My Life With Deth (9 page)

We made
Killing Is My Business . . .
in December 1984. All of us were strung out to some degree during the sessions—Chris completely so; Gar a little less because he had to keep it together for his job as a general manager at B.C. Rich Guitars. I was the fun, happy partier who was getting in way too deep.

Making the album was pretty exhilarating, although the sound quality wasn’t great, because we had so little money for it. I liked
Killing Is My Business . . . 
, but I wish some of the tempos had been a bit less extreme. We’d originally rehearsed the songs significantly slower, but Megadeth’s music had suddenly gotten much faster back in the fall of 1983 when Dave received a letter from a fan, forwarded to him by our friend Brian Lew, who was helping us out, acting as a fan-club go-between. Metallica had just released their debut album,
Kill ’Em All
, and this fan had written, “Dave, I hope your songs are faster than Metallica’s.” The next day we sped up all the songs by about forty beats per minute. Extreme speed was deemed the cool factor in thrash metal back in those days, and that one fan letter changed Megadeth’s sound overnight.

Our version of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” was a comedy cover, for sure, but I think Jay Jones—whose idea it was—saw the storyteller, raconteur side of Dave and knew that he could do a real tongue-in-cheek version of it. It worked well and lightened the mood of the album a little bit.

We turned in the record to Combat in January 1985. By then Chris was pretty much out of the band. His addiction had really taken over, and made it impossible for him to remain with Megadeth.

In the spring of 1985, we were still short a guitarist. We were supposed to hit the road, and our backs were against the wall. Jay Jones introduced us to Mike Albert, a seasoned musician who had played guitar with Captain Beefheart. He became the fill-in guitar player for the Killing Is My Business . . . tour: five or six weeks across the U.S. as the support act to the Canadian band Exciter, who also had a new album out.

Mike Albert was a seasoned touring musician. He was concerned about the tour income, which we knew was going to be very low from the start. He was in his early thirties, a decade older than Dave and me.

I was the only guy in the band with a credit card, despite being the youngest member, and believe me, we used every nickel it afforded us. Dave was an optimist, though, and he could see the big picture. Plus, we had no other options anyway. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I felt sure what my destiny was, so we went for it.

The tour commenced in June 1985 in Baltimore. I remember Gar flew in late from New Orleans, where he was exhibiting with B.C. Rich Guitars at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, his day job at the time. Because of this, Exciter had to go on first, which was a great way to start the tour.

On the way to the third show, in Cleveland, our van broke down, leaving us by the side of the freeway. Our New York tour manager Frank Pappitto and I hitched a ride for a couple of exits and suddenly saw a National car rental outlet, right there under a streetlight, at eleven o’clock at night. It was surreal. We went in, rented a Chevy Caprice on my credit card, went back to pick up the other guys, and transferred all our stuff from the van into the car. It was a brutal night drive, with all of us squished together.

Early the next morning, Gar was driving, and at one point he turned around to help me move one of his kick drum pedals, which was crammed behind his seat. As he was doing this, he took his eyes off the road just long enough to lose control of the car, and we went flying off the road at eighty miles per hour. We hit a road sign, which sheared off and flew over us as we careened into a ditch on the side of the road. I thought we were dead; I truly thought that this was the end. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

The car hit the ditch and came to a screeching halt. We were all freaking out. A boom box sitting in the back window above me had hit me on the back of my neck, which really hurt. I got out of the car and saw a semitruck, which had stopped to see what had happened. The
driver got out and asked if we were okay. I answered, “Yeah, I think there was a deer in the road!” He rolled his eyes with a kind of amused skepticism and helped us pull the car out of the ditch. We had to put the spare tire on the car to carry on. So there we were, driving along with a replacement tire and weeds sticking out of the side of the car, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies, rolling in to gig number three. We’d only been out for three days. The whole tour was like that, one borderline catastrophe after another.

