Meanwhile, I’ve been able to transition into other areas of service in the church community. I’m now the director of community outreach, and I’ve been able to put other alcohol and drug recovery–based courses in place, too. Over the years I’ve learned that a spirit of rotation is good for us when doing volunteer work. It keeps us from trying to take ego-based ownership of things, and it allows for other people to be able to step up and serve with their talents, too.
The Rust in Peace tour was an incredible high for us. We played Latin America and then did a full seven-week tour of Europe. From there we rolled right into the Big Four dates. One of the coolest things was that Metallica called a band dinner, the night before the first show in Warsaw, for the band members only, with no managers or other associates. Robert Trujillo was the greeter at the front door of the restaurant and as soon as we walked in, Kirk Hammett and Dave started chatting. It was a great opportunity just to break bread with each other before the shows actually started. We did the hang before we actually played any music.
James Hetfield and I had a chance to connect for the first time. As much as our two bands have been around each other over the years, it was great to rekindle my friendship with those guys. The next day at the first show, James was standing outside the dressing rooms, cheering everybody on and shouting, “Have a great show!” A band that big doesn’t have to do that: they could just as easily retreat to their dressing rooms and after the show hop on a Learjet and be out of there. But that wasn’t Metallica’s style. It was genuinely like we were one big family. We weren’t going back in time to re-create thrash metal. Instead, we were unifying thrash metal in one huge, connected front, truly for the first time ever.
After that European stint came the American Carnage tour, which was interesting because these were rescheduled dates that had been supposed to happen back in January. Slayer’s singer, Tom Araya, had needed neck surgery and the dates were postponed. In a way, his surgery had opened the door for me to come back to the band because of schedule changes. I just knew that all these things pointed toward my return to Megadeth.
It reminds me of the old story: A Christian guy dies in a flood and goes to heaven, and he says to God, “Why did you let me die? Why did you do this to me?” and God says to him, “When your neighbor told you to evacuate the building, and you said no, because you thought God would save you. That was me. Then, when your friend came past in a boat and offered you a lift to safety, but you said no because God would save you, that was me, too. And then, when the helicopter came down to pick you up from the roof of the building, and you said no yet again because you knew that God would save you, that was me, coming to get you out of the mess you were in!”
The opportunity to rejoin Megadeth this time was like that helicopter: it was as if God was saying to me, “You need to get back there now.” When James LoMenzo left the band, there was really only one bass player who could take his place. It all lined up.
Everything was really going well. Dave and I spent a lot of time together reading scripture, and the synergy was back between us. He and I both had the exact same study Bible. You think that’s a coincidence? Well, there’s a saying that there are no coincidences in God’s world, because He has orchestrated it all. The Book of Proverbs has thirty-one proverbs in it, one for every day of the month, so if in doubt, right before we went onstage, if we had a bit of time backstage, or when we were grabbing a coffee in the lobby when we woke up, we would kick back and soak up the Bible. That was our personal connection. The more time we spent with the Bible, the closer we got and the better the band sounded. It was a form of faith development, and it just goes to show that when you put first things first, all the rest will handle itself.
It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: you can spend so much time looking for one particular piece, and when you go away to answer the phone, you come back and that piece has been lying in front of you the whole time. That’s how I see my experience. Because Dave and I were so driven in the early days and so focused on work, we missed out on our faith development, which was always right in front of us. The days that we do that together are still my favorite days on the bus. Shawn likes it because he sees that it joins us and brings us closer together, and so he takes part, too: that’s what I love about him, that he’s a very pragmatic, calming kind of person.
In the old days we used to get together with straws and lines of drugs on the table: that was our connection back then. That obviously didn’t work very well, which I think is an important point. People always want to get together, whether it’s over music or a couple of drinks or whatever, but anything that is derived of man will ultimately fall short and divide you.
Now we’ve found a connection that is bigger than all of us, and its only common goal is loving, serving, and connecting each other. There is no downside to helping others, and on my return to Megadeth that was what we tapped into. I’ve learned that faith is a daily discipline, every day of the week: in fact, some of our crew started good-naturedly calling me “Pastor Dave” as a result. I had come back with a fresh perspective, to find that Dave and I were seeking to follow our faith walk together. It was as if both of us had been holding the key, but until 2010 we’d never put it in the lock and opened the door.
Fred Kowalo (guitar and bass tech, Megadeth):
When David rejoined the band, James LoMenzo told me, “Ellefson’s a great guy. You’ll love working with him.” He was right. You hang around with some guys on the road, and they start wearing you down. With Ellefson, that’s not the case. He saw me one day when I was really down and depressed because I’d received bad news from home. He pulled me aside and talked to me. It was Pastor David coming out there. We sat down and talked and we prayed a little bit, and everything turned around. Touring is a hard life, it’s really tough, and if you have a guy like Ellefson around who can pick you up and keep you focused, that’s a great thing. It’s common to have guys say to you on the road, “Hey, let’s go party,” but not at all common to have someone say to you, “Do you need somebody to talk to, or be there for you?” Also, Ellefson doesn’t preach or push religion on you. He doesn’t say, “God’s looking down on you and he wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing.” He says, “You’re human. If my words can help you get through this, then that’s great.” That’s what a good pastor does. He wants to help. That’s the great thing about the guy.
