Ex-MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman took part in a soundcheck with his former band ahead of the Dave Mustaine-fronted outfit’s first-ever gig at Tokyo, Japan’s famed Budokan. Friedman will come up on stage for three songs during the show’s encore. Check out photos below.
Asked how he was approached to play with MEGADETH at Budokan, Marty told Jonathan Montenegro‘s “My 3 Questions To“: “Really about as simple as any approach could possibly be. Dave said, ‘We’re playing in Japan in February. You wanna jam?’ And I’m, like, ‘Sure.’ And that was really it. I mean, it’s really something that simple. So, I wish I had a more detailed answer for you, but that’s about it.”
Asked if he as a favorite MEGADETH album from his time with the band, Marty said: “If you would have asked me at the time that I was in MEGADETH, I would have definitely whatever album we were working on at the time, because I can tell you with a hundred percent certainty that anything that we did when I was in the band was a complete effort to do our absolute best, and when it was finished and we all thought it was done, we signed off on it and we knew it was the best album that we could make and it was really what represented us at that period of time. Now, looking back over all these years, I haven’t really heard everything in the details that I’ve listened to it when I was in the band, but I would probably say that my favorite record is somewhere between ‘Rust In Peace’ and ‘Countdown [To Extinction]’. But my favorite period of time in the band was probably ‘Youthanasia’ and ‘Cryptic Writings’.
“With this MEGADETH thing coming up, it’s really kind of forced me to think about MEGADETH stuff, and it’s been a while, and it’s kind of fun looking back through all this stuff,” Friedman added.
The Budokan concert, which will be live-streamed on February 27 and available on demand for a couple of days after, will mark the first time in more than two decades Friedman has shared a stage with the group.
On February 14, Friedman released a video message in which he said: “What’s up, everybody? This is Marty Friedman here. Just a quick announcement to let you all know that I’m gonna be joining my good friends in MEGADETH on stage at the Budokan in Tokyo on February 27th. It’s been a real long time since I’ve been on the same stage with Dave Mustaine making music, and we’ve both taken severely different paths in our life since then,” he continued. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m so extremely proud of the part that I played in MEGADETH‘s history and MEGADETH‘s legacy, and I’m also very, very proud of the achievements that the band has done in my absence. But for right now, at this moment, I just feel immense joy and serious adrenaline to look forward to playing together at this very, very cool place. So I just really wish you could be there, and I hope to see you soon.”
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