My Life With Deth (24 page)

For me, prayer is huge. It is the one method of spiritual communication I’ve seen work wonders in my life. So I pray every day, wherever I am in the world. In the beginning, I didn’t know who or what I was praying to, but things started to happen. Skeptical though I was, the evidence ruled against my doubts.

Part of any spiritual awakening is the journey itself. That journey usually includes seeking out fellowship with like-minded believers. This is what led me back to the doors of the church, if for no other reason than for my family to have a home with God.

These days, I find that modern church culture is fantastic. It is much different from what it was when I was growing up. Nowadays it is tied in with social media and with cool, uplifting rock music. For people of my age it needed to make that shift to remain relevant. In fact, that musical shift inside the church came from people of my age, many of whom are musicians who have toured and played out, gotten married, grown up, and realized that at some point, they can bring their guitar or bass into church and continue to rock out for a different cause. Even better, in church you don’t have hecklers, and you can bring your wife and kids, because no one’s drinking beer, throwing up, and spewing vulgarities at you. It has really expanded in that direction.

I have become good friends with a number of Christian musicians, one of whom is Jesse Reeves, who plays bass with the singer-songwriter Chris Tomlin.

Here’s a quick footnote from history which I find fascinating. In 1517, the German theologian Martin Luther challenged the political agenda of the Catholic priesthood, which taught at the time that believers could buy their way into heaven. Luther went back to Scripture, read it, and declared that the church was doing it all wrong. They were not following what Jesus said. Instead, they were really using it for their own political and personal gain.

That was the start of the Reformation, the Protestant movement,
and the origins of the Lutheran Church. This process extended when people such as my ancestors in the Ellefson family began to migrate en masse from northern Europe to North America in the seventeenth century. They brought their religion with them, in much the same way that Irish and Italian immigrants brought Catholicism with them.

Speaking of this development, there is a board of elders at our church, and at one point they wanted to elect me to be an elder. At that time I couldn’t do it because I was traveling so much. A few years later, they asked me again and I was able to say yes. I was brought in as an elder for a two-year term. I was initially reluctant because I didn’t know what it entailed, although they turned out to be a pretty relaxed bunch of guys. In fact, one of the first meetings took place at a Mexican restaurant and these guys put away quite a bit of beer. It was cool, though: these people weren’t alcoholics and they were perfectly entitled to a beer with their chips if they wanted one.

I believe, as Luther did, that the Bible speaks the truth, and that is why I was honored in 2006 when Pastor Jon Bjorgaard of the Shepherd of the Desert Lutheran Church and School asked me to lead a new contemporary worship group. He knew about my history in the rock world and also about my life in the Christian community, and he suggested the name MEGA Life!, an obvious play on my former band name as well as the basis in scripture of John 10:10.

I was honored, of course, although I was a little worried that Megadeth fans would consider it a bit dorky that I had gone from playing bass in stadiums to playing bass in church. My human pride kicked in a little there, I suppose, but I realized that anyone who would want me to stay in the same spiritual place of addiction that I had previously occupied is not someone whose approval I needed anyway. That was a revelation to me, and it took a long time for me to get there.

I started the new MEGA Life! group, holding auditions for musicians. On the first day of auditions, Julie and my kids came rushing into the church and told me that my mother had suffered a severe stroke back in Minnesota. She was only seventy-two years old. She had survived it, but she was at the hospital back in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I immediately booked a flight and flew up to see her. My mother had been somewhat of a shining star in VH1’s
Behind the Music
special on Megadeth for her sweet candor. When she had her stroke, a friend put the word out to the metal community, and we were showered with prayers and thoughtful words to her from the fans. It was truly a touching moment. Within a week, she’d taken up residence in the same nursing home where she had worked for the twenty years since I’d left home, back in Jackson, Minnesota.

My pastor told me when I came back to Arizona that when the Lord decides to do something like the MEGA Life! project, Satan tries
his hardest to distract leaders away from him. Not that my mother’s stroke was an act of Satan, but rather that it could be a distraction for me to not pursue the worship service. That was the first time I really connected the personal issues of spiritual warfare that I mentioned earlier.

