If thrash metal had to be boiled down to its absolute essence, at the core of blistering solos, pummeling riffs, snarling lyrics, and self-assertive nihilism stands Dave Mustaine, the outspoken and indisputably brilliant musician responsible for pioneering heavy metal’s most popular sub-genre.
Mustaine’s 30 year career and 14 album discography have throned him as a leader of the Big 4, and Megadeth regularly fills venues across the country on their regular national tours. They will be doing so again here in New York at the end of November, when the band plays New Jersey’s Wellmont Theater and then Long Island’s Paramount a few days later. I was granted the incredible opportunity to speak with Dave by phone this week, and was able to discuss Dave’s favorite guitar solo, why he almost cancelled Megadeth’s Yankee Stadium appearance, and a tentative surprise for fans of 1994’s Youthanasia album:
Examiner: Good morning Dave, it’s Elliot from Examiner.com in New York. How are you today?
Dave: That sounds so robotic. I’m good, how are you?
Examiner. Well, I’m not a robot but I’m great, and I have to say it’s a real honor to be talking with you today. Your music has been an influence and inspiration in my life and I want to say thank you for that right off the bat.
Dave: You’re welcome.
Examiner: Then let’s get right to it - Megadeth is coming around on a winter tour at the end of November, and you’re playing the Wellmont Theater in New Jersey, then The Paramount in Long Island a couple of days later. Those are going to be the fourth and fifth Megadeth shows in the New York City area in the last six months. How did we win the Megadeth concert lottery this year?
Dave: You know, I don’t really look at it like that, how many times we’ve been in the New York area. We just kind of look at it like where’s the supply and demand coming in, and when we go through with Gigantour it’s one thing, and the Iron Maiden thing was totally different. I didn’t even think about it like that. Well, we can cancel the shows if you want?
Examiner: Oh man, please don’t. You know New York loves their Megadeth fix. The New Jersey show is Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, otherwise known as Black Friday. If you think about it, the lyrics from your song Black Friday are pretty applicable to what goes on in department stores at 2am that day.
Dave: Yeah there’s a lot of savagery there for sure.
Examiner: Are you flying home for Thanksgiving itself, or staying on the road?
Dave: No, we will be on the road. Some of the guys are due to go home for the holidays, but for me... when you got a job like this, when the fans treat you the way they do, everyday is like Thanksgiving for us. It’s kind of hard to act like it’s not a holiday every day.
Examiner: That must be nice.
Dave: Well I don’t mean to brag about it or anything, but I’m not going to act like I’m suffering or anything.
Examiner: Well you have one of the greatest jobs in the world.
Dave: I think I do.
Examiner: Your friends in Slayer are playing here in New York two days before your Friday show. You guys should do a semi-Big 4 Thanksgiving dinner together. I bet Frank Bello would host it.
Dave: Who? Oh, Frankie. I love Frankie. He’s so awesome. And I thought he was great in Helmet too. Talk about a guy who has a lot of talent, who could do just about anything.
Examiner: You’re playing the Paramount on this upcoming tour, and you also played it in May on the Countdown to Extinction tour (read my review here). Do you have a favorite New York venue to play?
Dave: Yankee Stadium.
Examiner: There’s no beating that one. But that was kind of a tricky show for you (read all about the Big 4 here). You had surgery the next day, right?
Dave: It was very close, the day after that. I was supposed to not do that show. I’d been laying in the emergency room getting ready to have them put me to sleep, and I’d said we had to cancel the concert. And one of the people associated with the concert said I was a pussy, and I thought “I’m a pussy. I’m getting ready to have two major spinal surgeries done and I’m a pussy. Okay.” Obviously you don’t know what pussy is, because that’s not pussy.
Examiner: Well you proved him wrong. It didn’t look like you were playing under any stress at all.
Dave: I did have a lot of signs around the stage that said “Don’t headbang or your head will come off.”
Examiner: These upcoming shows are going to be the official Super Collider tour dates. The last run was Gigantour, and before that the Countdown to Extinction shows. How do you tweak the setlist to get the right balance of old and new material?
