For decades, Dave Mustaine’s time in Metallica has been one of rock’s most contested intersections of legend, ego, and fate. In a candid, three-hour interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, the Megadeth frontman looked back at how it all began — and how it all unraveled.
“I was done with [my previous band] Panic and I said, ‘I’m gonna find something else to do,’” Mustaine said (via Blabbermouth). “So I got a newspaper called The Recycler, and it’s just a rag from Los Angeles, Orange County. It’s like a county classified ad magazine. And I’m looking in the classified ad magazine. Go figure. The biggest band in the world would advertise in this newspaper.”
There it was: a call for a lead guitarist. He picked up the phone and called: “So I look at it and it says, ‘Wanted lead guitar player’ and mentioned a couple bands. So I called up and I got Lars on the phone, and I said, ‘Yeah, well, I like Motörhead and I like Budgie.’ And he goes, ‘You like fucking Budgie, man?’”
That was it. “And I went, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And that was the icebreaker because Budgie is a Welsh band. It’s a three-piece. It’s very obscure. And by me listening to them showed that I had credibility in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal world because of the bands I was listening to. They were not a band like a white metal band or a progressive metal band. They were a three-piece from Wales that kicked ass. They didn’t have to have all those silly names in front of it.”
From there, the conversation turned into an invitation: “So, Lars and I were on the phone, and he made that comment that I know them, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ So we talked about meeting face to face.”
He drove from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach, where Lars lived.
“And the funny thing was my mom was a maid and she had actually worked an event for catering in his complex he was in. And I’m thinking, ‘Go figure. My mom was a maid here, and your mom has a place here. What a story that is, two different sides of the same coin.”
Inside Lars’ place, he heard a song that would become legendary.
“And so I went into his place and started talking to him. And he played this song called “Hit The Lights” that was written by a guy named Lloyd Grant. Metallica didn’t write that song. Lloyd Grant wrote it, and then he was friends with Lars, and then Lars introduced him to James, and then they started playing “Hit The Lights”. That’s a song that I heard from them first, and I said, ‘Wow, this song needs way more lead solos in it.’ It was just me being cocky, being me: ‘It needs more lead solos in it.’”
That attitude didn’t scare them off. “And he was trying to figure out if I was for real. And so we went to rehearsal. He said, ‘We’re gonna try you out.’ I said, okay. I mean, I knew how good I played. I have been gifted, and I know it’s not by my own doing, so I don’t try to take any credit for it. So I don’t care how good I am or not, or what people say, or anything like that. So I just knew what I knew, what I knew.”
The rehearsal didn’t go as expected: “And I went to Ron McGovney’s parents’ fourplex. They had this place where James was living with Ron. And I went up there with Lars, and I set up my amps and I plugged my guitar in, and I just started warming up. And they wouldn’t come in. They wouldn’t come into the rehearsal room. So I put my guitar down and I thought, ‘This is really strange.’ And I walked out and I said, ‘Guys, are we gonna do the audition?’ They said, ‘You got the gig.’”
He didn’t doubt it. ‘Cause I could play that stuff. I mean, there weren’t very many guitar players like me around at the time. Who were they? Randy Rhoads. There were people like that. The guy from Ratt — Warren DeMartini was really great. But real shredders? There weren’t a lot of us around at the time.”
Being in Metallica felt like fate. “Well, again, it’s kind of like it seemed like this was what my destiny was.”
Their first concert? A school show — possibly one Lars had attended. “And when it came time for us to do our first concert, we played at a high school, or maybe it was a junior high school, Lars might’ve gone to. I know he went to it, but I can’t remember if it was elementary or junior,r or high school, whatever.”
But more than playing, Mustaine handled business and fights. “And from that point on, it was just clear that whenever there was any kind of altercation that was going down, I would be the one who would take care of it. James was very peaceful, and Lars, was a little bit of a devil; he liked to have fun. But, yeah, if there was ever any stuff going down, I had to take care of it.”
Even the money came through him. “When we went up to San Francisco and did our first couple of shows up there at a place called The Stone, I was the one who had to go and collect the money.”
Because, as he explained, clubs had plenty of ways to shortchange a band.
“And there are a million ways to embezzle or to be corrupt when it comes down to running a club or a bar, when it involves a band getting paid. They can say all kinds of stuff. And if you don’t know, you don’t know. And most kids my age at that time didn’t know. And they try and get money, and they’ll say, ‘Well, you sold 200 tickets and you have a bar tab here, and so we’re gonna give you 150 bucks.’ And you know that they made a killing on their booze. You know that they made money on the food and snacks that they have there, and the ticket prices. Plus, they take a giant whack at your merchandise. And that was my gig. I would go do that.”
The next chapter was a cross-country move — and a crash.
“When we decided we were gonna move out to New York, that was because Lars had found somebody he wanted to manage us, this guy Jonny Zazula, who had Megaforce Records. And Jonny heard our demo tape, the No Life ‘Til Leather demo tape. And he lost his mind, just like everybody else in the world.”
