Mustaine

by Dave Mustaine

  “What do you want?!” the woman growled.

  “Uhhhhhh . . . I want my scorpion back.”

  Sharon then came to the window and began screaming at me.

  “Yeah? Well too fuckin’ bad. You’re not getting your scorpion back.” She paused, smiled. “And by the way, when you see your guitar player, tell him I said thanks for biting my pussy.”

  I had no response for that one. All I could do was stand there slack-jawed, thinking, Whoa . . . Poland. You fucked my girlfriend. Touché to you, bro.

  THE FIRST MEGADETH record was called Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good! From concept to finished product, it was an adventure, during which I learned more about the music business than I ever imagined. And most of it was not particularly encouraging. Oh, the run-up was fine—crafting the riffs in rehearsal, writing the songs themselves, learning to have confidence in my own ability not only to play guitar but to sing. The latter was the bigger hurdle. Right up until we went into the studio, I was still considering the possibility of hiring a full-time vocalist. Prior to making our demo, we had a guy we liked. His name was Billy Bonds, but he showed up for rehearsal one night wearing makeup and eyeliner, and that was the end of that. I didn’t care if the guy could sing like Robert Plant—there was no way some glam-band wannabe would be the face of Megadeth.

  Second show ever, Ruthie’s Inn Berkeley, 1984.

  Photograph by Brian Lew.

  “Fuck it,” Ellefson said. “Why don’t you just try singing?”

  It took time to learn proper technique. I didn’t know how to breathe efficiently or how to pace myself so that I wouldn’t wreck my vocal cords. Consequently, I developed a unique singing voice. Not everyone is a fan, of course. But there’s no questioning the originality. When you hear a Megadeth song, you know it. My voice is every bit as recognizable as James Hetfield’s or Axl Rose’s. Giving up the security of (relative) anonymity that a guitar player enjoys was equally challenging. Say what you want about lead singers: they’re arrogant, egotistical, immature, petulant, hypersensitive. They also have huge balls. Without that particular attribute, you can’t get out onstage and sing. It’s just not possible.

  After receiving the contracts from Combat Records and finding the language almost indecipherable (I’ve since grown far more savvy about these things), I had to find an attorney. Jay Jones suggested a lawyer with whom he had done some business in the past, and we figured, well, if Jay says he’s good, then he’s probably good. As it turned out, this was not a decision that worked in my favor. I remember looking at the contract and wondering why it seemed to be so one-sided, with everything favoring the record company. I noticed incentives for the attorney, but I wasn’t discriminating enough to question any of it. I just wanted to make music and have a good time. That’s all any of us wanted.

  By this point we were full-blown junkies. On more than one occasion David Ellefson and I would visit the attorney, and I would fall sound asleep the minute he began speaking in legalese. Junior would stay awake and try to pay attention, but he didn’t know what the fuck the attorney was doing, and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit it. By the time the ink had dried on all the contracts, we wound up with one of the most pathetic deals in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Even by the sorry standard of independent labels, we got fucked over.

  Our entire budget was eight thousand dollars, a figure so insultingly low that it was almost laughable. And yet, we were undeterred. The album would be recorded at a studio called Indigo Ranch in Malibu. The studio was originally built by and for the Moody Blues in the 1970s (thus the name Indigo), so there was a legacy of professionalism and success attached to it, which was important to us. Every artist gets a charge out of walking into a studio or concert venue and standing in the same spot where great musicians have performed in the past. You like to think that the history seeps into your marrow, becoming a muse of sorts. If that sounds a little mystical, well, it’s true nonetheless, and despite the perversely minuscule budget, I was excited about getting into the studio and putting our mark on the world.

  Unfortunately, things began to go wrong almost from the day we arrived. Gar and Chris showed up with Jay Jones, armed with about a hundred pounds of frozen hamburger meat and a huge cache of cocaine and heroin. Basically, we spent about four grand on drugs and four grand to make the record, which is just one of the many reasons why Killing Is My Business did not come out the way I had hoped it would. Simply put, we ran out of money.

