Dave Mustaine
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Is that connected with your best friend?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Your best friend dying, was that connected to what you guys were talking about?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, right, right, right. You said that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
For me, I work really hard for my money and it was, for anybody else it would have been a difficult decision if I would have thought about this is the sister who's treated you like shit your entire life Why are you gonna do this? And it ain't about what she thinks, it's about what God thinks, you know? Am I doing the right thing with what I'm getting given? You know, my funds, my gifts?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I was like, whoa. That's very touching.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Talking about Sedona, yeah, with the magic mushrooms and everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You know, it can be used for very bad stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
The motorcycle concert we did for the bikers up in the hills, they paid us off with magic mushrooms. Back in the early 80s, late 70s, people were taking magic mushrooms a lot. also taking LSD, which was very popular at the time. I did that a couple of times. They didn't like it, because they couldn't turn it off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I found out recently that if you just take an opiate pill when you're frying, that you could come down from it immediately. And I thought, I'm sure glad I didn't know that. I just don't want to know anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Not yet. But your story sure made me think. And by the way, that's not black. It's dark purple.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Energy. I'd have to probably know you a little better. Yeah, it's only on that side. Kind of shows up a little bit on that side, but it's right by this area. Do you have anything going on in your mouth over here? You sure?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
To help my sister try to pass into the next world? You know, I thought she, being a Jehovah's Witness, would be so eager to get into heaven, you know? I mean, I don't understand the concept of heaven, so I would have thought she would have said, you know, chuck this... old body, man, I'm out of here. But she fought and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Did they check your lymph nodes over here?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Okay. Now you're worried. Well, I'd love to say just kidding, but I'm not. I wouldn't have brought it up. Let's take a break.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I don't know exactly what you're talking about with the frequency stuff and the Satan stuff you're talking about. Can you be a little bit more
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
See, that's the whole thing that I have to go back to. I don't think anybody that is practicing witchcraft, that that would have been their natural first choice unless they had some kind of fractured paradigm for a functional, healthy family. I'm not saying that it has to be a two-parent family. Mine wasn't, and I turned out pretty good. My kids are great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Pam and I have always taken the approach that both of us have a very significant role, and that is to do what we do 100% and be able to do what the other one does 100% in times of necessity. Is any of that stuff pushed on you? Satanic music? No. I think the Geraldos of the world are in dire need of a severe censoring. They've got a microphone and they just,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They're just blathering holes, for lack of a better word. They say stuff that they think will get listeners, viewers, readers. And I did something with, I think it was one of the network stations. They were trying to do an expose on satanic music and all that stuff. Same thing, basically what you're asking, but a different environment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I was just saying, you know, I believe that if somebody is trying something and it doesn't work, they're going to try something else, no matter what it is. Even if it's, you know, making toothpicks out of logs. If it doesn't work, they'll find another way. They have to. That's the way we are by human nature.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
If we don't like something, we're going to say, screw it, and try and find something new. And I think that if you've got a young person, it's very impressionable. It's like beautiful, clean, fresh clay. And we're supposed to be responsible for helping form that person, not control them, but help keep them in the middle of the roof.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And finally, the government out in California put her into hospice. I'd been paying for a very long time for a nurse for her. When people wonder what I spend my money on, that was a lot of it, was paying for my sister's transition into death. And then the youngest one, who's a little bit older than me, she's got a little bit of a mental illness.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
There's not a lot of people that really care about that anymore because of society and the environment and the economy because most families need to have a two-income family anymore. And what happens when there's a two-income family? Well, there has to be child care, and that's usually at the hands of somebody in the school, in an after-school project or program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
or having somebody that comes to your home. And either one of those, any of those choices are very expensive, and it produces diminishing returns because you've got to unprogram the nanny or teacher or substitute or whatever. And I remember when I was younger, Justice was just a baby, and I'd hired a nanny for him while we were on tour. We were in France.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I got off stage and he was crying because he was just a little kid and the nanny had not changed him. And I went... Fucking ballistics. My kid, don't ever, ever think that you're going to work for us again. And that was it. She was gone, and I changed the diapers. I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Going back to the thing about the satanic stuff, though, I think that usually occurs when people are desperate and they have nowhere else to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
In the music industry, yeah. You have to be very careful from the pedophilia. You have to be very careful from the rape, for lack of a better word, because if you're not a child and that same thing happens to you, what is it called? There's a lot of stuff that's in TV right now with Sean Puff, Daddy Combs, with Jeffrey Epstein, with all these people that are coming out now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
getting busted for these crazy orgies and sex parties and everything, that breaks my heart to think that somebody that was an adult with a functioning mind, no matter how depraved it is, but that they would assault an innocent child and rape them, that to me is reprehensible. And I don't know why there isn't stricter punishment for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I think a lot of it is because people just don't know what's happening. Is that that common in these circles? Well, there are a lot of people that are very famous musicians that the rumor has that they were executed because they were getting ready to expose, uh, pedophilia. Executed as in killed?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, the rumors going around about, uh, Chester from Lincoln Park and about Chris from Soundgarden was that they were making a movie on, on, uh, child abuse and child trafficking, I think it was. And, uh, they're both gone and it's very suspicious. Geez. Yeah, because they don't want this stuff to come out. Well, it's out. It is. But, yeah, it's pretty sad stuff to talk about. Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I love my daughter, and we moved out here because we couldn't find... The first place we went looking was Austin, Texas, and I'm glad we didn't move there, not because of the people of Austin, but because of the interlopers that have started to invade Austin that have done the exodus from California. We were...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We were looking for homes out there and had gone every Easter out there to look for three years. And I finally was out here playing, and a friend of mine, I didn't know who he was. I had met him, and we'd gone our separate ways, and I saw him again. And I went, oh, yeah, I remember you. So we started talking, and I told him, well, my daughter wants to be a singer, and he goes...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He goes, why are you looking at Austin? You should move to Nashville. And I said, really? And he goes, yeah, man, it's so much better here. And I was in a really good place because we just played the show with Iron Maiden there. And all of our friends and neighbors and all of our associates that we had here in town finally get to see me do my job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
and get to know a little bit about me in a professional capacity instead of me just standing in front of them and yapping. So we moved out here, and she started pursuing her country career, and then she decided she didn't want to do country. And I thought, well, that's great. And she started trying to sing pop again, and she didn't like that either.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I don't know what you would call it, if it's depression or if it's, you know, what? I don't know. But we still talk, but she kind of... talks like a baby when she talks to me. So that's a little weird. And every family has this stuff. We all do. It's either your immediate bloodline, your family of origin, maybe your family of choice, your best friend.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And we had started our wine business when I played with the San Diego Symphony in San Diego. I had this opportunity to play with them and I wanted to make something unique for them to drink. I didn't think that the symphony would have a lot of beer on tap or a lot of hardcore alcohol, that they would probably just have champagne or wine or something. So I said, I think I want to make a wine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So we made a wine, and that took off really well. And then fast forward a few more years, Electra is now a sommelier. She's one of the youngest sommeliers that was a female. And she's a sommelier. What is that? That's a wine taster. They can take a little spoon and take a sip of wine and tell you where it's from. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, they're very, very, very sought-after people because they can taste the soil. They can taste the grouping of the grape. Like a red grape will have... numerous red fruit tastes to it. That's the idiosyncrasy of the grape. It could taste like a cherry. It could taste like a raspberry. It could taste like a currant. It could taste like a strawberry, for example, a plum.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Those are all the red colors. And so when you're tasting the wines, to have an educated palate like that is very desirable for a restaurant. And certainly desirable for a wine company. We want somebody who knows their stuff. Now, Electra and Pam are running House of Mustaine. And if you're getting your wine graded, when you make it into the 90 percentile, you are very, very desirable. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Is your daughter still here? Yeah, she's still living here. She has her own place that I bought. And she's doing the wine, and Justice and I are doing the beer. And we just were an entrepreneurial family. I thank God that my kids turned out the way that they did, but it wasn't for lack of trying. They certainly had a rambunctious spirit and we had to,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You know, Lecter was like a little horse, and she did not want to be ridden. She did not want to be on a harness. She didn't want to be on a halter. She didn't want nothing. She was going to just live life her way. And Justice was kind of like that, too. He actually wanted to move out when he was young, so we let him move.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He moved into a house we had in Oceanside, and I went down there one time, and he had just had a little get-together once.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
and i was looking in the house and i opened up one of the closets and i saw a smoking device that was about as big as your oar over there made out of glass that i don't know i guess the guy puffs on it for a little while another guy comes along when it fills up it's the biggest bong i've ever seen in my life and um
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, that's the way the things were going back then in Cali, because everybody was getting their medical cards, and as soon as that happened, everybody was smoking pot 24-7. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Do you like it here? I love it here. I think one of the things that happened when we first got here was... The culture shock. My blood pressure went down. I started to really enjoy driving in traffic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I realized that people don't stick their finger up in the air as much here. They don't honk. I can tell when people are here that aren't from Tennessee when they drive out into the middle of the intersection when they're going to turn. And I used to make that mistake all the time. I don't now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I can tell sometimes when I'm just beyond the point of, of any, uh, coming back to earth, I'll honk, you know, of course I've said like eight cuss words while I'm honking, but, uh, Yeah, it's been really good for me. The cost of living, the people are wonderful. I love the fact that there's hardly any graffiti anywhere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And our particular neighborhood where we're at has a very, very thorough police presence and sheriff presence. So we feel safe. You know, there were some people in the property behind us. It looked like there were about 12 people walking with backpacks. And I thought, well, that doesn't look right to me. If they were working over there, they'd probably have something resembling a tool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
something, but they're just a group of people walking one direction with backpacks on. So I called the sheriff and I asked, I said, are you guys aware of any migrant traffic up here? Because there's some people in my backyard. And they came out and they said, no, it was the guy behind you. He was doing something and he neglected to tell anybody. And you know what I did? Nothing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I mean, I know a lot of people who I've been close with that that aren't here anymore, and I'm thinking, for fuck's sake, man, I'm only 63. How is it that you've died already? I feel like I've still got a lot of life left in me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
If I was back in California, I would have made a way to let him know that I didn't appreciate him having people tromping through my backyard and make him very aware that I'm upset. Like what you were talking about with the tripping. It's just like taking off a tight pair of shoes. You just go... You know, life just kind of settles back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I remember one of the times when I was staying down at my mom's house, David Ellison and I had just gotten sober and we were... down in Elsinore trying to get away from Los Angeles. And I remember there was one day I woke up and I heard the birds chirping and I thought, I haven't heard the birds for so long, I just don't listen for them anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And now every morning I hear the birds, I listen to nature, I listen, I can tell when there's aircraft in the area, I can tell when the wind's blowing, I can tell when the horses are out. I drove past our one pasture the day before, and I got a mare for my wife. We have three horses, actually. So I got her a mare because her gelding just passed away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And she put her head up and just went, just did this huge whinny. And I thought, man, talk about the life these guys have made here in Tennessee. The weather's beautiful. The grass is probably so delicious to them. And our neighbor is growing alfalfa in his grass for his livestock. So we have that, too. And our field and our forest is full of lavender. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