They loaded a truck and headed east. “We were driving through the snow. None of us knew how to drive through snow except for Lars, because he was from Denmark. And I’m driving this Ryder truck. It’s a 24-foot truck, and it had a tow bar and it had James‘s pickup on the back.”
Disaster struck. “We hit black ice, and the whole thing spun around while I was driving. And I managed to keep it upright in the middle of the freeway, but the truck stopped, and oncoming traffic was coming towards us.”
And it almost killed their sound guy. “The guy that had produced — I think he produced the first Metallica record; his name’s Mark Whitaker. He was the guy who was doing our sound and stuff. He almost died. I had to push him out of the way, and a truck was to the right, or right where he was standing. So if I hadn’t seen that truck coming and saved his life, he’d be dead right now.”
Soon after, the band switched trucks — and, secretly, made a decision.
“And when we went to the U-Haul place to get our truck, we placed and moved all of our gear into the new truck. James and Lars had made a decision to replace me because they tried to pin that driving thing on me as the last straw.”
That wasn’t the only accusation. The drinking had become a problem for all of them: “We all drank. That’s why they called it Alcoholica. I mean, they didn’t call it Dave-Alcoholica. We all drank. And they continued to drink like that even after I was gone. But that was, I think, the beginning of the end.”
He brought riffs with him to New York. “I had a reel of tape, this quarter-inch tape, that had probably two days’ worth of guitar riffs on it, just me playing and playing and playing. And we took that tape player and the reel of tape with us out to New York.”
But it didn’t matter: “We did two shows out there, and after those two shows, they woke me up one morning and said, ‘Look, you’re out of the band.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘You’re out of the band.’ I said, ‘No warning? No second chance? You’re not gonna give me a warning? You’re just gonna kick me out?’ And I thought that was unfair. And it showed a grotesque lack of character.”
He told them not to use his music.
“I told them when I left, ‘Do not use my music.’ And of course, they used it. “Ride The Lightning” I wrote. “The Call Of Ktulu,” I wrote. Let’s see, what else? There’s “Phantom Lord”, “Metal Militia”, “Jump In The Fire”, “The Four Horsemen”. And I wrote a bunch of “Leper Messiah” too. They didn’t give me credit for that. You listen to the riffs, you know they’re my riffs. It’s like, you think I’m gonna all of a sudden hear my riff and say, ‘That’s not me.’ So, yeah, I wrote a lot of their music that made them, and all the solos on that first record were mine — the best Kirk, could try and copy them.”
The issue, he says, wasn’t drinking — it was violence: “Because when I got drunk, I got violent. James and I had gone out to a club one time. It was the old Mabuhay [Gardens in San Francisco]… Some guy came out of the alleyway and said, ‘There’s a guy beating some girl up in the alleyway.’”
He went down to stop it: “I, being the champion for justice, did not want to hear that and not do anything. So I went down the alleyway with James, and, of course, James, not being a fighter, started yelling out, ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him.’ And the guy comes out from behind a van, and he was much bigger than James, and he said, ‘Who’s gonna kill me?’ And James goes — points to me. So I immediately grabbed a guy and put him down in a submission and started rabbit punching him until he stopped moving.”
There was also a fight over a dog: “She leans up against the car and puts her paws on the front quarter panel, and James goes bang and kicked the dog. And I went, ‘What did you just do? What did you just do?’ And it went from the front yard into the house, and there was still stuff being said. And I said, ‘You better shut up or I’m gonna punch you in the mouth.’”
It escalated.
“Ron McGovney says, ‘If you hit him, you’re gonna have to hit me first.’ And I said, ‘You stay out of it.’ And then James said the same thing: ‘If you hit him, you’re gonna have to hit me first.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you win.’ And bang, I hit James in the mouth, and then I hip-tossed Ron into his television set-up. And that was it. Two strikes and it was over.”
Lars tried to intervene: “Lars was pulling his hair, going, ‘I don’t want it to end this way.’ And I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve already told you, it’s either me or James.’ And we did that a bunch of times, ’cause James was doing stupid stuff. And I told James the same thing. I said, ‘Man, it’s either me or Lars, ’cause Lars sucks.’ And I got the ax in the end. So it’s good. Fine.”
When he got home?
“I contacted a friend of mine and I said, ‘I quit.’ She said, ‘No, you didn’t. You got fired.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I got fired. I quit. I got fired, whatever. I’m back home. Wrong word. it’s not changing the outcome.’”
But he stayed on message: “I made sure not to ever say that I quit, ’cause I wanted people to know that I was unfairly dismissed and that I didn’t give a shit. ‘Cause we [Megadeth] may not be as big as they [Metallica] are. Hell, their biggest song, “Enter Sandman”, go look up the band Excel right now. Look up their song — I think it’s something “Into The Unknown”. [The track is actually called “Tapping Into The Emotional Void”.] Pretty similar.”
1 Comment
If it’s true he kicked your dog, you have every right to beat his ass, not some lousey one punch Dave.