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Hi, I watched you trying to sneak some of that brandy and there when I wasn't looking, you know, not you. I know what you're drinking there, Mr. Moon Shine. What's on your head? Let me. All right, welcome to talk is Jericho is the pilot of Thunder and rock and roll. Let's get the weekend started with the patented. Here we go. Duff MacGagan joke. I wish you had no defecating call. Yeah, hey, listen, I went to some of my doctor yesterday. He diagnosed me with hypokondria. I said, not that too.
Thank you very much. I like that one. Stasis. She didn't get it. He's got hyperchondras. Me. She thinks you have every disease. I saw my doctor last week. He diagnosed me with hyperchondra and the guy said, not that too.
So I like that one. I love Duff for sending them in every single Friday, even when he's on tour, which he's about to be again is they're hitting the road next week. Guns and roses in South America starting September 1st. And then they're going to make all Asia and ending the year in Australia and New Zealand. And they are drawing huge crowds as always.
It's Guns and roses. So playing better than ever. And Fuzzy also playing better than ever getting ready to hit the road again as well. The save the world tour continues September 8th in Columbus, Ohio at the King of clubs. And we're crisscrossing the states headed to Canada for couple gigs in Toronto, Montreal.
Fuzzy Rock.com is all the dates and ticket information along with the details on our legendary supremely popular VIP meet and greets. We're also headed back to Europe in November. We started Manchester on November 4th. We hit Birmingham, Nottingham, Dublin, Belfast, Swansea, Bournemouth, Bristol, Glasgow, London, basically Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England.
We are going everywhere. So come check us out there and come check us out in Australia and New Zealand. We are going to be there on November 28th at Auckland. And we got shows in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide with Buck Cherry. Come rock with us this fall Fuzzy Rock.com for all the info and ticket details and VIP details. And come watch us rock and come listen to us rock and stay here. Listen Dave Mastain, the leader of Megadeth, the legendary Dave Mastain returning to talk as Jericho.
They have a new album coming out. It's called The Sick, The Dying and The Dead. It drops next Friday, September 2nd, but it's available for pre-order now at the official Megadeth store. iTunes, Amazon Music, and wherever you buy music. I put a link on the show description for easy access. It is a great album. It's been spent a lot of time with it lately, really enjoying it.
Dave and I talked about what it was like for him to make this record while undergoing treatment for throat cancer during a pandemic. Think about that. Radiation, chemotherapy, lockdown. He gets very candid about the experience. It's like how his battle with cancer changed his life, his music, and his unique singing voice and why he feels that he is a vocalist.
Not a singer. We talk about Kiko Lerero from Angra, joining Megadeth on guitar, but a huge anger fan. Of course, obviously a huge Megadeth fan. He's been there for a few years and how that's been for Dave and the guys to acclimate to him. Plus Dave shares some stories with Metallica's early days, roaming with James Hetfield, touring with Exciter, Canada's own Exciter, getting rides from Cliff Burton to and from Metallica rehearsals.
What exactly Dave contributed to Metallica's song that Cliff taught him from Leonard Skinnerd? You can hear about that in a very short time. Dave's also a Black Belt and Corradiant, Taekwondo, and working toward his Black Belt and Gracie Barra, Jiu-Jitsu. Dave's sensei travels with the band when they tour.
We talked about that as well and a whole multitude of other subjects. Great to talk to Dave, always a good guy to talk to and my friend. And he's here, he's back on Megadeth right here in Talk is Jericho, the sick, the dying, and the Dave. Mustain returns to TIJ here and now.
Alright, so it's been a long time since I saw Dave Mustain. And in the midst of doing press, you had to take a 30 second break in between interviews here. Is this something that you enjoy doing? Is it a necessary evil? Are you excited about doing all the talking about the record? Well, first off, hello to all of your listeners and viewers and it's so great to see your face. And I'm actually really fond of our friendship. It's really cool to see you and catch up with you.
And absolutely when you get a chance, you know, I don't know, you know, it's we have so many, many, many interviews right now because of the nature of this new record. I've wanted to do this record for a while and the music's been in me. It just hasn't really surfaced. A lot of it had to do with lineup. A lot of it had to do with label. A lot of it had to do with me.
So I think I've done a lot of introspection after I got sick and made me look at everything. You got a lot of times sitting there, reflecting and thinking about things, thinking about people, thinking about, you know, what you would like to do with the time you have left. So I think it's made me a better person. I think it's made me a little bit more. I don't know. If you've seen any of the interviews as of late, there's a different kind of tone, I guess, that I'm feeling just.