How could you complain about stuff like that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
There's a lot of stuff. We have a book coming out, In My Darkest Hour. It's a book about my cancer diagnosis. I went to go see a dentist. I was out on the road for the Jimi Hendrix experience. My mouth hurt, and I thought that the guy that had just done my work had maybe had a little debris in my mouth, some glue, maybe an instrument broke off, and it was hurting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I went there, and he goes, I can't see anything. You need to go see an oral surgeon. I go and see the oral surgeon. The guy looks at my mouth. He leaves for 45 minutes, and I'm thinking, I'm just thinking, man, what kind of a doctor are you? This is horrible bedside manner. And I should have been prepared from what he did. I walked into the reception area and I said, where's the doctor?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the girl goes, he'll be right in. So I go in and he walks and he stands in front of me and he goes, you got the big C. And I looked at him and I went, And I asked him, what did you say? Because I went into shock immediately. You got the big C. And I don't remember anything after that leaving his office. I just know I got up and I walked out and I got in my car.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then I called my wife and I said, honey, I have cancer. And I didn't notice it, but I'd been sitting in my car for a little while and I had tears coming down my eyes because I was in shock. I didn't know. I just didn't know. not for the absolute worse.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that is the beginning of the book and how we made our best album to date, The Sick, the Dying, and the Dead, while I was going through cancer treatment. I think it was something like eight chemo treatments and 30 radiation, something, some ridiculous amount of treatments. Maybe it was 51, I don't know. Jeez. But it was a lot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And they said they wanted to be really, really, really aggressive with it because I was a singer. And... I love my doctors. They did great work keeping me alive and keeping my voice. So, yeah, that's one thing we're doing. We also are resurrecting our big festival tour, Gigantor. We have a couple one-offs. We're playing Bonnaroo soon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And we've got two big festivals over in Europe that we're going to be doing. We've got the record that's going to be coming out this year. We've been in the studio recording. I'm actually supposed to be there right now. And there's somebody we've been talking to about documenting the whole thing. So we've recorded the making of the record.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We've done this several times with several records we've made, but it never really gets out the door because as soon as we're done making the record, it's...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
too much stuff to do and of course it's there you know we have the making of Dystopia we have the making of The Sick, The Dying and The Dead we have the making of this record already and at some point I'm sure they'll be worthy to put out but you know we're just we're staying busy busy busy I know that Pam and Electra are doing really great with the wine they just released a new wine I think it's called a Vernaccio which one that is
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, but all the wines we have have song titles to kind of give them a little bit of some connection to me for the House of Mustaine stuff. Let's see what else is there. We've been working on our vineyard over in Italy. We've got a piece of property over there we've been planting and building a house over there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that's been really exciting because we figured out with the wines from California, a lot of them have sulfites in it, and that gives you a headache. The wines from Italy do not, and they don't give you a headache. So that's been really neat, and we've been really successful with that. The kids have been moving around a lot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Justice just got a new house, so we helped him move and just getting ready for a tour. You got, what kind of cancer was it? Throat cancer. Throat cancer? What stage? Oh, I don't know what stage it was. We just, we discovered it and we went to work on it right away. I know how big it was. I know it was a couple millimeters. It was a non-basal squamish, whatever, I think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I tried to not dig into it too much because I didn't want to give it power over me. So that's why I don't really know the amount of chemo or radiation numbers I have because I frankly don't want those numbers to be the definition of me. It doesn't define me. How did your family react when you told them? I think Pam was scared. I know the kids were scared.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I think Justice knew that I was a fighter and that I was going to fight this. I'm not sure that Electra knew that. And Pam knows that God's in control so that whatever happens is his way anyway, right? And you recorded an album?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
while going through that yeah our best one yet holy it was hard it was hard and I I fell asleep a few days in in recording and you know for people that don't understand that they think you're just getting drugged out and you're enjoying it I wasn't enjoying it I was getting drugged out yeah but that was because they were trying to kill me to kill the cancer in my body damn Hard to sing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It was hard to sing. My voice changed. I could imagine. Plus I had my neck broken by a chiropractor back in 2012, and I had to have my neck fused together. So I've got a plate in my neck, and that's changed my voice too. Holy shit, man. Yeah, yeah. It's been a lot of stuff. So looking out the window, appreciating the ride for me right now, Yeah, I do that. I do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because there's a lot of stuff that tried to take me out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Follow and listen on your favorite platform.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, yeah, I did that a long time ago. I did go through the 12-step program, and I made my personal moral inventory of everything that I'd done, and I read it to my sponsor, and then I got prepared to go out and make amends to everybody except when to do so would...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
No, I think that was very, very honoring. Thank you for that. I did sell about 40 to 50 million records with Metallica, so it was about 100 million records. Wow, 100 million records.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
injure others you know i'm not going to say my skin is somebody else's expense and then i just continued the last three steps you know keep taking moral inventory of myself um and carry the message uh in in all my affairs and i'm not i'm not a 12 step but it shows you how it worked in my life i can recite a lot of it and uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It all goes back, if you boil it down, it goes back to the Sermon on the Mount anyways. It's just the Beatitudes. That was adopted by the Washingtonian group who got adopted by AA. And then AA was the groundwork for the other fellowships that came after that, like CA and NA and GA and OA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, Michelle was, she was a very determined woman. She was one of the first people who applied to join the Navy in our county. And for some reason, the Navy wasn't accepting women at the time. And they just, they just,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I don't know if it was a moment where they weren't accepting them or if they hadn't opened up the idea of having women in the Navy, because I seem to think that there were women in the Navy that were really old, and it just kind of defies logic that she wouldn't be able to do it unless there was a moment where they said, we're not taking any more women.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But she was really determined, and she married a guy that I really just looked up to him so much for. He's my brother-in-law, Stan. And I already told you about the first one who was the chief of police in Stanton, California. Well, this one was a motorcycle cop for the California Highway Patrol. I don't know what's up with my sisters being drawn to Leos, but it is what it is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So that particularly sucked when my mom would move in with my sister because they were both very large men And they would have to do the unthinkable. And I know they hated it, but they would come home and my sister would say, well, David was the oldest and these guys got in trouble. So he's had his nose in the corner for an hour and you need to give him a spank. And the fuckers both had gun belts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that's what I got spanked with was the leather belt that they kept all of their tools on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, because I didn't have a dad in the picture. My mom would empower them to be my surrogate role model, surrogate father kind of thing. So it was really fucked up. It was psychotic. This is part of that whole witness thing. What do you mean it's part of the witness thing? Well, when you have problems with somebody who needs to be disciplined, they help women.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
that have kids that aren't listening by singling them out and getting people around them to talk to them in usually a less than edifying way. And I was never put in one of those situations where my sister Debbie was. She had done something, gone out somewhere with another guy that was in the church that they went to, and some girl that liked the guy made up a story that they were
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And it never happened. But the church believed this other girl because her dad was one of the executives in the church. They call them overseers. So, of course, you're going to believe the daughter of an overseer because they're a hierarchy. They're, you know, they're pious. They're without any remorse. they're without any spot, no blame, they're spotless.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So their kid can come up with a story like my sister banging some guy and never happened. And of course, she's disfellowshipped and that traumatizes her because, again, the social circles and what happens when you don't have people that you associate with on a regular basis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I was talking to Darren earlier and I told him, I said, you know, we have the people that we would associate with and there would be Two days we would see people on Wednesdays and on Sundays, unless you went out in service on Saturdays. And you didn't really get a chance to associate with people, so your social life was very stunted.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I feel like a lot of the young people in organized religion, this particular one didn't think about the social hardships that it was going to be for young people growing up. You know, it's kind of like M. Night Shyamalan's movie, The Village. You know, we were in the village. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
How bad did it get? The spankings? Yeah. Well, you know, the gun belt's like two, three inches wide. It's about three-eighths of an inch thick leather. So one swat with that hurt like hell. And it wasn't like I was beat every day, but whenever anybody got in trouble, I got it because I was the oldest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I had both of those sisters had kids that were just a little bit younger than me that were boys. So we would all be together. Even though I was their uncle, we would go out and do stuff as three kids because we're all we had. We didn't have anybody else. We weren't allowed to play with normal people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, we would go someplace, we would shoplift something, we would light a fire in a field, we would break something, we'd throw a ball, you know, break out a streetlight, throw somebody's shoes over a wire, whatever. And they would just go nuts. Damn. How did she get into witchcraft? Oh, Michelle. Yeah, so she got into this thing with Stan. She married Stan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Stan was, like I said, he was a really, really terrific guy. He was a really awesome guy. Good looking and... I mean, first thing in the morning, the whole fucking neighborhood vibrated, and who wouldn't want to be married to a cop like that? And his tour that he had to do every day was Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. That doesn't suck, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So anyways, he left her, and she was heartbroken, and she went crazy. And she started pursuing alternate means because God had not worked for her. The God of the witnesses that she'd been praying for her husband to come back didn't work for her. And she, I had ran away from home and I moved up to Idaho and I was living with her and her kids in a trailer, which was awful, just fucking awful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And she'd went to work one day, and I started playing hooky from school because my nephew had told people at the school I was a martial artist guy, and the first day I got there, I got cold-cocked, and I figured I'm not going to this school because I'm not going to deal with this every day. So I started playing hooky. I figured I would run away back to home, but
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
One day I went back into where her bedroom was, and there was a candle that was on her desk that had melted, and it had some substance in the top of it. It looked like moss. And there was a picture that was burnt in half. And it was a hex to have him leave the girl he left my sister for, who was a big blonde bombshell from a bar, and to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Come back to my sister, who was not a big bombshell blonde. And I'll be damned if he didn't come back. Are you serious? He came back. He came back. So I figured, wow, this has got to work. And I saw the book. It was just a little piece of paper. It was like you fold it in half, and that's a page. And it was like a 20-page booklet or something like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And it had a couple hexes in there, and I tried two of them, and they both worked too. So at that point, I had to tell my wife what I had done, and we started on the journey of trying to get the oppression, the demonic oppression that had happened to me by opening up my defenses and asking for the Dark Prince to help me put a hex on somebody. That really fucked my life up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And it took years for us to get out of it because we were going to like San Francisco up to Filipino priests that would lay hands on you. And I had some Indian rajas that would do cupping and acupuncture and crazy stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, one was something that had to do with the guy that actually punched me at school. What happened was we... We went to school that day and the guy walked up to me and just slugged me and he said he was going to see me after school. Now we rode a normal school bus to one point and then the bus stopped and all the kids got out for a smaller bus that would take us out into the rural area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And so we stop, we get out and everybody circles around the two of us, like we're gonna fight right there. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this is going down. So everything I'd learned up to that point, you know, was going through my mind. And the second bus shows up and we get in the bus
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