As the MEGA Life! leader, I was on the church staff for about three years, and I learned many things. I realized that to people who don’t go to church, it can seem from the outside like a bunch of self-righteous, flawless people who run the place. Well, I’m here to tell you something: it isn’t just the holy who go to church! All of us have earned our place there, including the sickest of the sick. Ironically, as a supposed rock star and heavy metal guy, I was able to enter the church with a fairly practical approach to it, not trying to be grandiose and using it as a platform for my own notoriety. My approach was much more street level.

The benefits of attending church are many. When I was growing up, my life was a lot more stable and I felt a lot less fear. I felt better about myself and my place in the world as a regular churchgoer. That feeling of safety has come back to me in my adult life from my church attendance. I didn’t realize this a few years ago, though. My feelings about church were that it was culturally irrelevant, that it was dated, and that it was for my parents’ generation, not mine. Then, like I said, the church reinvented itself, and that was something that I wanted to continue with MEGA Life!

I quickly wrote a lot of songs for the worship group when I was the leader. If we needed a communion song, or a song for benediction, I’d write it. Essentially a service will be comprised of three songs plus a sermon and shared testimony. For two years MEGA Life! was an evening service, and after that it became a morning event.

After all of these transitions I was finally in a good place. I had graduated college; I had been in my own bands; I’d worked for Peavey; and I was involved in worship ministry at church. I had a pretty well-rounded life with a lot of stability. I thrived in these aspects of my life.
Rather than feeling like a boat bobbing up and down on the ocean, I now felt like a pontoon with stabilizers on all sides.

A THOUGHT

The Bass Guitar—and How to Play It

To me, playing any instrument well requires that you do it often. Practicing at home is good, but there’s nothing like being in a band room or on a stage with other musicians regularly. It’s the thing that really tightens you up as a player. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not about being the flashiest bassist, but rather about being consistently solid and stable in the band, whatever style you play.

The greatest bass player who ever lived? I’m not sure there is a “greatest” anything or anyone, because everyone brings something unique to the table with their style of playing. Some of the more special ones to me are Steve Harris, Geddy Lee, and Bob Daisley, who played in Rainbow and on the early Ozzy records. Those guys had very melodic and interesting lines and they are also great songwriters, which probably has a lot to do with why their bass lines are so prominent in their music. They are artists as well as bassists, and I’ve learned a lot from that approach in my own career.

We have so many generations of great music behind us now that there are a lot of genres, players, and influences to draw from. Whatever style you like to play, make sure you do your homework and learn the basics, too. Learn things like the blues and classic rock songs; learn some Beatles, Zeppelin, and country; and study the basics of jazz. In fact, once you learn Jazz 101 you will essentially have the basics to play with anyone, anywhere, and in any key.

It’s important to dumb it down and play some punk rock, so you can learn how to have some raw emotion in your music, too. Being refined is great, but most music I’ve ever played sounds best when it has some kicking energy to it and is not just played perfectly all the time. I
think there’s something we can all learn from the three-chord bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and, more recently, Green Day and Nirvana. That music is all about spirit, even though it may be lacking in some refinement. Also, learn to play by ear, because that can become your most valuable asset on any bandstand anywhere. Most bands don’t have sheet music, so don’t get too used to reading maps when you should be looking at the road signs anyway. Oh, and don’t snub the pick!

A lot of modern metal is tuned way down to B and even low A. Some of that stuff can be played on a four-string that is strung B, E, A, D, basically eliminating the high-G string. But since I learned how to play bass more formally, not knowing where the notes are in dropped tunings drives me crazy. I would rather grab a five-string and have all those notes available to me in a manner that is musically correct, even if I have to tune it down a whole step for a low A tuning. It keeps me from having to widen the nut space on the low strings, too. Plus, overall there is more wood in the body and neck of a five-string bass, and sometimes a longer scale length, which makes it better for reproducing the lower tunings.

“Somewhere early in my life the Holy Trinity went from Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Even stranger is that it all came full circle and restored itself to its natural order.”