MEGADETH

After three decades of metal, Dave Mustaine and company still won’t be stopped 

Just a few months ago, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine wasn’t sure he’d ever play guitar again. He experienced crushing neck and back pain when the band entered the studio to record its new Th1rt3en album in May, but soldiered through. While touring as part of the traveling Mayhem Festival this summer, he could barely stand onstage and at one point was nearly paralyzed—but still decided the show must go on. “At the end of the festival, we could only play half-sets,” says Mustaine, who has dealt with nerve-damage problems off and on for almost a decade. “It was unbearable to endure the pain, but I wasn’t gonna cancel.”

Mustaine eventually limped into the Watkins Spine Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif., for successful neck and spinal surgery. Still, unable to pen new music for Th1rt3en, he resurrected unrecorded songs from the early 1990s. “The studio for me is a place to create, but I knew my neck was really bad,” says Mustaine. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen, so I went into this saying, ‘OK, this is it. I’m going to grab all my best stuff and put it on this record.’”

The California native’s health woes come on the heels of last year’s autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, in which he wrote about his consuming obsession with making Megadeth a success. His efforts have paid off—the band has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide over 28 years—but he paid a heavy price. A blackout drunk by 16, he moved to hard drugs and made more than a dozen rehab attempts before getting sober for  good in the early 2000s.

In recent years Mustaine has mended bridges with former adversaries—most notably his onetime bandmates in Metallica, who ejected him from the group in 1983. “At the time my judgment was being clouded by alcohol,” Mustaine says of his early Metallica days. “We’d always been friends. That’s what made it so difficult, because when you like somebody and you’re forced to part ways, you’re either justified doing it or you try and cover up why you got the boot. Now there’s no animosity.” Mustaine’s personal life is also settled—he and wife Pamela are raising two teenagers. “I was talking to my son Justis, and one place I haven’t played is in Africa,” he says. “I said, ‘Would you be willing to do a safari with your old dad?’ He said, ‘Yeah, for sure, dude.’ I am so happy right now.”

–Steven Rosen

comment closed

Copyright © 2012 M Music & Musicians Magazine ·