My Life With Deth (12 page)

The next day I somehow played the Donington set—the biggest show of my life, in front of 107,000 people—but I was so sick and strung out, I was dying up there. Onstage, I violently whipped myself around, using the adrenaline to distract me from the pain. Once I got off the stage, I was so sick that I just went to the bus and fell apart, hearing KISS in the distance as we rolled back to the hotel for the night.

Right after Donington, we had three more stadium festival shows scheduled with Iron Maiden in Germany, and I ended up having to
cancel Megadeth’s participation in all three of them so I could go home and get into rehab, as Charlie and I had agreed. Our agent, while very shocked, stood by me. I don’t know who was responsible for making up my excuse, which was that I’d broken my arm in the shower and had to cancel the shows, but I wanted to take the blame for the cancellations somehow, even if I didn’t want it said that “David Ellefson’s on heroin and has to go to rehab.” I wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

Nowadays, of course, everyone can talk about rehab, because our culture is used to celebrities crashing and burning. Back then, it wasn’t in vogue yet. It was horrible and embarrassing. I’ve since gone back and tried to make it right with everybody, because I put people in a position where they had to lie to cover for me. That’s probably the worst part of addiction: You may think you’re going out in a blaze of glory by yourself and that your life is your own. You simply want to be left alone to do what you want. But the reality is that you’re connected to other people and you’re taking some of their moral character down into the flames with you. Everyone around the addict suffers, too.

We flew home to Los Angeles and I went straight into a drug rehab program at the Valley Presbyterian Hospital, with the help of the sobriety guru Bob Timmons, who had been recommended to me by our management. It was supposed to be a ten-day detox, but I only lasted three. Quite early on in treatment they told me, “David, there’s only one thing you have to change, and that’s everything,” which was scary. I thought, “You know what? No girlfriend is worth this much suffering.” I left and scored dope to get high on my way home.

Charlie bailed pretty quickly after that.

Although my first stint in rehab had failed, I was still going to methadone clinics in L.A., trying to get sober—or at least trying to get off heroin, which is not the same thing. At the same time, we were demoing songs for our next album, which would become
Rust in Peace
, including “Holy Wars . . . the Punishment Due,” “Tornado of Souls,” and “Rust in Peace . . . Polaris.”

We had a rehearsal room over by Dodgers Stadium, a decrepit little
hole of a place called the Hully Gully. Dave, Chuck, and I would rehearse there every night. Usually I’d wake up at about three or four in the afternoon, get some dope, and start rehearsing by seven or eight o’clock. I’d be up until five or six in the morning. I started when the sun went down and passed out shortly after the sun came up. I was a total vampire.

Despite our writing songs for
Rust in Peace
, these were really our darkest days. I wanted to clean up, but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want my current life, but I didn’t know if I wanted a new life either. I was just dying somewhere in the middle, with one foot in tomorrow and one foot in yesterday, oblivious to the beauty of today.

Slash from Guns N’ Roses often came over to hang with Dave and me around this time, as GNR were just wrapping up their world tour for
Appetite for Destruction
. We had a good time together, just playing guitar, partying, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. It was funny because I would play a lot of guitar with Slash and it felt like a really creative period, but Dave would just look at us and say, “You guys just play the same riff over and over again. . . .”

Slash was a great guitar player and a supercool guy. It was a real treat to jam with him. He really understood metal music, but was also a very broad-based rock ’n’ roll guitarist, with a gutsy vibe to his playing. With the successful completion of the Appetite for Destruction tour, the financial floodgates were about to open up huge for GNR, but at this time he was still living in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment right behind Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. There was a lot of chatter along the lines of “What would it be like if Slash came into Megadeth?” but that was really about it.

I still had to deal with my ongoing drug habit. My first attempt at rehab had failed, so I checked myself into Brotman Medical Center in Culver City in February of ’89. During that stay I experienced a brief moment of clarity. There was a big hall there where they always had their Saturday-night meeting, and it was mandatory for all the rehab patients. I was so dope-sick and strung out that it felt like having the
flu, mono, and pneumonia all at once. One night at the mandatory meeting, the evening’s speaker was talking right in front of me. I was a few rows back, and I just bowed my head to pray and asked, “God, please stop me from feeling so bad right now.” A few minutes later I realized that I was actually paying attention to the speaker and I was no longer thinking about myself and how terrible I felt. I remember it clearly: I prayed, I asked for help, and I got an instant result—even if it was fleeting. It was my first spiritual experience since I was fourteen.

I still didn’t want to be sober; I just didn’t want to be strung out anymore. I didn’t want to change my life, because I was scared of leaving my comfort zone, even though it was actually quite uncomfortable. As a result, that second rehab didn’t work, nor did a third attempt the following month. I kept hearing at meetings that half measures avail you nothing, that you’re either all in or you’re all out—it’s that simple. Besides being strung out, I was running out of money, accruing debts, and unable to pay my bills. I was really living on borrowed time on every level—financially, spiritually, and morally.

