THERE HAD BEEN times in my life when I’d been relatively sober, but I was kind of like that old Western joke:
What do you get when you sober up a drunken horse thief?
A horse thief.
I was a frustrated guitar player who had a real hard-luck story growing up, and to deal with my pain and anger and loneliness, I medicated myself. But I didn’t really find any solutions until I started to do heroin. For me, heroin was the magic bullet. It changed the way I looked at the world. It killed all the pain, even more so than alcohol. Drinking stoked my anger. When I did smack, I mellowed. Growing up I never would have anticipated that I’d be a junkie. Especially a heroin addict. I was a Jehovah’s Witness, and I can still see the issue of the Watchtower with its painfully earnest antidrug message and the picture of a junkie on the cover, a filthy, fetid old guy drawing his injection up out of a rusty bottle cap.
But that’s not how heroin addicts get loaded, unless they’re locked up in a Turkish prison or something. Heroin was a much more accessible and mainstream drug than I had been led to believe. Far more insidious, too. You do a little heroin and the brain gets confused. It says, “Hmmm, looks like we don’t need to excrete any dopamine today. Already enough in the system!” So the brain instructs the pituitary gland to take a vacation. As long as you keep feeding the body (and thus the brain) more opiates, the masquerade continues. But here’s the problem: if the body’s natural mechanism for producing dopamine (and endorphins) shuts down for a day, and then starts up again, you’re going to feel a little icky. If it stops for three days, you’re dope sick.
I was willing to pay the price, to take whatever risks were involved. Frankly, it all felt like part of the package. I was a rock ’n’ roll rebel in a hot band. I had a beautiful girlfriend and a widening musical reputation, bolstered by the fact that most people who followed heavy metal knew of my role in Metallica.
One of those people was Chris Poland, a guitarist who had previously played in an L.A. jazz fusion band with Gar Samuelson. The two of them, in fact, had been high school buddies back in Buffalo (hence the name of their band: the New Yorkers), and they’d come out to California in search of fame and fortune and God only knows what else. Chris, like Gar, was a friend of Jay Jones.
“Dooood, you gotta check this guy out,” Jay said. “He played with Gar, and he’s fuckin’ awesome.”
On that point, Jay was correct. Unlike Gar, who was preternaturally laid-back and almost anemic in appearance, Chris was solidly built and ambitious. He introduced himself to me after a Megadeth show one night and basically asked for a spot in the band. Upon meeting Chris I was actually somewhat surprised that he appeared to be so robust, given his relationship with Jay and Gar. I just sort of expected another sickly jazz junkie. But in both demeanor and appearance, Chris was strong, in part due to the fact that Chris had a girlfriend named Lana whose parents owned a fleet of mobile burrito stands (“maggot wagons,” we called them) that delivered to construction sites around town. So Chris rarely had any trouble finding his next meal (or “getting well”), unless he got in trouble with the girlfriend or she got in trouble with Dad, all of which would eventually happen. The junkie’s life is rarely a straight line.
I listened to Chris for about ten minutes before making up my mind. The guy was an impressively dexterous guitar player—better than I was at the time, for sure—and, like Gar, he was informed by a jazz background that added nuance to his playing. Equally important was the fact that he and Gar already had developed a certain chemistry from having played in another band together and from having been friends for so many years. That was important to me, especially after the ugliness of my breakup with Metallica. I longed for that closeness. I’ve always said that when you are in a band with someone, playing music together, you can’t get any closer . . . unless you have sex with each other. Now, the truth is, most guys in bands do have sex with each other, in an indirect sort of way—pulling trains on girls, tag-teaming, sharing girlfriends, because, you know, when you’re in a band nothing is “mine” and everything is “ours.”
But I digress.
Our first backdrop for Megadeth.
Photograph by Harald O.
The point is, Chris was a nearly perfect fit. So we offered him the job on the spot.
Then we all went out and got loaded to celebrate.
Chapter 7
Mission: To Break All the Rules of God and Man
A good role model and a bad role model.
