My Life With Deth (26 page)

The first song we played was “Symphony of Destruction,” which sounded great. We looked at each other and we knew right away it was going to work. After that we went out to dinner, and Dave told me that he was impressed with the way I looked and played. He said, “You’ve got the life that I’ve always wanted.” Just for him to say that was enough. We hugged and he said, “Are we going to do this?” and I nervously said yes. He went home thrilled, and I thought to myself, “What did I just commit to?”

I have a tendency to do this: it’s a shortcoming of mine. My initial reaction was “Never mind the money: let’s just do it!” but then my head kicked in and I started worrying. But once your head starts getting involved, that’s your ego getting in the way. Don’t listen to it,
although I did on this occasion. I called Dave and told him that I was worried about letting go of the Peavey gig and all the things I had in my life, and he was devastated—but he reassured me, and I was in.

There’s a saying that goes “You will keep being presented with a lesson until you finally learn that lesson,” and this was my lesson. To finally jump in and stop trying to control the outcome, to have faith that it will all work out as it should. Over the weekend I played on the new Megadeth track “Sudden Death,” which was being used on the
Guitar Hero
computer game. But I was still worried all that weekend, and on Monday morning I had a long conversation with Dave where I laid all my fears on the table. I told him that we’d been through a lot together. He told me, “Why don’t we take it one day at a time?” and quoted Scripture, reminding me that the Israelites took forty years to make a journey that should have taken eleven days. How long were we going to wander around like that, he asked? We would never know until we tried it. Sometimes Dave’s wisdom is pretty simple, and this time I heard it.

I got home and handed the phone to Julie, who talked to Dave and asked about his wife, Pam, and their children, and they had some laughs together. After that, Julie and I talked, and she said, “You need to do this. You haven’t been really happy since you left the band, and Dave is really asking you to come back. Do it because you’re his friend. Don’t even do it as the bass player for Megadeth: just do it as a friend. If it doesn’t work, at least you two will walk away as friends.”

As it happened, Peavey were making cutbacks at the time, and after seven years with them, my job went away—just as I was rejoining the band. If that isn’t a sign of a higher power at work, I don’t know what is. I was grateful to them for my job there. I got to study business and apply those principles in the real world at the same time. It was a great eight-year period of my life that was about to transition once more.

Initially I signed up for the one-month Rust in Peace U.S. tour. Shawn told me, “Come on, it’s just a month,” probably knowing full well that a month would turn into a permanent commitment. And I’m
glad he did it, because when I rejoined Megadeth in February 2010, I really felt that a new season of my life had begun. I handed the reins of MEGA Life! to a good friend, Ray Berry, and when I’m in town share my testimony there about once a year. I also play bass in the services when the schedule allows, and my wife and kids have been able to let go of their service commitments and attend with other regular churchgoers. It’s really lovely.

Meanwhile, I’ve been able to transition into other areas of service in the church community. I’m now the director of community outreach, and I’ve been able to put other alcohol and drug recovery–based courses in place, too. Over the years I’ve learned that a spirit of rotation is good for us when doing volunteer work. It keeps us from trying to take ego-based ownership of things, and it allows for other people to be able to step up and serve with their talents, too.

The Rust in Peace tour was an incredible high for us. We played Latin America and then did a full seven-week tour of Europe. From there we rolled right into the Big Four dates. One of the coolest things was that Metallica called a band dinner, the night before the first show in Warsaw, for the band members only, with no managers or other associates. Robert Trujillo was the greeter at the front door of the restaurant and as soon as we walked in, Kirk Hammett and Dave started chatting. It was a great opportunity just to break bread with each other before the shows actually started. We did the hang before we actually played any music.

James Hetfield and I had a chance to connect for the first time. As much as our two bands have been around each other over the years, it was great to rekindle my friendship with those guys. The next day at the first show, James was standing outside the dressing rooms, cheering everybody on and shouting, “Have a great show!” A band that big doesn’t have to do that: they could just as easily retreat to their dressing rooms and after the show hop on a Learjet and be out of there. But that wasn’t Metallica’s style. It was genuinely like we were one big family. We weren’t going back in time to re-create thrash metal. Instead, we
were unifying thrash metal in one huge, connected front, truly for the first time ever.

After that European stint came the American Carnage tour, which was interesting because these were rescheduled dates that had been supposed to happen back in January. Slayer’s singer, Tom Araya, had needed neck surgery and the dates were postponed. In a way, his surgery had opened the door for me to come back to the band because of schedule changes. I just knew that all these things pointed toward my return to Megadeth.

It reminds me of the old story: A Christian guy dies in a flood and goes to heaven, and he says to God, “Why did you let me die? Why did you do this to me?” and God says to him, “When your neighbor told you to evacuate the building, and you said no, because you thought God would save you. That was me. Then, when your friend came past in a boat and offered you a lift to safety, but you said no because God would save you, that was me, too. And then, when the helicopter came down to pick you up from the roof of the building, and you said no yet again because you knew that God would save you, that was me, coming to get you out of the mess you were in!”

