My Life With Deth (7 page)

Even our names were carefully thought out. Right from the beginning Dave said, “We can’t have two Daves in the band. What’s your middle name?”

“Warren,” I said.

“Maybe we should call you War?” Lor suggested, but I didn’t think that was cool and neither did Dave. I agreed that we needed to do something about this name thing, though. We were friends with a guy named Peyton, who shared an apartment with his sister and her husband just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. He had been to BIT and was a driven and creative sort of character who was also a fantastic paint artist. One day we were at the grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard, and Peyton said something about how I’d just come from the farm or just arrived on the turnip truck, and therefore I was “Junior Dave,” as if I was just a naïve farm boy.

Dave started cracking up. “Junior! That’s great. Junior!” And the name stuck. I hated it. I felt it was completely condescending, and even though I accepted it as my new moniker, it bothered me for the next twenty years. I didn’t like being labeled a wet-behind-the-ears farm boy. I don’t look at it the same way now, but it irritated me at the time.

I knew my place was with Dave. I certainly didn’t consider going home an option. What was I going to do—help my brother on the farm? I never had a backup plan, but I look on that as a blessing. I had a calling to go forward and do this music thing. I knew I had to do it. Ironically, as much as I had family and other financial resources upon which I could have drawn, I never did. I never moved back home, I never called home for money: I figured if I was there to stake my claim, then I had to suck it up and make it work. Years later my mother disclosed to me that she and my dad realized that they had never had to put me through college, so giving me the family van and a credit card with a five-hundred-dollar limit, which I always paid off myself, was a pretty light load for launching their son into the adult world.

When we met Dave, Greg and I needed jobs to make some money. I had brought seven hundred dollars of savings with me to California, and I had the credit card my dad had given me, but little else. Dave had a job in phone sales at an office down in Culver City, setting up appointments for solar energy companies to sell solar panels. Dave helped me, Greg, Brad, and Brent all get jobs there to get on our feet with our relocation. It was a staggered, commission-based gig—if we set up an appointment, we’d get twenty-five dollars, and if that led to a sale there’d be another fifty dollars in the back end—and probably a scam job. Since we could all talk on the phone, we were each pointed to a cubicle and told to pick up the phone and start “smiling and dialing.” Our new employment worked out well for Dave, too, because now he had an easy way to get to work—in my van.

During my interview, the guy who ran the company said to me, “Look, man, if you’re gonna be in the music business you’re gonna be selling yourself, and that’s why this phone sales thing is good for you. It’s a great way for you to learn how to sell yourself. I realize you’re not going to do this forever, but it’s a chance for you to come out of your shell.” I hated this, perhaps because I knew it was true. I also hated trying to make people buy something they didn’t want. I wasn’t an extrovert, unlike so many people I saw in L.A. But Dave was really good at it. With his California street smarts, his storytelling, and his gift for gab, he could go from having two appointments on the wall to fifteen or eighteen by the end of the day. He was definitely a survivor. In any situation, he could turn on the charm to provide for himself.

After that, we took jobs in another phone sales place, run by an aggressive little guy whom we really looked up to because he was a kind of father figure. We worked a few of these phone sales jobs, but by August, Brad and Brent had turned around and headed back home to Minnesota. They were like, “This is not for us: we’re not meant to be here.”

After a while, Dave and I realized that Greg wasn’t working out in the band either. Although he was a nice guy and could play reasonably
well, he didn’t look the part and was too laid back to to be a productive member of a group. What he was really after was a summer vacation. We’d party and have fun together, but the band was the band, and we were focused on world domination. So one day we went down to the apartment and Dave delivered the news to him. It was hard. I don’t think I said much at all, other than that I’d go and get my stuff together because I was moving out of the apartment we shared on Sycamore.

It was sad, but it needed to happen. He went back to Minnesota and played in a band called Kublai Khan before joining the navy and living in San Diego. He’s a lawyer now and one of my best friends.

After that, we moved out of our apartment and in with Peyton, his sister, and her husband—although they weren’t exactly thrilled about it. Dave and I developed a habit of just moving in with people, and then we’d use their phone and split the groceries. We didn’t want to squat, but we had to—it was musician survival stuff. We were essentially homeless for about two years as we got the band off the ground. We hated it, but we did what we had to do.

Now I was the only remaining Minnesota guy out there in California, out of the four of us who’d headed west, which definitely took me out of my comfort zone. This gave me the liberty to decide that if we were going to make this band happen, I needed to pay attention. Making Megadeth work professionally was a job: you showed up on time, you put on a uniform, and you obeyed the rules, as any good employee should.

Even at that young age, I was starting to get my Megadeth act together on every level: how I talked, how I played, even what I thought. That year, 1983, was a serious wake-up call in my life. I had to jump into the shark tank and learn to swim with the best of these guys—or be eaten myself. It was that simple.