Photograph by Ross Halfin.
“And by the way, when you see your guitar player, tell him I said thanks for biting my pussy.”
Jay Jones took care of us, in a manner of speaking.
He’d show up at Mars Studio nearly every day, around noon, just as Ellefson and I were stirring from our slumber. To help clear the cobwebs, Jay would take us to a place called Norm’s, a really grotesque neighborhood luncheonette where $5.99 got you a hunk of dry meat, potatoes (mashed, baked, or French fried), a side of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a bowl of Jell-O for dessert. Oh yeah—and a bottomless glass of iced tea or lemonade. The food was horrible, but we didn’t complain. There was plenty
of it and we weren’t paying. It’s amazing how little you need to survive when you are young and chasing goals both noble (artistic success) and ignoble (the daily heroin or cocaine score).
We had learned how to eat for literally pennies a day. Jay didn’t mind paying, even though he had little money himself, because Megadeth was his ticket to a better life. I think he also genuinely liked our company—we were a rolling party at the time, and Jay was our facilitator. After lunch we’d go to a nearby pub, where Jay would complete the day’s transaction, dispense a balloon of heroin, and we’d all get well, just in time to start rehearsing. Each of us had his preferred method of getting high. I started out snorting heroin, then (as with cocaine) advanced to smoking, which provides for a faster, more intense intoxication. Gar and Chris Poland were far more experienced; both were intravenous drug users by the time we met them. Addiction, though, is addiction, and I don’t mean to minimize or distort my own capacity for self-destruction, but I could see right from the beginning that shooting smack was a whole different game, and frankly a little too scary for my tastes. I shot heroin only a couple times. Didn’t like the way it felt, didn’t like needles, didn’t like the whole culture surrounding it (which often involved sharing needles). It just seemed dangerous and unhealthy and, well, gross.
That we were able to make music—sometimes great music—while living this way remains something of a marvel. But we did. We were young, ambitious, talented, and indestructible. Or so we told ourselves. Prior to Chris joining the band we had recorded a three-song demo (“Loved to Death,” “The Skull Beneath the Skin,” and “The Mechanix”) that swiftly began making its way through the underground network of tape trade and distribution, much as No Life Till Leather had done for Metallica. We played up and down the Pacific Coast, mostly in L.A. and San Francisco, putting on ferocious stage shows that were sometimes brilliant, sometimes sloppy, but never boring. By this point Metallica’s first record had become a hit and the band was gathering momentum. I tried not to pay attention, but it was hard (and would only become harder). In interviews, Lars Ulrich would occasionally denigrate my contribution to Metallica, alternately describing me as a temporary guitar player or a mere footnote. More than once he actually criticized my guitar playing. Well, that was more than I could handle. If you want to say I was a drunk, fine. I was a drunk. If you want to say I was a handful, okay. I was a handful. I should have cleaned up my act. But don’t lie about my playing ability; don’t suggest that I wasn’t a major contributor to everything the band accomplished in its embryonic stage. Without my songs and my solos—without my energy—I don’t know that Metallica ever would have become the band that it was. A bold statement, perhaps, but there you have it. And I was righteously pissed that Lars couldn’t at least do me the courtesy of being respectful.
Flye
r for an early Megadeth show.
I responded in the most cutting and juvenile manner possible. Over the next couple years, as Megadeth carved out its own niche, battling Metallica for thrash metal supremacy, journalists and disc jockeys often requested interviews. Invariably, I’d calmly deflect any discussion of Lars, sometimes by speaking in Danish.
“Godmorgen,” I’d say with a smile.
The chip I’d been carrying on my shoulder since childhood only grew heavier as Megadeth cultivated a reputation. Our live shows, combined with the demo, naturally provoked interest from record companies. My goal was to land a deal with a major label right out of the starting gate, but it became apparent in fairly short order that we didn’t have the juice to make that happen. Rather, we couldn’t make it happen on our terms.
