to our apartment in West Hollywood, just off Sunset Boulevard across from Tower Records.
Mercedes and I were an item, for no other reason than convenience, although later when I took an HIV test and the results were negative, I realized how lucky I’d been—and also how foolish. I fell for Mercedes, I genuinely did, but it turned out that she was doing private “escort” work on the side, which was too much heartbreak and reality for me. I later found out that this was a common form of income for a lot of the rock ’n’ roll groupie girls in Hollywood—strip dancing, nude pinup magazines, and escort work.
Like most rock ’n’ rollers, I didn’t mind a bit of attention from groupies here and there. The women up in San Francisco were pretty tough broads, with leather jackets, attitude, and so on. Down in Los Angeles the women were much sexier, and more appealing to me. Then again, they weren’t really into thrash metal; they were more into the Sunset Strip hair bands. There were always enough girls around, though.
It was all a rather different life for a Lutheran farm kid from Minnesota. I was naïve and an easy target, but also a willing participant. L.A. was like a great big adult playground where you could make up your own rules, which I tried to do, all the time realizing that these were not the morals and standards set down for me as a kid from the Midwest.
In January and February 1986, we did a short tour of the East Coast in a freezing motor home. It was technically the second leg of the Killing Is My Business . . . tour, even though we were already playing songs from Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying? In many ways it was our form of preproduction for the record, performing those songs live each night. It was then that we realized we had something of a hit song with “Peace Sells.” It really put some excitement in our lives to know that we were moving on to a more mature sound with these new songs, too. This was a sound that really became our own with the next album.
At our show at Irving Plaza in New York City, our booking agent Andy Somers brought down Tim Carr, the A&R talent scout from Capitol Records. Tim liked what he heard and within months offered us a contract with Capitol. Andy also hooked us up with his friend and manager Keith Rawls, who later assisted in our signing to Capitol Records and managed us from the Peace Sells . . . through the So Far, So Good . . . So What! records.
After that tour we started putting plans together to record Peace Sells . . . at the Music Grinder studio on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. The recording was contractually still with Combat Records, our label at the time. We had a $25,000 budget from them this time, so we could put ourselves on small salaries. It also allowed us to bring in an outside producer, Randy Burns. He and his engineer Casey McMackin worked fast and furious on the album. Casey was an excited young lad who spent a long time running through guitar and bass tones with us and offering suggestions on parts and revisions—in many ways, responding like a producer.
Once the record was done, we turned it in to Combat, and Dave and I took a trip back to Minnesota to relax for a few days, because we were being courted by Elektra Records in New York City, who had previously signed Metallica. (This was just before Capitol Records put their offer out to us.) We stopped off at the farm in Minnesota and hung out there for about a week. It was weird to be back home, having been stee
ped in the L.A. drug lifestyle. I remember I brought some smack with me and I had to detox off the stuff while at my parents’ home.
Once I was back on the farm, my dad—who had never been one to mince words—made it clear that he was a bit skeptical of our lackluster success. As much as he wasn’t a music guy, he did understand show-business etiquette. He used to say to us, “You need to treat your fans better, stop swearing onstage, and start writing more mainstream songs!” I could tell this freaked Dave out, but he listened to my dad out of respect.
My father was like that: he earned your respect because he called it like he saw it, whether you liked it or not. It was an interesting dynamic to see my dad and Dave together, eating together and praying at the dinner table together. I think Dave really liked it. It was a different family dynamic from the one he knew, and very comforting when compared to our hand-to-mouth existence in L.A., building the band.
When we were in New York a few days later, it was game on once again. I was back to using and drinking. Dave and I shared a room at the Omni Hotel by Central Park, and our manager was giving us money to live on, which felt as if heaven had parted and given us some grace. The pressure was finally off and it felt like we really were going to have a future. It was there in New York that I was introduced to the drug ecstasy. I took it and asked what it was. That’s how bad I’d gotten: I would take a drug and then ask what it was! I’d never taken it before, and I didn’t feel anything until about thirty minutes later, when we got to the legendary club CBGB, down in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan. All of a sudden I started coming on to this new drug high. It was bizarre: really, really weird, like a mix of acid and cocaine—I was hyper but tripping. It was often used as an aphrodisiac.
I was high as a kite as we went club hopping around New York City. On the one hand it was like something you’d see in a movie, being wined and dined by a real major label with a promise of fame and fortune in front of you. On the other hand, I kept trying to sober up, thinking that I had to keep my wits about me and at least try to be a professional in the midst of all the partying. Fortunately, nothing happened beyond a great party, but it was a surreal event. We were treated like rock royalty and whisked in and out of the trendiest VIP clubs in town, with no questions asked. It was a buffet of drugs and girls, and it felt as if we’d made the big time.
On the way home from New York, I was thinking about my life in L.A. We’d actually had a home for that one week in New York, with all expenses paid by people who had real interest in us and could actually make things happen. I was hip to Mercedes’s escort work and it was killing me.
Fortunately, not long after that New York trip, some more major labels started taking an interest in the band, and Capitol Records finally put an offer on the table, which in turn escalated to a bidding war with Elektra. Capitol won out. That released some record advance money to us at last, and our manager got the band a three-bedroom apartment over in Silverlake, just east of Hollywood. We had a home and a real band headquarters at last.
You always hope that you’ll get a major deal when you’re a musician. Metallica had paved the way for the thrash metal bands, and certainly the Big Four, as Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer were later collectively known, by signing with Elektra back in the mid-1980s. Right after we signed with Capitol, Anthrax signed with Island Records, and Slayer signed with Def Jam. As a band, and even as a genre, we were finally starting to find our way.
