My Life With Deth

by David Ellefson

  Marty Friedman (former Megadeth guitarist):

  Ellefson understood my reasons for leaving Megadeth. I didn’t sense any hard feelings from him, then or later. It was really cool of him to look past the fact that I left Megadeth at a bad time.

  Dave and I had been through so many musicians in our career, but when things were going upward no one wanted to leave Megadeth. Now that we were on the back side of the wave, the ride down was not so attractive. With a month remaining on the road, canceling dates was not an option. We had debts, and we were barely keeping things afloat—and now a vital component of our band was going to leave us.

  We knew that the fans’ reaction wasn’t going to be good. As good as Jimmy DeGrasso was, many Megadeth fans already missed the Rust in Peace lineup, which had featured Nick Menza. Without Marty, the fallout would be even worse. The team was disintegrating, but we had no choice except to soldier on. Jimmy was the consummate professional, and failure was not an option in his book either. He quickly recommended Al Pitrelli as an immediate substitute for Marty so that we could carry on with the live dates.

  At the same time, we were engaging in our first real corporate sponsorship with stereo equipment manufacturer JVC. Who knew what they would do if they saw the chink in our armor caused by Marty leaving? Our first real test was a JVC corporate acoustic show in Las Vegas in early 2000. We flew Al out to watch us play, and he came to my hotel room after the show so that we could sit down and start the process of learning the eighteen-song live set. As good as Al was, he was a long way from being able to pull off Marty’s guitar parts on such short notice, let alone produce true thrash metal playing. He was a rock ’n’ roll gunslinger, not a dyed-in-the-wool metal guy.

  Fortunately, Marty agreed to stay on board for a couple more weeks, working with Al each day on the bus to help break him in. I also sat down with Al and worked through the arrangements, as I had always done with new members. Never before had Al been in a band that understood the essential role of picking-hand palm muting in thrash metal. But Al is a fantastic musician, and he really stepped up under the pressure.

  In fact, Al’s debut with Megadeth came sooner than he expected. Marty, who had been flying to all the shows separately from the rest of the band now, suffered what appeared to be an anxiety attack at one point, demanding that we get another guitarist in immediately. Al was almost ready, but not quite. Marty was supposed to play his final show with us on January 16, 2000, at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, but as the clock drew closer to showtime, there was no sign of Marty. Half an hour before we were supposed to go on, Dave looked at Al and told him to lace up his boots and get ready to hit the stage.

  The show went off well—the band sounded heavier than it had in years. This final transition of both Marty and Nick out of the group needed to happen, in retrospect. Al and Jimmy had a much more behind-the-beat style of playing, which anchored the band more than it had ever been before. As a bassist, I loved it. We were developing a new sound. It was invigorating, and once more, we were back to me and Dave plus two new guys.

  We continued to tour through 2000, playing dates with Mötley Crüe and Anthrax for the Maximum Rock tour of North America. It was an odd mix, and as if the poor reception of Risk hadn’t been enough, now we were really out on the edge with live fan reach. Although it was still better than the ill-fated Aerosmith tour of 1993, the Mötley tour was greeted with poor ticket sales. Tommy Lee was not in the band at the time, and the situation was disjointed on their side as well.

  A stroke of good fortune lay ahead, however. Our manager Mike Renault had been shopping for a new record deal for the band and brought in an amazing offer from Sanctuary Records, a part of the Iron Maiden and Rod Smallwood camp. Sanctuary was mostly an indie conglomerate, and we knew we probably weren’t going to sell anywhere close to the numbers we would need to recoup the advance in the deal. However, the deal was rich and it was certainly a draw for us.

  To Dave’s credit, as much as we’ve both experienced the “feast or famine” side of the music business, he’s never considered the money first in any decisions he’s made for the band. In fact, he has always made the music and the execution of the band our top priorities, which in turn has helped keep the money flowing. I’m not as good with that, so it is a lesson I’ve tried to learn from him: do what you love and the money will follow. Risk may have been a lesson to all of us that when you put the attraction of success before the actual success comes, you have placed the cart before the horse.