I think you guys played D tuned, but back when we were playing in A440, the frequency 440 was supposed to have been a frequency that they tuned their instruments to for your listeners that don't know what I'm talking about. The second thing that I'm not going to sing on the guitar, not the second one, but the second is an A. It needs to vibrate at 440 vibrations per second. I think it is a minute or something.
The true frequency was supposed to have been 432. That's what real classical symphony tune was 432. If you look on the internet right now, there's a rage going around about listening to healing frequency. They're really getting into infrared, light healing, sound healing. It's marvelous. It's really interesting. Now, of course, I wouldn't tune my guitar to 432 because we're already tuned down to D because of the plate I have in my neck from the fusion.
Different surgery. A true heavy metal warrior, for sure. Once you used parts. So you're tuned to that for vocal reasons, then? Is that what you're saying? Is that the plate that you have? No, to D? Yes. I can hit the high notes, but it sounds terribly strained. I'm not a singer. I'm more of a vocalist. I kind of tell stories a little bit more with melody. As opposed to someone like St. Robert Halford or Sean Harris, the guy from Diamond Head, or Bruce Dickinson, some of the people that sing.
I listen to people like Sting singing. If only, you know, if I could sing like that. What would it sound like? Would I have ever sang in Metallica? Who knows? I know James wanted to be the singer for a long time, but there were times when we were in James' head fights. Not for nothing, you know. Just saying, if I had been singing in the whole time, I don't know where I would be or what I would be doing.
What's interesting when you talk about your voice is something I was going to bring up. It really is so unique. And if you showed up on the voice or American Idol, you would not last five minutes. But like you said, you're like, you know, like Aussie is like this. And Bob Dylan is like this where there's such a personality and uniqueness to the voice. Nobody sounds like Dave Mustaine. And you said that you're a vocalist, not a singer. What is the difference for that for you?
Well, I think if you're vocalizing something, you're basically speaking something that's a pitch to it. And maybe you're talking a little bit higher or something, for example, people that come from Canada have their sentences and nothing. Did you talk about it? You were talking about it, you were talking about it, you were talking about it. You were talking about it. You are talking about it. You are talking about it. You are talking about it. You are talking about it. You want to download.
Right. And I think a lot of that has to do with the splitting of the country and the colonization of Canada that they embraced that part with the sentences and I'm not. A lot of Europeans will ask questions and it goes up on the end. What are you doing today? Do you like me to rip that bandaid off your head? If everybody did that when they talked, they vocalized when they talked. Everything was a song of sorts. There has been a couple songs, Chris.
I know, you know, I said for so long that, that you know the ones I'm talking about, but there are songs I could tune along where I tried to sing a little bit more, going home, coming home, whatever the name of the song. It's like, I can't even remember anymore. Coming home, yeah. I never struggled, you know, I said something to a singer from Pantera one time that I liked the song Cemetery Gates. We were on tour with Pantera.
For some reason, you know, it was the last show we were in home and I think it was. And they said, do you have a song you want us to play for you? And I said, yeah, Cemetery Gates. They hadn't played at all tour. Okay. And so I said Cemetery Gates. And they did it. I think the guys got a really good voice, yeah, for say. And I think that sometimes when you go down the road, sometimes you can't go back. Sometimes you can't.
For me, I've always tried to make sure everyone knew if I took both of my field off first space, I was either getting to second base or I was going to play one of the most deadly games of pickle you've ever seen in your life. So how was your voice affected? Talking with Bruce Dickinson five, six years ago when he had tongue cancer, he said when he finally came back to sing, he had a lot of issues with the saliva in his throat and that sort of thing.
And obviously his voice now is maybe better than ever, at least in the modern era. How did the throat cancer affect your voice and how were you able to adapt to it and come back to singing full throttle? Same thing. I have issues with my voice with saliva. See, I think what happens is when your head goes inside of that radiation chamber, there are certain things inside of your body that is not going to survive.
And you're hoping that you push the envelope to the brink of death of the organ until it's had enough and then you stop and you let it convalesque back to normal health. For me, fortunately a lot of the stuff that was damaged is coming back. My memory was totally through barred and I'm starting really.
Yeah, I would be in the middle of a conversation and I have to ask the people that I love that are around me to help me because of, you know, what happened with all the radiation and the chemo was not really too. I had a lot of chemo too. They're talking about something and sometimes depending on what part of the day it is, I'll just be tired or the medication will catch up with me and I'll forget what I'm talking about. I'll get on the tangent because I have so many stories I wanna tell.
