Overall, it was a good run for us, although the tides were shifting within heavy metal music. The end of hair metal was coming and the thrash metal bands were finally getting our turn at bat, which is why it was a good idea to join forces. We accomplished a lot more that way, with more money and greater opportunities. Clash of the Titans was a huge statement from our genre in these arenas. Suicidal Tendencies were popular at the time: Testament were on their way up; and the two top bands of Megadeth and Slayer were both major forces.
We went around the world on that tour, playing with Judas Priest and Testament throughout North America in 1990 and then playing Rock in Rio in 1991. From there, we did Japan, Australia, and Hawaii. It was a great rebuilding process, and times were exciting for metal in general.
We then did a short tour of Europe in the spring of 1991, and our support group was Alice in Chains. They were a fantastic band. We’d had a lot of support acts, and a lot of them I just didn’t get, but we stood by the stage and watched Alice in Chains every single night, because they were so amazingly cool.
Then we started the Clash of the Titans tour in North America with Anthrax replacing Testament, and the opening band was Alice in Chains again, whose first album, Facelift, had just come out. I arrived at the first show, in Dallas, and their singer Layne Staley was there. He was a very shy, soft-spoken guy offstage. He’d had his hair cut short and bleached blond, and he looked great. He told me that he’d just come out of rehab, and I said, “Rehab? For what?” He said, “Ah . . . heroin,” and I said, “I just saw you a few months ago, and I never would have thought you guys did any heroin. I thought you just smoked a lot of pot.”
Dave and I put our arms around him and told him that we’d been down that road and that if he needed a place of refuge out there on tour he should come to us, because we were there to help him. I think Layne stayed sober for that tour, but at some point thereafter he fell off the wagon, and I don’t know if he ever got sober again before he died in 2002. It just goes to show that when you’re sober, you can’t ever take for granted that you’ll be given that gift again. It’s always easier to stay sober than it is to get sober.
It has been well documented that there was some friction between Dave and some of the other musicians on the Clash of the Titans tour, and I think I understand why. A lot of it was about jockeying for position on the tour, which was hard, because we wanted to become a united force. There were definitely some things said that made it difficult, but I played the diplomat, as usual. I handled political relations for the band and lightened the mood as necessary.
More importantly, the Clash of the Titans tour was completely sold out almost every night. It was apparent to me that this was as big as thrash metal was ever going to get, with our videos on MTV and so on. Coming off that tour, I remember sitting in the accountant’s office over in West Los Angeles, and much to our surprise we had a bonus of positive cash flow from merchandise. The advances were recouped, we paid back all our debts, and I paid Dave back the remainder of a $5,000 loan he’d given me in 1989 from one of his Metallica royalty checks, when I was in financial straits from my drug use. I was on a payment plan with pretty much everybody, but I finally paid them all back. I made my last payment to the IRS and then we were finally ready to turn the page and roll into the next record, Countdown to Extinction. What a phenomenal way to end a year.
A THOUGHT
Letting Go Absolutely
There can be real freedom in letting go. Once we do, we are suddenly free from our past and allowed to move forward to experience life as it is meant to be, rather than how we want it to be.
Sometimes things just don’t work out as we’ve planned, and being able to make adjustments and corrections has been key to my ability to move forward. In short, we can either be stuck in a bad situation, or we can let it go and see it as an opportunity to learn and grow.
More than anything, I’ve come to realize that life is a verb, not a noun. It is constantly in motion, always moving forward. The only way we can truly experience it is to be in the present, because that is where the action is. When we are stuck in our thoughts of the past (which no longer exists) or projecting images of our future (which hasn’t yet happened), we rob ourselves of the here and now. And right here, right now is where life is actually going down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Countdown Begins
“That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.”