  We were now seriously disheartened with Bud Prager. It was sad, because our point man Mike Renault was a hard worker, and he had resolved some of the precarious financial debt and upside-down business management that had been a part of the Youthanasia tour cycle. Our tour manager Steve Wood had previously worked with ace rock manager Larry Mazer, based in the Cherry Hill area of New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia. I knew of Larry’s track record with breaking Cinderella in the 1980s, as well as his work with KISS and Pat Benatar.

  Steve had Larry come to a show on the Mötley Crüe tour in Camden, New Jersey, where he gave us his full pitch about why he should be our new manager. His “Go team, go!” approach fell on eager ears and within a few weeks we had fired Bud and Mike and hired Larry. I liked Mike and hated to see him go. Bud was a different story, not because I disliked him as a man, but rather because he pulled the divide-and-conquer routine on the band during Risk.

  Larry put the Sanctuary deal in place for us, and after the Mötley Crüe tour we went back to Dave’s studio, where we had written Risk, and started to carve out the songs for what would become our next album, The World Needs a Hero. This was a title based on a conversation our Japanese promoter Mr. Udo had had with us over dinner one night, at the end of the Cryptic Writings tour in late 1998. Dave liked the idea, and it became a reality.

  We found a good engineer in Bill Kennedy, who had coincidentally just worked with Mötley Crüe. Bill didn’t have much creative input into the music, though, as this was Dave’s time to try and turn Megadeth back into the thrash metal icon it deserved to be. However, it was like turning a giant ocean liner on the open seas—one spin of the wheel takes a long time to make any difference. So it was with The World Needs a Hero, which only made a minor dent in our major issues.

  I thought the album was okay, and a lot better than Risk. It was the first step away from the direction in which Megadeth had been going, but we hadn’t focused entirely on writing thrash metal songs. We were writing choruses, as we had been for most of the previous ten years, and it’s hard to switch back to writing riffs from that approach.

  The album was released by Sanctuary, even though it was technically our final album for Capitol. VH1 filmed a Behind the Music special about Megadeth, where we all talked about sobriety and how great things were going for us. I think Dave especially liked that he was able to talk about his Metallica years, and James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich even agreed to be interviewed in the episode. It was my job, as the diplomat, to reach out to the former members to participate. After much coaxing on my part, Jeff Young and Chris Poland agreed to take part, too. I was happy for them as the program gave them some public visibility and a platform to talk about their experiences in the band.

  We set up The World Needs a Hero with a three-week acoustic tour across the U.S. where we would do local radio during the day and perform in a 500- to 1,000-seat theater that evening. This was a great way to play an intimate show for our fans while at the same time schmoozing the radio folks for Sanctuary—all part of a game that we were well-versed in playing by this point.

  We toured the festivals in Europe that summer, then played Japan and Korea, before moving down the Pacific Rim to Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. We then agreed to a 1,000-capacity club tour in the fall as a way to set our guarantees of money. This also meant that we didn’t have to spend so much on a costly production to keep the machine on the road.

  We had a day off on September 10, 2001, and I went to the local c
inema to chill out. I watched the movies American Pie and Rock Star and went back to the hotel to get some sleep. The next morning, before 6 A.M., Dave called and woke me up to tell me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Thirty minutes later the second plane hit the towers and it felt as if we were in a world war.

  Our show in Seattle was canceled that night, but we made our way across the border into Vancouver, Canada, for the show the next day. It was freaky to leave your own country when all the planes were grounded, without much knowledge of what had just happened, but as they say in this business, the show must go on.

  We played our final shows of the World Needs a Hero tour in Tucson and Phoenix on November 16 and 17. Those shows became the Rude Awakening live DVD and double CD set. While the shows looked and sounded good, I was thoroughly baked from it all. I was extremely ill with chronic asthma and bronchitis for most of 2001, from the pressures of band-member and management changes.