The opportunity to rejoin Megadeth this time was like that helicopter: it was as if God was saying to me, “You need to get back there now.” When James LoMenzo left the band, there was really only one bass player who could take his place. It all lined up.

Everything was really going well. Dave and I spent a lot of time together reading scripture, and the synergy was back between us. He and I both had the exact same study Bible. You think that’s a coincidence? Well, there’s a saying that there are no coincidences in God’s world, because He has orchestrated it all. The Book of Proverbs has thirty-one proverbs in it, one for every day of the month, so if in doubt, right before we went onstage, if we had a bit of time backstage, or when we were grabbing a coffee in the lobby when we woke up, we would kick back and soak up the Bible. That was our personal connection. The more time we spent with the Bible, the closer we got
and the better the band sounded. It was a form of faith development, and it just goes to show that when you put first things first, all the rest will handle itself.

It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: you can spend so much time looking for one particular piece, and when you go away to answer the phone, you come back and that piece has been lying in front of you the whole time. That’s how I see my experience. Because Dave and I were so driven in the early days and so focused on work, we missed out on our faith development, which was always right in front of us. The days that we do that together are still my favorite days on the bus. Shawn likes it because he sees that it joins us and brings us closer together, and so he takes part, too: that’s what I love about him, that he’s a very pragmatic, calming kind of person.

In the old days we used to get together with straws and lines of drugs on the table: that was our connection back then. That obviously didn’t work very well, which I think is an important point. People always want to get together, whether it’s over music or a couple of drinks or whatever, but anything that is derived of man will ultimately fall short and divide you.

Now we’ve found a connection that is bigger than all of us, and its only common goal is loving, serving, and connecting each other. There is no downside to helping others, and on my return to Megadeth that was what we tapped into. I’ve learned that faith is a daily discipline, every day of the week: in fact, some of our crew started good-naturedly calling me “Pastor Dave” as a result. I had come back with a fresh perspective, to find that Dave and I were seeking to follow our faith walk together. It was as if both of us had been holding the key, but until 2010 we’d never put it in the lock and opened the door.

A THOUGHT

Faith—and How It Changes You

Life can be funny. It was never my goal to end up back in the church, especially once I got rolling in rock ’n’ roll and on my way as a young man in the world. In fact, you could say that once I started rockin’, on the church door I would not be knockin’.

However, having faith has a way of changing a person. Experiencing faith as an adult is much different than as a child. What I found was that blending my gifts of music and faith wasn’t as much of a stretch as I had previously thought. The truth is, if God is the source of our talents, then I guess He can make even the strangest things happen when used for His glory.

“Carry the Gospel with you wherever you go. Sometimes you may even have to use words.”

—St. Francis

M
egadeth was on fire, so we decided to carry on playing
Rust in Peace
when the American Carnage tour began. Slayer and Megadeth together was a great bill. We’d played together as far back as 1985. We’re very different musically, but we come from the same genre and we represent the same culture and lifestyle. There were no hostilities between the bands anymore.

We were all playing at our very best.
Endgame
, Megadeth’s most recent album, was excellent; the fans had received it really well, and the
Rust in Peace
album still cast a long shadow. We had now become almost a legacy classic metal band, whose history was a big reason why fans would come out to see us. This is a much better position to be in than to record a new album and have the ensuing tour dates stand or fall on whether that album has legs or not. Our legacy was strong now.

We had a lot of creative think-tank sessions, which I call “Starbucks sessions,” because the band members would get up in the morning, arrange
to meet for coffee, and have a discussion. It’s funny that we’re such early birds, given that we’re a metal band . . . but it’s natural. I’ve done yoga, and I’ve learned that your body wants to follow the natural rhythms of daylight—as long as you’re sober and not staying up all night partying, of course.

The next item on the agenda was the Jägermeister Music Tour, which was essentially Clash of the Titans Part Two, as it featured us, Slayer, and Anthrax (although because the movie remake of
Clash of the Titans
had just been released, we couldn’t use that name). I’d done a lot of work with the people at Jägermeister when I was at Peavey. We did a lot of great things together with F5 and Temple of Brutality. The relationship was fantastic and they were stoked about me being back in Megadeth.

Is there a conflict for me, as a sober man, to be working with a company that produces alcoholic drinks? No. One of the things I learned in recovery is that we should not look down our nose at the drinks industry as an institution. I sometimes find that religion takes that attitude: the Bible doesn’t tell you not to drink, but it does tell you not to participate in drunkenness. I personally don’t take any alcohol into my body because it sets a particular reaction in motion, but I know plenty of people who can drink socially and for whom it’s not an issue.