and we take off and he's coming up to his house and he walks through the walkway in the bus and elbows me in the back of the head as he's getting out. And I was trying to fit in, so I had a mouthful of Redman and I was trying to get into the whole chewing tobacco thing because that's what everybody else was doing. And when he hit me, I went and I swallowed that shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I went back to my sister's trailer and I got really, really sick and I figured, That's it. I'm going to do something about this. So I looked through the book and I found something that would do what I wanted, and I did that hex. And then there was another one. What did you want to happen?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I really don't want to get into it because I don't want anybody to be misled and try and figure out what I did and go down that route because it was a terrible deviation from what was good and right in the world for me. Of course, that power's out there. Without black, there's no white. But it was just... For me, after that happened, I realized that I really don't want to talk about this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I really don't want to get anybody interested in it. So I'll talk about it to the degree that I'm comfortable with where I know that nobody can be misled from it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I did a second one, and that one was something when I had moved back to California already. And, uh, there was some, somebody that I wanted and, uh, I was just, you know, I was an ugly redheaded freckle face kid with short hair and sweat rings. And, and I, I, uh, didn't have any chance of being with this girl, but everybody in school wanted to be with this girl.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I figured what the hell, you know, I say that quite a lot in my life. Right. Um, and, uh, We were together, and then we weren't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
understanding that there are black witches and white witches, that there are witches that do good. Um, but witchcraft is the witchcraft. It's the use of the elements and, and, uh, you know, there's alchemy, there's wizardry, sorcery, electricity, um, magic, there's, uh, um, use of blood, use of spit, use of sperm use of, um, all of these things that are all part of, uh, um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
what was created and being used in an unnatural way. So, um, you know, for me, I, I, when I walked away from practicing any kind of witchcraft, cause I, I, I didn't practice it. I did it two times and both of them worked. And then I went, this is bigger than I am. And I, I'm not going to mess around with this. And so, um, both the song, the conjuring and, uh,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And there was another song that was kind of along from that inspiration, from that experience. It was Bad Omen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, no, see, that's probably, you know, as soon as I said that, I thought, you know, there's probably going to be some people that think I don't believe in heaven. See, the thing is, is I'm willing to believe in it. And I'm willing to be wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It's like Pasquale's equation when he said, it's better to live like there's a God and die and find out there isn't one than to live like there is no God and die and find out that there is one. So for me, I like to try and live my life as if there is a God. And I like to look forward to my life. I want to live a long time. I don't want to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
die and go to heaven right now because I'm in a very human way selfish and I want to spend time with my family, with my granddaughter, with my son, with my daughter, with my wife. I love making music. My career's full stop right now and You know, the idea of just saying, oh, I give up. Let's go. Ding, ding. That to me is not what I want to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Do I believe in streets of gold and all that kind of stuff? Well, there's a lot of documentation about that in the word. But, you know, I don't necessarily remember everything because of...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
part of the cancer treatment the chemo brain is something that happens when you get chemotherapy and and the radiation and chemo treatment that i had was really gnarly so um do i believe when i die i'm going to go to heaven yeah hope so what do you envision heaven like I don't know. See, that's the whole thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I always have this picture of clouds and a gate and you walk through it and then it's like I think, do I want to go to heaven? No, I want to spend more time with my wife because if I go to heaven and I'm not with her, if I go to heaven and we're not together as a couple anymore, that would make me sad. And I get real emotional when I think about that. So I don't want to talk about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I'll ask the second question first. How does it affect my worldview and focus? How does martial arts affect my worldview and focus?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, See, I loved my dad. I didn't know what was going on. I was still really young. I remember to this day when we were living on one particular street in Costa Mesa, and my mom and my dad were still together. They must have tried another time, because I don't believe I was four at the time. I believe I was a little older. But they for sure got divorced at four.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I remember kissing him goodnight and his stubble on his face, and he always smelled like a pipe. like cherry vanilla pipe. So I grew up to love that smell.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Now, the things that I was told about my dad that I never saw was that my dad had slashed on my mom's tires so she couldn't get away, that he had cut his hands and he rubbed his blood all over my mom's face, and that he'd smacked her a few times and spit in her face. What do I know? Do I think that's real? Probably is. It probably is. Do I wish I knew? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But do I know now after going through treatment so many times that A lot of times when people are in the throes of spirits or medication or street drugs, any kind of thing like that, the whole reason that people do anything like that is to break the reality. just to have a momentary break in reality so that you can feel anything but what you're really feeling right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I just want to feel something different. I don't know if I want to go up or go down or go sideways. I just want to feel something different. I hate my life. I hate my job. I hate my relationship and I have nothing to live for. And I know I don't want to kill myself because I'm afraid of killing myself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, that's what I thought. So my worldview is, you know, it's in flux. It... changes over time. Something that I thought was okay when I was a teenager certainly isn't okay now. Stuff that I thought wasn't okay seems absolutely normal right now. My thinking evolves just like anybody who has an open mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the choices sit there and, you know, just be miserable or someone will come around and say like, Hey man, let's have a drink. And it's usually how it starts. A drink, another drink, another drink. And if you're someone like me, the reason why I don't drink hard liquor is because once I get to the point where I take one and I go, ah, the second one I'm going to go, oh.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the third one I'm going to go, whoops. There's just no place in my life right now for that. I'll see people when they're in our presence, meet and greets, concerts, stuff like that, and they'll be clearly inebriated, and we'll try and be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
real considerate of that and make sure that they're being handled in a proper way because sometimes they say stuff that makes them look like they're an aggressor but they're just a rambunctious fan who's intoxicated so back to the thing with my dad there was those stories that I had heard but then again I go back to the same thing I said previously about I don't know why they didn't try and
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
take him to a treatment facility because he was a vet. He was in the Army. I know he had a problem with the VA. And I know he had some kind of disease. He had gout. That was one of the things he had. And he had some other kind of diseases because when he passed away, I went to his apartment and I found his Masonic ring. And then I...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
found these jars that were full of medication, and they were big jars. They were like peanut butter-sized jars, not the little ones you get from the pharmacy. They're big. So whatever he was dealing with, he had enough medication there to last, in my estimation, a very long time unless he was eating them like candy. When did he pass? How old were you?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I was 17 when he died, and he had been working in a bar. He was working for National Cash Register at the time. He went from being the West Coast branch manager of Bank of America to being a guy that worked on cash registers because of his alcoholism. I'm sure that that was unbearable for him. So he's in a bar, he's working on a cash register. They said he fell off a stool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
All I know is that he was in a bar and his head hit the ground. Whatever transpired between him walking through the front door and him walking out in a stretcher,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
is it's an enigma to me but he had a mass cerebral hemorrhage and he was in the hospital my sister called me up and they said daddy's in the hospital you need to come now and all i had for transportation at the time was a moped because my mom had left me and i that's the and i took the moped with my surfboard down to the beach every day that's all i needed transportation for but
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I got the call and I grabbed a bottle of whiskey. It was this stuff called Old Granddad. It was awful. And I started driving down Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach to Costa Mesa to go to the hospital where my dad was. He was already dead. He was in a coma. And he was in the fetal position.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I walked into my sister Suzanne, the middle one, because you're going to end up just like Daddy. And I hated her from that moment on. Before then, I didn't hate her. I was confused why she had ostracized me. But when she said that, I just figured, you're just rotten. And I'm not going to have anything to do with you anymore. And we stayed out of touch for a very long time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, the funny thing was when my mom moved out, I, I had, um, called him up and, uh, it was the first year. And I, I, like I said, it was 17 and, um, I had, uh, it was, it was father's day and I called him up and I said, Hey dad, I'm living on my own now, and I'd really like to come down and see you for Father's Day. And he said he'd really like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I've been around the world and I've seen so many things that it makes me really grateful for where we live, but it also makes me grateful for the way in which we live.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I went down, and I saw his apartment, and it was just bare bones. And I opened up his fridge, and there was a piece of meat in there on a plate, like a pot roast, and nothing else. And at the time, I didn't put everything together that this is not acceptable. This is not okay. This is my dad. What's going on here? I just went down and I figured this is the first step.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
because it's the first time I'd ever seen my dad in a neutral territory where my mom wasn't saying her mantra, which was, you're gonna go live with your father. So I was always threatened with my father at the end of the sentence. You know, you're gonna get your head shaved with your father. Anything like that stupid shit, they would just say, you're gonna get this with your father.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And when they would say I was going to go move with them, after a while, I started to fear that. And I needed to find out for myself. And I went and I met him. I saw him for the man that he was. He was a sick man. And he wasn't weak by any means. He was sick. What was the conversation like? It was very, very shallow. It was very strained. I think he knew how badly he had
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
had let me down as his son. I can tell you, when I do stupid stuff like cuss around my son's daughter, I feel like I've done the unthinkable. So when my dad had to face what he did, I'm sure it was 100 times manifest and so many times worse, all the things he had to face and think of. Because I've never done anything like, bled on my wife or spit on her or slash her tires or anything like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Whenever we get in an argument, I know that I love her too much to say anything that I would regret. So I usually walk away. And, you know, I get hit with stuff as I'm walking away. Don't walk away. Come back here and fight. But, you know, it's usually better. I let her cool off and then... You know, every couple has that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Going to some of the other countries that are socialist countries or other countries that maybe are third-world countries and the poverty level is extreme, you want to say, hey, this person is just like me, and they are physiologically, but when it comes down to anything beyond that, them just standing in front of you, their whole existence is completely different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You know, if you really love somebody, you gotta face the fact that you're two completely different people trying to live together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That was the one and only time I'd seen him. Damn. Ever, without any kind of conditioning by my mom. Usually he would come over the first week of school, and my mom would let him bring over stuff like pencils and school products for the list that they give you when you start each school year. You need to get your notebooks and your this and your that. My mom would have him provide that for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I don't know that he ever gave her child support. That could have possibly been a problem. But see, it's like I said, it's an enigma. I just don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Tried. We talked. She would come over and maybe once every couple weeks and do stuff like – clean my house or come over to maybe cook something. I think it was her way of making sure I didn't die. But, you know, because she still was a mom and I still was her son, no matter what religious organization had a hold of her mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Her heart still belonged, you know, to her maternal production, for lack of a better word, that I was, you know. How did you get into dealing? That was, like I said, I started off messing around with it a little bit, and then I figured out I would sell it. And it wasn't like something that happened overnight. I was going to Marina High School. There was a place they had
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
that went over this moat that went around the school. It was called the bridge. And all the kids that were the bad kids would go out on the bridge. So I would go out there and people would sell joints. And stuff that you hear on Cheech and Chong records, Acapulco Golds and Columbian and Sense of Me and stuff like that. That's what the pot was called back then.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I remember we would go out there during lunch everybody smoked joint, you know, you'd get one puff off of it and then you'd go back to go eat lunch and then go to class. Unfortunately for me, algebra was after lunch and I got an F in algebra.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But all the other classes I had that were philosophical in a sense, like English, stuff like that, social studies, those were things that were enjoyable for me when I was in high school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Me, myself? Yeah. You know, it depends on what people say abuse is, because if you see stuff that you shouldn't see, that's abusive. And I saw stuff I shouldn't see. And for me, I think that, you know, it's one of those things that you have to break the chains. You have to. Because maybe it was in my dad. Maybe it was in his dad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But doing something like that, I believe, is a spiritual trespass on somebody. You're talking about generational trauma. Yeah. Yeah, any kind of bloodshed or any kind of sexual abuse, stuff like that, because the sins of the father are revisited onto generations. And I was having a hard time with stuff, and we did a bunch of ancestral
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