Dave: Well the setlist we had on Gigantour we thought was really great because it allowed us to play with David Draiman who’s been a friend of ours. Having Cold Sweat was cool, to have the other band members come out and do that all-star jam thing. But that didn’t quite happen as often as we’d like it to because everyone’s schedules are so insane.
Examiner: There were originally going to be two New York shows on that Gigantour, and then the first got cancelled but you made up for it with that three song acoustic set at Vevo studios (see video highlights here).
Dave: Yeah, well the whole thing with that second show... I don’t question the promoters on what they do or how they think or act or anything, but that was not my idea. And when we initially had booked that show, splitting the show up over two days, I thought this isn’t really a great idea, but the concert, I thought it was a great concert. Black Label Society guys play great, Zakk Wylde is such an amazingly talented guy, how could he have a bad show?
Examiner: It could never happen. Zakk is the man. Kingmaker has become a favorite song from Super Collider, and I’ve seen it going over well at the concerts too. What does it take for a new song to stay in the setlist beyond the album touring cycle, like She-Wolf has?
Dave: You know, a lot of it seems so scientific, but a lot of it isn’t. It’s just a matter of how long the set is, how high the song is singing-wise, who we’re playing with... The set we did for Gigantour isn’t that different from what we did for the Iron Maiden tour, but we took out a couple of songs, we took out a Tout Le Monde and we took out Trust, kind of let it rip. I think a lot of people were totally surprised by that setlist for the Iron Maiden dates, and so was I. I thought that was a good setlist, but a lot of times you have people saying “Oh you gotta play A Tout Le Monde, that’s your biggest song, you gotta play Trust, that’s your number one hit. You gotta do this, you gotta do that.”
I ain’t gotta do nothing. And listening to the fans, what they like, and listening to what I like. Between the two of us, one of us is going to be right. And I know that when it comes down to playing stuff that makes me feel good, I like playing the heavy stuff.
Examiner: I know the fans like the heavy stuff too. I don’t think anyone comes to a Megadeth show to hear the pop singles.
Dave: Well, that’s the whole thing. There was the period there, going back to the “you have to have been there” syndrome, what were the songs that were coming out around the time Risk was out? Blur was big, Bush was big, Sponge was big. There weren’t really many metal bands out anymore. If you take all those variables and go “Oh yeah, music was looking pretty bleak back then.” But if you think about the fact that every one of our records have had our songs on it, it’s songs that are great, it’s songs that are not great, and I think that that’s the beauty of when you play music. You’re playing music, you’re not working at it. You’re having fun, you’re playing. Don’t take yourself so seriously.
Examiner: Youthanasia was my very first Megadeth record ever, so I’ll always have a soft spot for it. Any chance you’ll go out and tour the whole album like you did with Countdown and Rust In Peace?
Dave: Very big chance. In fact funny that you mention that, we were just talking about the part where David Ellefson used to play the extra floor tom during Reckoning Day, because the video we did for that song was filmed in Finland and Finland is right next to Russia, so the taxi cab I was in was an old cab from the Russian days back during the cold war. And a lot of the footage from that video, it’s a really, really old video, was from all those concerts back in the day when metal was just huge and before the whole alternative new metal things confused things and f*cked up our business.
Examiner: We only have a minute left, so which guitar solo are you most proud of?
Dave: My favorite studio solo would’ve been the solo for Holy Wars, because that was the only time I’ve ever done a solo in one take. And basically what happened, when we were doing that solo, we were getting ready to record and we were having problems at the time, the guy who was producing the record with us, his dog had just knocked over my guitar and I was pissed. So we went in there to track everything, I said just turn everything all the way f*cking up. So I turned every knob on the Marshall all the way up, even the ones that shouldn’t be turned up, and I said “Do me a favor, when the song starts I’m just going to open my volume up and go from there. It’s going to feed back because there’s so much gain coming through.” So that’s why in the beginning of the solo you’ve got <whistles> that squealing feedback sound, because that amplifier was vibrating while we were doing that solo.
Examiner: Thank you for your time today, Dave, I’m looking forward to the shows in November.
Dave: Thank you, take care.
Megadeth will be playing the Wellmont Theater on Friday November 29, and The Paramount on Tuesday December 2. Tickets are onsale for both shows.
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