Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  In some ways, Mustaine’s long bouts of self-abuse were probably an extension of the ruin he had felt as a child. When he was seven, his parents divorced, leaving Mustaine and his sisters and mother living in poverty in the suburbs of Southern California. By his early teens, his mother was absent much of the time, and Mustaine spent the next few years residing with his sisters and their families. One day, when he was fifteen, says Mustaine, one of his brothers-in-law punched him in the face when he found him listening to Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny. “I decided right then,” says Mustaine, “that I was going to play this music. That would be my revenge.”

  In the early 1980s, after playing in a series of pop and metal cover bands, Mustaine hooked up with Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, from Norwalk, California. Together, they formed Metallica—a band that, within a few years, would become the most important heavy metal ensemble since Led Zeppelin. It was Metallica, in fact, that codified speed-metal as a music derived from the rhythmic brutality of hardcore punk and the yowling melodic drive of early-1980s British denim-and-leather metal bands like Motorhead and Iron Maiden. But for all its gifts, the group was also beset with serious personality conflicts. Mustaine and the others fought frequently—sometimes about drug use, sometimes about leadership of the band—and in time, the tension became unbearable. “One day,” says Mustaine, “they woke me up and said, ’Uh, look, you’re out of the band.’ And I said, ’What, no warning? No second chance?’ And they said, “No, you’re out.’

  “To this day,” continues Mustaine, “I have a hard time seeing those guys. Something inside me feels like saying, “You know, you guys are really fucked for firing me. You didn’t give me a chance—and I really miss you; I miss playing with you.’ And while they’re responsible for their own success, I don’t think they ever would have developed the way they did if I hadn’t come into the picture. I was a key part of that band.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Mustaine settled deeper into his drug use and thought for a time about quitting music altogether. But in 1984, after he met Dave Ellefson, a bassist who had just moved to California from rural Minnesota, Mustaine decided to take another stab at band life, and formed Megadeth. “I thought of this band as not just the return of Dave Mustaine,” he says, “but also my revenge. I thought, “This is the music I want to play: a jazz-oriented, progressive music that’s going to alter heavy metal as we understand it.’ ” Mustaine proved good to his promise. Though Megadeth shared Metallica’s passion for hard-and-fast riffs, the best tracks on albums like Peace Sells . . . But Who’s Buying and So Far, So Good, So What! demonstrated a melodic and textural versatility that no other band in metal has matched.

  But Megadeth has also seen its share of problems—including numerous band firings, as well as Mustaine’s worsening drug problem. “One of the earlier members in the band,” he says, “finally got me into heroin. He had told me it was like being back in the womb, and, I mean, I was a slut. Pussy was my favorite thing in the world and for me to be fully inside a pussy was the fantasy of a lifetime, and that’s what heroin was like to me. I became like a dope-seeking missile, and after a while I was losing my mind. I got to the point where I just could not play anymore. I knew that I was going to die if I didn’t get sober, and even that wasn’t enough to make me stop. I would have done anything for coke or heroin. I would have even gone into prostitution.”

  One morning in early 1990, while driving home in a drug-and-alcohol stupor, Mustaine was pulled over by the police. He had heroin, cocaine, speed, and liquor in his blood system, and he also had some of those same substances in his car. He was arrested, and a short while later he was given a choice: Get clean—and stay clean—or go to jail. It turned out to be the impetus Mustaine needed. Within a few weeks he had joined a twelve-step addiction recovery program, and has stayed clean since. “In fact, tonight,” he says, seated aboard the bus in Lubbock, “is my birthday: A year ago today was the last time I used any drugs. And you know what? Now a lot of my dreams are coming true. In the last year I got married, we put together our best version of Megadeth yet, and we also finished our best record, Rust in Peace. I think it all has to do with the fact that now I pray and meditate a lot. I don’t sit at home by the phone waiting for some fucking creep to come over with powder.”