research and found out that there was a lot of uh war in my family and a lot of warriors and a lot of bloodshed consequently so um we had to uh had to really face a lot of that stuff and and you know i'm not a violent person by nature um like i said one of the best things i've ever learned about fighting is not to if you don't mind me asking we don't have to go there what kind of stuff did you see
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I can't go down to South America, for example, and expect somebody who's a fan, who is living under those pressures of poverty to know what it's like to have your own house. I learned a long time ago that young people in Japan had a decision to make whether they were willing to purchase a vehicle or a house. They could not do both.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, sexual stuff? Well, I saw stuff with some cousins that I had that were kind of fooling around with other people. And it was something that they thought it was kind of fun to show us kids. And to me, I think that's sexual abuse. Nine years old, you don't need to witness somebody having intercourse with somebody else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
As far as anybody trying to sexually abuse me, that hasn't happened, fortunately for me. And as far as my family's concerned, we're golden. Ever since our children were born, they've been treated like gold, and there was never anything that we would make sure that they didn't watch any inappropriate movies for their age.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Even at this time, with Electra being in her mid-20s, when she's in the front room watching movies with her mom, and there's too much cussing, I'll go, you guys... And here I am. I can't get through a sentence without saying fuck. It's like that guru that's on the internet that says all the great ways you can use fuck in a sentence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But when I hear it and I hear my family saying it, I'm like, come on, man. Don't do that. You're a lady. Stop it. Goofy, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
The first thing is to say something about it. As embarrassing as it is to let it continue to happen in a very twisted way, kind of allowing it to happen. And you don't want to be a co-conspirator in your own sexual abuse. There are certain circumstances I'm sure of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I have a vivid imagination where people are in circumstances where they cannot get out of a circumstance where they're being sexually abused. And that's where I think you need to say something. To who? To anybody. First person you fucking see, say something. You know, because if you're being sexually abused in your child, that person is doing the unthinkable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
If you're adult and you're being sexually abused, there are laws for that, equally the same ones with children. And stuff that's taken by force, there are laws for that. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we should go back to the death penalty for rapists. Part of me says yes, and part of me says no. But I think when you do that, because you're taking a piece of somebody's life away forever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, you're destroying their innocence. Yeah, and they're going to think about that moment for the rest of their life. Something's wrong with me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then to get back to your first question about Brazilian martial art, I'm working on my fourth black belt right now in VJJ. And it started with Benny the Jet Ukidas, who was in the Black Belt Hall of Fame. And he was my first black belt that I got in Ukidokan. And that was back in the 90s. And after that, I moved to Arizona. So I was unable to train with
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I don't know. Um, let's, let's go down the chain. Michelle, she passed away recently from leukemia and a bunch of blood diseases. And I think that could be because of what she did. I talked to my uncle, her husband, Stan, every once in a while because he's still kind of like my childhood hero. My next sister, Suzanne, she passed away from Parkinson's disease just this year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And her husband died a long time ago, and he was the police chief. And I made amends with him before he passed away, which was good. And the amends with him was really weird because I told him, I said, I needed to make amends for you, and I'll never get over my drinking unless I... clean up the wreckage of my past and I've seen I've done the following harm to you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I made you have to discipline me and I know you didn't want to do that. And I need to say that I need to know what I can do to make it right. Not sorry, because I said sorry so much it became a fucking character reference. But when I would say I need to make amends to you and I see I've done the following harms... you know, and what can I do to make this right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Some people would say, I don't ever want to see you again. Some people will say, you know what, I'm looking forward to see you in heaven, but not down on earth. And other people would say, you know what, just stay sober. Or one guy said, I want a guitar. And I went, Inside, I was rolling my eyes, but on the outside, I went, okay, that's what you want, and that's what I'll do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That's the price, the dummy tax that I spent. Right on, right on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
sense of any anymore and the closest most convenient place for me to go work out was a taekwondo school that was there and I got a black belt in that really fast and I was going for the master program and I started to notice there were holes in the program like I was teaching a kid's class and I grabbed the bottom of his gi and I pulled on it and he fell and started crying and I felt terrible
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, that was, again, not having a social network of people that were my age that I hung out with. I had to hang out with my sister's boyfriend's little brother. So my sister got married when she was 17. Oh, wow. Yeah. To this guy, who they're divorced now. Yeah. He's not anybody I ever want to see again in this world. And he had a guitar, but his little brother had a bass.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I remember going to... the little brother, his name was Mark, to his house, and he was listening to some records with his friends, and we just smoked a joint, and we thought that we were the coolest kids in the world. And there were some girls that were in the neighborhood.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Mark had a girlfriend, and her girlfriend had a friend, so I hooked up with her, and we had everything to be in a rock band except talent and instruments. So my brother-in-law, Mike, the older one, had this guitar. It was a piece of junk called a Supra. And he was playing guitar. He was playing some Deep Purple at the time, which is not a band that I'm really fond of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I respect the players tremendously, but it's not really my type of music. But I did understand the playing was very cyclical. It was something that did not...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
reminisce in any way American music because American music was a lot of rock and roll stuff so there was a chord followed by another chord followed by another chord which would go verse, chorus, verse, chorus little bit of a middle eight section like a refrain, and then a chorus, and the song's over, maybe two minutes, three minutes. Then it started getting a little longer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I had my first introduction to playing the guitar through Mark and Mike Bally. The first time I ever actually played the guitar was my cousin John Odell, and he had Gibson Les Paul back then. God, what I would give to have that guitar from him. But he showed me how to do a bar chord, and I knew how to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And one of the first songs I ever learned was a song called Panicking Detroit that was done by David Bowie. And the next one was All the Young Dudes by Mata Hoople. And I can't remember which one was first. It was one or the other of those two, but those were... basically the two songs I started playing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then I thought, this program doesn't teach people how to fall. But in the meantime, I got my black belt with that. organization and then we went to korea and i got my my third black belt in taekwondo and i got my fourth degree with the world taekwondo federation and uh um mr chung was the uh he was the president at the time he was the one that had presented me my awards and my belts
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then I heard Led Zeppelin, and I thought, god, this is just amazing, but it's so difficult. And I started to learn how to play and started to get drawn more to the guitar. Right after Led Zeppelin, it was Ted Nugent and Kiss. Those were really influential bands. And so now I'm starting to see the visual. I'm starting to hear the mystical with Led Zeppelin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I'm hearing the blue collar stuff with Deep Purple and so on. Ted Nugent being, back in the day, the Motor City Madman, he had some really amazing songs for the time. I still think he's an amazing guitar player. I know that a lot of people don't like Ted, but I think that my guitar playing has a lot of influence from Ted Nugent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
as well as once I started to get into the new wave of British heavy metal, because the first time I got involved in music was the British invasion. So for my songwriting, learning how to song write, it was primarily bands like The Stones, The Who, The Beatles, so on and so forth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then when I started to pick up guitar, I started to learn the new wave of British heavy metal, which was bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Diamond Head, Motorhead, so on and so forth. And there was a total difference, because how I write a song is not based off of what I can play on guitar.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because I can play guitar to the level that I can, I can write songs that are a little bit more explorative.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, no, that's not exactly right. What I learned about songwriting was from the British Invasion. So from listening to the Beatles. Also, my sisters were very much into Motown. So Megadeth has its swing and its groove from the Motown influence that I had. Sam and Dave, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone. Chaka Khan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
There's so many bands from back then that R&B stuff would be played at my house. Plus, it was sometimes the only thing you could hear on the radio. There's a radio station in Los Angeles called K-Earth, K-Earth 101. And it plays oldies. And I love the oldies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Picking it up... It happened at a really good time in my life where I was looking for something because I was playing Little League and I was really, really good at it. But I also knew the reality was that I was never going to be a professional baseball player because I'm not stupid. You know I'm not stupid, so I became a rock star instead. That's hilarious. It's not a dichotomy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It's more along the lines of me knowing the odds for being able to become a professional baseball player. I was not huge in stature. I was not a big person. The position I played was a catcher, and most catchers in professional baseball are solid guys. They're much more... taller and heavier than I was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I was thinking, you know, part of the reason that I liked playing that position was because I got to almost sit down the whole game.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, see, that was, I made up my mind I was going to do that. That's different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
When I was a child? After I stopped playing Little League, I knew that I needed to make a decision in my life, obviously. I'm living on my own, I'm selling marijuana, and I'm not happy. I'm alone. I'm alone. And as bad as things were, this was worse. Being alone was worse. I knew that I needed to do something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Playing guitar? I was 13. My mom had gotten me an acoustic guitar when I graduated from some grade. I don't know what it was. But she got me an acoustic guitar from Pier 1 Imports. And it was a piece of shit. But I started plunking around on it. My sister was playing piano. And my mom had got her a piano. and me a piece of shit acoustic guitar.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So again, here I am, the last kid, getting the tough kid's blue jeans that are somebody else's already for a few years. So I started playing guitar to play along with her, and then it became clear to me that she wasn't getting any better. So I stopped playing with her, and I started playing by myself. And once I met her boyfriend and her boyfriend's little brother,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then the one thing that I always wanted to do was ground fighting because Yukido-Kan is a hybrid of nine different styles. And one of the styles is Jiu-Jitsu. And it doesn't mean that it's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or man on the moon Jiu-Jitsu. It's Jiu-Jitsu. But I found a school here. I went there and I didn't like the instructor, or the owner, but I liked the head instructor there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That's when I started really focusing. And the thought of me not being that person, not being a rock star, just didn't cross my mind because I had nothing else to, you know, it's like an officer and a gentleman where the guy says, I don't have anywhere else to go. I didn't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Little weird stuff. Like I went with a little three-piece group that I was in for like a day. It was for a dance. And they were having a battle of the bands. And we only knew one song. And they said we were too loud. So we missed out on that one. I started playing at my cousin's house down in Dana Point. And we did several concerts down there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that's basically where Megadeth was born, was out of my cousin John's front room in Dana Point. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You mean Panic? No, Megadeth was born there because the songs that are in Megadeth were being played in Panic at that time. So Megadeth was born at that time, although I didn't know it. I was in the guise of... panic, but really Megadeth had just broken surface as the terra firma. And now I'm gonna watch this whole thing unfold before my eyes. Am I gonna, am I gonna be able to handle the pressure?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I think so. I've had a lot of pressure in my life. Am I going to be able to stay relevant? I think so because I've had to almost teach myself because of dropping out of school and having to figure everything out for myself. Right now I'm writing a song on the art of war because I've got a song that just sounds like a fucking samurai song.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I thought it'd be really great because I've read the art of war so many times to maybe put that book as a muse to help me write a story about something related with the samurai culture or the way of life. How did you get into the art of war? I've read a lot of really good books to help me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, I started very early reading all the self-help books you could get, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, all those books, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read a bunch of C.S. Lewis books. read tons of books, and just stuff that gives you a different perspective on stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It may not be real, it may not be appropriate, it may not fit, but it helps me to maybe understand somebody else a little bit more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Panic? Man, I was a teenager. That was the best thing I could come up with. Pretty good name. Yeah, it was pretty good at the time, and... I remember there was another band that was called Panic at the Disco. And I always wondered who had it first, because I never really did the research and see when those guys actually started.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But I think there was another band that was called Panic, too, at some point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, the first time that we played, we were in my cousin's apartment. And apartments, they're not generally gigantic places to live in. So I think the room probably was, his front room was probably about 2 3rds the size of this room. And we had our gear set up. And my cousin was very well known in Dana Point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