During a trip to New York we carried on a brief flirtation with a major record label. The company’s A&R director at the time was a charismatic gay man, very much out of the closet. I can say with a degree of certainty that while he may have known his business, he was also an intensely strange and aggressive character. I saw it for myself one night at the Limelight, a popular club in New York. The record company executive had taken us there as part of our recruiting trip, and it definitely had the desired effect. One of the first people I saw when I walked in was the guitar player for the Cars, which was an A-list band at the time. “Let the Good Times Roll” was among the first songs I had learned when I played in a band back in high school, so I couldn’t help but smile as I passed him, thinking, Man, I’ve made it now—I’m hanging out with the guy from the Cars!
As often happened at clubs in New York in the 1980s, we ended up in the bathroom snorting lines of cocaine. And in walked the record company executive. I’d been out with him before, so I knew of his prodigious capacity for partying, but this particular incident took me by surprise. He walked up to us, took a couple pills out of his pocket (ecstasy, I presume), stuck them in our mouths, and then tried to seal the deal with a big kiss.
Junior, the midwestern boy far from home, stood there with a blank look on his face. The record company executive, meanwhile, laughed like a madman. I managed only a weak “What the fuck?!”
I don’t know if this was the guy’s idea of a joke or just his way of showing his guests a good time. Maybe, I thought, this was the first in what he expected would be a long line of favors traded. But I wasn’t going there. If getting a major-label record deal meant I’d have to introduce my dick to some guy’s ass . . . well, then Megadeth would be going the independent route.
We met first with representatives of Enigma Records, a small label with a reasonably strong list of artists in its portfolio. When that didn’t pan out, we turned to Combat Records, an independent label out of Long Beach that was in some small way part of the Sony empire. Representing Combat in that meeting was Cliff Cultreri, the vice president.
Cliff was accessible. New York–born and –bred, he was thick around the middle, spoke with the nasal twang of Adam Sandler, and appeared more interested in being our buddy than in playing the role of record company executive. As I recall, in that meeting, Junior and I were somewhat cocky. We’d been romanced by labels large and small, and more were knocking at the door. It seemed unlikely that we were going to come out of this whole thing without a contract. Indeed, not more than five minutes after we left the offices of Combat Records, Cliff Cultreri came running out into the street, screaming, “Wait! Wait!” By the time he caught up with us, his face was flushed and covered with sweat, his breathing labored. For a moment I thought he might have a heart attack.
“I . . . called . . . New York,” Cliff gasped. I presumed he was referring to the parent company, but he didn’t elaborate. Probably because he was too tired. Or too excited. Maybe both. “They want . . . to . . . sign you.”
So we signed with Combat Records, and before long the showbiz pigs were sniffing around, trying to take advantage of us, teaching me why I needed to count my fingers whenever I shook somebody’s hand and why I needed to keep my back against the wall. The education would take time. I wasn’t terribly interested in the business end of things in those days. I wanted to make music, get high, and get laid. Not necessarily in that order. Megadeth facilitated the achievement of those admittedly hedonistic goals, and we had little concern for damage done to friends or family or reputation.
After moving out of the studio, I was essentially homeless, although Ellefson let me stay at his place for a while. I was smoking cocaine and heroin. We were junkies, we were bad boys, we were alcoholics. We smoked pot, got in fights, and fucked chicks. And we were utterly remorseless. As Chris Poland once said, “I guess our mission statement was to break all the rules of God and man, and we pretty much did.”
Actually, there was another mission statement, one that more accurately, if not more articulately, expressed our creative aspirations. Although it mutated with some regularity, the sentiment was consistent: to make Megadeth the “fastest, utmost-heaviest, most ultra-furious heavy metal band in history.”
Or some such nonsense. It sounded good at the time, and if the verbiage left something to be desired, at least the spirit was admirable. We would be heavier than heavy metal, faster than the fastest of speed or thrash metal bands. We would redefine the genre. On our own terms.
Despite the rampant promiscuity that was so much a part of our lives, we were all hanging with specific girls at this time. These were relationships of convenience and nothing more. Diana remained my true love, but since Diana lived with her parents and I needed a place to stay, I moved in for a time with a girl named Sharon.