A THOUGHT
Money
Sometimes you have to make the most critical decisions in life under excruciating circumstances. This has been the case for me many times. Financial decisions are hardest to make when you have no money. Moral decisions are likewise hard when you have no morals. I’ve been between a rock and hard place on these matters more than once in my career.
Fortunately, a good friend counseled me that when making career decisions I should ask myself, “What does the decision look like when I remove the financial reward? Is it still worth doing?” If not, I know that if I proceed I will really be doing it only for the money.
Finances come and go, but what’s really important is whether you can truly leave your mark on an endeavor. If it is still worth doing with no monetary reward, then it is worth doing for a greater reason.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hitting Bottom
“You can’t do the wrong thing the right way.”
—Anonymous
There’s one thing that I’ve always appreciated about Dave Mustaine: Megadeth was never about buddies sitting around jamming. It’s a very focused mission, and Dave has the vision to achieve it. You meet him on his terms, not yours, and that dynamic works. Without him, the band wouldn’t have its edge: without me, it would be complete gunfire at all times. The strategy of battle can’t be constant surrender, but it can’t be constant attack either. There has to be a little bit of both. He’s the colonel and I’m the lieutenant, and between us we win the war. That sums up the dynamic between me and Dave, as it has from the very beginning of Megadeth.
When Capitol signed us, it felt like Megadeth was in big business. We visited the Capitol tower with our heads held high—even though when we left the tower, I went downtown to Ceres Street, scored some heroin, and took it back to our Silverlake apartment in small, rolled-up balloons, carrying them in my mouth to avoid getting busted.
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying? was released in the fall of 1986 and we were scheduled to start that tour with Motörhead down the west coast of California and the southwestern U.S. We hired designer Ray Brown to create some stage clothes for us, as he had designed looks for Judas Priest, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, and other big bands at that time. We did photo shoots and loads of media interviews around the new album, bought some new equipment, and quickly got our business up and running.
Motörhead were a notoriously tough bunch, like a biker gang. For this tour, their drummer, Pete Gill, had his kit set up on stage-prop train tracks, which came to the front of the stage and seriously impeded us in setting up our show with Gar’s drums in the middle of the stage, and our amplifiers on each side. Dave was furious, and rightfully so, because we didn’t have any stage space. That led to an argument between our manager, Keith Rawls, and Motörhead’s manager just before the show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the second show of the tour. It seemed to me that both men puffed up their chests too much—and Keith pulled us from the last three dates of the tour.
Even now, I think that didn’t need to happen. That decision to pull out of the tour led to a rift between Motörhead and Megadeth, which lasted until the Graspop festival in Belgium in 2001. Personally, I just wanted to play the bass and have a good time, but this was a power play between managers.
Lars Ulrich of Metallica came to see us on the first night of the tour at the Kaiser Center Auditorium in Oakland, California. He was pretty beat up, because it was right after Cliff Burton had died in the coach crash in Sweden. I asked Lars what he was going to do for a bass player, and he replied, “Why, do you want a job or something?” There was some speculation afterward about whether or not that was an offer, but I think it was simply rhetorical. They never formally approached me about the bass position. (In 2001, when Jason Newsted left Metallica, Dave told me that Lars had called him to get Dave’s blessing for me to be on Metallica’s list of bass players to consider. I didn’t get the call, however.)
Cliff and Dave had remained friends after the split back in 1983. I didn’t know Cliff well, but I thought he was very personable. He was a reserved, quiet guy, whereas Lars was very engaging and wanted to chat with whoever was in the room. When we got the news that Cliff had died in the crash, Dave was absolutely crushed. He wrote the music and lyrics for “In My Darkest Hour” that very day.
After the Motörhead dates we went out in support of Alice Cooper on his Constrictor tour, and the natural thing for us young bucks was to ask on a regular basis if we could meet Alice. Finally, one night after our set, we were told that he was rea
dy to see us. We sobered up as best we could and went onto his bus. He was very cool: a very gentle, mellow guy. We got him onto the subject of partying, and he told us that he used to drink a bottle of whiskey a day—and that we needed to be careful so we wouldn’t end up in a similar situation.
It was a quick conversation, but we were listening intently and there was a silence on the bus after he spoke. It was a sobering moment, and a clear reminder for me that I was blowing it with my drug and alcohol use. I knew I shouldn’t be taking drugs, and it was as if the Good Lord had sent us a warning sign through Alice Cooper. If anyone knew the perils of addiction, it was he. Following the Constrictor tour, Alice and his organization made a big mainstream comeback with his next album. His words resonated with me, but I was too wrapped up in my addictions to take any action. Drugs are like that. The warnings to not start taking them can be helpful, but it’s a whole different dynamic once you’re already hooked.
Toward the end of the Peace Sells . . . tour, we agreed to record a song for the soundtrack of a forthcoming film called Dudes, starring Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jon Cryer (later a star of the popular TV show Two and a Half Men), and Lee Ving from the punk band Fear. The film was directed by Penelope Spheeris. We recut our version of “These Boots” and it sounded great, partly because our chops were tight from being on the road.
This led to us appearing in Penelope’s next film, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, which was part of our initial launch of the album, So Far, So Good . . . So What! in 1988. I was thrilled with the way we came across in our interviews, especially compared to most of the other musicians in the film. I talked a lot about integrity in my interview with Penelope, and I meant it, but I was extremely high on heroin when she recorded it. When I look at it now, it’s obvious; my eyes give it away. I was completely hammered.
My Life With Deth Page 7