he had let all his friends know hey my cousin david's coming i hate when he calls me david my cousin david's coming down from huntington beach to do jam with his band people there it's a block party no shit yeah and uh so i'm hiding in the bathroom and uh getting ready to play and uh We go out and we start playing the songs that we'd learned. And we played a couple of originals I had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And so much so that I helped him get a school on his own. We moved away from that original school. He opened up a school in Spring Hill and he opened up a second school in Columbia. And it's Renzo Gracie jiu-jitsu. So I have my brown belt right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We played what ended up being Hangar 18 there, because it was called N2RHQ at the time. It was a tail number on a plane that I had seen one time. And I thought, what does that say? And I wrote down N2RHQ. It's probably not what the fin had on it anyways, or the tail had on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I thought about what it would be like to have a place in outer space that was a new existence, like, for example, Skylab. And so that was how that song started. And it morphed as it went into Megadeth. We changed the name and changed the lyrics just a little bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, it was... It felt wonderful, obviously, but it was... It was very foreign. So I never experienced anything like that. I mean, the games at the Little League Park, that was great. You hit a home run. I was tied for first place for our home runs that were hit. One of the last seasons I played down there, and I wasn't by any means a ringer, but it was two kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He hit four, I hit four, but kids weren't hitting home runs. And that was cool. I don't know why I keep going off on this baseball stuff, but the people that were in the bleachers cheering and stuff like that, that felt good. That felt good. But it wasn't a routine occurrence. How routine did it become? It was a weekend thing with Little League.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Sometimes you would have an after-school game, but usually it was weekends, and not always did we win or not always did I have a VIP performance. I mean the concerts. The concerts. Okay, so that would happen about maybe once every— Once a month, maybe. Once a month? It only happened, I think, four or five times down there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then we did a couple parties up in Huntington Beach, George County area. And then I left because it was just getting the drugs that were going around. And there was a whole other scene that I never knew about until we started playing. As soon as we started playing, we were at a friend's house.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
There was a party, and some people from another neighborhood came to this party, and they dumped a bunch of things that were called reds. I think it's barbiturates. And they dumped that into the... fruit punch that they made. So they had fruit punch and vodka and somebody came there and dumped a bunch of these other drugs in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And if everything goes according to plan and I stay in my training routine, I probably will have my black belt sometime at the end of this year or next year. Wow. Wow. Long question.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And everybody was falling out in the place and they ended up getting robbed. And it was just a bad scene. So that, and everybody seemed to start showing up with somebody who did or somebody who knew somebody who did or had cocaine. And it was just, that was the time of the, in my life where cocaine was prevalent everywhere. It was in the eighties and yeah, yeah. How old were you at this point?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, it depends what part of the agnus I'm talking about. If it was when Megadeth started, that started later. Panic didn't go from being functional to being Megadeth overnight. Yeah. When I was in panic, obviously, I went to Metallica and then got back in Megadeth. And the stuff that I learned in panic, it took with me to Metallica, and I think that's part of the reason why Lars was letting me
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
help settle shows and being the spokesperson for the band until we got management.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Like I said, I was probably around 18, maybe. Wow. Yeah, I think so. Maybe about 18. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people died. And it just kind of seemed like there was bad stuff that was supposed to happen to just test me. What did happen? Oh, well, that first band, Panic, there's a lot of death. The guitar player, myself, the drummer, the bass player, and the singer were down in Dana Point. And it was our first show. And it was time for everybody to go to bed. Right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So my cousin says, you can sack out here, you can sack out here, you can do this. And the drummer and the sound guy, guy's name was Joe, and the drummer's name was Mike. They say, no, we want to drive home. And I said, it's Dana Point, it's nighttime, you guys are buzzed, and you're going to drive all the way back up to Huntington Beach? Bad idea. Don't do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And they did it, and the driver, Joe, fell asleep while he was driving on Pacific Coast Highway right south of the Huntington Beach Pier. He hit a control box for the traffic signals, and the car flipped on its side and burst into flames. The driver, Joe, was impaled by the steering column, and he broke his neck, and he died immediately. at the scene and Mike never woke up in the back seat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He was burnt to death. And then shortly after that, Tom, the guitar player, had driven off of the freeway where there was a huge embankment like roads up here, you know, when they had those things that are down the side and you can look down and there's a parking lot down there. Well, he went off the freeway
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And he hit the parking lot and his Jeep somehow pinned him underneath it and slid for a long distance and just ground him into nothingness. So that was really sad. And I know that our singer had some issues, but he's doing great now from what I hear. It was just the whole scene, the drug scene. We did a concert out in the woods for the... for these bikers one time. It was down in Fallbrook area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah. The one thing I did know before I knew how to fight was that I didn't like taking shit from people. I didn't know how to defend myself, but I knew I did not like taking shit from people. 12 years old, I joined the YMCA. My brother-in-law was the chief of police in Stanton, California. And he told me that the YMCA across from the police department was doing free karate classes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And we specifically learned songs like Bad Motor Scooter by Montrose. And we were out there and we play our set and we're done. We're getting ready to go. And the guys come up and they go, you're not done. You're going to play again. And I said, no, we already played our set. You ain't leaving until you play another set. And I thought, this is bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We're out here with a bunch of bikers and they're pissed and drunk right now. So one of the guys that was with us two of the guys that were with us decided it was an awful idea to go try and steal a keg from the bikers. They had taken it and rolled it up a hill and lost grip on it, and it rolled down the hill and went, bung, bung, bung, bung, squish, into the water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So you know the sound a keg makes. It was like the ringing of bells in Notre Dame, and all of a sudden these guys are... wanted men, and the bikers were on the hunt. So I hear one of the guys, he's up in a tree like a moron going, cool, cool, trying to talk to us. And I thought, this is not going to end well. So they said, you can play again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We'll pay you to play again, and we'll give you this big giant bag of magic mushrooms. So everybody passed him out, everybody ate him. And then the singer, I remember him walking around with a trash bag full of beer with a hole punched in the bottom and he was just drinking like a giant boda bag. It had gotten so out of control.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the next morning we woke up and it was time for us to get out of there. You can imagine what else could go wrong. The car that we drove down then in there burns out its clutch. So now we have to hitchhike from the woods out in the forest of Fallbrook back up to the freeway and try and hitchhike home to Huntington Beach. It was probably one of the worst days of my life playing music. Shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
How did you, I mean, were you guys close within the band? in panic, we were kind of, Pat the singer was much older than we were, so he kind of had a fatherly, I'm not gonna say condescension, but just a little bit of a, he just seemed like he was older than us, and it just felt like that was being made clear. He's the guy that's responsible. He's the guy with the wife. He's the guy with the kid.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He's the guy with the house. We're all derelicts that do drugs and live in apartments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
All three of them? Well, Mike's was really hard to deal with because he was the drummer in the band that I was in. Tom hadn't passed away yet. And Joe, I barely knew. So Mike was hard for me to lose. And he was a good guy. He was a left-handed drummer, too, which is very rare. Yeah, that was hard to get over. Starting the process of looking for a drummer again seemed very artificial.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because deep down inside, I didn't want another drummer. I wanted Mike to be alive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
How did that come about? I was done with Panic, and I said, I'm going to find something else to do. So I got a newspaper called The Recycler, and it's just a rag from Los Angeles, Orange County. It's like a county classified ad magazine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
i'm looking in the classified ad magazine go figure the biggest band in the world would advertise in this newspaper so i look at it and it says wanted lead guitar player and um mentioned a couple bands so i called up and i got lars on the phone and i said yeah, well, I like Motörhead and I like Budgie. And he goes, you like fucking Budgie, man? And I went, yeah, I do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I went, it was Shorinryu. So it was more the traditional karate style. And I remember when I went and started taking classes there, the first thing we did, it was like within the first couple of classes was a tournament. And I was still a white belt and there's no striking to the face, no striking to the groin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that was the icebreaker because Budgie is a Welsh band. It's a three-piece. It's very obscure. And by me listening to them showed that I had credibility in the new wave of British heavy metal world because of The bands I was listening to, they were not a band like a white metal band or a progressive metal band. They were a three-piece from Wales that kicked ass.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They didn't have to have all those silly names in front of it. And how did that develop? What part? Joining Metallica. Joining Metallica. Yeah, so we were on the phone, and he made that comment that I know them, and I said, yeah. So we talked about meeting face-to-face, and I drove down from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach, where he lived, in a place called, I think it was called Park Newport.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the funny thing was, my mom was a maid, and she had actually worked event for catering in his town.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
complex he was in and I'm thinking go figure my mom was a maid here and your mom has a place here what what a story that is the two sides of a different coin you know or two different sides of the same coin and um so I went into his his place and started talking to him and uh he played this song called hit the lights that was written by a guy named uh Lloyd Grant so um
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Metallica didn't write that song. Lloyd Grant wrote it, and then he was friends with Lars, and then Lars introduced him to James, and then they started playing Hit the Lights. That's the song that I heard from them first, and I said, wow, this song needs way more lead solos in it. It was just me being cocky, being me. It needs more lead solos in it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And he was trying to figure out if I was for real. And so we went to rehearsal. He said, we're going to try you out. So, okay. So, I mean, I knew how good I played. I have been gifted and I know it's not by my own doing, so I don't try to take any credit for it. So I don't care how good I am or.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
or not or what people say or anything like that so I just knew what I knew what I knew and I went to Ron McGovern's parents fourplex they had this place that James was living with Ron and I went up there with Lars and I set up my amps and I plugged my guitar in and I just started warming up as it And they were impressed. They wouldn't come in. What do you mean they wouldn't come in?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They wouldn't come into the rehearsal room. So I put my guitar down and I thought, this is really strange. And I walked out and I said, guys, are we going to do the audition? They said, you got the gig.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Good, good. I knew I was going to get it. You knew it. Yeah, because I could play that stuff. I mean, there weren't very many guitar players like me around at the time. You know, who were they? Randy Rhoads, there were people like that. Guy from Rat with Warren Demartini was really great, you know. But Real Shredders, there wasn't a lot of us around at the time. Damn, damn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And first guy that I competed against kicked me in the groin and smacked me in the face. And he was DQ'd, but didn't change the fact that I could not finish. And so I just said, that's it for me. And I went a different route and I started training in Kung Fu San Su after that for a little while.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, again, it's kind of like I said, it seemed like this was what my destiny was, and when it came time for us to do our first concert. We played at a high school, or maybe it was a junior high school. Lars might have gone to. I know he went to it, but I can't remember if it was elementary or junior or high school, whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And from that point on, it was just clear that whenever there was any kind of altercation that was going down, I would be the one that would take care of it. James was very peaceful and Lars, he was a little bit of a devil. He liked to have fun. But yeah, if there was ever any stuff going down, I had to take care of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
When we went up to San Francisco and did our first couple shows up there at a place called The Stone, I was the one who had to go and collect the money. And there's a million ways to embezzle or to be corrupt when it comes down to running a club or a bar. When it involves a band getting paid, they can say all kinds of stuff. And if you don't know, you don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And most kids my age at that time don't know. And they try and get money, and they'll say, well, you sold 200 tickets, and you have a bar tab here, and so we're going to give you $150. And you know that they made a killing on their booze. You know that they made money on the food and snacks that they have there and the ticket prices. Plus, they take a giant whack of your merchandise.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that was my gig. I would go do that. When we decided we were going to move out to New York, that was because Lars had found somebody he wanted to manage us, this guy Johnny Zazula, who had Megaforce Records. And he heard our demo tape, the No Life Till Leather demo tape, and he lost his mind, just like everybody else in the world. And they wanted to get the band to come out, and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
