We flew home to Los Angeles and I went straight into a drug rehab program at the Valley Presbyterian Hospital, with the help of the sobriety guru Bob Timmons, who had been recommended to me by our management. It was supposed to be a ten-day detox, but I only lasted three. Quite early on in treatment they told me, “David, there’s only one thing you have to change, and that’s everything,” which was scary. I thought, “You know what? No girlfriend is worth this much suffering.” I left and scored dope to get high on my way home.
Charlie bailed pretty quickly after that.
Although my first stint in rehab had failed, I was still going to methadone clinics in L.A., trying to get sober—or at least trying to get off heroin, which is not the same thing. At the same time, we were demoing songs for our next album, which would become Rust in Peace, including “Holy Wars . . . the Punishment Due,” “Tornado of Souls,” and “Rust in Peace . . . Polaris.”
We had a rehearsal room over by Dodgers Stadium, a decrepit little hole of a place called the Hully Gully. Dave, Chuck, and I would rehearse there every night. Usually I’d wake up at about three or four in the afternoon, get some dope, and start rehearsing by seven or eight o’clock. I’d be up until five or six in the morning. I started when the sun went down and passed out shortly after the sun came up. I was a total vampire.
Despite our writing songs for Rust in Peace, these were really our darkest days. I wanted to clean up, but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want my current life, but I didn’t know if I wanted a new life either. I was just dying somewhere in the middle, with one foot in tomorrow and one foot in yesterday, oblivious to the beauty of today.
Slash from Guns N’ Roses often came over to hang with Dave and me around this time, as GNR were just wrapping up their world tour for Appetite for Destruction. We had a good time together, just playing guitar, partying, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. It was funny because I would play a lot of guitar with Slash and it felt like a really creative period, but Dave would just look at us and say, “You guys just play the same riff over and over again. . . .”
Slash was a great guitar player and a supercool guy. It was a real treat to jam with him. He really understood metal music, but was also a very broad-based rock ’n’ roll guitarist, with a gutsy vibe to his playing. With the successful completion of the Appetite for Destruction tour, the financial floodgates were about to open up huge for GNR, but at this time he was still living in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment right behind Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. There was a lot of chatter along the lines of “What would it be like if Slash came into Megadeth?” but that was really about it.
I still had to deal with my ongoing drug habit. My first attempt at rehab had failed, so I checked myself into Brotman Medical Center in Culver City in February of ’89. During that stay I experienced a brief moment of clarity. There was a big hall there where they always had their Saturday-night meeting, and it was mandatory for all the rehab patients. I was so dope-sick and strung out that it felt like having the flu, mono, and pneumonia all at once. One night at the mandatory meeting, the evening’s speaker was talking right in front of me. I was a few rows back, and I just bowed my head to pray and asked, “God, please stop me from feeling so bad right now.” A few minutes later I realized that I was actually paying attention to the speaker and I was no longer thinking about myself and how terrible I felt. I remember it clearly: I prayed, I asked for help, and I got an instant result—even if it was fleeting. It was my first spiritual experience since I was fourteen.
I still didn’t want to be sober; I just didn’t want to be strung out anymore. I didn’t want to change my life, because I was scared of leaving my comfort zone, even though it was actually quite uncomfortable. As a result, that second rehab didn’t work, nor did a third attempt the following month. I kept hearing at meetings that half measures avail you nothing, that you’re either all in or you’re all out—it’s that simple. Besides being strung out, I was running out of money, accruing debts, and unable to pay my bills. I was really living on borrowed time on every level—financially, spiritually, and morally.
During this period in 1989 we had to make a drummer change with Chuck Behler, who had recorded and toured So Far, So Good . . . So What! His drum tech Nick Menza was always brought in on that tour as an understudy for Chuck, in case anything ever happened to him and we needed a replacement behind the drum kit. Dave told me to check him out, so I went over and auditioned Nick at a small rehearsal hall just west of the Burbank Airport in the San Fernando Valley.
