My Life With Deth

by David Ellefson

  It was a leap of faith to move out to Arizona and leave the music hub of Los Angeles. Add to that the financial responsibilities of buying a home and cars and developing a life together as a family, especially with the volatility that comes with life in a rock band. Dave and his family had also moved out to Arizona a couple months prior, so it was just the two of us band members making the migration at that point. I only knew one other person in town. His name was Craig S., and he was a real guru in the Phoenix recovery community.

  Beyond our buying a home, the move to Scottsdale was really a major life changer for me and Julie. That was when I joined the recovery program for real as an active member, not just to show up late at the meetings and sit at the back as I so often did in L.A. I found it difficult to develop strong ties with the recovery community in Los Angeles in my early sobriety, but in Phoenix it was easier and much more relaxed. I learned to arrive early and be an active participant in the program. Craig became my official new sponsor, and I really went through the process top to bottom. I realized that I was capable of a lot of destruction, even as a sober guy. In order to keep that tendency in check I rigorously practiced the principles of recovery.

  After the songwriting for the Youthanasia record in early 1994, there was a two-week break. Julie and I flew to Hawaii for a quick vacation getaway. It was on that vacation that I proposed marriage to her. I was lying on a massage couch one morning at the hotel, and mid-massage it just hit me that I should marry her on this trip. Originally, this had been just a vacation, nothing more. However, it was such an amazingly powerful inspiration that came over me. I went upstairs to our hotel room and proposed to her, right then and there. I said to her, “Why don’t we just get married while we’re out here, rather than having to plan for a big wedding and reception? Plus, we can hold a celebration when we get home to Arizona for all of our friends and family.” She accepted and agreed, and we bought a ring later that day. We found a pastor and we arranged to get married on the beach of Wailea, Maui, on April 2, two days later.

  Before the ceremony on the morning of April 2, Julie and I went down to the restaurant to have breakfast. Afterward we went up to our hotel room, and I saw that the red message light was blinking on the telephone by the bed. I called voice mail and there was a message from our next-door neighbor back home in Scottsdale. Her name was Lori and she had been watching our house while we were away. She was crying on the message, and she said, “David, something terrible has happened to your dad. You need to call home immediately.” My heart sank. I knew my dad had been admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the week of our trip, because he had ongoing heart problems.

  I immediately called my brother and my mom back home, and it turned out that my dad had passed away the previous night from congestive heart failure. He was sixty-nine. I was stunned. It was bittersweet, to say the very least, to get married on the same day that I lost my father. I was sobbing all the way through the wedding ceremony on the back lawn of the hotel, by the beach. One Ellefson had passed, yet another came into the family, on the very same day.

  We cut the honeymoon short and flew back to Minnesota for my dad’s funeral two days later. My mom told me that my father had said to her, “I hope David and Julie take care of each other out in Hawaii.” He wanted me to marry her, and here I was returning to Minnesota with Julie as my wife—to attend his funeral.

  By April 1994, my old life had been washed away.

  A THOUGHT

  Marriage

  Getting married was one of the most trusting processes in the world for me, because it truly meant letting go of my past. It also meant partnership with another person on a whole new level. Julie wasn’t a groupie rock ’n’ roll girl. She was the real deal, with a good head on her shoulders, and she has become the true champion of our household in the years after we married, especially raising our two children.

  What’s even more humbling is that we often mirror the examples set before us by our parents. I was lucky that my parents were married until the day my father passed away. They set a good example for me in marriage, as did Julie’s parents. My father was a real straight shooter, and knowing that our marriage was finally in place was one of the best gifts I could have given him at the end of his life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The End of an Era

  “Most people adjust their lives to meet their goals, but addicts adjust their goals to meet their lives.”

  —Anonymous

  Life goes on despite the sadness of bereavement, and I remained on pretty solid ground with my new life during this period. There really is strength in numbers when you’re trying to move away from old playgrounds, playmates, and playthings. This was the first big proving ground for me of my motivation for being clean. When I watched other addicts go back down the old roads, it initially looked like fun. It was the morning after that didn’t look so pretty.

  Megadeth continued to work as prolifically as ever. In 1993, we recorded a song for the Beavis and Butt-Head compilation album The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience. At the same time, we were also asked to cover a Black Sabbath song for the Nativity in Black tribute album. We went into that session at Enterprise Studios in Burbank, where we had done Countdown to Extinction, and right away I suggested that we do “Paranoid.” It was easy, and it was one of the more popular Sabbath songs. I used to play it in cover bands back in Minnesota. It was a no-brainer.

  When Dave called, saying he wanted to get started on our next album, Youthanasia, it was a real relief for me to start working again. From a recovery point of view I had never sat down and made amends with him before. In early 1994 I sat down with him at the Orange Tree resort in Phoenix, where he and I sometimes played golf together, and I made amends with him. It was important that I clear my side of the street, and I felt it necessary to sit down man-to-man and clean a few things up. You can’t walk around with a life of resentment. It was great, because it started a new journey for us.