  Mustaine glances at the clock on the wall. It is now past 1 A.M. The bus should already be on its way to the next stop, but everybody’s waiting for a final band member to arrive. When somebody suggests that the musician is out having sex with a young woman that had been seen backstage, Mustaine turns momentarily livid. The woman, says Mustaine, is a recently recovered addict, and he won’t tolerate anybody in his band using her. As it turns out, the rumor is false—the person in question had barely even met the woman—and a few moments later when the woman shows up to say goodbye to everybody, Mustaine and bassist Ellefson (who is also a recovered addict) spend several minutes talking with her and encouraging her to keep up her sobriety.

  “A lot of things have changed for me,” Mustaine will say later. “I think I now have a more genuine concern for others—though I’m still not strong enough to be around people who are drinking or using drugs. Also, I don’t have the same kind of interest I once had in the occult. I think it’s simply that now I know that there is a God, and, uh, it’s not me.”

  THE NEXT DAY—when the Titans tour appears in San Antonio—is a Sunday, and one of the local newspapers bears a story on its front page under the headline: “Face to Face with a Devil.” It is a flimsy story of a woman who was reportedly exorcised of a demon by a local priest, but it is covered as if it is major news, and it also serves as a reminder that these Texas cities that this tour has been visiting the last few days are strongholds for conservative religious values. On the surface, towns like these might seem unlikely places to harbor a substantial heavy metal audience. (In fact, a few years back, San Antonio’s city officials considered banning heavy metal concerts within the city, but instead settled for an ordinance restricting kids under the age of fourteen from attending “obscene performances.”) But as Donna Gaines points out in Teenage Wasteland (probably the best book written about contemporary youth culture), conservative communities tend not only to breed a fair amount of repressed anger and fear, they also tend to breed conservative fears—like fears of the devil and rock & roll. And, if you’re young and have had to live with these sort of values too long, what could be better as a way of rubbing against the local ethos than subscribing to the symbology and values of heavy metal?

  You can see signs of the local youths’ appetite for offense as the crowd begins to arrive at San Antonio’s Sunken Gardens amphitheater. Most of the fans here are young, and many of them are wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with the names of their favorite metal bands (besides this show’s headliners, big favorites include Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Danzig). These shirts are rife with horror-derived imagery, including depictions of rotting ghouls, greenish skulls, and apocalyptic demons. The iconography may sound gruesome, and yet when you’re confronted with an endless variety of these shirts in mass quantity, there’s actually something mesmerizing—even lovely—about it all. Plus, it’s simply a kick to draw the attention or disapproval of others by wearing these shirts. It’s a way of boasting your toughness and your proud status as an outcast. Conservative moralists can fume all they like about the question of what art is tolerated inside our museums, but they’re missing an important point: The canvas has shifted in this culture, and it is kids like the ones who are gathered here in San Antonio who are bearing the defiant new art on their chests. And the best part is, there is no way this art can be shut down or deprived of its funds. It has already spilled over into the streets, and into our homes.

  At 7:00 P.M., Slayer takes the stage in San Antonio, and begins to slam across its fierce music. There is a dense and pummeling quality to the band’s sound—the bass rumbles, the drums explode at a rat-a-tat-tat clip and the guitars blare and yowl in unison—but it�
��s all played with a remarkable precision and deftness. Meantime, the audience that is jammed up close to the stage erupts in frenzy, with some kids slamming and bounding hard against each other while others clamber atop one another so they can dive over the barricade. This goes on and on until even the band can’t take its eyes off the action. On a night such as this, there isn’t anything in all rock & roll like a Slayer show. Watching the melee and hearing the fulmination of the music, you feel like you’re seeing a live band as exciting as the Sex Pistols.