Nick was a very charismatic guy and quite artistic, too. He liked to draw and he could play guitar fairly well when writing his own songs. His father was a renowned jazz bebop sax player named Don Menza. If you mentioned his name in jazz circles, people really lit up. Nick was really excited when he auditioned for the band, and he looked great behind the drum kit. He talked fluent “dude” and was the Tommy Lee of thrash metal.
Once Nick was in the band, we started guitar auditions to round out the new lineup. We tried the guy from Jag Panzer and a bunch of others, some of whom had prepared and some who had not. Some of them assumed that they would get the gig without knowing that many of the nuances in Megadeth’s music are found in the picking hand, not just the fingerboard hand. A lot of guys learned the notes for the fretting hand, but never understood the rest until they got in the room with us. Other musicians, however, understood the advanced techniques behind our music.
Mike Kroeger (Nickelback):
Ellefson’s bass playing is incredible, because the style of music his band plays requires him to play really intricate parts. I’ve learned a few of the songs that Dave Mustaine writes, and they’re really hard—yet Ellefson nails them perfectly.
Dave, Nick, and I had this understanding that the guy would set up next to me in the auditions, because I was, as it were, the band’s de facto diplomat. I’d help him set up and then Dave would call the tunes. We could tell within the first four to eight measures of a song whether there was a vibe: it was that quick. It’s like being with a girl—you pretty much know within the first few sentences of the conversation whether or not you click. Dave and I had a secret message where we would reach back and switch off the wireless transmitter packs on our guitars, and we’d know right then that the audition was over. Then Nick would be the guy to usher him out the door. We met half a dozen guitarists. I was usually the one who would have to tell them that it hadn’t worked out.
“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott of Pantera was invited to audition around this time. Back when I was dating Charlie, we went to visit her parents in Texas. During that trip, she suggested we make time to hang out with the guys from Pantera. I guess she’d dated Dimebag or something. He was called “Diamond” Darrell back then, and he was a big guitar star in the magazines. Pantera were the reigning champions of Texas back then, but they were still a hair band, having just gotten Phil Anselmo in the band and recorded their Power Metal album. We did some drinking with them and Darrell told me, “Man, Peace Sells . . . changed my life.” The next night we went to hear them play at a club in Dallas. They were great: it was mostly cover songs, with a few originals, too. They invited me to join them onstage to play “Peace Sells” with them. They played great, even though they drank hard.
I told Dave about this in early 1989 when we started putting out feelers for guitar auditions, and brought up Dime’s name. Pantera were just turning the corner, though, because they were about to sign to Atco and were ready to record Cowboys from Hell.
We also considered Jeff Waters of Annihilator. Nick and I were huge Annihilator fans, but Jeff was in a very different headspace in those days with Annihilator coming quickly up the ranks. So it never went anywhere. In recent years I’ve become good friends with Jeff, and we’ve talked about the “what-ifs” had he joined the band. He’s a great guy and I love hanging with him.
We’d just about given up. Dave and I had moved to a new apartment complex called the Studio Colony over in Studio City, and
by then I was quite strung out. I would wake up at three or four in the afternoon after the previous night’s partying, having missed my 1 P.M. call time for rehearsal. Nick was on time and often waited hours for us to show up. Despite all this, we had demoed three songs over at Track Record Studios back when Chuck Behler was still in the band, and these served as the foundation of the new album. They were “Tornado of Souls,” “Polaris,” and “Holy Wars.” We spent our time auditioning guitarists and writing the rest of the record. Nick was the only successful audition out of the batch, so the three of us soldiered on.
During this time I was on various methadone programs, and I would have to drive about thirty to forty-five minutes in rush-hour traffic from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood to get it, because the clinic only offered it between six and ten o’clock in the morning. If you missed those hours, you were sure to be dope-sick.