Dave recognized that he had street smarts and I didn’t, and while I think in his heart he wanted to be friends before bandmates, his street-smart drive told him that the band’s success had to be the priority. In the early days, I could see that people were really attracted to Dave and genuinely interested in the status of his developing band. I remember going down to the Troubadour with Dave one night, where W.A.S.P. was playing with a band called Hellion, who were coming up the ranks and had a female singer named Ann Boleyn. Dave introduced me as Junior, his new bass player, which led to an onslaught of questions about whether or not I was as good as Cliff Burton, Metallica’s bassist.

Cliff was a very innovative player in metal, and Dave knew I’d be
compared to him, so he had high standards for me. I had to be more than just good, I had to be great. Fortunately, having had some formal jazz studies, I understood and appreciated Cliff’s skills. Specifically, I think what endeared metal fans to Cliff was his use of arpeggios and a distorted wah pedal: it was a cool combination of shred meets virtuoso.

My approach, however, came more equally from a rock and jazz perspective, influenced by bassists such as Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. To my mind, what those guys were doing was inhuman—stuff from another planet altogether. Regardless, as bassists like Cliff and me started to incorporate other styles and genres into our bass playing, the metal fans loved it. This enthusiastic response to my playing from the fans fueled my and Dave’s drive to really put the bass out front in our songs. To some degree, I think Dave didn’t just see me as worthy of being compared to Cliff; he saw me as a secret weapon that he could deploy to show the world that his new band could live up to, and even be better than, anything Metallica could do, even with regard to innovative bass playing.

Ultimately, I had to take everything I’d ever learned from playing in a jazz band, learning Iron Maiden licks, and playing in a cover band—all the things I’d done back in Minnesota—in order to partner up with Dave and create something different. This was no time to be a lone wolf. Shortly thereafter, we recruited a new drummer, Lee Rausch.

Just prior to this, Megadeth had another drummer in 1983 named Dijon Carruthers, who was really into Ritchie Blackmore and Deep Purple. His dad was an actor named Ben Carruthers, who had been in films like
The Dirty Dozen
. Dijon was a solid double-bass drummer, heavily into British drum god Cozy Powell. He had a twisted sense of humor but did not do any drugs. His offbeat sensibilities helped him pen the original lyric to the song “Black Friday,” which appeared on the
Peace Sells . . .
album. At one point Dijon tried to convince me to move to England with him, which I thought was bizarre. Still, we got on well together, although he didn’t stay in Megadeth for long.

I remember Dave and I went over to Dijon’s apartment in the Fairfax
and Santa Monica area of Hollywood on my nineteenth birthday in November 1983, and I attempted to drink nineteen shots of tequila. I think I got as far as thirteen. I was hungover for two days, and that was the last time I ever drank that stuff.

Dave was writing songs all the way through 1983, and after some early rehearsals at a little room off Sunset Boulevard, right opposite the Chateau Marmont, we had the beginnings of “Looking Down the Cross,” “Devil’s Island,” and “Set the World Afire.” Dave was also working on “The Skull Beneath the Skin,” which had the original working title of “Self Destruct.” The tempos were slow, with a cool, groovy feel. They had a heavy, Black Sabbath kind of vibe, which caught the attention of everyone who heard them.

We auditioned all these Sunset Boulevard kinds of singers before Dave became the singer of Megadeth. It happened on New Year’s Eve when we were rehearsing close to downtown L.A. at an old brewery converted to a rehearsal hall, run by a hustling local musician type known as Curly Joe. We rented space from him to rehearse in his facility, and on this night yet another singer flaked out on his audition with us. At the time, Dave wrote all the lyrics, so now it seemed he should sing his own songs. I remember the first time he did it: he was all red-faced afterward because he didn’t know how to breathe properly and sing, but it was obviously going to work.

I remember being very encouraging to him about this. Dave never viewed himself as a singer, but he is an artist in every sense of the word, and sometimes the quality of a singer’s voice is second to the conviction of their words, especially in metal music. That was a huge lesson for me as I was sowing my own oats as an artist. Perfection is not always needed, but conviction is, and Dave had that quality to his singing.

We played a few shows with Kerry King of Slayer on guitar in early 1984. He had a B.C. Rich guitar, which we liked because it meant he was thinking like us. We’d considered a few different guitarists, including Jim Durkin from Dark Angel, but Kerry was the only one who came in and nailed the music right away. I remember that Dave showed
him some riffs—really complex stuff—and Kerry instantly mirrored it and played it right back at him, note for note. I was flabbergasted. It was like he was part of Dave’s DNA. To this day, Kerry is still one of the best rhythm guitar players that was ever in Megadeth.