  At the same time, this is a band that deals with some fairly unsettling subject matter. When Slayer first emerged in the mid-1980s—chasing hard after the punk-metal coalition that had been made possible by bands like Black Flag, Metallica, and Venom—the group’s repertoire (written at the time by guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman) was heavy with songs about Satan and hell. But in recent years, under the influence of bassist and vocalist Tom Araya—who is now the band’s chief lyricist—the emphasis has shifted. Araya—whose family fled Chile during a time of political unrest and who has lived around some of the rougher sections of Los Angeles and witnessed the effects of gang warfare—decided the band should write more about the human and social horror of the modern world, and over the course of the band’s last three albums, he has developed a special affection for topics like political oppression, modern warfare, gang killings, and serial murders. Perhaps the band’s most chilling song is “Dead Skin Mask,” told from the point of view of Ed Gein, the famous mass murderer who killed numerous children and adults and flayed them, and who later served as the inspiration for such works as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. In “Dead Skin Mask,” Araya enters into Gein’s heart and mind, and tells the story of his crimes from inside that dark and awful place.

  “I know that a song like that,” says Araya, “where I’m writing it as if I am the person who is doing the killing, freaks people out. They say, ’How could you sit there and think that way?’ Well, it isn’t hard at all. In fact, it’s very easy. I sit there and I ask myself, ’Now how would it feel if I really wanted to kill somebody?’ And I know: I’d feel an exhilaration. I’d feel awesome.

  “See, when I wrote ’Dead Skin Mask,’ I had just read this book called Deviant, about Ed Gein. As I read it I was trying to understand this guy—why he did what he did, and how he got that way. The fact that he could seriously skin these people and preserve their body parts . . . I mean, this guy had noses and ears. He had garter belts made from female body parts. This guy was fucking out there. Can you imagine doing that and thinking that it’s okay, and not really knowing the difference between right and wrong? That’s just fucking amazing, to do things like that with no heart at all. And then I came across another book about this guy named Albert Fish, who a long time ago murdered all these little boys and then ate their penises. He said he tried eating their testicles, but he found them too chewy.”

  As he speaks, Araya’s face gradually lights up, until by the time he gets to the part about chewy testicles, he is smiling delightedly. After a moment or two, he catches what he’s doing and blushes. “You know,” he says, “I can sit here and talk about mutilation with a smile on my face and laugh because of the things these people do, but I do know the difference between wrong and right. I mean, I sit and think about murder, and sometimes I think it would be real easy to do. And then I write the stuff, and for me it works as kind of a release. I figure, well, I’ve thought about it, I know what it would feel like—and that’s good enough for me.”

  LISTENING TO Tom Araya talk about the titillations of murder can be as unnerving as listening to Slayer’s music—in fact, even more so. At least with Slayer’s music it’s possible to make a case that, by presenting horror in such unflinching and unromantic detail, some of the band’s boldest songs actually work as critiques of violence and evil. But after talking to Araya, you have to wonder if some of the songs aren’t precisely what they sound like: namely, celebrations of the ruin of life.

  Actually, either interpretation—critique or celebration—seems fine by Slayer, who is probably more adept than any other band at depicting terrible realities without giving any indication of how the band views the moral dimensions of those realities. But by completely sidestepping any moral reaction, it’s possible that Slayer has misjudged just how deep the horror runs in the stories it has chosen to tell. Killers like Ed Gein or Albert Fish may be fascinating to read or talk about, or to see portrayed on the screen, but the truth is, real human lives were tortured and destroyed at their hands, and the horror and misery didn’t end there: The surviving families and friends of both the victims and the killers had to live the rest of their lives with the effects of those crimes, and with the knowledge of all the hopes that were forever transformed and sealed off in the seasons of their bloodshed. This is the sort of horror that never knows an end—the sort that lasts beyond death or fiction or art—and it may be a greater evil than Araya and his band are prepared to comprehend or address.

  At the same time, for all his creepy interests, there’s really nothing unpleasant or evil-seeming about Araya himself. In fact, he comes across as a basically funny, courteous, and sweet-tempered guy who has a deep affection for his family and his fans, and who only becomes really unpleasant when he witnesses a security guard roughing up some exuberant fan. In short, Araya is a bit like many of the rest of us: On one hand he can be fascinated by the depictions of evil in a true-crime book or a piece of fiction like The Silence of the Lambs, but when the real violence spills over into his own world, he is genuinely repelled.