A THOUGHT
Faith—and How It Changes You
Life can be funny. It was never my goal to end up back in the church, especially once I got rolling in rock ’n’ roll and on my way as a young man in the world. In fact, you could say that once I started rockin’, on the church door I would not be knockin’.
However, having faith has a way of changing a person. Experiencing faith as an adult is much different than as a child. What I found was that blending my gifts of music and faith wasn’t as much of a stretch as I had previously thought. The truth is, if God is the source of our talents, then I guess He can make even the strangest things happen when used for His glory.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back to the Start
“Carry the Gospel with you wherever you go. Sometimes you may even have to use words.”
—St. Francis
Megadeth was on fire, so we decided to carry on playing Rust in Peace when the American Carnage tour began. Slayer and Megadeth together was a great bill. We’d played together as far back as 1985. We’re very different musically, but we come from the same genre and we represent the same culture and lifestyle. There were no hostilities between the bands anymore.
We were all playing at our very best. Endgame, Megadeth’s most recent album, was excellent; the fans had received it really well, and the Rust in Peace album still cast a long shadow. We had now become almost a legacy classic metal band, whose history was a big reason why fans would come out to see us. This is a much better position to be in than to record a new album and have the ensuing tour dates stand or fall on whether t
hat album has legs or not. Our legacy was strong now.
We had a lot of creative think-tank sessions, which I call “Starbucks sessions,” because the band members would get up in the morning, arrange to meet for coffee, and have a discussion. It’s funny that we’re such early birds, given that we’re a metal band . . . but it’s natural. I’ve done yoga, and I’ve learned that your body wants to follow the natural rhythms of daylight—as long as you’re sober and not staying up all night partying, of course.
The next item on the agenda was the Jägermeister Music Tour, which was essentially Clash of the Titans Part Two, as it featured us, Slayer, and Anthrax (although because the movie remake of Clash of the Titans had just been released, we couldn’t use that name). I’d done a lot of work with the people at Jägermeister when I was at Peavey. We did a lot of great things together with F5 and Temple of Brutality. The relationship was fantastic and they were stoked about me being back in Megadeth.
Is there a conflict for me, as a sober man, to be working with a company that produces alcoholic drinks? No. One of the things I learned in recovery is that we should not look down our nose at the drinks industry as an institution. I sometimes find that religion takes that attitude: the Bible doesn’t tell you not to drink, but it does tell you not to participate in drunkenness. I personally don’t take any alcohol into my body because it sets a particular reaction in motion, but I know plenty of people who can drink socially and for whom it’s not an issue.
The highlight of that tour was playing at the Gibson Amphitheatre at Universal City. Kerry King hadn’t been able to join us in the encore jam at the Big Four show in Sofia, Bulgaria, because he had been called to approve some video footage of Slayer while it was going on, so we invited him to come up and play “Rattlehead” with us onstage. He’d been the very first performing guitarist in Megadeth apart from Dave, so it was a great opportunity to capture the moment. It was cool to have Kerry up there.
I happened to be on the cover of Bass Player magazine at that time, which was a huge thing for me. I was so thrilled when they called me about that. They told me that it was high time I was on their cover, as I’d done a lot of writing for them over the years and never been on there. It was the same month as the magazine’s Bass Player Live event, too, where I also played, so I was completely thrilled. That was definitely a high point in my career, and even more so because it wasn’t simply part of the regular press for a Megadeth album.
We went to Australia in December. That whole year was such a great ride, playing for people all around the world. It was good to be back. Fans saw that there was a genuine camaraderie onstage, the band sounded great, and obviously no one was complaining that we were playing Rust in Peace all the way through.
In January 2011, I inked a deal with Jackson Guitars for a signature bass, which you can see at the bottom of this page. My relationship with them is a good one, because, having worked with endorsing artists at Peavey for so long, I can walk into the office and communicate with them on a business level as well as be the famous guy who endorses their instrument. I know the numbers and I know how the machine works, and their office is only fifteen minutes away from my house in Scottsdale, so it’s very cool.
Since then I’ve often performed at bass clinics for Jackson and Hartke, my signature amp manufacturers. I did many of these events in tandem with my friend Frank Bello, the bass player in Anthrax.
Frank Bello (Anthrax):
David Ellefson is not only a great bass player and songwriter, he is my friend. He is one of the good guys in music and has always been a great source of knowledge about this business for me. We’ve done a lot of touring together throughout the years, and Dave has always been and still is that good guy.
NAMM in 2011 was amazing. It was great to be there as a bass player, back with my home band, performing for my peers, which we did at Dean Guitars’ Friday-night show at the Grove venue, close by the Anaheim Convention Center.
After NAMM, we went into the songwriting and then the recording sessions for the next Megadeth album, Thirteen, which was probably the most fun album I’ve ever recorded with the band. Within a week I had all of my bass lines for its thirteen songs done and in the can. We brought back “New World Order,” which was an old track which we’d demoed in the fall of 1991 in the Countdown to Extinction sessions.