—Anonymous
Our songwriting changed a bit for Countdown to Extinction. In 1991, we’d been playing really high-speed metal songs in big arenas like Madison Square Garden, and the sound was a little odd as a result. We started writing songs that were a little broader and more melodic. Our new mission was to create music that had more of a groove to it. Marty’s writing was very melodic anyway, and the vocal lines moved in that direction, too, assisted by Max Norman, our producer. We added these great big riffs and it all came together in a perfect storm of songwriting.
We were in great spirits and the music was flowing out of us. We would go over to a rehearsal facility in Van Nuys called the Power Plant to write, shoot some hoops on our breaks, and then go in and write more songs. It was easy, it was fun, and the collective goodwill around the whole thing made it a great time. It was one of my most treasured times in all of our careers together.
By the end of 1991 Megadeth was in a great place. I was sober and more financially secure, and in Ron Laffitte we had a manager who understood heavy metal and where Megadeth fit into it. He was a fantastic manager, in a similar way that Rod Smallwood is for Iron Maiden. Some managers would have just sucked up to the singer, but that never works, and Ron didn’t do that. He really grasped the bigger picture of the band working together to accomplish huge goals.
We rolled into 1992 and went into Enterprise Studios with Max Norman in Burbank and started cutting the record. Dave’s son, Justis, was born at that time, so Dave had a pretty full plate of commitments between his family and the workload at the studio. Even so, the album shipped platinum. In those days you could ship a million copies and you’d get a platinum award, even if 900,000 of them were returned to the record company!
We were certified platinum in the first week. The presidents and staff at Capitol Records came down to our tour rehearsal in Santa Monica and presented us with the awards. We went around the world and did a pretty massive press junket to promote the album before it was released, and clearly those efforts paid us huge dividends upon its appearance. Dave was a correspondent for MTV, covering that year’s Democratic convention, and there was a lot of mainstream press attention focused on us.
It was exciting stuff, but it was also stressful. This was a heavy workload, and rather than simply being able to sit back and enjoy the ride, we found ourselves dealing with a lot of micromanaging. We had no previous experience of celebrity on this level. It was a whole new world that we were moving through, at what felt like a really fast pace.
We did the first leg of the Countdown to Extinction tour in big arenas in Europe, and then continued in the U.S. It was very profitable. Nineteen ninety-two was the single best year of my career, financially, when I made some $500,000.
Countdown to Extinction was a major hit, debuting at Number 2 in the Billboard Top 200 in the U.S., right behind country artist Billy Ray Cyrus. We sold about 250,000 records our first week, which was huge for us, and for thrash metal in general. In December Marty and I went to Japan to set up what was essentially a sold-out tour. It was going to be huge. We got on really well and we had a great time. I remember being at a photo shoot in front of the famed Budokan and feeling that the Japanese tour in March 1993 was going to be simply fantastic.
I thought we had finally arrived. I had cleaned up my past, and the band was really firing on all cylinders. There was a general good feeling about it all. I felt as if after all these years of starvation, we’d finally begun to reap the rewards of all our hard work and discipline. We were all very excited about
our futures and where we were headed. We fully expected to sell more and more records, and to get bigger and bigger.
Life, of course, has a way of deflating expectations.
* * *
We’d done a U.S. arena tour in the fall of 1992 that was very successful. However, at a show in Eugene, Oregon, on February 17, 1993, things began to shift quickly and we came off the road. It was essentially the final U.S. date for the Countdown to Extinction tour. The Japan tour was canceled, simply because the pressure of keeping Megadeth afloat at this level was causing health issues within the band.
In early 1993 Megadeth was nominated for a Grammy award, our third of the eleven nominations we’ve had to date. On February 24, Marty and I put our tuxedos on, rented a limo, and took our girlfriends down to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. As we were walking in, longtime supporters like Brian Slagel from Metal Blade Records were already congratulating us, saying that it was going to be a landslide and that we would easily win the Grammy. We were really excited.
We sat down and our nomination was almost immediately called, as the Best Metal Performance Grammy was one of the first to be announced. Lyle Lovett and Mary Chapin Carpenter were the presenters, and they read off the nominees for Best Metal Performance. There was a pause, during which you could hear a pin drop, and then they said, “The winner is: Nine Inch Nails.”