Farther along in the tour we played a gig in El Paso where we all got good and drunk after the show. Later that evening, I saw Mike Albert in a corner of the backstage area, threatening to use his martial arts skills on one of the security guards. It felt as if the tour was constantly on the brink of disaster, with partying and wild behavior the whole time. I loved it—it was great to be out of Los Angeles and actually touring. It defined us as a band.

Despite the mishaps, the band’s mood was good, and a couple of remarkable things happened during the tour. At one point we were in a motel in Kansas, sitting around with some girls who were prepared to provide some affection, food, and beer. We were broke—and I mean genuinely flat broke, with no resources except what these fine girls were willing to shell out for us. The girls helped us buy a little barbecue so we could grill some meat out in the parking lot.

I remember Dave called Steve Sinclair, our artists & repertoire (A&R) person at Combat Records, and told him how broke we were. He said, “We have no money, our credit card is maxed out, and shows are either not happening or being canceled.” Steve replied, “You guys just need to go home and get jobs.” That, more than anything, put the fuel on the fire for us. We knew then that our days at Combat were numbered.

At the same time a booking agent named Andy Somers came on board with us, and offered to ensure that the remaining shows went ahead and that we would get paid. He became our booking agent for the next several years, through the Countdown to Extinction tour, and
was largely responsible for getting us signed to Capitol Records a year after we hired him.

I was drinking and smoking but using much less coke and heroin. I’d learned that most road coke was usually pretty bad, and heroin was harder to come by, so there wasn’t much use trying to score on tour. Besides, there was always some beer on the rider, and someone, somewhere would usually have weed. I wasn’t strung out on smack, but the smokes and libations kept me going and I still had a good time.

When we came home off the tour, Mike Albert quit, and we were fine with that. He wasn’t the right long-term fit for us anyway. He didn’t play the guitar parts in a Megadeth fashion, although he played the part of the fourth member onstage well enough. Chris Poland returned after that. He was on methadone as a way of detoxing from heroin, so we knew he would be able to tour.

We spent the fall of 1985 rehearsing just south of L.A. in an old warehouse that had been turned into rehearsal rooms. I slept there a few times, and so did Dave, because we were essentially homeless. It was a landing pad where we could hang out, drink beers, and write a new record, which we called
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?

I remember Dave picking up my B.C. Rich Eagle bass, off of which I had ripped the frets and made it into a fretless, and composing a loose version of the introductory riff to the song “Peace Sells.” We picked up Gar in Pasadena for rehearsal that night and while I was driving, Dave wrote the lyrics to that song. By the next day, the whole song was musically written. We already had “Devil’s Island,” and a bunch of the other songs were written pretty fast. The following year, it was an amazing thrill to hear my performance of the “Peace Sells” line as the intro to
MTV News
. They used it for something like ten years during that segment.

Dave and I were then living over in Echo Park, which is just east of Hollywood, close to Dodger Stadium. We rehearsed at a place called Mars Studios in East Hollywood, and I took a job there, eventually managing the place. It gave me an opportunity to sell pot out of there
from time to time, because, like any good musician, I didn’t want to get a job but needed to make money somehow. The idea was that we could take some of our merchandising advance money, buy some pot and sell it, and that would help us to continue to make more money. Of course, we made very little profit, because I became my own best customer.

The only real job I ever did in L.A. was selling appointments at the solar energy company, which I mentioned earlier. Eventually I realized that I didn’t have time to work because I was too busy with the band, which was fine with me; the sacrifices would be worth it one day.

All this was happening as we were recording the
Peace Sells . . .
record. We were still essentially homeless. I’d even joined the Holiday Health Club at the corner of Sycamore and Hollywood Boulevard for a hundred dollars a month, so I’d have somewhere to shower each day. Chris had a wealthy girlfriend who was taking care of him. Gar was still working at B.C. Rich Guitars, so he had a good day job, although eventually he had to quit in order to go on tour. He started working for his girlfriend’s father in carpentry to make money during his downtime.