Within a ten-week period or so, between the Indio Big Four date and the next Big Four show in Germany, we wrote and recorded the record. We’d never named an album after a number before, and thirteen is a cool, spooky number, so there were a lot of firsts there, among them the fact that it was my first full-length album since I’d rejoined the band.
We played more Big Four shows in Europe in summer 2011 and then joined the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem tour in America. Then there was the Big Four show at Yankee Stadium in New York, which looks to have been the last of those shows for now. It was wonderful. I was really happy for the Anthrax guys: it was right in their backyard, after all, with them being the New York champions of the Big Four. It was the final flag in the ground, ending on U.S. shores, where all of the Big Four are from, which had huge significance. It was also bicoastal, because we’d played one in California, too: the two shows on the West and East Coasts represented the origins of the four bands really well.
We released Thirteen on November 1, and we played the Jimmy Kimmel show the night before, dressed in Halloween costumes. I was the Wolfman, Dave was Frankenstein, guitarist Chris Broderick was the Phantom of the Opera, and Shawn was Dracula. A couple of days later we flew down to South America to kick off the Thirteen tour and carried on playing live dates all the way through until December 8, 2012. The back end of the tour essentially turned into the Countdown to Extinction twentieth-anniversary tour. It was great to celebrate our legacy with these anniversaries as well as create new music.
I looked back and realized that we had pretty much done three years of nonstop touring since I rejoined the band in early 2010. I needed some relaxation time, as everybody in the band did, before we began recording the next Megadeth album, Super Collider.
Chris Broderick (guitarist, Megadeth):
I love getting together with David because he still has the enthusiasm for music that a young person has. We’ll sit down and work on some chord sequences and turnarounds and improvise. When we’re working on songs, he’ll have suggestions for me and vice versa. It’s very cool. He has such a solid, tight rhythm and timing, and he plays right in the pocket with the drums. His picking is right on the money and he knows a lot about harmony, too, so he crafts some great bass lines. You can sense somebody’s experience by how quickly they adjust to a new idea or a new environment, and David does that seamlessly, right off the bat. He’s a true musician, whether he’s playing in Megadeth, or with his worship band, or just picking up an acoustic guitar and playing.
It’s been a three-year victory lap for us, and now my kids are three years older. They’re really growing up. It’s been so rewarding to see Athena take an interest in music: she’s artistic and passionate and rapidly becoming the wonderful guitar player and pianist of the Ellefson household. I’ve also seen my son pursue his interests and become focused on languages, engineering, and sports trivia. To see them become interested in creative arts is a huge thing for me as a father: the cycle feels complete.
When Roman was a baby, he hated it whenever I left to go on tour. He didn’t know where I was going; he just knew I was leaving, and he hated it. He was fifteen when I rejoined Megadeth and it was completely different this time. When the press release went out, he immediately received tons of texts and instant messages from his friends saying, “I can’t believe your dad’s back in Megadeth!” and this time, it was a good thing. It was a big change for him and Athena, of course, although I’m not away for long, extended tours anymore, and we talk via Skype every day.
I still love playing metal, but my least favorite part of the touring experience at this point is the travel. Time zones still create proble
ms for me. My main focus is that ninety minutes to two hours onstage at around eight in the evening, with the gym visit and phone calls in the daytime. Tours these days are better if they last over three weeks, even though that is a long time away from home, simply because you need at least two weeks for your body to get used to that daily routine.
For thirty-five years I’ve stood in the rifleman’s position with my hip twisted and my left arm out, playing a fifteen-pound bass guitar hanging from my shoulder. I’ve got a chronic chiropractor’s issue, which I have to deal with out on tour: my lower left sacrum goes out, and that affects the whole left side of my spine and the vertebrae in my neck, and that can make you sick. Dave, with his martial arts training, can give me a pretty good adjustment: he can twist my lower back so it pops back into place. Most people can’t bear to watch, because it looks so painful, but it actually brings great relief. That’s my only significant health issue, though.
When traveling I usually only suffer from respiratory issues like bronchitis and sinus stuff: I’ve been blessed with a strong stomach, and I don’t get too ill with food. Nothing is worse than playing onstage with a fever, because just touching your guitar strings hurts and the kick drums thunder through your head, so I normally travel with antibiotics in order to get through it quickly. The feeling is not unlike detoxing from heroin, so getting ill onstage is more or less the only time I ever think of that drug anymore. I don’t take any pain relief, either: while my addiction may not be my fault, my recovery is definitely my responsibility, and these days doctors dispense drugs like they’re candy—so I have to be vigilant.
My faith walk continues and progresses. I now study in a Senior Mentoring Program, or SMP, for members of a congregation who wish to become ordained. It is run by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, which offers online studies. My pastor suggested that I would be a good candidate for it, and so I now spend a week each year on campus in addition to pursuing my online studies. It’s something I’m passionate about.
My Life With Deth Page 19