  This was an exciting time, personally as well as professionally. When we moved out to Arizona, Julie cashed in her pension and put it in the bank. I had bought our house, but it was a little scary because I had taken this risk assuming that we would record another Megadeth album. It was a real leap of faith, and I had no backup plan. After all, I had no plans for a solo career. I grew up wanting to be in a band, because I was seeking camaraderie and a brotherhood to lock arms with. I wanted the band to work.

  I started writing some songs with a friend of mine, Pat Schunk, who was a great guy from the Midwest I’d met through Nick Menza. Nick, Pat, and I would go mountain biking in the hills of Los Angeles just above the San Fernando Valley, in and around the Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction records. We hit it off and started writing some tunes together at his home in Studio City, a few blocks from where I lived at the time.

  After we compiled a dozen songs or so I started shopping some of them around to friends at record labels and other music publishers. Megadeth was big enough that when I rang people in the industry, they would take my call. I realized that if my time in Megadeth ever came to an end, I might be able to continue a career in rock music. You don’t just become a solo artist, but I did enjoy the songwriting process and registered the songs with EMI Music Publishing. I even submitted a few of them to Megadeth to consider for Youthanasia, but I soon realized that they weren’t written in the same spirit. They weren’t heavy metal songs.

  It was good to get involved in the songwriting process with people outside the band. It not only gave me a greater appreciation for Megadeth, but it opened me up musically. I revisited instruments I would never be able to play in the band, such as keyboards and acoustic guitar. I learned to appreciate the skill of writing other kinds of music. Moreover, I got to experience some real producing, even if it was just for myself. Understanding the layering of instruments and working with other professional players is a process I still enjoy. A highlight of those sessions was when I hired John Bush of Armored Saint and Ant
hrax to sing on one of the songs. Those songs are still there, and effectively make up a solo album if I ever choose to make one.

  The initial idea for Youthanasia was to rent a big house out in Arizona, where Dave and I now lived, and move a studio into it and make a record there. The producer Max Norman flew out, but we couldn’t find the right house where we could effectively carry out our endeavor. We started looking at some commercial spaces and found a 10,000-square-foot place just southwest of downtown Phoenix. Definitely not a great neighborhood, but the building was perfect.

  We leased the place for six months. Max built three isolation rooms for recording in the building, which he would later dismantle and take back to L.A. to build his own studio. Mick Zane of the band Malice was Max’s buddy, and had a day job building sets at one of the Hollywood film studios. He became one of the chief carpenters on the project to help Max build the studio. It was incredible that Max not only oversaw the record production but also designed and built a studio in Arizona, all the while tending to his family back in Los Angeles. Truly a man of many talents and much energy.

  At the same time, we were rehearsing at Phase Four Studios down in Tempe, where we spent five days a week running through song ideas and getting them together. We had realized that a lot of music you hear on the radio is at 120 beats per minute, because that’s around the same pace as an active human heart rate. We talked to Max about the tempos and also the tunings, in order to refine the songwriting. We went to another studio in central Phoenix called Vintage Recorders, where we did the final writing.

  Since Rust in Peace, we’d had a sort of spiritual sobriety guru around us, to help us work through our issues as they arose. Having a counselor available to help us communicate and resolve things was quite effective. Most big companies have a human resources department; most rock bands don’t. Counselors fulfilled that role for us. Friends and fans would sometimes remark about the same matters in the Metallica movie Some Kind of Monster, to which I would reply, “Yep, been there, done that!” Honestly, I understood it, because we’d been through something similar, which had been helpful in the rebuilding process around Rust in Peace.

  In Phoenix we were introduced to a business development coach named Daniel. One of his main areas of focus was team building. Businesses hire these people to analyze their structure, spot weaknesses, and help fix them. There was almost a corporate mind-set about Megadeth at this time. It was quite a contrast to be asking how we could create and control our business in the middle of all our creativity, though. Somehow we made it work, as we were heading into uncharted waters with our success.

  We rolled into Youthanasia with a lot of optimism, and the first single, “Train of Consequences,” was greeted with a lot of fanfare in the press. MTV had us come out and play a Halloween show called Night of the Living Megadeth in New York City. During the set, Dave made a comment when introducing a brand-new track called “A Tout le Monde” along the lines of “This is a song about how I tried to kill myself.” He was actually referring to another one of our songs, “Skin o’ My Teeth.” Regardless, “A Tout le Monde” was scheduled as our next single, and we’d spent a lot of money shooting a video for it with Wayne Isham, who had done the video for “Train of Consequences” and other videos from Countdown to Extinction. When we submitted the video to MTV, they rejected it. We were shocked and asked them why. They told us that they didn’t like the lyrical content, so we reedited it for them, but it was dead in the water. It was a real blow to our campaign in the U.S.

  Adding to this mishap, times were changing musically, too. Youthanasia was popular internationally, but sold only half as much in the United States as Countdown to Extinction, though not because of its merits as a record. The bigger issue was that, in 1994, the Seattle bands were coming to the fore. The only real metal band to survive that change was Metallica, but even they cut their hair and changed their look and their sound. They were still very popular, though, and when you’re that high up, any glide downward takes a very long time.