We'll be talking about something and I'll think, oh yeah. And then it's like, oh shit, I forgot what I was saying. All right, all right, all right. You have a metal heart too? Spider. Spider. Now my nipples get harder on you, Chris, you know that. I have of course, but nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Oh my goodness. Well, Dave, like you mentioned, when you come, obviously you hear the word cancer, you know, all of us were worried about you but was it something that was, how bad did it get?
I mean, was it something that was always manageable? It seemed like you kind of got through it. But I mean, was it, were you like, completely screwed all across the board or was it something where the treatment took care of it instantly? And he didn't take care of it instantly. It took time, you know, there was obviously stuff that, body takes time.
Yeah, I mean, you're an extreme athlete, you know, when you get hurt, you know, your herbs, your aches and pains are nothing compared to an average human because you're an elite athlete and your body has been conditioned to block out a lot of the typical pain. Most people would experience a stubbed toe and say, ow, you know, you have to have your toe broken, right?
Because your pituitary gland is like a full-on charge in rhino, you know, versus other people who don't put their bodies through that kind of a rigorous workout. And, you know, I'm doing BJJ sure, but I don't exercise as hard as you do because I'm not competing. Right, but, you know, probably the worst part about the cancer treatment was the side effects. You know, the cancer we caught it early, you know, we were able to deal with it without having to go under the knife, but it was still trying.
And it took its toll on my family because all the different medications, you know, you have to take this one for nausea and that one for pain. And this one's for nausea from the pain. And this one's from pain from the nausea stuff. And this one helps you sleep and that one helps you stay awake. And this one makes it so that you don't piss your pants. And this one makes it so that you can go pee.
And, you know, and you're thinking like, yeah, half of these if I stop taking them, I don't need the other ones, right? That's right. And it's just crazy and eating was hard. You know, I didn't have much appetite. And they said, if I didn't mean I was going to get a feeding tube and I said, there's no frickin' way I'm getting a feeding tube. So, so I ate as much as I could and we were recording the record. We had the luxury of having someone run and get our food for us.
So I was able to eat what I had a last minute craving for. I'm like, near at home and, you know, you open up to fridge and you figure, well, what's there? How can I make myself satiated with what's here versus, you know, and I think I'm going to have a left handed banana or something really good like that, you know? Hey, looking back in hindsight, it could have been way worse. I think if I didn't have the support system I had, that it would have been worse.
It's great because there's a note on, on, on, we'll be back, a high scream that is very howford-esque. And I've never heard you sing like that before, Dave. It's right during the solo, right before the solo. And it's like, wow, that was a hell of a note. Is that something that you just said, get, I'm going to go for it? I've never heard you sing like that before. Yeah, I must have got hurt while I was singing because I don't even know it. Maybe it's a guitar solo sound. I don't know.
Like a big high scream. Yeah, thank you. You know, honestly, Chris, the record so fresh in my mind and I was undergoing so much challenge from the number one challenge, you know, making the record was kind of like a hobby while I was trying to say, if I'm sure, my voice. And feel like I have to come back and take a chunk of my tongue out. You know, I'd heard that about Sir Edward. Right. You know, I mean, he didn't sing in Van Halen.
So I mean, granted, it must be terrible to be a person who doesn't have part of your tongue removed. But that wasn't the case. I didn't lose my hair. Lost a little bit of weight, had two bad days of getting sick. That was it. You know, I had days where I did throw up, but there was only two days where I had bad days of throwing up.
And everything else was, you know, ECP's, I think a lot of it had to do to Chris from being out on the road and getting food poisoning as much as we do with some of the terrible stuff that we have to eat. And you know, the famous line that John said in debtor alive, you know, sometime you tell the day by the bottle that you drink, you know. And I don't know if you're a drinker, if you ever were, if you still do.
And that's how I used to tell my day, you know, where we're at at the time, how many bottles you would drink. You know, where you were at, how you were dealing with stuff. Because it was that kind of a living. You were basically homeless and the only difference between you and a real hobo was you weren't in a box car. You were in a camper. Right. And when we first went out touring and we were out with the exciter, I just talked to Dan just recently.
I don't know if you're going to give him or not. Did you? Well, I didn't talk to Dan B. or I talked to his new member, but Dan and I were really close. We were so poor in the beginning with Megadeth. And we did this tour with them. We supported them. Gar had gone out to go try and score some smack. And he got to a blade, whatever. I think what happened was he connected. And he got a blade. Right. Right. So it's time for us to go on. No, Gar. Dan's getting hot.