  Incredibly enough, we also ran out of dope within a week. Without dope, we were incapacitated. Without dope, there could be no record. So I called a friend and begged for assistance in finding some cocaine. We ended up driving all the way from Malibu to Manhattan Beach to get the coke, and it was just awful, watered-down shit that didn’t facilitate the process at all.

  Building up our following was going to take time, but the fans were there from the very first show.

  Photograph by Brian Lew.

  Frustrated, angry, dope sick, we ended up firing Jay Jones in the middle of the project (although he would slide in and out of our lives for years to come). For a while I was concerned that we might not even finish the record. Ellefson and I were living at the time with a man named Karat Fay, who was the sound engineer on Killing Is My Business. Karat was a competent enough engineer, but he was another in the long line of oddballs associated with Jay Jones (who had hired him for the job). High on Karat’s résumé was the fact that he had previously worked with Kiss. Why some old dude who had spun the knobs for Kiss was supposed to be right for Megadeth, I don’t know. But there he was. Karat was nice enough to let me crash at his place after Sharon threw me out. That was generous, and it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. But after a few days of watching Karat walk around the house naked (which was something he did far too often for my tastes), I began to wonder exactly where I was going with my life.

  Singing was not my idea!

  Photograph by Brian Lew.

  We wound up going to the record company and getting an extra $4,000, so the whole album cost $12,000 to make. A pittance, really. But we got it done, turned it in, and then began discussions about cover art. This, too, proved to be a disappointment.

  I had already loosely conceptualized a logo for Megadeth and with the help of a friend named Peyton Tuttle had sketched out some original artwork well before the first album was recorded. I had drawn the logo myself because I had wanted to get a tattoo, one that incorporated my feelings about religion and repression and freedom of expression. The logo featured a skull and crossbones, with an additional pair of the latter placed in such a way that they looked almost like twin crucifixes. Ultimately this led to the creation of our mascot, Vic Rattlehead, a skeletal creature whose eyes, ears, and mouth are covered or clamped shut—“see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”—and whose mythical evolution was the centerpiece of a song called “Skull Beneath the Skin,” the third track on Killing Is My Business. In the song, poor Vic stumbles across a black magic séance; he gets caught, captured, and . . . well, a lot of very bad things happen to him.

  Prepare the patient’s scalp

  To peel away

  Metal caps his ears

  He’ll hear not what we say

  Solid steel visor

  Riveted across his eyes

  Iron staples close his jaws

  So no one hears his cries

  When I told Combat about my concept for the logo, they had no problem with it. I turned in the artwork and waited to see the finished product. Today I’d handle things much differently. I’d expect to be involved every step of the way. I’d insist upon seeing sketches and mockups. I’d work closely with the graphic artists in charge of the design. But I was a neophyte, and the record company treated me as such. To this day I don’t really know what happened to the cover art I suggested—whether it was lost or ignored. I do know that when the album came back, and I saw what they had done to the cover art, I was mortified. The formidable Vic h
ad been reduced to a caricature. Rather than a brilliant and disturbing image, the cover of Killing Is My Business featured what appeared to be a plastic Halloween skull and a variety of dime-store accoutrements. It looked as though someone had turned a beer can inside out and used it as a visor to cover the eyes; the blood looked like ketchup. Everything about the design smacked of amateurism. I remember holding the cover in my hands and saying, “You have got to be kidding.”

  Poor Vic. He deserved better. Vic had been born not so much out of my contempt for organized religion but out of my fascination with comic book lore. When I was a kid I would go down to the corner store and buy packs of baseball cards with bubblegum inside. One day they had superhero bubblegum cards, and I got one with Iron Man inside. Then I got one with Captain America, and pretty soon I was devouring comic books, immersing myself in the fantasy world of flawed but courageous heroes. I wanted to be like them. And if you think about it, Vic is very cartoonlike. Much of Megadeth’s success can be traced to the popularity of certain iconic images and the way they fit into our lyrics. One of our most popular songs, for example, is “Holy Wars: The Punishment Due,” the second half of which is based on The Punisher, a graphic novel about the great Frank Castle. Inspiration is where you find it, and mine, at least in the beginning, came from the vastly underrated and underappreciated realm of comics and graphic novels, particularly those with a nihilistic bent.

