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  MUSTAINE

  A HEAVY METAL MEMOIR

  DAVE MUSTAINE

  WITH JOE LAYDEN

  To Mom and Dad,

  I promised I would be Good.

  This book is dedicated to all of the people

  who told me I would never . . .

  Come, come, come my little droogies. I just don’t get this at all. The old days are dead and gone. For what I did in the past, I’ve been punished. I’ve been cured.

  —ALEX, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

  Regrets, I’ve had a few . . .

  —SID VICIOUS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  A Horseshoe up My Ass

  Chapter 1 - Daddy Dearest

  Chapter 2 - Reefer Madness

  Chapter 3 - Lars and Me, or What Am I Getting Myself Into?

  Chapter 4 - Metallica—Fast, Loud, Out of Control

  Chapter 5 - Dumped by Alcoholica

  Chapter 6 - Building the Perfect Beast: Megadeth

  Chapter 7 - Mission: To Break All the Rules of God and Man

  Chapter 8 - Familiarity Breeds Contempt

  Chapter 9 - The End of Western Civilization

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter 10 - The Traveling Carnival

  Chapter 11 - Against Medical Advice

  Chapter 12 - The Living Years

  Chapter 13 - I Pray the Lord My Soul to Keep

  Chapter 14 - The Inner Weasel

  Chapter 15 - Soul for Sale

  Chapter 16 - Some Kind of God

  Chapter 17 - Megadeth: Reborn

  Epilogue: Three Boats and a Helicopter

  About the author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note:

  Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  Photograph on page iii by Rob Shay.

  All photographs in the book and insert courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.

  A Horseshoe up My Ass

  Photograph by Daniel Gonzalez Toriso.

  HUNT, TEXAS

  JANUARY 2002

  If you’re looking for bottom, this seems to be about as good a place as any—although I’d be the first to admit that the bottom has been a moving target in my dark and twisted, speed metal version of a Dickensian life.

  Impoverished, transient childhood? Check.

  Abusive, alcoholic parent? Check.

  Mind-fucking religious weirdness (in my case the extremes of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Satanism)? Check.

  Alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness? Check, check, check.

  Soul-crushing professional and artistic setbacks? Check.

  Rehab? Check (seventeen times, give or take).

  Near-death experience? Check that one, too.

  James Hetfield, who used to be one of my best friends, as close as a brother, once observed with some incredulity that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass. That’s how lucky I’ve been, how fortunate I am to be pulling breath after so many close calls. And I must acknowledge that on some level he’s right. I have been lucky. I have been blessed. But here’s the thing about having a horseshoe lodged in your rectum: it also hurts like hell. And you never forget it’s there.

  So here I am, staring down the throat of another stint in rehab, at a place called La Hacienda, out in the heart of the pristine Texas Hill Country. It’s only about two hundred miles or so from Fort Worth, but it seems a world away, with only cattle ranches and summer camps for neighbors. The focus is on healing . . . on getting better. Physically, spiritually, emotionally. As usual, I’ve brought only modest expectations and enthusiasm to the proceedings. Ain’t my first rodeo, after all.

  You see, I’ve learned more about getting loaded, more about how to get drugs, more about mixing drinks, and more about how to bed the opposite sex in Alcoholics Anonymous than in any other single place in the world. AA—and this holds true for most rehabilitative programs and treatment centers—is a fraternity, and like all fraternity brothers, we like to swap stories. It’s a ridiculous glorifying of the experience: drugalogues and drunkalogues, they’re called. One of the things that always bothered me most was the incessant one-upmanship. You’d tell a story, sometimes baring your soul, and the guy next to you would smirk and say, “Ah, man, I spilled more than you ever used.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Well, I used a lot, so you must be one clumsy fuckhead.”

  For some reason, this sort of interaction never did much for me, never made me feel like I was getting better or improving as a human being. Sometimes I got worse. It was at an AA meeting, ironically, that I first learned about the ease of procuring pain medication through the Internet. I didn’t have any particular need for pain meds at the time, but the woman telling the story made it sound like a great buzz. Before long the packages were coming to my house and I’d fostered one hell of an addiction. By this time I was a world-famous rock star—founder, front man, singer, songwriter, and guitarist (and de facto CEO) for Megadeth, one of the most popular bands in heavy metal. I had a beautiful wife and two wonderful kids, a nice home, cars, more money than I ever dreamed of. And I was about to throw it all away. You see, behind the façade, I was fucking miserable: tired of the road, the bickering between band members, the unreasonable demands of management and record company executives, the loneliness of the drug-addled life. And, as always, incapable of seeing that what I had was more important than what I didn’t have. The joy of writing songs and playing music, which had sustained me through so many lean years, had slowly been siphoned off.

  Now I simply felt . . . empty.