I’d started having serious emotional and mental breakdowns from doing so much cocaine. I recall one night in particular, I called Nick and his girlfriend Stephanie after I’d had a load of cocaine, even though everyone thought I was clean, and I was all nervous about it. I freaked out, left a rambling message on Nick’s answering machine, and flushed all the cocaine down the toilet in a drug-induced panic. The next day, when Nick and Stephanie asked me if everything was all right, I tried to cover my tracks and make out like everything was cool. Talk about shame.
As I said earlier, sobriety was a big trend at the time. One day I was sitting in my apartment waiting for my drug dealer to call and the phone rang. It was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. He had called, at the urging of Bob Timmons, to make a sobriety call on me. It was basically one addict reaching out to share his testimony with another addict. I understood why he was calling, and I’d grown up as a big fan of Aerosmith. Now, as a professional contemporary, I really grasped the purpose of the call. But as I was sitting there, I was thinking to myself, “Man, I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to my idol telling me to get off drugs, and at the same time I have to hurry him up and get him off the phone so my drug dealer can call me!” All my childhood dreams were being blocked by my addiction. That was the whole of 1989 for me, hiding and sneaking around to feed my addiction.
Around this time we switched managers to Ron Laffitte, who really helped the band by bringing us some great new opportunities.
Ron Laffitte (former Megadeth manager):
I already knew the members of Megadeth from my years on the California heavy metal scene. I took over their management during the So Far, So Good . . . So What! campaign, when they all seemed to have spun out of control. David Ellefson was critical to the balance of the band. As intense as Dave Mustaine was, David was measured, calm, and low-key. He always seemed to be in complete control, despite the fact that he was suffering from drug stuff like the rest of them. He always seemed to be focused and conscious and attentive, and he always showed up, which was very comforting to me, especially in the early days, when I was transitioning into taking over the band’s management. I’d show up for a meeting or a rehearsal, and no one else would be there except for David. He may have been using, or he may have been jonesing and in really bad shape, and I wouldn’t even know it.
Throughout that year, I tried to maintain the illusion of sobriety by attending a few meetings, taking appointments with a drug counselor, and even picking up sobriety celebration chips for thirty, sixty, and ninety days clean. The truth was, just before each chip I had actually lapsed back into drug use, even if just for a day. I remember sitting in my apartment and thinking, “This is a real drag. Everybody thinks I’m sober. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore and I can’t even invite anybody over to get high, because they all think I’m sober!” So a month went by and I got high. Then a second month went by and the same thing happened, and I didn’t tell anybody—so everybody thought I was three months sober, when really I only had a month because I’d slipped every month for three months in a row. It was embarrassing, and I realized how powerless I really was against my addiction.
My conscience was kicking in, big time. Lots of people who thought of me as a junkie had distanced themselves because I couldn’t be trusted. There is a saying, “A belly full of booze and a head full of recovery is a pretty awful feeling,” and that was exactly where I was in life. I knew what sobriety looked like, but I just couldn’t bring myself to seize it. It was like swinging from a vine in the jungle but being too afraid to let it go and grab the next vine in front of me. I was stuck.
Then, in the summer of 1989, Ron Laffitte introduced us to Desmond Child, who was an A-list songwriter for artists like Bon Jovi and other major arena rock stars. He was hired to produce our single “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” a cover version of the famed Alice Cooper song, intended for inclusion in the soundtrack for the film Shocker. This was the first song we recorded with Nick Menza. At the time, I hated the song, though I don’t dislike it now. Not so much the actual song itself, but because of the way the whole process was handled businesswise with people around the band. It felt as if it should really have been a Dave Mustaine solo song rather than a Megadeth tune.
Meanwhile, I was plummeting further still into the pit of my addiction. Rehab hadn’t worked, methadone hadn’t worked, and the last vestige of something I was holding on to, which was my identity in Megadeth, was threatened because my senior partner told me that if I got high I’d be out of the band. The one thing I was holding on to was the “Hey, it’s rock ’n’ roll” attitude, where I could just take drugs, party with the girls, get onstage, and still feel validated. The bad news about rock ’n’ roll is that it is very forgiving of decadence; it actually celebrates that way of life.