Right. No, Gar. It's going, clicking away. Another 10 minutes, another half hour, he goes, OK, hey, I'm going to play now. We don't know if you about this. And I went, you know, so they playing. Gar shows up. And Dan was gracious enough, which was really cool, because he was still the headliner to let us play after him. And the thing that was most important that I coveted with Dan was he was kind of at the time because I was basically homeless.
He was like liquor cabinet for me and for Ellison, because he drank white russians all the time. It was so typical. We'd go over there and you would hear this on the camper door that they were traveling in. And he'd go, hello, you look quite good. Hey, white russians, come on, man, we're ready. Not a sound, right? Wait. I know you're in there. Come on, man. That's how the tour was after we would play. We would have white russian parties with them all the time. That was a fun period in my life.
I'd love to go to Canada that first time was beautiful. Well, Kat, especially Eastern Canada, such a heavy metal area, even to this day. Sure. Yeah. All right, get in on all the NFL action at FanDuel. America's number one sports book. I just placed a couple bets for my wife, Jessica. You know, she's a huge Minnesota Vikings fan. So I picked the Vikings to win the NFC North great value for a top tier team. I also picked them to win the Super Bowl. Huge money if they come through school.
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You've been through, has that changed your attitude? I mean, when I see you, there was a great thing on social media a few months ago where you go out into the crowd. Oh, yeah. And you gave a little kid a pick, and you say, secret Dave Mustaine, that kind of shuffle walk that you're doing with your hoodie on, it's like, I don't envision Dave 10, 15 years doing that. It's just amazing. You don't envision me doing that? I don't envision you doing that maybe 10, 15 years ago.
Maybe you did, but it's just now, it's just like a whole new mindset for you. Yeah, I've always been cool to little kids. And I've tried really hard to just do what's not normal. The norm is to be hard-ass and not to kids. Not to women, not to old people. If it's a bro and you can get away with him and mature the horse, that's OK. But if it's somebody who, and even in this situation, I know who I was, who the hell knows.
But the fact that he knew who I was and that we had that little fun connection and watching his little brother go, who's this guy? You know, it's not hard to go out of your way to make people happy in life. And I don't know how that affected him. I was going to translate further on in his life. He may end up being someone great in the music industry, all because Dave Mustaine came out and gave him a guitar pick. Going to be a guitar player? Well, who knows.
He could be an attorney for entertainment. He could be a super powerful magnet in a record label or in management. Who knows? Maybe he was somebody in class that digs numbers and that just made his brain just go to a new level. Now Einstein had said that humans use approximately three to 8% of their brain and geniuses are the only ones who get up near the 8% level.
And I thought, good God, Chris, could you even imagine what people would be like if they could use more than that's 3%, or the geniuses that can get up to 8%. You know what I'm saying? Oh, totally. Think what things would be like? Because I'd seen this thing. I'm a lot of people don't like me and that's OK. I say stuff that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I don't do that to make anybody mad. I like to bring things to the surface and have people find out for themselves the truth.
This is a lot of the stuff that we sang about in the beginning because it wasn't trendy. Trendy is a terrible word for anything you associate with magnetism. It was provocative. Right, it was poignant. You've always had that lyrics that make people think a little bit. Yeah. And this record too, I mean, there's a lot of lyrics on about war, I find, in this. And obviously, the first song, Sick the Dine, The Dead, is probably it was about the Bubonic Plague, is about the Black Plague.
I mean, there's a lot of history in the lyrics that you write. And that's to educate, or that's what you enjoy writing about. Metaphorically, Chris, I think, you know, Soldier on isn't about war. Yeah, although it says Soldier and it has marching cadence at the end of it, it's a song about the inner conflict you have to make with the relationship, somebody that you know that it's bad for you.
If you love something so much that you're willing to walk away from it, there's something very inherently evocally non-there. And Mike Drug use was so rampant when a lot of the songs, like, like, Tornado with Souls, was about me having to walk away from this relationship.
Soldier on talks about this person who has gotten so enamored with this double life that they're living that now all of a sudden the road is as mistress and the stages is why, if he doesn't care about family, his care about children, his care about wife's commitments or anything, wherever he's at, whatever it is that he's doing. You know, he could be a musician, he could be, you know, a proctologist for, you know, like, yeah.
And you've got other songs like Life and Hell is another song that's very much like that. I could have come across as, you know, a cult-like song. You know, it's more again about the relationships stuff, dogs with Chernobyl. Is it about meltdown? Well, it's about relationships. Somebody leads somebody on their ass and they don't know what happened, poof, they're gone. I watched that be a great sci-fi flick on Chernobyl. It was a real sloppy movie.
