My Life With Deth

by David Ellefson

  To be accepted into the course was a real miracle: to be saved from heroin addiction, to be rewarded with success, and then to be pulled into church work and still be allowed to sharpen myself with spiritual knowledge is an incredible series of gifts, and an amazing journey. It was interesting, because one or two of my fellow worshippers questioned the fact that a guy in a band called Megadeth could really be studying on this course. I keep my lifestyle clean with even more diligence as a result, especially as I’m now technically Vicar Ellefson, essentially a pastor in training.

  As I write this, I’m on a one-year sabbatical to allow myself the necessary time to go through another album and tour cycle. The studies were really enjoyable, although one particular challenge was preparing for stage warm-ups while having my laptop on backstage and keeping an eye on the Tuesday-evening seminary chats that are part of the course. Time zones make that a bit more difficult, too. I will complete the remaining three years: in fact, by the time you read this I will probably have resumed them.

  Pastor Jon was a little sad that I had to unplug from my worship leader role with MEGA Life!, but he was excited about me getting more involved in church work. He also told me that my son, Roman, is one of the very few kids he’s met who has the true heart of a pastor. I consider Pastor Jon a friend and a mentor, and he’s provided some fantastic opportunities for spiritual growth for me and my family, so I felt some conflict when I told him that I wanted to rejoin the band. But I knew I had to do it: I had to clean my slate.

  My reasoning was that I had been a sober member of the band for many years, and whoever pulled me off the Megadeth campus for eight years—whether God did it, or I did it, or if it was a combination of the two of us—I was clearly supposed to go back and take care of unfinished business. In Corinthians 6, Jesus says that if you’re at a church and you’re ready to praise God, but you have anything outstanding with your fellow man, leave the church immediately. Don’t give up your money, don’t sing any songs. Go and make it right with that other person before you come back into the church and stand there as a hypocrite praising God.

  That’s pretty heavy, and for me it meant I had to go and repair my relationship with Megadeth. It’s interesting to have gone to college to study business and also work in a church, because the church is where business and spirituality come together. Boy, what a collision that can be if it’s born of human design.

  So what does my future hold? It appears that we can do Megadeth for as long as we want, or at least as long as we can still headbang and fit into our jeans. We’ll keep producing new material, and there seems to be an ongoing demand for us to play live. I’m still active as a volunteer with MEGA Life! Someday I’ll likely settle down into a church and work there, but until then, an amazing opportunity for some ministry work lies ahead of me. If there’s ever a chance to be of service, which happens because people e-mail me from all over the world asking about sobriety, I take it.

  I truly have a “mega life.” God is the author of all of life and everything fits together perfectly.

  A THOUGHT

  Faith and Religion

  I know I’ve talked a lot about faith, God, religion, and more in this book. I realize that might seem strange to you, coming from a heavy metal guy. Trust me, it would sound odd to me, too, if I was reading this book. However, we all have our path. Just know that these are my discoveries as they have come to me. Hopefully as the years pass by, I’ll have even more new awakenings about such matters.

  Although I was raised in a respectable and religious home, I needed to have my own faith journey, rather than simply believe what they told me in Sunday school, or from the pulpit of the Lutheran church as a kid. I’m the kind of guy who learns much better with hands-on training, when my back is against the wall and it’s “do or die” time. Faith has been the same for me.

  There are probably as many different opinions on faith and religion as there are people who hold them. As for my religion and views of the Bible, I quit going to church after I was confirmed in my Lutheran faith at age sixteen. Even though I’ve worked on staff in church now for several years, I still think like an unchurched person rather than a regular attendee, because that’s my life’s walk. Given the choice as a teenager, I walked away, and it never got any better until I was brought to my knees by addiction at the age of twenty-five.

  So, to me, the ritual of faith—often known as religion—is not as important as the actual act of faith. Scripture reminds us that faith is asking for something we cannot yet see, but acting as if it has already happened. Once we do this enough and see tangible results, it’s almost as if we don’t even need faith because we then have proof.

  My adult church life began after I got clean in 1990. Julie and I attended a few churches in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. We were yearning for the word of God in some shape or form. I remember going over to see the famed author Marianne Williamson give her lectures in Santa Monica back in 1992, just before her appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show that propelled her to international fame. Her lectures were based on “A Course in Miracles” teachings, which included Christianity, a dash of New Age ideas, and personal thoughts and inspirations. We drove around listening to her tapes, which helped us cop a good spiritual buzz.

  At the same time, we listened to motivational guru Tony Robbins’s tapes. I never really got where he was coming from, but it did help Julie quit her job. Maybe it was the right thing at the right time to help her do something she knew she needed to do. She is decisive, and when she has her mind made up, she does it. I’m not as good like that, but have gotten much better in recent years.

  Once we had kids, we began a quest for something much more solid. We become our own parents when we have kids, and suddenly all that rebelling we used to do isn’t so cool anymore. In fact, once I had kids of my own I realized that my parents were actually pretty hip and had it together—even that church thing.