  And so I went off to Hunt, Texas, hoping this time the change would stick. Or not hoping. Not caring. Not knowing much of anything, really, except that I needed help getting off the pain meds. As for long-term behavior modification? Well, that wasn’t high on my list of priorities.

  And here’s what happens. Early in my stay I wander off to get some rest. I remember slumping into a chair and tossing my left arm over the back, trying to curl up and sleep. The next thing I know, I’m waking up, dragging myself out of the fugue of a twenty-minute nap, and when I try to stand up, something pulls me back, like I’m buckled into the seat or something. And then I realize what’s happened: my arm has fallen asleep and it’s still hooked over the back of the chair. I laugh, try to withdraw my arm again.

  Nothing happens.

  Again.

  Still nothing.

  I repeat this motion (or attempted motion) a few more times before finally using my right arm to lift my left arm off the chair. The moment I let go, it falls to my side, dangling uselessly, pins and needles shooting from shoulder to fingertips. After a few minutes, some of the feeling returns to my upper arm and then to part of my forearm. But my hand remains dead, as if shot full of Novocain. I keep shaking it out, rubbing it, whacking it against the chair. But the hand is numb. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. I try to make a fist, but my fingers do not respond.

  Out the door, down the hall. My breathing is labored, in part because I’m kicking drugs and out of shape, but also because I’m scared shitless. I burst into the nurse’s office, cradling my left hand in my right hand. I blurt out something about falling asleep and not being able to feel my hand. The nurse tries to calm me down. She presumes, not unreasonably, that this is just part of the process—anxiety and discomfort come with the territory in rehab. But it’s not. This is different.

  Within twenty-four hours I will be on hiatus from La Hacienda, sitting in the office of an orthopedic surgeon, who will run a hand along my biceps and down my forearm, carefully tracing th
e path of a nerve and explaining how the nerve has been freakishly compressed, like a drinking straw pinched against the side of a glass. When circulation is cut off in this manner, he explains, the nerve is damaged; sometimes it simply withers and dies.

  “How long before the feeling returns?” I ask.

  “You should have about eighty percent within a few months . . . maybe four to six.”

  “What about the other twenty percent?”

  He shrugs. The man is all Texas, in movement and delivery. “Hard to say,” he drawls.

  There is a pause. Once more, nervously, I try to squeeze my hand into a ball, but the fingers are unwilling. This is my left hand, the one that dances across the fretboard. The one that does all the hard creative work. The moneymaker, as we say in the music business.

  “What about playing guitar?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  The doc draws in a long breath, slowly exhales. “Aw, I don’t think you should count on that.”

  “Until when?”

  He looks at me hard. Takes aim. Then he hits the bull’s-eye. “Well . . . ever.”

  And there it is. The kill shot. I can’t breathe, can’t think straight. But somehow the message comes through loud and clear: this is the end of Megadeth . . . the end of my career . . . the end of music.

  The end of life as I know it.

  Chapter 1

  Daddy Dearest

  My first recorded photograph with my father and sister Debbie.

  “No more of that shit in my house!

  You understand?”

  Flip through a stack of school yearbooks from my childhood or adolescence, and more often than not you’ll find one of those gray silhouettes, or maybe even a big question mark—the great scarlet letter of yearbooks!—where my photo should be. Like a lot of kids who bounce around from school to school, town to town, I was frequently absent and thus became something of a phantom, a sullen, red-haired mystery to classmates and teachers alike.

  The journey began in La Mesa, California, in the summer of 1961. That’s where I was born, although it’s possible I was conceived in Texas, where my parents

  had lived during the latter stages of their tumultuous marriage. There were two families, really: my sisters Michelle and Suzanne were eighteen and fifteen years old, respectively, by the time I came along (I often thought of them as aunts rather than sisters); my sister Debbie was three. I don’t know exactly what happened in the years between the two sets of children. I do know that life unraveled in a great many ways, and in the end my mother was left to fend for herself, and my father became some sort of shadowy figure.

  For all practical purposes, John Mustaine was out of my life by the time I was four years old, when my parents finally divorced. Dad, as I understand it, had once been a very smart and successful man, good with his hands and head, skills that helped him rise to the position of branch manager for Bank of America. From there he moved to National Cash Register, and when NCR transitioned from mechanical to electrical technology, Dad was left behind. As the scope of his work narrowed, his income naturally declined. Whether this failure contributed to his escalating problems with alcohol, or whether alcohol provoked his professional failures, I can’t say. Certainly the man who ruled the Mustaine household in 1961 was not the man who married my mother. Much of what I know of Dad was passed down in the form of horror stories from my older sisters—stories of abuse and generally insane behavior perpetrated under the shroud of alcoholism. I choose to believe that many of the allegations are untrue. There are snapshots tucked away in the back of my mind, memories of sitting on Dad’s lap, watching TV, feeling the razor stubble on his cheeks, smelling booze on his breath. I don’t have memories of him not drinking—you know, playing ball in the backyard, teaching me how to ride a bike, or anything like that. But neither do I have a catalog of despicable images.