During this period in 1989 we had to make a drummer change with Chuck Behler, who had recorded and toured
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
His drum tech Nick Menza was always brought in on that tour as an understudy for Chuck, in case anything ever happened to him and we needed a replacement behind the drum kit. Dave told me to check him out, so I went over and auditioned Nick at a small rehearsal hall just west of the Burbank Airport in the San Fernando Valley.

Nick was a very charismatic guy and quite artistic, too. He liked to draw and he could play guitar fairly well when writing his own songs. His father was a renowned jazz bebop sax player named Don Menza. If you mentioned his name in jazz circles, people really lit up. Nick was really excited when he auditioned for the band, and he looked great behind the drum kit. He talked fluent “dude” and was the Tommy Lee of thrash metal.

Once Nick was in the band, we started guitar auditions to round out
the new lineup. We tried the guy from Jag Panzer and a bunch of others, some of whom had prepared and some who had not. Some of them assumed that they would get the gig without knowing that many of the nuances in Megadeth’s music are found in the picking hand, not just the fingerboard hand. A lot of guys learned the notes for the fretting hand, but never understood the rest until they got in the room with us. Other musicians, however, understood the advanced techniques behind our music.

Dave, Nick, and I had this understanding that the guy would set up next to me in the auditions, because I was, as it were, the band’s de facto diplomat. I’d help him set up and then Dave would call the tunes. We could tell within the first four to eight measures of a song whether there was a vibe: it was that quick. It’s like being with a girl—you pretty much know within the first few sentences of the conversation whether or not you click. Dave and I had a secret message where we would reach back and switch off the wireless transmitter packs on our guitars, and we’d know right then that the audition was over. Then Nick would be the guy to usher him out the door. We met half a dozen
guitarists. I was usually the one who would have to tell them that it hadn’t worked out.

“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott of Pantera was invited to audition around this time. Back when I was dating Charlie, we went to visit her parents in Texas. During that trip, she suggested we make time to hang out with the guys from Pantera. I guess she’d dated Dimebag or something. He was called “Diamond” Darrell back then, and he was a big guitar star in the magazines. Pantera were the reigning champions of Texas back then, but they were still a hair band, having just gotten Phil Anselmo in the band and recorded their
Power Metal
album. We did some drinking with them and Darrell told me, “Man,
Peace Sells . . .
changed my life.” The next night we went to hear them play at a club in Dallas. They were great: it was mostly cover songs, with a few originals, too. They invited me to join them onstage to play “Peace Sells” with them. They played great, even though they drank hard.

I told Dave about this in early 1989 when we started putting out feelers for guitar auditions, and brought up Dime’s name. Pantera were just turning the corner, though, because they were about to sign to Atco and were ready to record
Cowboys from Hell
.

We also considered Jeff Waters of Annihilator. Nick and I were huge Annihilator fans, but Jeff was in a very different headspace in those days with Annihilator coming quickly up the ranks. So it never went anywhere. In recent years I’ve become good friends with Jeff, and we’ve talked about the “what-ifs” had he joined the band. He’s a great guy and I love hanging with him.

We’d just about given up. Dave and I had moved to a new apartment complex called the Studio Colony over in Studio City, and by then I was quite strung out. I would wake up at three or four in the afternoon after the previous night’s partying, having missed my 1
P.M.
call time for rehearsal. Nick was on time and often waited hours for us to show up. Despite all this, we had demoed three songs over at Track Record Studios back when Chuck Behler was still in the band, and these served as the foundation of the new album. They were
“Tornado of Souls,” “Polaris,” and “Holy Wars.” We spent our time auditioning guitarists and writing the rest of the record. Nick was the only successful audition out of the batch, so the three of us soldiered on.

During this time I was on various methadone programs, and I would have to drive about thirty to forty-five minutes in rush-hour traffic from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood to get it, because the clinic only offered it between six and ten o’clock in the morning. If you missed those hours, you were sure to be dope-sick.

I’d started having serious emotional and mental breakdowns from doing so much cocaine. I recall one night in particular, I called Nick and his girlfriend Stephanie after I’d had a load of cocaine, even though everyone thought I was clean, and I was all nervous about it. I freaked out, left a rambling message on Nick’s answering machine, and flushed all the cocaine down the toilet in a drug-induced panic. The next day, when Nick and Stephanie asked me if everything was all right, I tried to cover my tracks and make out like everything was cool. Talk about shame.

As I said earlier, sobriety was a big trend at the time. One day I was sitting in my apartment waiting for my drug dealer to call and the phone rang. It was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. He had called, at the urging of Bob Timmons, to make a sobriety call on me. It was basically one addict reaching out to share his testimony with another addict. I understood why he was calling, and I’d grown up as a big fan of Aerosmith. Now, as a professional contemporary, I really grasped the purpose of the call. But as I was sitting there, I was thinking to myself, “Man, I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to my idol telling me to get off drugs, and at the same time I have to hurry him up and get him off the phone so my drug dealer can call me!” All my childhood dreams were being blocked by my addiction. That was the whole of 1989 for me, hiding and sneaking around to feed my addiction.

Around this time we switched managers to Ron Laffitte, who really helped the band by bringing us some great new opportunities.