  Vic was supposed to serve as an homage. Instead, in this incarnation, he was a joke. Not exactly the way I had it planned. Years later Killing Is My Business was reissued with cover art more reflective of what I had in mind. But in 1985, we were stuck with a plastic skull and ketchup. And there was nothing we could do about it.

  The album itself, while not exactly a masterpiece, was far from the embarrassment the cover art suggested. There was a lot to like about Killing Is My Business—the energy, the speed, the storytelling. Granted, the sound was a bit muddy, but that’s what you get for twelve grand. There are gems on that album that hold up to this day, especially when you listen to the digitally remastered version; all things considered, I’m proud of the way it turned out. While far from platinum, the album sold briskly, especially for an unknown band on an indie label, and was well received by critics who cared enough to take notice.

  Although Killing Is My Business announced Megadeth as a new voice in heavy metal, it was actually an old pop standard that became one of the record’s most popular tracks. The song was “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a bluesy little tune made famous by Nancy Sinatra in the sixties. I can still hear it coming out of the speakers of my mom’s Ford Fairlane, parked by the beach at Lake Cachuma, with the doors open and the volume cranked as we splashed in the water.

  “You keep saying you got something for me . . .”

  I connected with that song on a visceral level, felt drawn to it in a way I’d never known. Might have just been hormonal, of course, but still . . . when that happens, you don’t forget it. When we got together and started rehearsing for the first Megadeth record, the opportunity to do a cover was presented. It was an easy way to add some material to a record, to give you a little breathing room if you didn’t have enough stuff; back in the day, there was only so much space you could put on each side of a vinyl LP before the grooves of the record narrowed to the point of incompatibility and the songs would begin to overlap. We didn’t want to put a lot of material on those early records, out of fear that there would be bleed-through. So we kept the formula simple: four songs on each side of the record, eight songs in all. Each song would run approximately four minutes in length. We went into the studio to record Killing Is My Business armed with seven original songs. That meant we had room for one more. And I wanted it to be something completely different, something totally unexpected. Something you’d never expect to hear from a speed metal band.

  The choice was obvious.

  It wasn’t hard to convince the other guys in the band that “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” would be a great way to close the record.

  “Look, we’re kind of a smoky jazz band anyway, right?” I said, exaggerating just a bit (okay, maybe a lot). “It’ll be perfect.”

  The song was good on record but great when performed live. It became a fan favorite, especially as we added drama, dragged out the bluesy intro, and turned the song into something of a showpiece. We’d have one of our roadies stand at the side of the stage and throw out a bar stool for Junior. With the lights down, he’d light up a cigarette and just sit there and play, riffing through the bass intro for as long as he felt like playing. Finally, at the end of the intro, I’d yell, “Okay!” and the guitar would kick in, and then the drums, and then the song belonged to Megadeth. And that was when Ellefson would jump to his feet and kick the bar stool off the stage.

  Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of jam bands. I’ve seen bands that play on through extended bathroom breaks by the lead singer, or through costume changes or God only knows what else. Rarely, in my opinion, does it work. It’s like that old joke popular among musicians, in which two guys are walking nervously through a jungle, listening to the rhythmic beat of drums in the distance. And suddenly the drums stop.

  “Bad news,” one of them says.

  “Why?”

  “Bass solo.”

  True enough. But in the case of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a little jamming was appropriate. And entirely in keeping with the spirit of Megadeth.

