May. 07, 2008 - Issue #655: Trash Talk
Megadeth
Mustaine is Mega-articulate
‘I’ve been on the road for the last year and it’s going
great,” Dave Mustaine, vocalist, guitarist and leader of Megadeth,
says over the phone. “There’s a lot of people out here, and
with people come relationships and relationships are hard to maintain,
unless you’re a complete phony and then you can pretend you like
somebody and really hate their guts. But I’m the kind of person, if I
don’t like you, it’s hard for me not to say
something.”
It’s not hard to believe that Mustaine is more than willing to speak
his mind when he has something to say—during our conversation, he
riffs more in 15 minutes than many people do in 45, covering plenty of
topics along the way. Still, as pointed as his statement might sound, he
hasn’t kept Megadeth alive for the last 25 years by firing off random
attacks on people. Mustaine’s attitude is quite the opposite, in
fact: it’s only the people who have burned him in the past who are on
the receiving end of his cutting jabs—mostly old band members who
have lied or stolen from him over the years.
“We’ve always tried to be classy, because the relationship
we’ve always had with you—the press—and them—the
audience—we’ve always really recognized that without the three
of us we would not exist,” he says of the interconnections between
the different groups that make up the music community that Megadeth is a
part of. “I know that there’s a lot of [journalists] that like
me and a lot that don’t. I know that there’s a lot that like me
but they don’t necessarily like my music. I’m cool with all of
that—I know that it’s a job and I know that it doesn’t
necessarily mean that you’re a good or a bad person because of what
you do.
“I also know that we’ve got some fans that are great people and
we’ve got some fans that aren’t such nice guys,” he adds,
his voice taking on a more serious tone. “There are some people who
are fans of ours that love our music and they use it to do bad stuff
with.”
The bad stuff that Mustaine is referring to is the 2006 shooting that took
place at Dawson College in Montréal, where the shooter had claimed
to have been inspired by Megadeth’s “À Tout Le
Monde,” a 1994 song that Mustaine re-recorded for the band’s
most recent album, United Abominations.
“What happened here before up at Dawson, it was terrible,” he says. “But I made absolutely sure to say when that happened, that song belongs to the beautiful people of Montréal and it wasn’t meant for anybody to do anything like that and I refuse to allow that song to be stolen by him ... I think that you have to take ownership of stuff like that and if you let the bad guys win, you’re letting the bad guys win.”
It’s not surprising that Mustaine’s feelings on the subject are
so strong. He doesn’t like to waste words when he speaks, and the
same holds true for his lyrics. And when it comes to subject matter,
Mustaine can write just as easily about personal relationships as he can
about politics, putting considerable thought into each word that he puts on
the page.
“I’ve always tried to use intelligent lyrics,” he says.
“I think it’s kind of a shame when singers say,
‘Fuck,’ just for the sake of it. You can tell when guys are
pussies and they use a bunch of dirty words in their songs to make them
have some kind of cred. In my whole career I think I’ve said
‘Fuck’ maybe twice on over a hundred songs ... but then
there’s other guys you know who call women ‘bitches’ and
they just glorify all of this stupidity that people make fun of heavy metal
about.
“I like writing about things that are important for us as people regardless of what nationality we are,” he continues. “I like writing stuff that’s intelligent for us as a race regardless of how old we are or what sex we are. Megadeth music is something that’s provocative and stimulating and it’s been that way ever since the beginning. I’ve always tried to write lyrics that were something that would make you sit back and say, ‘Wow, I wonder what he’s talking about,’ and then do a little research on it. I’ve never said vote this way, vote that way, I’m this so you better be that, too.”
So, while Megadeth’s music might come on like a hurricane,
Mustaine’s lyrics reveal a man who is particularly concerned with
both freedom and respect. That attitude is something that connects Mustaine
with his earliest days—before Megadeth, before his days in the
earliest version of Metallica—back when he was just another kid who
was into music and looking for a way out of the grind of life.
“I didn’t get into this for the money,” he states. “I got into it honestly in the beginning because I was a skinny, redheaded kid and I was lonely and I had a friend who took me to a keg party one time, and this dude who looked like freakin’ Frankenstein was playing guitar and as soon as he got done playing the girls were crawling all over him and I went, ‘Oh my God, is that the ticket?’ And I got a guitar and you know what? It worked. It was instant popularity, and the better you got, the more popular you became.
“I look at a lot of other bands that have become really popular and
they just absolutely self-destruct. I dig the band Oasis—some of their
songs are really cool to listen to when you’re driving or when
you’re partying, not the really mellow, sappy crap, but I mean the
cool, kinda buzzy, fast alternative riffs—and then you hear that these
guys went home because someone threw a shoe at them up here in Canada
somewhere. Man, I’ve been hit with more shoes than I know what to do
with—that’s just part of the job.” V
Mon, May 12 (5:30 pm)
Megadeth
With In Flames, Children of Bodom, Job For a Cowboy, High on Fire
Shaw Conference Centre, sold out
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