Marty and I were completely stunned. I was in a state of shock. I was a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and I didn’t know about the process of the Grammy votes, but Trent Reznor was the new kid on the block, and we had sold two million records and we were all over MTV. It seemed like that would count for something! Immediately Marty said, “I’ve seen enough. We’re out of here.” He was adamant, so we called the limo—which hadn’t even found a place to park yet—and we headed up to Hollywood to grab something to eat. I don’t even know how to describe that feeling. It was such a bizarre moment, because it was as if the amount of work it had taken to ramp up to that hopeful night was literally gone in a second.
Nineteen ninety-three wasn’t all bad. In June we played stadium dates with Metallica, which was a great bill. Milton Keynes in England was the first one, and included Diamond Head, a favorite of both Megadeth and Metallica. The run of dates carried on into Italy, Slovenia, and Hungary. The shows were great, especially for Marty and me, who regarded Metallica as trailblazers. That band never made a wrong move. It seemed at the time that they had the Midas touch. They also have a lot of fun, and they keep things loosely tight, which I admire. There is a human quality about Metallica’s songs that people ultimately relate to. I’d look at Metallica and think, “There’re fifty thousand people here and they know the lyrics to every one of these songs.” They were the masters of a well-run business, but they were also able to get onstage and put on a great rock ’n’ roll show.
We did a big amphitheater run in the States in July ’93. We were headlining, Pantera were the direct support, and White Zombie, who were an up-and-coming band, opened the show. Pantera were on the rise. I remember getting a promo copy of Cowboys from Hell a couple of years earlier and I could tell they were onto something big. It was the start of us going on tour with bands that went on to be much bigger than we were. In many ways, Pantera screamed right past us after their next album, owing in large part to some of our own internal issues and tours that were canceled or postponed on the Countdown tour cycle.
Rex Brown (Pantera, Kill Devil Hill):
David Ellefson has been the epitome of the solid metal bassist as long as I’ve known him. His style is impeccable. He’s also a great ambassador for sharing his style with so many, with his unique clinics.
That particular amphitheater run was mapped out to be a six-week tour for us, and it would have been very advantageous for all three bands in our careers. It would have been a nice financial windfall for all of us as well. Sadly, the tour was shortened and we instead booked dates with Aerosmith. Unfortunately, that tour also came to a sudden and unexpected end. As I see it, the worst possible way to make a business decision is to base it on sobriety, which was part of our motive to tour with Aerosmith. Business decisions need to be based on business—period. Both Aerosmith and Megadeth were at the peak of their careers at the time, but the two bands were clearly not a good match.
I remember the Aerosmith tour started in Mobile, Alabama, and then we went to Little Rock, Arkansas. At the second show, Steven Tyler came into our dressing room as he had heard that Dave was upset about production issues on the tour. We weren’t getting a sound check or much space onstage, and we couldn’t have a backdrop. I agreed with Dave on this. We weren’t a baby band of the kind that Aerosmith often took out on tour with them as their openers. We had paid our dues, and we didn’t deserve to be treated like the new kids on the block. As long as we were onstage, we wanted it to be a Megadeth show, but it clearly wasn’t that.
Steven came into our dressing room to talk with Dave and I remember him being very cool. He said, “I hear there are some problems. Is there anything I can do?” I thought that was very considerate of him, since he certainly didn’t have to do that, as the CEO of Aerosmith. He explained to Dave that he had walked similar roads and that if Dave ever needed him, he’d be there.
I took the opportunity to bring up Steven’s sobriety phone call to me years earlier. I said to him, “You probably won’t remember this, but about six years ago you actually called to talk sobriety with me when I was in my addiction,” and I thanked him for that.