  About the only person who didn’t like our version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” was the song’s writer, Lee Hazlewood, although, interestingly enough, he waited a very long time to voice his displeasure. I had altered some of the lyrics in an attempt to appeal to the kids who formed the core of our audience. For example, “something you call love, but confess” became, in the Megadeth version, “something you call love, but I call sex.” I honestly thought the changes were so small as to be insignificant, but Lee felt otherwise and eventually asked us to take our “vile and offensive” version of the song off subsequent issues of the record.

  It’s worth noting here that Lee’s protest came more than ten years after Killing Is My Business was released. A cynic might argue that Mr. Hazlewood’s sensibilities were offended only after the royalty stream slowed to a trickle. I do know that he never failed to cash a check. Regardless, his protestations received some media attention, and we acquiesced. At least for a while. When we rereleased the record a few years back, “These Boots” was included, but with all of Lee Hazlewood’s original lyrics rendered indecipherable. My words were audible; Lee’s were beeped out.

  Call it an odd compromise if you’d like. I prefer to think of it as a triumph of technology over hypocrisy.

  Chapter 8

  Familiarity Breeds Contempt

  Megadeth backstage: Gar Samuelson, David Ellefson, me, and standing in the back, Mike Albert.

  Photograph by William Hale.

  “Why the fuck is your bitch running off with the limo?”

  It was like riding a rocket.

  That’s the way I felt in the early days of Megadeth. Everything happened so quickly, and our relationships were so combustible, that the best strategy was simply to hang on and hope for the best. Chris Poland once said it was like being in the movie Fight Club—every night. That’s not a bad analogy, either. Unfortunately for Chris, he rarely got to play the role of Tyler Durden. That one usually belonged to me.

  Every band has its problems, not least of which is merely keeping a lineup intact. I have admiration for any band whose career stretches out over

  decades, rather than years, without multiple personnel changes taking place along the way. Bands like the Rolling Stones, U2, a handful of others. Endurance of that type takes commitment, but it also takes luck, diplomacy, and common sense. About the only time it happens is when success comes early, roles are assigned and accepted, and the money piles up to such an extent that everyone realizes the folly of rocking the boat.

>   In most cases, though, the band undergoes seismic shifts long before anyone sees a nickel. Pretty soon you have to make a decision: do I commit to the band, or do I do something else with my life? You’re sitting at home, hanging out with the old lady, and the guys are waiting for you at rehearsal. Do you leave . . . or do you stay? The old lady thinks “rehearsal” means “partying with the boys” (which it often does). The bandmates, conversely, think “hanging out with the old lady” means “I don’t give a shit about the band.” And so you lose either way. All bands eventually break up because of one or more of the four P’s: power, property, prestige, pussy.

  As Megadeth prepared for its first tour, we were an impressively wild and narcissistic collection of miscreants. We honestly believed that it was possible to drink and take drugs and fuck like Caligula every night and still be one of the most important bands in heavy metal. But there is always a price to pay. Just a few hours before we were scheduled to go out on the road—and not just for a few days, mind you, but for a legitimate tour—Chris got busted while trying to score heroin. I couldn’t believe he had done something that stupid; I was livid. What were we supposed to do—cancel the whole tour? Our first tour in support of a legitimate record? The consequences would have been severe.

  We had to find a new guitarist. Immediately.

  “Don’t worry about it, dooood,” said Jay Jones. “I’ll get Mike Albert.”

  “Who?” I’d never heard of the guy.

  “Mike Albert,” Jay repeated. “He played in Captain Beefheart. Trust me, the dude shreds.”

  So I go meet this guy . . . and . . . Jesus. What a sight! He looked a little like Benjamin Franklin, with tufts of graying hair on the sides of his head and almost nothing on the top. A camouflage baseball cap did little to hide his age—he was probably fifteen to twenty years older than anyone else in the band. But Mike was an undeniably feisty little grandpa of a guitar player, with the cranky disposition you’d expect from someone who’d spent much of his life on the road. Mike stuttered and twitched nervously whenever he became uncomfortable, which happened a lot on that first tour.