  For the most part, thrash metal fell from its throne, and Megadeth spent the rest of the 1990s, with Cryptic Writings and Risk, trying to navigate a very challenging music business. We had to think like businessmen—almost like marketing executives—rather than simply musicians with guitars around our necks. This was the reality of us simply wanting to continue to be Megadeth, unlike so many of our contemporaries who just got swept away by the winds of change.

  All of a sudden, MTV was very clearly not playing heavy metal videos. It was all Seattle and grunge bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains. By the time we released Cryptic Writings in 1997, we had realized that mainstream music channels were simply not going to play our videos any more. Fortunately, MTV didn’t make Megadeth, and we had a fan base that we knew was going to be there even when our videos weren’t being played. That is the power of heavy metal and our fans. Nonetheless, MTV had taken us from being a band that played 500-seat clubs to arenas through sheer exposure, so we certainly weren’t unappreciative, either.

  I remember when our booking agent flew out to present us with the schedule for the Youthanasia tour: it was a list of midsize halls. Although it would have been wise to start small and build up, we wanted to keep the profile of the band large and still play arenas. We went out with four trucks and three buses to commence the U.S. tour. This wasn’t a fatal move by any means, but we ended up coming home and having to readjust our game plan. We had to, if we wanted to survive the music business changes, especially those that affected heavy metal. We always liked to quote Clint Eastwood in the movie Heartbreak Ridge when he said that sometimes one has to “overcome, adapt, and improvise.” That became us.

  As we went around the world promoting the new record, I had the idea of writing a book. I’d been writing a few columns for magazines, and I’d been reading a lot of self-help and motivational books, and although that wasn’t my area of expertise I certainly knew a lot about the music business. Although you can go to college and learn how to play your instrument, there’s nowhere you can go to actually learn about the industry—at least, there wasn’t in those days. For the most part we were all just winging it and learning the business on the fly.

  So I wrote this book, which was published in 1997, called Making Music Your Business: A Guide for Young Musicians. At the same time Bass Player magazine, whose publisher later issued my book, asked me to become a regular monthly columnist. This process started around the time of Youthanasia and gave me an interesting creative outlet as I traveled around the world during that twelve-month tour cycle.

  By the end of 1995, our manager Ron Laffitte was getting disheartened. We’d been through the Countdown to Extinction years of popularity, with all those huge highs and lows, and with all of the music industry changes I often couldn’t help but feel as if our ship had sailed. It felt as if there were so many things in our lives that were out of our control. It was a sad reality that we never discussed, but that we all recognized.

  Ron accepted a position in charge of the West Coast division of Elektra Records, and although his plan was to manage Megadeth and work for Elektra, I could tell that Ron—who had pulled us out of the scrap heap back in 1989 with Rust in Peace, only to see us get knocked back over and over again in ensuing years—was getting burned out.

  For whatever reason, there’s a two-album cycle for most people around Megadeth, whether they’re producers, managers, agents, or road personnel, and Ron had survived three. Ron had initially brought us to a meeting with Iron Maiden’s manager Rod Smallwood back in 1987 or ’88, but Rod was not that interested in us at that time because we were pretty unstable and all of his bands were successful. However, in 1995 Dave and I took another meeting with Rod over dinner in Paris, with the idea that he would begin to manage us. His view was that we should make another album and come back to play in Europe, and then tour and tour and tour. Dave and I felt that while this would be great for our overseas audiences, we had sold millions of records in
the U.S., and we’d be risking our appeal back home, which was still our primary market.

  We did one final U.S. tour in 1995. Our support act on the tour was Corrosion of Conformity. Dave struck up a correspondence with their manager Mike Renault, a former soundman for Journey back in their glory days. One thing I’ve always found about managers who have come from the road is that they’re all about the nuts and bolts, and they really service the mechanics of a rock band on the road very well. They understand the fundamentals and, most important, they understand how to balance a budget.

  A lot of guys in the music business have a top-down approach up in the stratosphere, and they like to drive fancy cars and live in nice houses, but they don’t like to get their hands dirty. The guys who come up from the bottom are the opposite of that, so we hired Mike and his senior partner Bud Prager. I was a little unsure about this. Mike was very pragmatic but Bud was an older, white-haired gentleman and he didn’t seem to have much interest in us, probably just because of his age. Anyway, we hired them as managers by early 1996.

  We felt a new, but more realistic, optimism on the next cycle as we went into Vintage Recorders studio in central Phoenix to begin the songwriting for our next record, Cryptic Writings. My son, Roman, had been born on February 2, 1996, and the sleep deprivation for Julie and me was a nightmare. I’d never experienced anything like it. Thankfully, the songwriting sessions became a sort of mandatory schedule to settle our home life a bit, as we determined 10 A.M. as the start time for the sessions. This meant we had to get some sleep in order for me to not feel deliriously like killing everyone each day from the lack of rest.