  And sometimes that violence can spill over in unexpected ways. For example, during the recent Persian Gulf War, Slayer received several letters from troops stationed on the front line, some of whom stated they were anxious to kill the Iraqis (“the fucking ragheads,” as one soldier fan put it) and thanked Slayer for providing them with the morale to do so. Closer to home, Geraldo Rivera presented a show a year or so ago called “Kids Who Kill.” It featured a panel with five adolescents, all of whom had killed either other kids or family members, and all of whom cited a passion for thrash or speed-metal bands—particularly Slayer. To some critics, incidents like these might suggest that Slayer’s art is a dangerous one, that it works as an endorsement of violence or might even help embolden it. Well, perhaps. But at the same time, what would it be like if the music of Slayer didn’t exist? If the band disappeared or were silenced, would that absence diminish the frequency of murder? Would it have had any impact on the killings committed by the children on Geraldo Rivera’s show?

  Jeff Hanneman, one of Slayer’s lead guitarists (and the author of “Angel of Death”—the song that got the band thrown off CBS Records), doesn’t think so. “Obviously,” he says, “a lot of our fans do identify with evil—or at least they think they do. But the truth is, when you come across one of the most hardcore Slayer fans—one of these guys going Sa-tan! Sa-tan! Sa-tan!—and you say, ’Now calm down, dude; do you really believe in Satan?’ he might go, ’Yes! Sa-tan!’ And then you go, ’No, no—do you really believe in Satan?’ he’ll go, ’Uh, well, no, not really.’ You know, to him it’s cool because it’s evil, and evil is rebellion.

  “I mean, these are just normal kids—at least normal by today’s standards,” Hanneman continues. “You have to remember, this society has changed a lot, and some of these kids are coming from some pretty rough family realities and some pretty hopeless conditions. This music is a way of reacting against all that. They go to a show, thrash around for a few hours, and then they go home and hopefully they’ve worked some stuff out of their systems. Whereas when they listen to something like Mötley Crüe, with some song about a hot girl . . . well, they can relate to that, but they’ve got this anger inside that they need to get out and Mötley Crüe doesn’t help them do that.

  “Basically, I think we’re doing a positive thing,” says Hanneman. “But if some kid goes overboard, I can’t take responsibility for that. I mean, w
e all have an inborn capacity for violence, but most of us know where to stop. If somebody goes over that line, then their boundary is obviously gone, but that has more to do with how they grew up than with our music. Sometimes we’re a little bit over the borderline about killing and stuff like that, but it isn’t like we’re out there giving them knives, saying, ’Here, cut your throat. Hurt somebody.’ That isn’t what we’re doing.”

  Rick Rubin, who has produced Slayer since the mid-1980s, has his own view of the band’s impact on its listeners. “There’s no question,” he says, “that a lot of really troubled people like this band. You can see them some nights at the show: kids who are living with boredom and stress every day of their lives, kids who really have no ambition and nothing to live for. And I think that these kids recognize that the people in this band are troubled spirits as well. There’s a kinship there. All these people—both the band and its audience—have these feelings in common. Slayer exists because people feel this way—because some kids kill, or want to kill. But Slayer is simply a reflection of that condition, not the cause, and you shouldn’t blame a mirror for what it reflects. If you don’t like what Slayer represents, then change the world, and make it a better place. Do that, and bands like Slayer won’t exist.”

  TO A CASUAL listener, most speed-metal bands might seem rather interchangeable. After all, most of them tend to boast predictably dire names (some of the more memorable current ones include Morbid Angel, Suicidal Tendencies, Atrocity, Entombed, Carcass, Coroner, Repulsion, Dismember, Deathcore, Abomination, Hellbastard, Napalm Death, Pungent Stench, Death Strike, and, uh, Defecation), and nearly all of them trade in predictably dire topics like, you know, death, the devil, and damnation. What’s more, they all feature guitarists who blast out grinding sheets of rhythm and noise, and vocalists who yell or growl impossibly wordy descriptions of perdition at impossibly breakneck clips.