record a record. And while we were on the way out there, we got in a car crash. We were driving through the snow. None of us had to drive through snow except for Lars, because he's from Denmark. And I'm driving this Ryder truck. It's a 24-foot truck, and it had a tow bar, and it had James' pickup on the back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So when we were driving, we hit black ice, and the whole thing spun around while I was driving. And I managed to keep it upright in the middle of the freeway, but the truck stopped. And oncoming traffic was coming towards us. And the events that happened at that location, the guy that had produced, I think he produced the first record, his name's Mark Whitaker.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He was the guy that was doing our sound and stuff. He almost got died. I had to push him out of the way and a truck goes to the rider right where he was standing. So if I wouldn't have seen that truck come in and saved his life, he'd be dead right now. And when we went to the U-Haul place to get our truck replaced and move all of our gear into the new truck,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I've had various training in different styles, but I still think the best defense is to keep your eyes open and don't be a dick. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
James and Lars had made a decision to replace me because they tried to pin that driving thing on me as the last straw. We all drank. That's why they called it alcoholica. I mean, they didn't call it Dave alcoholica. We all drank. And they continued to drink like that even after I was gone. But that was, I think, the beginning of the end. And when we got out to New York, I had a reel of tape.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It was a quarter-inch tape. It had probably two days' worth of guitar riffs on it, just me playing and playing and playing. And we took that tape player and the reel of tape with us out to New York. And when we did two shows out there, and after those two shows, They woke me up one morning and said, look, you're out of the band. And I said, what are you talking about? You're out of the band.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I said, no warning? No second chance? You're not going to give me a warning? You're just going to kick me out? And I thought that was unfair. And it showed a grotesque lack of character. And so it pissed me off and was a huge part of the fuel. But at the time, I was really mad, and I didn't want to forgive them for what they did. And I told them when I left, do not use my music.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And of course, they used it. They write The Lightning I wrote, Call of Cthulhu I wrote. Let's see, what else? There's Phantom Lord, Metal Militia, Jump in the Fire, The Four Horsemen. Jeez. And I wrote a bunch of Leper Messiah too. They didn't give me credit on that. You listen to the riffs, you know they're my riffs. It's like, boing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You think I'm going to all of a sudden hear my riff and say that's not me? Damn. Yeah, I wrote a lot of their music that made them. And all the solos on that first record were mine. The best Kirk could try and copy them. Wow. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because when I got drunk, I got violent. James and I had gone out to a club one time, and it was the old Mabuhay. It was across the street from the Stone. And we were out front, and some guy came out of the alleyway, and he said, there's a guy beating some girl up in the alleyway. And of course, I, being the champion for justice, did not want to hear that and not do anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I went down the alleyway with James. And of course, James not being a fighter, started yelling out, kill him, kill him, kill him. And the guy comes out from behind a van and he was much bigger than James. And he said, who's gonna kill me? And James goes, points to me. So I immediately grabbed a guy and put him down in a submission and started rabbit punching him until he stopped moving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then we ran out of the alleyway and we stood out front until the paramedics came And that was it. So I imagine he saw that and he figured, you know, I don't want to be part of this. Dave's already beat me up back down in Los Angeles and he's just too violent. Damn. Because James did get a punch in the mouth from me. He kicked my puppy. You kicked your puppy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I have two privates a week, and I have a gym in my house. One of your friends knows where we're at and has been there. So it's a little bit more than home gym. It's kind of like a semi-professional gym. We still need some stuff there, but it has everything that you need to get a good workout in. Damn, that's awesome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, I was selling pot for a living, as you know, so one time I did a concert and people knew I was on stage, so they just... Jimmy, the window, there's nobody there. I took all my pot, and I was pissed. So I got two dogs. My nephew took one, and I took the other one. And I had taken her up with me to rehearsal, and she was playing, and she's looking up at me. I'm standing over here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Ron McGovern's got this really nice GTO, and she leans up against the car and puts her paws on the front quarter panel, and he goes bang and kicked the dog. And I went... what did you just do? What did you just do? And it went from the front yard into the house and there's still stuff being said. And I said, you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the mouth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then Ron McGovney says, if you hit him, you're going to have to hit me first. And I said, you stay out of it. And then James said the same thing. If you you're gonna have to hit me first." And I said, okay, you win. And bang, I hit James in the mouth. And then I hip tossed Ron into his Intellivision setup. And that was it, two strikes and it was over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And Lars was pulling his hair going, I don't want it to end this way. And I thought, you know what? I've already told you, it's either me or James. And we did that a bunch of times because James was doing stupid stuff. And I told James the same thing. I said, man, it's either me or Lars because Lars sucks. Damn. And I got the ax in the end. So it's good. It's fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
What did you do after you got axed? I went home and I contacted a friend of mine and I said, I quit. And she said, no, you didn't, you got fired. And I said, yeah, I got fired. So I quit, I got fired, whatever. I'm back home. Wrong word, not changing the outcome. And I made sure not to ever say that I quit because I wanted people to know that I was unfairly dismissed and that I didn't give a shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because we may not be as big as they are. Hell, their biggest song, Enter Sandman, go look up the band Excel right now. Look up their song. I think it's something into the unknown.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It wasn't very long. I moved up to Hollywood. I knew I needed to go up into LA. And I was really disappointed that I'd moved to Hollywood because everything about Hollywood was what I despised, what we despised in Metallica. You know, we didn't like the short hair. We didn't like the eyeliner. We didn't like the glammy clothes. We didn't like the ballads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And those are all the things that we stood against. And... I don't know where I'm going with that. You moved up to Hollywood to get back in the saddle. I'm trying to figure out what I was going to say about that because when I first came up there, I had been friends with a bunch of people that were in pen pal kind of a position.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
This guy named Brian Liu was a guy who had a metal magazine called Metal Militia. Or no, what was it called? Was it Metal Militia? I think that might have been the name of his magazine. But anyways, Brian Liu is still a friend of mine to this day. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I told him that I was planning on getting together, and I had met this guy, and this other guy, and I was thinking about the name Fallen Angels, blah, blah, blah, okay, okay, okay, bye. Next thing I know, it's a story, that I have a band with three people, and it's called Fallen Angels, and there never was that band, there never was, but the guitar player that I met, Robbie,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
McKinney was the guy I first played with when I came to Los Angeles. And he actually introduced me to the people I ended up playing with. Because when we started trying to get people, one of the first drummers we had was this kid named Lee Roush. And we'd done a couple of shows up in Palo Alto with Kerry King sitting in on guitar for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Um, that was, uh, really neat, but it ended in a very weird way because, uh, we had, we'd been playing together, uh, backtrack to David Ellison being in the band, but we were playing together with this guy named Lee Roush and, and this first show up in Palo Alto. Um, it was New Year's Eve and we were at the rehearsal place we were at and
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
all over the place. My mom and dad got divorced when I was four, and I was born in La Mesa, and at that time all I really remember was about four years old when I was baptized as a Lutheran, and then my mom and dad got a divorce, and thus started the leapfrog game with my mom and the two youngest children that she had, myself and my sister Debbie.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Something happened, so we were all running out of the building as fast as we can. The power went off or something weird. So we're running down the stairs. He falls, breaks his leg, and we've got a show in a couple days. And I said, Lee, you're an idiot. What did you do? And he goes, man, I'll just break the cast off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And he gets a pair of pliers, gets the cast wet, rips the cast off, and does the concert. His foot is black and green. Looks like he's got gangrene on it, and it should have been cut off. But he played. On the way back to Los Angeles, he goes, man, I'm going to go take some acid and find myself. And I never saw him again. No shit. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
The next drummer we got after that was somebody who was introduced to us by a manager named Jay Jones. But I've skipped the part about David Ellison. So do you want me to talk about that? Yes. When we first got the drummer, We were going through, before that happened, when I moved to the apartment I was living in in Hollywood, right underneath me there was two kids from Minnesota.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They were living in Jackson, Minnesota, which is a podum town out in the middle of nowhere. And their parents both saved up and sent them out to California to make it big. They would go to Guitar Institute of Technology and then they'd be discovered and Everybody lived happily ever after. Well, I was there in my apartment. They were there in their apartment underneath me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Playing Running with the Devil. Right? Real difficult bass riff. Gene Simmons actually played that. Did you know that? No. Yeah. And so I'm hearing this, and I'm mildly hungover. Nah, I was really hungover. So I open up the window, and I said, shut the fuck up. Slam the window. It seemed to have worked. I go lay back down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I open up the window and I grabbed this potted plant that was on the windowsill and I went, and I threw it down and it burst on his air conditioner and I'm waiting. So I open up the door. They're both stunned. You know, they've got these long fucking ridiculous looking leather jackets on that have a belt around. It's like a smoking jacket. And they had canvas high tops and bell bottoms on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Like they were really styling. And I look at him and I look at him and they go, do you know where to get some cigarettes? And I thought, oh my God. And I said, at the corner. Wham, and I shut the door. WHAT? ! Can you buy beer? And I went, now we're talking. So we became friends. I found out Dave was the bass player. Greg Handovid was the guitar player of this twosome that came out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They were both in the band for a little while. Greg married a bong, and we fired him. And it was just me and Junior for a little while. And then I found this drummer that was brought to us by a manager we had named Jay Jones. Jay Jones is dead. His brother knifed him with a butter knife over a bologna sandwich. So it shows you the kind of people we had managing us, too. Holy shit. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Right. His dad was in the war, and he got hit with some shrapnel, so he'd sit out in the front yard each night and stare at the moon like a dog, right? And his brother got in a fight with him. They both lived at home still, and they were both way old adults. And the guy stabbed him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And whenever we would move, my dad would find us and usually would show up drunk. And I loved him. I didn't understand alcoholism at the time. I was just a kid. And I certainly didn't understand why they didn't try to get him into... like a 12-step program because they weren't in existence at the time. So four years old until 13, I was with my mom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So Ellefson came into the band. Hand of it exited. We got a meeting with this guy named Clark Samuelson. Me and Ellefson are working at the studio at the time. And, um, Jay brings this guy, Gar, his name's Gary.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So Gar sits down and he's smoking a cigarette and he nods because he's a heroin addict and he had just gotten well before he came to see us because Jay was his dealer who became our dealer. So Gar's sitting there on the couch with a cigarette and it goes, right through his fingers, and I thought, fuck, this guy's a masochist, man. This is going to be great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So we go in there, and we go to audition him, and he was amazing, just amazing. So we created Megadeth. It was a metal jazz band that had classical and punk influences, and we were a three-piece for a little while, and then we met Chris Poland.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It was on a handbill from Senator Alan Cranston on the way back from New York to California. There was a handbill on the bottom of the floorboard of the Greyhound I was writing in, and I picked it up because I needed something to write on. I figured I was going to start writing lyrics. The first lyric I wrote was on the back of a
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
hostess snow cones, you know those cups with the pink chopped up mutant stuff, whatever it is. Yeah. So I had written on the back of that and I needed more paper and there was this thing on the floor, the seat in front of me, so I kind of reached my foot and grabbed it and I flipped it over. I read it. And it said, the arsenal of Megadeth can't be read. This is Senator Alan Cranston saying this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And there was much more stuff there about why he should be retained as a senator. And I thought, Megadeth, that's a great song title. So I wrote it down as a song title. And I wasn't thinking of a band name yet. But we got to LA. We got a band together. We played. We were driving around in the van. And by now, we had hired Jay, I mean, Carr, David Ellison, myself. Greg Handovid was still with us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And there was a singer we tried hiring named Lawrence, but he went by Lore. And he was the one that was talking to us. And he goes, you made us a great band name. Because I was thinking something like a foreign word, like fire, something bomb or something in a foreign language. But then you can't really say it when you go into the foreign language speaking territories. On stage, bomb!