Anyway, one night we were driving around in Ellefson’s van, working our way through some China white (synthetic heroin), when Chris Poland and I began to get into it a little bit. Chris was a volatile personality—probably not the best match for someone like me—and we had already had heated arguments by this time. These were due in part to the combustible nature of our relationship, but also to the fact that heroin has a tendency to make you . . . shall we say . . . grumpy. Not usually when you’re high, of course—smack users are generally pretty laid-back, so long as they’re well stocked. But when you’re not well, it’s a very different story. You get intensely irritable—Poland used to call it “the heroin bitch”—and in that state, it doesn’t take much to set you off.
I forget exactly how the fight began. I just remember Poland bickering incessantly with Sharon and Ellefson’s girlfriend, Robin, the volume increasing, the insults and threats getting uglier, until finally blows were being exchanged, with the two women slapping at Chris and Chris throwing a punch in retaliation. The screaming continued as Ellefson hit the brakes and pulled over. Not knowing who was to blame, but figuring any guy who gets in a fistfight with a woman (or two) deserves to have his ass kicked, I yanked Poland out of the van and started rabbit-punching his head, trying with all of my might to knock him unconscious. But he wouldn’t go down. The guy was so completely fucked-up that he refused to quit, so essentially it became a technical knockout. Only the intervention of Scott Menzies, one of Chris’s closest friends (and a future Megadeth road manager), prevented me from perhaps killing Chris that night. Scott jumped on my back and pulled me off; as he and Ellefson tried to calm me down, Sharon climbed into the driver’s seat of the van and hit the accelerator. The van jumped off the curb and rocketed toward a Bob’s Big Boy across the street. Fortunately, Scott was working in hero mode that night. Just as Sharon hit the gas, he dived headfirst into the van, fought her for control of the wheel, and rammed the gearshift into park.
The van let out a horrible groan and crawled to a stop. I still believe that if Menzies’s death-defying leap had been a second or two late, Sharon would have taken out half the customers at Bob’s Big Boy. She was capable of such madness, and if not for the fact that I needed a warm bed and food, I’m sure I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did with her. But this was the end of the line. It took the better part of an hour to pick up the pieces of this mess
. We tracked down Chris, who had wandered off, then drove to Sharon’s house. By the time we got there, she had passed out in the back of the van, so we deposited her on the front lawn of her apartment building. Then we tossed a few empty vodka bottles at her feet, to heighten the disgust of any neighbors who might happen by.
When I came back later that night, feeling not the slightest bit guilty and simply needing a place to sleep, Chris was on the sofa in Sharon’s living room. I didn’t care, didn’t think anything of it. We landed where we landed in those days. I woke the next morning with a brutal hangover and immediately reached for a Quaalude to dull the pain. After getting a glimpse of Poland, I decided to split the pill in half.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, wincing at his bruised and swollen face. “I think you’re going to need this.”
He took the pill, thanked me, and off we went to rehearsal, with no hard feelings. Sharon, however, was a different story.
When I returned to the apartment that evening, my shit was piled up in the hallway outside the door. Nearly everything I owned—records, stereo, clothes, even a little cookie tin containing a quarter-pound of pot—had been removed from the apartment. The only thing missing, oddly enough, was my pet scorpion (a gift from one of my customers). Except to the extent that I no longer had a place to stay, I didn’t care much about the dissolution of my relationship with Sharon, and I certainly didn’t blame her for kicking me out; I hadn’t exactly treated her well. But I was pissed that she’d left everything in the hallway, where it could have been stolen, and I wanted my scorpion back.
I tried knocking on the door for a while; no one answered, so I convinced a neighbor to let me in and then tried to gain access to Sharon’s apartment from the outside, climbing from balcony to balcony, three stories above the ground. Eventually I reached her apartment, and what I saw inside scared the shit out of me. There was Sharon half-dressed, with a 250-pound gray-haired woman I had never seen before and who looked like a man.
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