  David Scott Mustaine, born September 13, 1961.

  Oh, there is one—the time I was down the street, playing with a neighbor, and for some reason Dad came strolling up the driveway to take me home. He was angry, yelling, though I don’t recall the exact words he used. Something about me being late. What I do remember is the sight of the channel locks in his hand. Channel locks are like pliers, only bigger, and for some reason I guess my father felt like he needed them to corral his four-year-old son. Or maybe he was working on something in the garage and forgot to put them down before setting off. Regardless of the motivation, the channel locks were soon taking a big bite out of my earlobe. I remember screaming and Dad seeming oblivious. He dragged me down the street, never releasing his grip as I stumbled and fell, then scrambled to my feet, trying to keep up, hoping my ear wouldn’t just rip right out of its socket. (Do ears have sockets? I was a little kid—what did I know?)

  Over the years I’ve generally defended my father against the allegations of abuse so often tossed around by my sisters. But I have to admit—this particular incident does not serve as much of a defense. It doesn’t exactly reflect the actions of a sober, loving daddy, now, does it? But sober is the important word in that sentence. I know better than most that people under the influence are capable of unspeakably bad behavior. My father was an alcoholic; I choose to believe that this did not make him an evil man. A weak man, perhaps, and a man who did some bad things. But I have other memories as well. Memories of a benign man smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper, and calling me over to kiss him good night.

  My father, John Jefferson Mustaine.

  After the divorce, though, my father became a monster. Oh, not in the literal sense of the word, but in the sense that he was referred to by everyone in my family as someone to be feared and despised. He even became a weapon to be used against me, to keep me in line. If I misbehaved, my mother would yell, “Keep it up and I’m going to send you to live with your father!”

  “Oh, no! Please . . . no! Don’t send me to Dad’s house!”

  There were periodic reconciliations, but they never lasted long, and for the most part we were a family on the run, always trying to stay one step ahead of my father, who supposedly was devoting his entire life to two things: drinking and stalking his estranged wife and children. Again, I don’t know if this was accurate, but it was the way things were portrayed to me when I was growing up. We’d settle into a rented house or apartment, and the first thing we’d do is run down to Pier 1 and get a roll of crummy contact paper to turn the shithole of a kitchen into something usable. Things would be quiet for a while. I’d join a Little League team, try to make some friends, and then all of a sudden Mom would tell us Dad had figured out where we were living. A moving van would show up in the middle of the night, we’d pack our meager belongings, and like fugitives we were on the run.

  My mother was a maid, and we lived off her salary along with a combination of food stamps and Medicare and other forms of public assistance. And the generosity of friends and relatives. In some cases I could have done with a little less intervention. For example, it was during this period of transiency that we lived with one of my aunts, a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Very quickly this became the center of our lives. And trust me—this was not a good thing, especially for a little boy. Suddenly we were spending all our time with the Witnesses: church on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Watchtower magazine study groups, guest speakers on the weekends, home Bible study. Then I’d get to school, and while everyone stood with their hands over their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, I’d have to stand quietly with my hands at my sides. When the other kids were singing “Happy Birthday to You” and blowing out candles, I’d stand mute. It’s hard enough to make friends as the new kid in school, but when you’re the JW freak as well . . . forget it. I was a pariah, always getting picked on, always getting smacked around, which really hardened me.

  I remember going to work one day with my mother, in a very wealthy neighborhood called Linda Isle in Newport Beach. There was a little sand pit near the boat dock, and a group of boys was tossing around a foot
ball, playing a game that is sometimes referred to as Kill the Guy with the Ball, although in the politically incorrect world of adolescent boys in the early 1970s, it was more commonly known as Smear the Queer. These guys were all bigger than me, and they took great joy in kicking the shit out of me, but I didn’t care, and I had no fear. Why? Because by this time I’d grown accustomed to getting knocked around in school, and disciplined by aunts and uncles, and harassed by a variety of cousins. I blamed almost all of it on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I mean, the fucking insanity of having a brother-in-law or uncle spank me because I supposedly violated some obscure rule of the Witnesses. And this was all stuff that happened under the guise of religion—in the service of a supposedly loving God.

  I hate cats. This one was on its way to the wood chipper, no doubt.

  For a while, at least, I tried to fit in with the Witnesses, although from the very beginning it seemed like some giant, multilevel marketing scheme: you sell books and magazines, door-to-door, and the more you sell, the loftier your title. Total bullshit. I was eight, nine, ten years old, and I was worried about the world coming to an end! To this day I still have trauma caused by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t get all excited around Christmas, because I still have a hard time believing everything that goes along with the holiday (and I’m speaking as a man who now considers himself a Christian). I want to. I love my kids, I love my wife, and I want to celebrate with them. But deep down inside, there is doubt and skepticism; the Witnesses fucked it up for me.