Dave and I were the ones running Megadeth. He quarterbacked all the plays, of course, but I was the center or the wide receiver, essentially his vice president. It was always us doing the grunt work. We were the ones who made the lifestyle sacrifices to keep Megadeth alive.

Back home, my father was going through a lot of hardship with the farming business. He lost one of his farms and had to turn another one into the bank, because, like a lot of other farmers, he’d taken out high-interest-rate loans on expensive farmland a few years prior, when times were good. My mother went back to work as a caregiver at a nursing home in Jackson, and my father had to work out a way of handing the farm over to my brother so he could get out of farming. It was great that my brother was there to take over; it was unnecessary even to discuss my coming back to run it.

Dave knew a girl named Nancy whose friend Mercedes was a model for pornographic magazines. Mercedes took a liking to me and I moved in with her. Now I had a home, albeit a cockroach-infested hole
in the wall. Mercedes once did a photo shoot with the legendary porn star John Holmes, and I thought, “Now I’m done for, I can’t possibly compete with him!” But it all worked for me, because I had a place to live where I could do heroin and have a good time with her. She liked to do drugs and cocaine, too. My drug use really accelerated during this period because she had access to really high-quality Persian heroin, mostly from a local taxi driver who would deliver it right to our apartment in West Hollywood, just off Sunset Boulevard across from Tower Records.

Mercedes and I were an item, for no other reason than convenience, although later when I took an HIV test and the results were negative, I realized how lucky I’d been—and also how foolish. I fell for Mercedes, I genuinely did, but it turned out that she was doing private “escort” work on the side, which was too much heartbreak and reality for me. I later found out that this was a common form of income for a lot of the rock ’n’ roll groupie girls in Hollywood—strip dancing, nude pinup magazines, and escort work.

Like most rock ’n’ rollers, I didn’t mind a bit of attention from groupies here and there. The women up in San Francisco were pretty tough broads, with leather jackets, attitude, and so on. Down in Los Angeles the women were much sexier, and more appealing to me. Then again, they weren’t really into thrash metal; they were more into the Sunset Strip hair bands. There were always enough girls around, though.

It was all a rather different life for a Lutheran farm kid from Minnesota. I was naïve and an easy target, but also a willing participant. L.A. was like a great big adult playground where you could make up your own rules, which I tried to do, all the time realizing that these were not the morals and standards set down for me as a kid from the Midwest.

In January and February 1986, we did a short tour of the East Coast in a freezing motor home. It was technically the second leg of the Killing Is My Business . . . tour, even though we were already playing
songs from
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?
In many ways it was our form of preproduction for the record, performing those songs live each night. It was then that we realized we had something of a hit song with “Peace Sells.” It really put some excitement in our lives to know that we were moving on to a more mature sound with these new songs, too. This was a sound that really became our own with the next album.

At our show at Irving Plaza in New York City, our booking agent Andy Somers brought down Tim Carr, the A&R talent scout from Capitol Records. Tim liked what he heard and within months offered us a contract with Capitol. Andy also hooked us up with his friend and manager Keith Rawls, who later assisted in our signing to Capitol Records and managed us from the
Peace Sells . . .
through the
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
records.

After that tour we started putting plans together to record
Peace Sells . . .
at the Music Grinder studio on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. The recording was contractually still with Combat Records, our label at the time. We had a $25,000 budget from them this time, so we could put ourselves on small salaries. It also allowed us to bring in an outside producer, Randy Burns. He and his engineer Casey McMackin worked fast and furious on the album. Casey was an excited young lad who spent a long time running through guitar and bass tones with us and offering suggestions on parts and revisions—in many ways, responding like a producer.

Once the record was done, we turned it in to Combat, and Dave and I took a trip back to Minnesota to relax for a few days, because we were being courted by Elektra Records in New York City, who had previously signed Metallica. (This was just before Capitol Records put their offer out to us.) We stopped off at the farm in Minnesota and hung out there for about a week. It was weird to be back home, having been steeped in the L.A. drug lifestyle. I remember I brought some smack with me and I had to detox off the stuff while at my parents’ home.