Megadeth frontman details trip from rock excess to recovery

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This article was published 05/08/2010 (5902 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is, according to the lore of rock journalism, only one taboo for Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine.

Ask him about sex. Ask him about drugs. By all means, ask him about the time his five-year-old daughter told him to see a psychotherapist. But don’t, under any circumstance, ask him about Metallica.

The 48-year-old Mustaine was cast out of the then-fledgling supergroup in the early 1980s, banished from heavy-metal paradise for rebelling against his bandmates. Penniless and humiliated, he vowed revenge.

“I wanted to find a group of musicians who were talented and ambitious,” he says in his new book, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. “I was out for blood. I wanted to kick Metallica’s ass.”

Out of this search for vengeance, Megadeth was born.

This story forms the mangled backbone of Mustaine’s autobiography — indeed, his entire career — and remains central to Megadeth’s identity, long after the band’s peak.

Before a recent Toronto book signing, the gregarious born-again Christian was happy to report from the front lines of a life thoroughly, exhaustively, comprehensively lived. His headbanger hair didn’t hang so much as writhe on either side of a creased face, while a sizable gut tested his T-shirt — a sign of good health for a man who, after 17 trips to rehab, finally kicked a snarling junk habit in the early 2000s.

“The order it comes in is the drugs first, then the rock ‘n’ roll, and then the sex,” Mustaine said.

“You usually get buzzed, then you go play, and then you see the girl. After you’ve taken your emotional victim hostage, then you go for more drugs. You have to get them high.”

And the cycle continues for the better part of 300 pages in the book by Mustaine, completed with the help of journalist and author Joe Layden.

Mustaine’s excess — his googly-eyed, Cookie Monster abandon — is itself worth the telling for readers with a taste for the squalid and the absurd. But it is the story of his recovery that saves Mustaine from veering too far into the realm of rock ‘n’ roll cliché.

It was not a near-death experience that scared Mustaine straight, though he had one of those. Nor was it temporarily losing his wife and kids, though that also happened. It was something doctors call a compressed radial nerve. And it struck under almost comically benign circumstances.

“I was in rehab and I decided to take a nap. I woke up — my arm had been resting over the back of the chair — and I couldn’t feel my hand,” Mustaine said. “I went to see a doctor and he told me I’d suffered a freak accident, that I’d never be able to play guitar again.”

It took being cut off from music for Mustaine to finally hit bottom. That’s where he found God, and the strength to fight his demons.

Through intense physical therapy and despite the odds, he regained the use of his hand. He also regained his sobriety for the first meaningful stretch of time since childhood (and has remained more or less sober since).

As for his arch-nemesis Metallica?

“We had a disagreement,” Mustaine said, “but the truth is that we really like each other and it was difficult to split up. If I wasn’t drinking too much, I may well not have lost my job. But the best thing that comes out of this is there’s two great bands.”

Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir by Dave Mustaine and Joe Layden is in stores now.

— Postmedia News