Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (32 page)

DAVE ELLEFSON:
I met Dave in the apartment complex we both lived in. I had just moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota, where I grew up. I knocked on his door and said, “Hey, where can you buy a pack of cigarettes?” He slammed the door in my face like I was some annoying vermin. I knocked again, and I said, “Hey, where can you buy some beer?” and then he let me in. I was only eighteen, and he was twenty-one. Once we settled on a case of Heineken, he started telling me about Metallica and played me some songs. Then he started playing some new songs he was working on, “Devil’s Island” and “Set the World on Fire.” I was blown away. I was like, “I have to be a part of this.”

KERRY KING:
I did the first five shows with Megadeth after Dave left Metallica. Basically, we both played B. C. Rich and we had the same guitar contact, and somebody suggested we should play together. I had seen him play with Metallica when they were still doing clubs. I was flattered that he would even consider my dumb ass, because, fuck, I was, like, nineteen then. I also thought it was a good way to promote my own band while helping him out and maybe learn something on the way. After five shows I went, “All right, it’s time for you to find somebody that you’re gonna keep ’cause that ain’t me.” It would have flown fine if I had stayed in Megadeth, but I had way more evil ideas to get out.

TOM ARAYA:
It weirded us out when Kerry played with Megadeth. Me, Jeff, and [drummer] Dave [Lombardo] were like, “What the fuck?” But we didn’t talk to him about it at all. We just waited to see what he was going to do. And whatever he decided, it wasn’t going to affect what we were going to do.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
When I first met Kerry he was making that fabulous spiked pentagram belt and he was putting on that nail gauntlet. I was watching him do that stuff in his front room, and his dad is a sheriff, so his dad was sitting there watching TV and Kerry’s assembling this fucking evil belt. Who would ever think that Kerry would come from a really normal family with a sheriff for a dad? One of the funniest things Kerry King has ever said to me was when we were driving up the freeway and I was rolling a joint. I said, “Would you hold this?” So Kerry put his hand out and I put a couple of skunk buds in it and then rolled the joint. Then he smelled his hand and said, “Wow, this smells neat.” We were just kids at the time. As far as I could tell, he really respected his parents because he waited until he was in his twenties til he started doing any [partying]. He wasn’t even drinking back then. It was really funny because we’d all be drunk, [ex-Megadeth drummer] Gar Samuelson’s doing heroin, and there’s Kerry over there blazing away on guitar—sober. I remember thinking, “How can you get up there and play like that without having some kind of stimulant?”

BRIAN SLAGEL:
When Megadeth started, Dave [Mustaine] wrote me a three-page letter about what Megadeth wanted to do. He wanted Metal Blade to sign them. It was between us and Combat. They offered him nine thousand dollars and we offered them eight thousand. So they went with Combat.

SCOTT IAN:
Dave played me the demos to Megadeth’s first album,
Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good
. We were on tour with Raven, and we were playing the Country Club in LA. We were sitting in someone’s car and he was playing me “Skull Beneath the Skin,” and we were just like, “Holy shit,” banging our heads. That record still absolutely holds up. To be able to get kicked out of Metallica after having written a lot of
Kill ’Em All
, and then come back with
Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good
, churn out all those great riffs and songs, is no small accomplishment.

Megadeth recorded
Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good
at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California, between December 1984 and January 1985. The record is universally regarded as groundbreaking for jazzy, technical thrash, despite its poor audio quality, which was largely the result of the band spending most of its recording budget on drugs and therefore being unable to keep producer Karat Faye on to finish the album.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
Even after we were signed, we were so broke. I was selling dope to try to finance the band, and then I became one of my customers, and then I became my best customer, and then I became my only customer. I went from girl’s house to girl’s house to live. When we couldn’t find some tart that would feed us, we would take turns living in a car. At one point we lived in a studio with no windows, no toilet. The only time we could shower was when our manager would take us to the gym. We’d go there high on whatever we could find in order to not feel the pain and misery of starving to death, or acknowledge the lifestyle we were living, as shaming as it was.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
I was flat broke and I knew I couldn’t get any dope. So out of boredom one day I went down to the mailbox and checked my mail, and MasterCard saw fit to send me a brand new credit card with an $8,000 limit, of which $3,000 was available at ATMs. So I went right to the ATM and just watched $20 bills fly out of that thing, so I could go cop dope.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
We had [guitarist] Chris [Poland] and Gar in the band, and every time we turned around they would pawn some of our equipment for heroin. We had nowhere to turn. So, yeah, we would get high whenever we could.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
During the
Killing Is My Business
era I was a raving maniac, drinking moonshine when I couldn’t score dope. One night I had sex with some girl on a sidewalk outside of a gig in Austin, Texas, and she even had to pull her tampon out before we could do it.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
I was into black magic and witchcraft when I was a teenager. I put two hexes on people and the result was what I was asking for. It took forever to get that Satanic depression off of me because it’s just like playing with a Ouija board. You open the doorway to the dark side, spirits come through. It took almost twenty years to get rid of it. You ask yourself, “How is it possible that all this bad stuff is happening to me?” Well, because you flirted with the devil and you owe him. That’s what the lyrics to “The Conjuring” was about. That’s why I have a problem playing that song today. Fortunately, I’m saved now so I don’t have to deal with that, but God, man, I was going through so much turmoil from what I had done.