  After we attended a few New Age–type churches following our move to Arizona in 1993, we began regularly attending a modern nondenominational Bible-based church in Scottsdale. During the Risk recording, the music leader asked Julie if I’d be up for playing in their band during my spare time at home. I’d been around the God campus long enough to know that this wasn’t just a guy asking for a bassist: this was The Man upstairs pointing me to yet another milestone on my faith journey. After I played a few times, they asked me to share my testimony, and things really started to kick into high gear for me and my faith. God has a good sense of humor to know that I will probably attend church more if I can bring my bass with me. He should know—He created me.

  A few years later, after Athena was born, we were getting the kids plugged into their preschool, which was at the nearby Lutheran church we had attended once on our arrival in Scottsdale in 1993. We loved the service, but the pastor announced it was his last sermon and that he would be retiring, so we moved on. And yet here we were only a few years later, with kids in tow for preschool. At the urging of our children, we started attending church there, so they could be with their friends. I presented my Lutheran Confirmation credentials and we officially joined as a family.

  Although I was fifteen years sober by that time, and had been attending church regularly, the question still lingered: “Is this Jesus stuff real? Did this really happen?” Then a thought hit me one day as we were sitting in the front row of this very church: “You didn’t believe in sobriety by way of spirituality, but you finally acted as if it was going to work, and it did.” So why shouldn’t I apply that same reasoning to my Christian faith? Bingo, that was it. I was on the path and have never looked back.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  New Frontiers

  “Religion is for those afraid of hell, but spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

  —Anonymous

  My new life started over twenty-three years ago as I write this. What have I learned since then?

  For one, I’m definitely not perfect, and please for
give me if I give the impression that I think I am. With that said, my life is really an example that even when we go astray, the good Lord can pick us back up and give us a second chance. We’re all human and fall short of perfection, but through our faith in God we can be forgiven. That was really my take on Christianity. God, through our faith in Christ, can not only give us eternal life but also restore us and give us the chance to do things differently the second time around in this lifetime. From there, we are born anew to gain a new understanding and purpose for our lives. In effect, that happened when I offered a prayer to a God I didn’t understand back in the fall of 1989. From there, something happened that brought me to where I am today.

  I realized a long time ago that I’m either letting God into my life or pushing him out: there is no in-between. That is true with every moment, every decision I make, and every action I take. Once I abide by that, my thoughts eventually start to purify as well.

  As they told me in early sobriety, “You can’t think your way into right actions. You have to act your way into right thinking.” My initial journey into this new life was about letting go of all the stuff that was broken and didn’t work. That allowed all the good things that were put into my life as a youngster to come back in and fill me up again.

  Perhaps you think that faith isn’t relevant to your life. I understand that. After all, when I first journeyed into these new frontiers with all my antagonism toward God, the only one who was holding Him at the door was me. I’m the only one who pushed Him away.

  As far as religion goes, I’m very liberal in a lot of ways. Conversely, I might be conservative about money and so on. My liberal beliefs come from traveling the world and seeing it with my own two eyes. It wasn’t like one day I was a drug addict and then I woke up a Jesus freak the next day. It simply wasn’t like that. It was a process for me.

  I still find the religious issues confusing at times and I have had my doubts over the years, too. I don’t want you to think that there was a sudden, enveloping experience for me. I’m human, and I know that ultimately I will have doubts and wonder what it would be like to reenter the abyss. I think the best I will ever be on this issue, in this lifetime, is a work in progress.

  Will I try to sell you the idea that you must have faith? No. There’s a tradition I like to abide by: “Attraction works better than promotion,” and it’s something I try to adhere to in my life. How we live is a better testimony than running around talking about how spiritual we think we are. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve never really been outwardly vocal about my faith journey in the professional arena of music. In reality, my belief is more “live and let live.” I live my life my way and I let you live yours your way, without needing to make you see everything the way I see it.

  Everything I’ve learned about faith that has been effective for me has been instilled in me through getting clean from drugs, and I’ve made that very clear to the various pastors and churches who have wanted me to step forward and give testimony. They want me to stand up and talk about how the love of Jesus saved me, and all that stuff—but that’s not how it happened. I did come back to believe, but it was coming through the wide-open doors of recovery that made it possible.

  Kerry King (Slayer):

  When it comes to religion, I admire anyone—whether I agree with them or not—who doesn’t just chime in with, “Well, I believe this, and this is the way everybody in America thinks.” I give Ellefson credit for that. He doesn’t try to talk me out of my beliefs.

  I didn’t fall to my knees, pray to Jesus and get saved, and then see a burning bush on a white cloud. For me, the process was much slower, more methodical and intellectual: I came to my belief in a process of spiritual awakening. That’s why I didn’t just get saved, quit Megadeth, go into the church, and turn my back on it all.