Ron Laffitte wanted to help me get sober, and he really did help me, just when I needed it most. I remember bursting into tears in front of him one day in the apartment in Studio Colony, when I was suffering most, and telling him that I needed help. He said, “If you want help, I can get it for you—but you have to really want to quit drugs for this to work.” I said, “Yes, I really want to quit.” He then introduced me to a doctor in Hollywood who prescribed a medication called Buprenex. You’d inject it into your buttock with a diabetes needle and it would curb the heroin withdrawal symptoms. That was the beginning of the end of my addiction, but I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet.
Ron Laffitte (former Megadeth manager):
I’ve never used drugs in my life, so when I became Megadeth’s manager I thought it was important to learn about drug abuse and the behavior that surrounds it. As a result, I spent a lot of time educating myself and going to Al-Anon meetings. I met a couple of sobriety experts in the music business: Bob Timmons, who helped sober up various rock musicians; Tim Collins, who was Aerosmith’s manager and became a mentor to me; and John B., who played a central role in helping David become sober.
I now had a professional counselor helping me, a guy named John B., and I started working through the sobriety process with him. He was a former addict who was five years sober with the recovery programs, and he was doing some one-on-one and group counseling on the side.
Do you want to know how I finally got sober? It went like this: By November 1989, I was in deep trouble with my addiction but starting to use this Buprenex. I’d been through several methadone detox programs throughout 1989, none of which worked, because I’d do the methadone and I’d get so high that I realized that I needed to go get some cocaine—and then when I got some cocaine I realized that it was twelve o’clock at night, and that I needed to get some heroin to come down, so I could get some methadone from the clinic. My opiate addiction had really progressed rather quickly, and I desperately needed help.
So, in early November I went to a party for RIP, a hard rock magazine owned by Larry Flynt’s publishing company. I came home after the party, and I just couldn’t get high anymore. Nothing was working for me. I had hit bottom, so I lay on my bed and I prayed: “Please, God, help me. I’m completely through.” I knew I couldn’t do it on my own anymore, a
nd so I reached out to God. That was the last night I ever drank, and I only chipped on smack a couple more times over the next two months.
Suddenly, and with increasing frequency, thoughts of faith would come to me. I prayed often and started reading spiritual books, which was also when I began to develop my own concept and my own definition of God. I didn’t know who I was praying to at first, but my prejudices toward religion had been softened after a visit to church with my dad during Christmas that year. I listened to the sermon and something clicked; my bias against religion melted away and I suddenly felt hope.
Then a strange thing happened. I’d been praying during this time—“God, help, help, help!”—and in quick succession, my two main smack connections got busted and went to prison. It felt as if God was doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. The way was being cleared and my temptations were stripped away.
Just as much, prayer seemed to be opening doors in other areas of my life, too. The guitar auditions finally paid off when Dave and I went up to Ron Laffitte’s office one day, and sitting on his desk was a Cacophony album and Marty Friedman’s solo album. Ron told us that Marty wanted to audition for Megadeth, and we said, “Is that Marty Friedman from the band Hawaii?” and he said it was. We agreed to the audition and set it up. Marty was very professional, bringing a guitar tech to come in and set up his gear for him. Marty was wearing white hi-tops and skin-tight black jeans with holes in them like the Ramones, a Ramones T-shirt, and a leather jacket: he looked like a rock star. A poor rock star, but a rock star nonetheless. He played really well. He understood the nuances of our music and played the songs perfectly.
We agreed that Marty was our guy. I did some initial woodshedding with him as I had done with everybody else. Nick had a friend who filmed all the guitar auditions, including Marty’s, and we gave all those films to Capitol with the idea of doing a behind-the-scenes-with-Megadeth movie, but Capitol disposed of them. I was told that they threw them in a Dumpster and that a guy who was painting the building at the time pulled them out. They’re all over YouTube now, of course. It’s still fun to watch them all these years later.
My Life With Deth Page 9