That moment passed, though—and a couple of shows later we were fired off the Aerosmith tour. We had driven to Lubbock, Texas, where we were going to play the Civic Center. We were staying at the Holiday Inn, just a couple of blocks down from the arena. Nick, Marty, and I got off the bus and walked across the street to this little Mexican restaurant. The waitress asked, “What y’all doing in town?” and we told her that we were in Megadeth. She said “Megadeth? What are you doing here? We heard Jackyl was going to be at the show tonight. I heard it on the radio!” So we went to the pay phone—cell phones weren’t quite commonplace yet—called our tour manager and asked, “What’s the deal?” He said, “I know, I know. . . . I’m booking flights home right now.” Our hearts sank. How ironic that the hostess at the Mexican restaurant knew about us being fired off the tour before we did.
I remember flying home that night and feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut for the third time on this Countdown tour. Japan had been canceled, not once but twice; we’d let go of the six-week tour with Pantera and White Zombie; and now we were getting fired off the Aerosmith tour. It was like three shots to the head. We were so deflated. It was the beginning of the end for Marty: it really took the wind out of his sails.
But we had to move forward. A new album, which we planned to call Youthanasia, was scheduled for release in 1994, and we regrouped to write it. During that process, two life-changing events took place for me, and what is more, they occurred on the very same day.
I’d known my girlfriend Julie Foley since 1988, when she worked for Doug Thaler, one of the partners at McGhee Entertainment. McGhee had some of the biggest names in rock ’n’ roll such as Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, the Scorpions, and Skid Row. It seemed like a really good opportunity for us to sign up with their firm. Julie and I really fell for each other, which was a little weird because we worked together. Dating the girl at the office is generally a business no-no. Yet at the same time, there was something there between us.
I remember our first date. Julie took me to a Los Angeles Kings hockey game as their office always had season seats to the hip sports events in town. To start, we went to a Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and from there I had to make a stop at a drug dealer to pick up some cocaine before we went to the game, which I think she thought was a little odd. She eventually asked me some years back why I didn’t drink on that first date, and I told her it was because I was on heroin. When McGhee Entertainment dropped Megadeth, partly because I failed to complete rehab, Julie and
I said good-bye. I thought that was the end of it. But when I sobered up in 1990, I gave Julie a call, and we became friends. We then began to date and fell for each other again. It truly was a new beginning for us.
Julie has put up with a lot from me over the years. The unspoken attitude of rock ’n’ roll is “I get to do whatever I want. Don’t you all wish you were me?” With all of the best rock ’n’ rollers, whether it be David Lee Roth or Jim Morrison, the message is that we get to live a life where you don’t have to go to work, you can drink and do drugs and be with chicks all day. However, being sober, I’m called to a new standard. If you take away the sex and the drugs, you’re left with the rock ’n’ roll, which was an awakening for me because it brought me back to why I got into music in the first place when I was eleven years old. It was purely for the love of rock ’n’ roll. How ironic that I’d come full circle.
That’s really been my journey up to the present day, and sobriety has allowed me to have a daily diligence and to be aware of the distractions. Drugs, women, envy of other people, pride, gluttony, worrying that if one band sells a million albums, then we need to sell two million—these are human fears and temptations and they exist for all of us, but they are magnified in this particular industry. Addictions can magnify them even more.
In late 1993 Julie quit her job with Doug Thaler, who had moved on from McGhee Entertainment to start his own company, Top Rock Development Corporation. Julie was his top employee and office manager, and Mötley Crüe was their number-one act. This was around the time that Mötley parted ways with their singer Vince Neil. Julie felt that it was time to move on, and that her time was done at that company. She had no regrets, as she had enjoyed a really exciting and fun career in artist management.
Now that I wasn’t using drugs or drinking, I had some reserves of money saved up. Julie had been flying out to Scottsdale, Arizona, every weekend and looking at homes, as we were ready for a new adventure outside the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. Plus, as a musician in a global band, I didn’t have to live in the city any longer, as I did when I started my career there in 1983. So we moved to Scottsdale in September 1993 and bought our first house.
My Life With Deth Page 11