  These past few years were really starting to take a toll, and I was seriously pondering what life outside the band might look like for me. Add to that, the mood in the U.S. had been dark since the 9/11 attacks. This forced us to make Arizona our final shows on the tour, rather than the originally intended Buenos Aires for the grand finale.

  In my mind, things had become a mess. Al had pulled me aside two weeks prior in Denver to tell me he was quitting the band and going back to Trans-Siberian Orchestra, his previous home before he joined Megadeth. He actually offered me an audition to play on the upcoming TSO tour that year, but I was fried from all the touring and declined. It would have been fun, because musically Al and I were a good match. Had I known what was to follow, I would have taken him up on his offer. Sometimes taking a leap of faith is the best course of action, a lesson with which I’d soon become acquainted.

  I was sitting in church one day, pondering how I had been told in rehab that everything would have to change in order for my development as a sober person to take place. It occurred to me that everything had in fact changed in my life, with the exception of one thing: Megadeth. The end was coming, though, and sooner than I had expected. After filming those last two shows for Rude Awakening, Dave injured his arm and informed us that he was officially quitting Megadeth. This was February 4, 2002.

  After receiving that phone call I went out to the backyard of my home in Scottsdale. My first thought was “Now what am I supposed to do with my life?” followed by a huge sigh of relief that it was over. Julie and I were looking for a bigger house at the time, somewhere that would be more suited to our growing family and my home studio and office needs. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I had thought that the Sanctuary deal would have secured a nice retirement for us. Julie and I even discussed moving to New Jersey, to be close to her parents, but Dave asked me not to do that in case he needed my help. But it was not to be.

  I was devastated. At the same time, I was relieved to not have to be around the drama of a rock band anymore. I was tired of living under the pretense that I had to be in a touring rock band while facing the realities of being a father in a loving family, who really needed my time at home. It was time for me to grow up once and for all. Within minutes the strangest thing happened: the chronic asthma from which I had suffered the year before suddenly disappeared. It was as if the weight of the world was finally off my chest. Dave had done for me what I couldn’t do for myself, which is quit.

  Dave told me that he wanted to assign the catalog to me, so we met in a Starbucks by my house in Scottsdale. He had a stack of paperwork with him detailing the catalog from Capitol Records, which he wanted me to remaster and reissue. My heart wasn’t in it, though. I knew that if Megadeth no longer worked, I wouldn’t have an income to sustain my family. I had to move on to new endeavors as the breadwinner of my home. I was very freaked out and still in a state of shock, and I now knew what Marty felt like when he was done. I told Dave, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to live out my dream,” meaning, “Thank you for our partnership over the years.”

  As the day went on, however, I became more and more angry with his decision to leave the group, and after seeing him at a meeting a few hours later I angrily told him, “If you’re getting on with your life, then I’m getting on with mine.” They were very harsh, tense words and I got in my car and drove off.

  A THOUGHT

  Change—The Ultimate Leap of Faith

  While change can be liberating, it can also be scary. Ironically, my life in a rock ’n’ roll band was nothing but constant change, and I experienced it together with my band of brothers. But when change comes upon you without asking for it, that is a whole other story. Especially when this first big change of my adult life made me question everything I had known from the previous eighteen years, as a member of a successful heavy metal band.

  Fortunately, God seems to make a way when there seems to be no other way. Those were the moments when all I had to back me up was hope that it would somehow work out, and faith that it actually would. Seemingly, that was all that was required to start a new life.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Transformed

  “If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?”

  —1 Corinthians 6:1

  As I look back on my life so far, it’s pretty clear to me that when I unhooked myself from the train of consequences that was Megadeth, I embarked on a new journey that was sober, mature, responsible, stable, and, finally, adult.