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Everybody runs for the doors, right? So yeah, we gave a lot of thought to Megadeth. And the funny thing is, as soon as I chose that name, this little douche from the Circle Jerks that was a drummer, his name was Keith somebody, went out and registered the name Megadeth. So I had to pay him off to get it. He knew because he was friends with Jay Jones, our manager at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Jay told him, we're called Megadeth, and he ran right out. It cost me $10,000. Damn. Yeah. Damn. So this is the stuff I see that I don't like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We'd move from one sister to another sister, to my aunt on our own, back to another sister, back to the other sister. And it was always me and my sister Debbie who would be doing this leapfrogging because my two older sisters had both been married and had families, so they had some stability. I never knew that. My mom was a Jehovah's Witness, and when I was
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I had been writing songs, and I had several songs that I had in Metallica, several songs that I had before Metallica. And I was just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And I think the first time we went into the studio was in 83, and we started doing a demo. It was a three-song demo. I might be wrong on the date, but it was somewhere around there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that started to circulate. And people, I remember Scott Ian from Anthrax had been doing a show at the Reseda Country Club in Reseda, California. And I went to go see them because we were friends. And I said, I want you to hear this song. And I played him Love to Death. And he lost his mind. He'd never heard anything like that before. And that was the beginning of our friendship.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And it's lasted a long time. And when it came time for the album, we had gone down to a record company. It was called, what was it called? Prodigy or something like that. It was like a... like a, like a new wave, uh, alternative kind of, uh, uh, Enigma was the name. As much as I say Enigma, that's the name of the, uh, the record company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So we went to Enigma and we talked to them and, uh, they were not interested because we weren't the kind of music that they know what to do with. So, um, I thought that was, uh, respectable because they, uh, didn't say, oh yeah, we want to sign you, but we don't know what to do with you. Yeah. You know? So then we went to Combat. Combat was owned by Important Records and, and, uh,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I went and talked to this guy named Cliff Coltrary. And Cliff was the vice president at the California side of important records. And we went in and we played the record for him. And he goes, OK, let me make a call. And so he calls up his boss out in New York. And meanwhile, we left.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We were walking to the car and we heard this coming down the road and this fat guy's running after us and all of a sudden we recognize this, the guy we just met. And he goes, wait, wait, wait, come back in, come back in. We wanna talk to you. So we signed our first record deal, The Combat, and that was my introduction to the music industry.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Back then or now? Back then. Well, it was just a constant party. I had a significant other at the time, so I wasn't really catting around. But there were loads of people partying all the time. And you know how that ends. Constant, constant partying. Money going out the window. People getting arrested or getting in accidents or stuff like that. Never ends well. Was it a good time?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
For me, it was not really a good time. I got off on it, but it wasn't a good time. It was a bad time, but I enjoyed a bad time because I was dangerous, and people knew it. The headlines used to say we were the most dangerous band, and I saw that headline once before for Motley Crue, and I thought, what if? fucking mistake you made there. Those guys aren't dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Because you talk about the real deal. Did they practice what they preached? Are they willing to go live in a van to go get their music out to the masses? We traveled around the nation for years from a station wagon to a van to a camper. And we got a motor home. And we thought, shit, we've arrived. And then when we got our first bus, that was a big deal. That's a big deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I started playing guitar and at about 15 years old, she said she'd had enough and she moved out and left me alone in an apartment and no money to pay rent. So I did not know what to do. And I knew it was just a matter of time before I was going to lose the apartment. So I did what any kid would do. I became an entrepreneur. and I became a distributor of sorts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
It's kind of like the bus from Almost Famous. Yeah. It probably was a bus from Almost Famous. But now we travel well. We don't do a lot of the crazy stuff we used to do. We don't outlaw that. If people want to be around us and drink and celebrate. The only thing I'm not really cool about is illicit stuff like powders and stuff like that. That to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
People that are in that circle, they're dangerous people to be around because if ever there was a momentary flip in their mentality, they could become very dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That was a long time coming because the scene was so small in the beginning. We were doing it when a big concert was sold out. Stone or sold out Mbuhe Gardens or stuff like that. That's what the scene was like. You could always have Fairweather fans. When Symphony came out and Countdown to Extinction album came out, that was a record that got huge commercial success because the time was right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And there was a lot of Fairweather fans that bought the album just because Megadeth is the cool band right now. I don't know if that answered your question or not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I got a rush when we were back down at Dana Point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Yeah, sure. People listening to something, you know, you've been an outcast, you've been a child that you're, family has made to feel less than and everything he does and now all of a sudden you do one thing right maybe maybe maybe this is meant for me and and that was kind of my way out you know i didn't see that i i don't think i would have
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
ever done anything harmful to myself, but I just did not see any kind of an existence with the way I was going before I started playing music. It just, God, what would I have been? A cash register repair person like my dad?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I'll tell you what you're asking, and I'll save you the incremental questions. The one concert that really blew me away was in 1988 at Castle Downington when we played with Iron Maiden and Kiss and David Lee Roth and Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses played before us at that time. Two people died there, but excluding the unfortunate deaths, that concert was 140,000 people. Holy shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And the Guinness Book of World Records has the sound system used for that concert as the biggest, most powerful public address system ever assembled for a concert. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And then of course we did Rock in Rio, which had, you know, it was another concert over 100,000. And then we started doing the Sonospheres. You know, one of those got up, I think it was around 200,000.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But for me, those really, really, really big concerts, they don't feel, they don't feel like I'm making a connection with people in the back. You know, the people have fun. I can see them. I can see them cheering. I can see their signs, their shirts, you know, who they're with, how they're acting, their moshing, if they're just throwing their hands up in the air, if they're singing, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And so I was able to sell some stuff and be able to pay my rent. And eventually I was making enough money where I had a car and I was able to get some musical equipment. But the meantime, we're still facing all the moves that had happened before then. And then as soon as... I hooked up with Metallica. The moving continued.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Those are some of the greatest shots we've ever gotten is the fans when they're just loving the music because you look at the cross-section of our audience, there are a lot of different types of people, not just all middle-aged white males or young white males. It's... It's people of color, it's people that are young, there are people that are old, they tend to stay in the back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And there's a lot of girls there. And you just don't see that with metal. Very few metal bands. Why were you called the most dangerous band? Because we were. What does that mean? Well, we went to our release party for P-Cells, but who's buying? We took two limousines there. And we were inside the bar getting drunk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And they called it the Firefly Bar because they would pour alcohol down the bar and light it on fire every set amount of minutes. I guess maybe it was hourly or something. And I was getting entertained in there. And of course it came time to go get more drugs. And we went outside and one of the limousines were gone and I was pissed. And I said, where's the limo?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And Chris tells me that his girlfriend and the rest of the girls got in the car and took off. And we got into the limousine and Chris started saying stuff to me. So I started beating him up in the limo and then, um, I can't remember if Gar was sitting next to me and then Chris came toward me and I kicked him in the face. Yeah, that's what happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So, I mean, you know, people know that kind of stuff and it gets around. People were talking. We were... You know, there was a set of...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
acts that each label had that were their dangerous people you know Capitol had Megadeth they had Poison who uh was a different walk of life than we were but to some people they were dangerous just as well you know but uh for us I think it had to do with um how we were living how we were you know um flopping at people's houses we uh squatted on a couple people um
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I remember we went to one kid's house named Billy Cordero, who was a really great guy. And he let us spend the night there for, I think it was six months. It was supposed to just spend one night. Yeah. Thank you, Billy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Countdown. Countdown went double platinum and then Peace and then Euthanasia was certified platinum when it came out because it had sold a million records before we even saw the record company, that campaign. And yeah, Countdown was, I think, the first one. Yeah, I mean...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I wasn't doing very good with it. Um, the, I was 30 when countdown came out. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, you know, fortunately for me, I'd already, um, I'd already met Pam and, uh, We'd gotten married and Justice was born. So let me get my dates right. This countdown came out in, I think, 92. And we got married in 91. March 3rd, 91, Justice was born. February 11th, 92.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Trying to think, I can't remember the date, but it was pretty, Euthanasia got certified way faster than Countdown did, and retroactively a lot of the albums prior to Countdown has been certified gold and or platinum. How did you meet Pam? That was funny. This guy that was a personal assistant for Stephen Adler from Guns N' Roses, his name was Ronnie Schneider.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I moved from Huntington Beach up to San Francisco, out to New York, back to California to Costa Mesa, then up to Los Angeles where I finally started Megadeth. Whoa, let's rewind a little bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And Ronnie was helping Stephen and ended up getting addicted to heroin while in that circle. And he went to treatment, and he got out, and he called me and he said, I have to go do a show tonight. Please come with me and help me stay sober. And I said, okay. I'm your man. I got your back. You were sober at the time. Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I went with him, and I'm in this club, and I'm there with Nick, and this friend of Nick named Juan – Juan's really dark complected, and he's got these gigantic white teeth. And Ronnie. So Ronnie goes and does this thing, and I'm sitting in here bored. There's not a lot of fun things to do in a bar if you're not drinking. I don't know if you've ever sat in a bar and you're not drinking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, yeah, I have. It's a shitty place to be in. So I'm looking around, and I see this woman, She was very young at the time, and I just thought, wow, she's really pretty. And I'm looking, and I'm thinking, and I'm looking, and I finally say, hey, Juan, go over and tell that girl I want to meet her. Because that's how I roll, right? And... Rolled.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And so he goes over there, and it's kind of dark, and I see his face, and then all of a sudden... These giant white teeth are flashing. I'm thinking, what's so funny? So he comes back and I said, what's so funny? He goes, she said, are you on a meter? You need to go over there yourself. And I went, spice, I like that. So I walked over to her and I said, hi, I'm Dave. She goes, I know who you are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I thought, well, this is going to be great. So I said, listen, I just am here helping my friend stay sober, and I'm sober myself, and I want to get out of here. I'd like to see you again. Can I take you out to lunch? And she didn't know what was going on, so I got her number, and I left. And... That was it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then a couple days later, maybe, I don't even think it was that long, I called her back and we went out for a little while and I was falling for her and I knew that I was falling for her so I broke up with her. I needed to make sure. So I broke up with her. It was really painful. I went to Hawaii with my bodyguard and he was talking to me while I was out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
philosophical kind of stuff, not Aristotle or anything like that, but just life. And I said, Tony, I think I love this chick. I think I want to marry her. So we had a concert in Hawaii, and I had invited her to come out, and her mom, and her stepfather, who I didn't like, and her grandma, who I loved, and her brother.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I think he brought his girlfriend and my three sisters and my sponsor and the guy who was going to be the best man at my wedding, a bank robber who had murdered two people. I thought that was a pretty street cred kind of guy to be your best man. Just kidding. Pam's in the hotel, and I knock on the door because we just got to Hawaii, and she was there ahead of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
How many siblings do you have? I have three. Debbie is three years older than me. And the other two were 15 and 18 years older than me and are both deceased. Were you close with them? Uh, the oldest one? Yeah. But after a while, because they were, um, following the guidelines of their religion, And I was supposedly a worldly person and they did what their religion calls for.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I said, hey, what are you doing on Tuesday? And she got mad because she didn't know what I was doing. I said, do you want to get married? And she flipped out. So we now are on the hunt for a wedding dress for my skinny, rail-thin wife in Hawaii. And we're trying to find a nice suit for me. So Pam got lucky and found some eight-year-old wedding dress from some playhouse or something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I had a suit that looks like it was made out of Wrigley chewing gum wrappers. Actually, I look like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, but it had a little bit of some fashion to it. It's this bright, shiny, aluminum-looking suit. And it's all I could get. It's all I could find. And I remember we were standing at the base of Punchbowl in Waikiki, Diamond Head, the volcano.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And that's where we got married, right under the volcano. Wow. Yeah, it was really neat. Wow. How long have you been married? 34 years, almost.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You have to say this. Honey, I've been thinking. and you're probably right, and I'm going to try harder next time. And mean it, you know, if you really mean it. Because if you tell them, you know, I've been thinking that, first off, that confuses them because they don't think we know how to think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then when you say, you're probably right, inside they have pinatas being burst and all kinds of sky streamers and stuff. And then when you say you're going to try harder, they go, it's good. Game over. So I'm just playing, but you need to have to look at things as two different, completely different organisms that are trying to coexist in the same body.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And you have to make sacrifices and you have to make I don't want to say consolation because that's not the right word I want to say, but you do have to make some... And sacrifice is the wrong word because it's too much, but you do have to make some adjustments. And I think the better that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
