NEW SG Interview: Dave Mustaine – A Heavy Metal Memoir0

by Ryan Stewart

April 11, 1983 was the definitive day in Dave Mustaine’s professional life. As lead guitarist and contributing songwriter for an up-and-coming thrash metal band called Metallica, he had been living out his dream of making a living at playing metal for over a year and a half. Like many at the time, he was also beginning to sense that his band was something truly special, a ferociously talented foursome that had the potential to go where no metal band had gone before. A musical virtuoso with unlimited ambition, Mustaine’s eyes were fixed on the future, but he was badly neglecting the present. A problem with drinking and drugs, owed in part to a rootless childhood, had plagued him for years, and as success drew closer his reckless behavior increased and lines were crossed. No one knows what the final straw really was, but on the morning of April 11, while Metallica was in N.Y.C. on business, Mustaine was awoken by singer James Hetfield and unceremoniously handed a Greyhound ticket home to L.A. He was out of Metallica, without so much as a warning.

He spent the next four days in hell, traveling from N.Y.C. to L.A. by bus without a dollar to his name, bumming bags of chips off of seatmates and wondering how his dreams had vanished into smoke. Despair and heartbreak couldn’t stifle his talent, though. Reading a handbill about nuclear war he picked up in a Greyhound station, he noticed a catchy phrase: “The arsenal of megadeath…” He began scribbling lyrics on the back of a muffin wrapper, and by the time he was deposited in L.A., he had a new mission: to rise from the ashes and form the fastest, most savage metal band of all time. Twenty-seven years later, Megadeth has earned its reputation as a pioneering metal band, one with landmark platinum records like Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction, and Youthanasia and one that can (and frequently has) shared a bill with those other metal godfathers, Metallica. SuicideGirls recently called up Mustaine to discuss his new autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, and discovered that age, success, and a newfound devotion to Christianity haven’t mellowed him in the slightest.

Read our exclusive interview with Dave Mustaine on SuicideGirls.com.