  The first thing I did was start looking for jobs. Fender had called me about a possible bass amp product manager job, which I wasn’t really equipped for. Also they wanted me in the office full-time, with no time for any future tours. At this exact same time, Alice Cooper’s camp called to ask if I wanted to play bass with them for an upcoming tour. As much as I appreciated Alice’s offer, I also realized that I needed to be with my family during this season of my life, as I might very well wake up on a tour bus at the age of fifty, and have completely missed my kids growing up. I had to stay the course of being responsible for providing for my family, even if that meant sacrificing my dreams of music and rock stardom.

  I then considered a career as a producer, but I didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in a studio for the rest of my life. I did, however, produce three songs for the band Numm out of Minneapolis, which included a friend of mine, Dale Steele, in their lineup. Nothing happened with that band or the demos, though. I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for a career flying around the country, producing unsigned bands. I also spoke to Monte Conner at Roadrunner Records, investigating an A&R role with them, and that didn’t materialize either, but Roadrunner did ask me to go and do some writing with their band Dry Kill Logic. This was an eye-opening experience for me, musically and with the music business. By and large it helped me open up dialogues with current record companies, managers, agents, and publishers.

  At this time there was a wave of modern heavy metal where all the bands tuned down, which was a different sound from that of traditional metal bands like Megadeth who tuned to the standard concert pitch of A440. It was funny writing with the Dry Kill Logic guys, who were all ten years younger than me, tuned down to A# and all these other whacked-out tunings. All of a sudden I realized that I was the old guy in the room. I got hip to the sound, though, because it was really a great thing to be exposed to.

  All the old rules of thrash metal, which I’d lived with, had gone out the window, and it was so liberating. I started breaking out my old riff tapes of unused material from as far back as Countdown to Extinction and playing them in a new tuning, and they sounded completely fresh. I had a whole new palette of creativity on the same fingerboard that I’d been playing for twenty years. It was like learning to paint all over again.

  But apart from those inspirations, I felt as if I had nothing going on career-wise with any real substance or momentum. I was really angry about it all and not a pleasant gu
y to be around during this time. I felt as if my whole rock star dream had been taken away from me. I know it sounds selfish, because to most, I had already achieved the dream. But I struggled with the reality that the decision to change my life had been made for me, rather than something that I had a hand in, and that bothered me. I knew that playing music professionally was still my calling, and I’d certainly laid the groundwork for a successful legacy. The trick was doing it while still being able to provide for my family. There were a lot of growing pains during this period and I just had to man up and deal with them.

  My marriage was put under some strain, because there were now financial issues and because my whole identity was different. Previously, any time a kid in a heavy metal T-shirt came up to me in a grocery store and asked for an autograph, I’d go into rock star mode. Now I wasn’t a star anymore, and had to work like everybody else. It was tough for my ego, I’ll admit, although it was refreshing to drop all the celebrity airs and go back to being the salt-of-the-earth guy from the farm that I used to be. It was a great ideal, but sometimes a difficult reality.

  Finally, after consulting with record labels on A&R jobs and producing, I considered another behind-the-scenes role in the industry, that of artist relations for a musical instrument manufacturer. I had dealt with many of the people in these positions for my own endorsements, so I felt that a role on the other side of the corporate desk might be a good fit for me.

  I called a buddy who formerly worked for Ampeg, a brand I had previously used on the Youthanasia cycle. His name was Tony Moscal and he was now working with Peavey. Coincidentally, I was currently endorsed by Peavey for my bass amplification. Suddenly, I felt a surge of hope.

  Tony made the referral for me, and Peavey’s president, Mary Peavey, called me up and said they were very excited about the possibility of working with me, which put a spring in my step, because until that moment I’d really felt like a man without a country. I flew down to meet with Mary and Tony for my interview, which back then involved part of the trip flying on a small and turbulent turboprop plane to arrive at their headquarters in Meridian, Mississippi. Mind you, this was something of a change for a guy who had been accustomed to flying around the world in jumbo jets, either business or first class, for the past fifteen years.