opposite spouses of being aware of the other spouse's needs and wants, the better the relationship's going to be. Because sometimes you just got to walk away. When Pam fights with me, I just walk away. You know, she'll throw shit, she'll scream, she'll call me names, but you know what? At least my side stopped. And sometimes cooler heads prevail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Sometimes I walk away, and then she'll say something, and I got to do a U-turn and go back and jump right in the fight. But most oftentimes, you know, we try and be really respectful of one another, and I really try and help Pam with support from the kids too. Because they're adults now, and they don't want to be looked at like kids. They want to be looked at as adults.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
He was born in wedlock. We'd been married 11 months, I think. We got pregnant about second or third month, I think. Wow, you guys aren't messing around. No. No, I think it was just meant to be, you know, because we weren't really getting a lot of time to spend together. I was touring a lot. So it was meant to be. I love my son.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I was disfellowshipped, not officially, but basically I was not allowed to be around anybody. I couldn't come to meetings. I couldn't go to witnesses' houses and stuff like that. And I didn't care because I hated that religion.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
The women walked, they didn't throw themselves. It was a joke. I know. How was it? Well, you know, it's... I guess it's like anything, if you know what your priorities are. You know, some people can walk into a candy store and want one of everything, you know? And then you end up sick at the end, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I got to a point in my life where I knew I was ready to find the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and... You know, I came really close. I was engaged to somebody for six years one time. And she was the muse for a lot of the early songs because our relationship was so toxic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But if I would have stayed engaged to her just a few more months, it would have been a common law marriage in California because at seven years, you're married. I don't know if I took that into consideration or it just happened that way, but it happened that way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, I mean, it never got bad. I had money. You mean how much did I do? Yeah. I used a lot, but I had a high tolerance. And, you know, as far as doing my job, when it was time to go out on the road and it was time to get on stage, we got on stage. And then when everybody got off stage, that was when the party started up again. You know, it was just a way of life at the time in Los Angeles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That's the only thing I haven't done that you said. Which one? The two-fifths of vodka.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
No, it was whatever anybody had that was partyables. You go to a party and, hey, I got some Ambien. You want some? Sure, what does it do? What's going to make you fall asleep in your food? Well, that sounds like a really fun drug. Consequently, I don't really like Ambien. The other stuff you said, Valium. Valium, I need to go get x-rays, CAT scans. I can't do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
When I have larynx scopology, now that I've had ear, nose, throat cancer, head and neck cancer, they have to look down my nose with that camera. I can't do that. I have to take a Valium for that. But am I addicted to it? No.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I was in Texas, and I'd hurt my arm really bad. And I was talking to this pastor, and he goes, man, you need the Lord, Dave. And I went, no, I don't. I've had enough God. So he goes, why don't you go up onto the hill? Up on the hill was a fire ring, and there was two people. sections of building that went together like this and had a cross hanging down in the middle of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Of course, I was brought up a Jehovah's Witness. The cross was a torture device, and Jesus wasn't hung on a cross. He was hung on a tree, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff that they believed that I don't. So I'm looking at the cross, and I'm just thinking to myself, man, what have I got to lose?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And those six simple words set me on my road to a new lifestyle and a new existence because I went down the hill and I told the little pastor, I said, yeah, man, I think I want to try this. I just was up there and I said, what have I got to lose? And he goes, okay, well, let's do the sinner's prayer. And he goes, get down on your knees. And I said, nope.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
we need to get on your knees to do the sinner's prayer. Nope, not doing it. Not praying on my knees. I'll say the prayer, but I'm not getting on my knees. And I did the prayer and I didn't get down on my knees. And I just couldn't bring myself to that place yet. I was not at that place yet. I mean, I prayed, I prayed all the time because I thought that was what you're supposed to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But the sinner's prayer What is that? I don't know if I like the sound of that. So we did it, and I told my wife, and she started laughing and said her friends knew that was going to happen. And from that point on, it was just a series of learning stuff, learning how to coexist with other people that may or may not be enlightened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So many sayings that I learned growing up, like walking a mile in another man's shoes. You think, what the hell does that mean? And then something like that happens where your life changes. Something that's been a part of your existence every day. I was telling somebody the other day that when we lived in Silver Lake, California, David Ellison would come into my bedroom every morning.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Well, not every morning. He would come into my bedroom and he would have a mirror and he would give it to me. And we were off to the races. So it's kind of how we lived. It was just, I didn't know any better. What brought you to the pastor specifically? My arm injury.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That ended way before that. Okay. I'm pretty sure. You know, I think about it all the time. Whenever somebody pisses me off, I think, man, I'll just, no, I won't. You know, I've actually, when my sister was alive, I called her up a few times and talked to her, and she talked me out of it a few times because I was at the end of my rope, and I knew it worked, but didn't do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
No, oppression. It was like a possession, not depression, like having a spirit on you. How so? Well, when you open up the doors to the dark, they're not going to wait to be invited in. They're coming, right? And if I believe in God, then I have to believe in the devil, right? And I believe in God. I believe in Christ. I believe in the devil. I believe they're demons. I believe they're angels.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Still don't know what the real estate looks like up in the heavens, but I've got a pretty good understanding of a lot of that stuff. I don't know. The stuff that happens when you get really drugged out a lot of times, you start to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
really unnatural things you know because you're on drugs well why wouldn't you you're you're not yourself you either have liquor in you which is called spirits for a reason or you're on stuff that's like an opiate which makes you um think everybody's your friend and um you know or you smoke pot and you're paranoid of everybody or You take sedatives, which for some people, they need them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
They need them to be able to not wear the people out around them. And, uh, other people need stimulants like children who have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. You know, but when somebody starts grinding pharmaceutical speed because they like it, you know, it's kind of what meth is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Oh, I know it was because we tried to get my life in order and stuff just kept happening and we would go see people who were spiritual in nature and they would say that they see something. The priest that was in... We went to go see a... I forgot I told Darren all this stuff too. We had... been talking about what had happened, Pam and I, and I said that I wanted to get rid of this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
No, I didn't like it. I'm a kid. I want to watch fucking cartoons, man. I don't want to go to church. And when they would say, okay, not only are you going to go out to church, but on the other day on the weekend, you're going to go out and knock on strangers' doors and try and sell them shit that they don't want. Right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So we went to this person, her name was, I think it was Caroline somebody, and her husband was a Green Bay Packer football player, so I thought it was legit. And she was a doctor, so she would do these kind of clearing things. And she had this Indian guy that was a rajah,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
come over, he was like a preach that did laying on hands, cupping, acupuncture, and so he came over and he said, when he was doing the acupuncture on me, he was meditating behind me and he fell over, and he said that there was a man with a silver turban that came out and said, I release him, and that's when he fell over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
When we went to San Francisco to go see the Filipino priest, he said that he laid hands on me and the bull, the head of a bull came out of my chest, out of my stomach. Holy shit. Yeah. And I didn't see it. I didn't feel it. I don't know what the fuck happened. But, you know, in the spirit world, you know, I don't know if I would see it because I don't know if I have that gifting to see the demons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But, you know, he had said the same thing. So there were several people that had nothing in common that knew that there was something going on with me. And finally it broke. And, you know, I remember getting baptized at some place in Northridge, California. And... Somebody, and this is Ricky, this is Ricky.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Somebody had said that there was a lot of weird stuff going on in that room at the time, like chairs were moving around because there was a bunch of people in there that were getting baptized and there was a lot of tongues being spoken and stuff. I didn't see any of that stuff. So I got to see it myself to believe it. But that's what I heard was going on in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And I was thinking, man, that's pretty cool because this whole God thing's real. And I live my life like there is a God, and I'm not going to regret it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Not in the physical. Visions, yeah, but not in the physical. But, you know, you do too. You see, I have dreams. Dreams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I mean, there's people that the houses you knock on the doors probably have the same outlook I do. I don't want to be bothered on Sunday because I'm scratching my belly in my pajamas and I'm watching, you know, college sports. So, you know, that kind of a thing, to me, it just sucked. And then having the holidays taken away, not being able to hang out with friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Walk into a room that's really cold all of a sudden. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that. We have a song we wrote about some young girl named Mary Jane Twilliger who was a witch, and her dad found out, and he buried her alive. And this was in the city right north of where... Ellefson lived. And we went out there to go visit that place and it was creepy. It was really creepy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
But that was it. It was just creepy. I didn't hear any owls. The wind didn't blow. I did hear, and this could be another bit of folklore, but somebody pushed her headstone over and when they went back to their car, they found their car keys on the hood. It's wild, man. Yeah, that's crazy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
if I wanted to sing it anymore because one of the songs had almost all of the hex in it that I used. And I didn't want to sing that anymore because what happens if somebody figures out the rest of the stuff that's missing? you know? And I haven't seen anything, but I know stuff happens to me. I know people have put curses on me. I know that they've cursed our dogs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
We had a dog who died and I prayed over her and she came back to life long enough for us to get her to the
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
veterinarian where she said goodbye to us all and she passed away there but she was she was dead dead dead Pam was hysterical and and I said let me pray over soup who put curses on you people that don't like what I sing about people that don't like Megadeth that may like other bands there was a guy in
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
In the past, there was a band called Diaseed, and we were playing in Israel, and I was really excited about playing in Israel, and I wanted to see what Megadeth looked like in Israeli font, right? So I look at the website for the festival, and it says the name of the thing, and it says our name, and then it says this band, Diaseed. And I went, what is that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
So I looked it up and the guy said that he's a Satanist and that, um, I was his mortal enemy. Are you serious? Yes. And he'd already killed two people. And so I figured, man, I walk in the light and I'm covered in the blood and motherfucker, you're going to try anything with me. You're going to know. And so I went there and went to go do the concert. I wasn't backing down. And, uh,
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You know, you make friends in school, right? And then they say, hey, you want to come over? Oh, I can't. Why? Because my mom's nuts. Jeez. What age did that start? What age did you start getting sucked into it? I think I was seven when she started. And it went on until she moved out because I was selling pot for a living. What else does a 15-year-old have to do? Sell his ass, sell pot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
My manager had got there before me, and he said he walked next to the kid, and he bumped into him, and the guy goes, oh, sorry, sir, sorry, sir. And I said, well, where is he? And he goes, he left. Wait, the guy that wants to kick my ass, we're in the same spot for the first time in who knows how long or ever will be, and he leaves? So much for wanting to have a confrontation with me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And he's dead now. He's dead now. Commit suicide. Wow. So what I think happened is the guy... He was probably a good musician. He probably had some kind of abuse happen in his life where he turned away from love and kindness and what's good in the world and started drawing towards other people who had the same kind of hardships that he did because misery loves company, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
You get a guy that has the same things happening to him or he says he understands and then they start... drawing you in. And pretty soon you know what you're saying, I hate my parents. Pretty soon you're stealing stuff from them. And then you're asked to leave, like I was. After you got sober, I mean, are you still clean today? I'll drink wine. And I take my cancer medication, that's it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
That's it? Was it hard for you to get sober? Yeah, of course. It was harder to quit cigarettes than it was to quit anything else. No shit, so you just quit everything cold turkey. No. I had to go to a clinic to stop smoking cigarettes, and they gave me a shot in my neck. And I had to wear these little transcavalorine patches for a couple days.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then I had to go wash all my clothes and clean my whole house out, all ashtrays and smoking paraphernalia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I wasn't going to sell my ass, so I sold pot. And I would go to rehearsal and I would say to my mom before she had moved out, I had a beginning of a relationship with marijuana. Sometimes I would have some and I would leave it and I would say, hey, somebody's coming by. There's something by the door. Just tell them to leave the money. I think that happened maybe like two, three times.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
I got off coffee, too. I'm drinking tea now. Yeah, same here. I'm like a bunch of grannies. I know, right? Megadeth and Sean Ryan. A bunch of old grannies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Is it constriction in your chest because he did something like that when he had a heart test?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
And then that was it. She was gone. Wow. Older sisters, Michelle, the oldest one, she actually was not one of the witnesses for a very long time. She actually went into witchcraft. That's where I learned my witchcraft from was my oldest sister, Michelle. And then she somehow got, you know, re-recruited, and she ended up being a witness again at the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
Can you see energy fields around people?
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
What does it look like? It's just like a black shadow. It's mostly on this side. Do you see that on a lot of people? No. It's there. No, I don't. Is it freaking you out? No, I was just looking at it. Just looking at it, making sure it wasn't the building, but it's not. Shadows in here. Yeah, it's like an energy field on you. Interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman
She would talk to me, but it was kind of like an aunt kind of thing. And then my sister that was younger than her, the one that was 15 years older than me, she didn't want to have anything to do with me. She just died. And even though she was awful to me, did the right thing and paid for her to go to hospice and paid for a nurse to be with them.