  I believe that God kept Megadeth in my life for a reason. He kept my relationship with Dave Mustaine alive for a reason. That which you don’t learn from will keep presenting itself until you finally learn its lesson. And to a large degree, my relationship with Dave was something that kept presenting itself until I finally learned the lesson—to step up and be in acceptance of it without trying to change it. We both bring something unique to the table, and we don’t have to try to be like each other. Again, live and let live.

  When I was younger I was generally a passive, easygoing, path-of-least-resistance kind of guy, and having someone like Dave in my life has been very beneficial to me. He is a very bold, extreme man on the edge, and he really pushed me out there in a lot of ways to my benefit. At the same time, I bring something different, which is caution and a look-before-you-leap approach. The two of us are yin and yang, which is really the spirit and the beauty of Megadeth. Without either of us there is a different dynamic. There are specific roles in this band that were put in place, and I look back at them now with a seasoned sense of sobriety and from a Christian walk.

  God has always been with me. I was sixteen years old when my heart said to me, “Go west, young man,” and two years later I moved to California. A week after that I met Dave and we started Megadeth. Those things didn’t just happen by accident. In light of all the things I’ve been through, I look back with the benefit of hindsight and I think, “First of all, the good Lord has a sense of humor!” Secondly, it’s interesting that He can use something as insane as a rock band as a tool to push out to the front line. Our passions can be used for many purposes in this life, if we are open to seeing the possibilities.

  I remember talking to my mother about my faith one day when I turned down the dirt road to our house off Highway 71, which is the main route north of Jackson, Minnesota. I’ll never forget saying to her, “I feel really happy; I feel really good about my life and my friends. They like me, I like them, and everything’s great.”

  It was shortly after that time, age fifteen, that I started drinking, which took me on a ten-year journey in the other direction. Once that life got close to me, it started to pull me away from church, and to pull me away from what I call G.O.D., or “Good Orderly Direction.” You may ask, if faith allowed me to feel so good about everything, then why did I drink? A good question! I’ve come to see it as curiosity. Sometimes our curious nature leads us into things we know we shouldn’t do, but we do them anyway. From there, often a price must be paid. That’s where drugs and alcohol took me.

  The simplicity of my journey is that in my darkest hour I reached out to God, and something happened. When I was out of options, He was the last one there for me and then He started to do for me what I couldn’t do for myself. I surrendered and reached out to Him, and things started moving quickly in a new direction. This was the pivotal moment for me: it was a spiritual experience. The obsession with using drugs and alcohol began to lift, because when you’re strung out, not only do you have a physical addiction, but your head can’t get out of the game either. That’s what started to happen: I started to get out of the game. I started to find some resolve: I thought, “You know what? Maybe I can actually beat this.”

  Why, then, was I so prejudiced toward the Church during my drug years? A lot of that was simply because when you’re living in darkness, the light is not your friend. When I first met Dave back in 1983, heavy metal was fascinated with Satan. Black Sabbath is an example of music that has a dark, enchanting allure to it, and the late Ronnie James Dio wrote mystical lyrics which, at my age, I found very captivating. When Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast album came out, it was pretty much my high school theme song! I’ve read the Book of Revelation: now I know where Maiden got those lyrics from, and I see that story through different eyes. But because I was drinking and partying, metal lyrics took on a whole different meaning for me back in my younger days.

  As I started to go down darker roads, drugs and alcohol pulled me even faster in that direction, and all of a sudden I was a vampire. I really lived vampire hours. I used to brag that I lived “the other nine to five.” I started my day at 9 P.M. and went to bed at 5 A.M. So a
s a result, I was moving away from everything the Church talks about: Good Orderly Direction.

  Another reason for my prejudice was that I saw the Church as the establishment. I look back now and I think that most of us musicians are kids from families that probably had some religion in one form or another. I remember that some pastors would come to our church when I was a kid, and they would tell us how evil rock ’n’ roll records were, and they would have these big record-burning parties. They burned LPs by Rush and KISS and Judas Priest—all my favorites.

  It was such a turnoff. I thought, “If this is what Christianity is about, then forget it!” I knew that KISS wasn’t a drug band, they were a fun party band, and I thought that these people were so misinformed. They had such a hard-line prejudice against everything that I completely turned away from them. I realized to at least some degree that I was dancing with the dark side myself, even though I wasn’t fully in bed with it yet, but to turn back and acknowledge that the religious people were right in any way would have been to show weakness. Or so I thought. But there was always a little thing inside me, hanging on to the church, no matter how bad things got.

  For that reason, not taking a drink or a drug is of paramount importance, above all else. There would be nothing for me in that case: no faith, no family, no band, nothing. I had to be convinced of that before I could really embrace a new life. The trick for me is to always remember that. That’s why I’m active in faith development. You’re either growing toward it or you’re going away from it.

  I’ve turned down several gigs because of their association with drugs. A lot of musicians smoke weed, and I don’t want to walk around with a contact high. Even though I’m not physically smoking it, I’m breathing in secondhand smoke, and all it takes is a little bit of spiritual sharpness to wear off because there’s some pot around me. All of a sudden, that’s a way for the enemy to come back in again.