Impaired by substance abuse and past dabblings with the occult, but hardly incapacitated, Megadeth entered the studio in 1986 to record its second album,
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying
? It was originally funded by Combat and produced by Randy Burns. Impressed by Mustaine’s charisma and the band’s songwriting, Capitol Records bought out Combat’s deal, signed Megadeth to a multi-album contract, and re-produced the album, which would catapult Megadeth to the upper tier of the thrash hierarchy. The video for the title track became one of the first big thrash clips on MTV’s
Headbangers Ball
, and the song’s rapid-groove bassline was used in the opening theme music for
MTV News
for years.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
Things were looking up, but we were still living like junkies. David Ellefson was living with the singer from Détente [the late Dawn Crosby]. Dave told me nightmare stories of him being over there and her making him sleep on the floor while she had sex with another girl.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
In ’86, we had just made
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying
. We had a rehearsal studio downtown in LA. We built a loft there, and I’d sleep between there and any girl that would have me. One of them was a prostitute in LA; she told me she was a cleaning lady. I’m thinking, “This chick really likes me,” and then I find out she’s shooting pornos and then copping heroin from a taxi driver. The day that I had to take her down to do a photo shoot with [porn star] John Holmes was when I knew my days were numbered.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
[In 1988], we canceled seven Monsters of Rock [support-slot] shows in [European] soccer stadiums. Why? Because Dave Ellefson ran out of heroin. When I ran out, I would tough it out. I’d be sick for a couple days, I’d drink some Jack Daniel’s, and I’d be over it. He came up with some excuse that he sprained his wrist in the shower and the tour ended. So did our run for a long time. We took the gnarliest hit to our credibility.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
I was fucked up for a long time. I was lucky I never got busted for drugs. But there were times I’d be copping bags of heroin, swallowing them because the cops came along—and then getting interrogated by the cops and getting away with it. Then I’d have to stop off at a Mobil station and puke my guts out and weed through my barf to get the balloons of heroin out. I’d immediately pop them open and get high, and celebrate the victory of not getting busted. After a while, I was hanging out in apartment bathrooms smoking crack and doing heroin with people I didn’t know. And I was looking around and thinking, “How did I get with these people? I hate these people.”

DAVE MUSTAINE:
We just did not want to, no matter what, quit or give in. And sadly, we encountered some situations that were of the magnitude that other people would probably say “forget it.” We ran over a person in a taxi going 60 miles per hour—creamed the guy dead as a doornail. The driver in the taxi said, “Whoa. Huh. I hit that sucker clean in the head. Better send a meat wagon.” He had an absolute disregard for life, and that kind of stuff affects people, and it affected us very badly. But the thing is, we kept making good music through all this. We just put our heads down and stuck it out.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
When Dave set out to start his band after Metallica, there was a lot of pressure on him. It wasn’t until the early nineties that we stepped out of that shadow. People had to get their mind around the idea that Metallica didn’t have to fail in order for Megadeth to be successful. Once that happened, people embraced Megadeth and the competition stopped.

STEFFAN CHIRAZI:
For some reason, Dave seems to never have gotten over being kicked out of Metallica. It’s like he’s got some sort of illness. I could never understand why he could not move on. If you’ve been tremendously hurt in a relationship, I think you’re allowed a few years to work it through. Whenever I would interview Dave, I would turn the tape recorder off when he would start complaining about Metallica. I would say to him, “Dave, I’m not here to talk about that. I don’t want to write about it.” Then I’d turn it back on when he was done. It’s weird because Dave is a unique and wonderful guy and yet, to this day, he’s so tortured that he was kicked out of Metallica. To the best of my knowledge, he still gets his publishing [royalties] from the songs he helped write.

While Mustaine was wrestling with the shadow of Metallica, his former bandmates were proving why they were the kingpins of the healthy West Coast thrash metal scene. After touring for
Kill ’Em All
, Metallica flew to Copenhagen to work with producer Flemming Rasmussen (Morbid Angel, Evile) at Sweet Silence Studios. There, the band tracked
Ride the Lightning
, which was more musically intricate but just as heavy as
Kill ’Em All
. In September 1984, less than two months after Megaforce released
Ride the Lightning
, Elektra Records signed the band, making Metallica the first thrash act on a major label. It reissued the record on November 19 with the wheels of promotion spinning faster than the churning guitars on the opening track, “Fight Fire with Fire.”

LARS ULRICH:
We wrote
Ride the Lightning
in a garage in El Cerrito, California, with egg crates on the walls and no heat. The last four songs of that were done in a cold cellar in nowheresville New Jersey at my friend Metal Joe’s house, where we were cold and hungover all the time. So there was no luxury there. We just wanted to tear everything up and play shows and get drunk.

MICHAEL ALAGO (ex-A&R Elektra, Geffen):
I picked up
Kill ’Em All
at Jonny Z’s record store and I was blown away, so I went to the Stone in San Francisco to see them play, but I didn’t tell anybody I was going. . . . It was amazing. James [Hetfield] was an extraordinary, raw ringleader. He has the most charismatic, wild smile. And those songs! I was sold. I was friends already with Jonny and Marsha Z at Megaforce, and when I came home and told them I had been to see Metallica and I wanted to sign them, they lost their minds. They were furious.

JONNY ZAZULA:
Metallica played in New York at the Rio Theater and that was a big show. Everything came together perfectly, and they were the greatest band in the world. There were about 800 people there. The next night was the Roseland Ballroom where we had Metallica, Anthrax, and Raven and had 3,500 sales. I think it only held 2,500. That’s the night Metallica got signed with Elektra.

MICHAEL ALAGO:
I knew there were other A&R people there from other labels, so I bolted the door shut and wound up being the only one backstage early in the evening. I said, “Look, I’m freaking out. I love you guys and you have to come to my office tomorrow.” They got there bright and early. I ordered Chinese food and beer for them and we talked. I think they liked that I was their age and I was that enthusiastic, and that I would take the right care of the band. And I did, from day one.