And I noticed one scene in there where they, these young kids had gone on this excursion out to Pripyat to go see Chernobyl. There were these dogs that were there and people had said, you know, what's up with the dogs? And they said, well, when the evacuation order came, people just left and they left their dogs behind. And I thought, well, this is pretty awful. And it left an impression on me, you know, that the person had to leave so fast that they just left their dogs, they're everything.
I mean, if we had to leave, we would obviously have to leave horses. We have two big horses and one miniature horse, so we'd have to leave them. We have very, very small dogs, so we may take them. But if they said no pets, we'd have to leave them, you know? And decision to do that probably is really difficult.
But the feeling that I imagined, I'm not one of those guys that wants to do, you know, some kind of shapeshifting or do some kind of crazy thought transference, you know, where I can think what it's like to be a dog, but just imagining what it would be like to have someone just gone, a whole city gone, everyone gone. And you've gone from being an indoor person to living outdoors now. And now you've got a forage for your food every day.
Plus you've got to face all the other dogs that want to kick your ass, take your food. Yeah, yeah, I know. So there's a lot more to some of these songs than what meets the eye. A lot of it's metaphorical. There's a couple songs, killing time is about some people in my life that I had endorsement with a long time ago, that I had left, you know, if you look at it, killing time for most people, they're going to think it's a song about execution. It's not, it's a song about procrastination.
So time is fleeting, it's not being killed. I'm saying you're killing my time, you're wasting my time. Right. So a lot of the titles that make it at the uses with our songs have death in the word in the title or dying or something similar to that, but it doesn't always necessarily signify homicide or somebody losing their lives. So you want to be a marketer. It's easy. You just have to score a ton of leads and figure out a way to turn them all into customers.
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Obviously, this record is very fast at times, great riffs, great guitar playing as always. But I think enlisting to it, this might be surprising. My favorite song that jumps out to me right now so far amongst many is Mission to Mars. And the reason why is it makes me smile. It makes me laugh when it's like, you know, 300 million miles isn't too far away. And then you, yes, it is. Like, there's these little, it reminds me of like, you're taking a right here or two. Yeah, or three.
You know, and like, that's fun. It reminds me of like a thousand times goodbye where there's these little kind of a size. And it's very much knowing you, you know, very much a Dave Mustaine style of just little sarcastic, little quirky. Starchy, yeah. But it's great. Like it really does connect with me. And I'm sure with a lot of your fans when you do those types of things. Thanks. You're the only person who's mentioned that, yeah, Chris. Really?
It jumped right out to me the first time I heard it. I was like, what was that rewind it? Rewinding, you know, or squirrel back, shall we say in this daydash? Yeah. Right? Did you know that we released cassettes on this thing? Really? And I had gotten the shipment from them that had these really awesome. Awesome collector's item records. I'll send you one. They're the lenticular ones.
You know, they'll lenticular one, like the tool covered that at an animal one where you flipped it back and forth and the guy rockered on his behind. Yeah. This is a lenticular one, but it's not like that. It's like one of the three dimensional ones. And we did that for the disc. We've got a dual Kfold record with 180 gram German vinyl discs. And then we have the regular record that is just a single disc. But the double record has, it has three songs per side.
So the grooves are spaced out a lot. It's the Fidelian is amazing. And we also have a CD with the lenticular cover on it. And that has bonus tracks on it. It has a Sam Hagar's track from a solo career. This planet's on fire, which he, graciously said, he's going to jump up on stage with us really placing it in this field. This tour coming up here. I hope we get a chance to do it. But I hope he's there.
I had mentioned something to Marty Friedman when we were playing in Japan coming up in February at Budacan, what he played with us. And he said, yeah. And then he writes back the days that he's out of the country. And he's not there. So all these years, we've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to do a song together. Budacan was a place that we were supposed to play together. It was something that Marty really loved. And sadly, at the time, we weren't able to do that.
We had a stint where the band was trying to get sobered up. And I had gone into treatment. And while I was there, the guy from Millie Vanille was there in the manager came and got him and took him out. And consequently, he died that tour. And I had been told while I was in the treatment center that when you get out of treatment, that you need to go into the chill. You need to get a support system, basically. So I was playing on going home. And we had an Asian at the time named Andy Summers.
And he booked us to go right after I got out of treatment to Japan. And I went, you're out of your mind. You need to cancel that. And I didn't think it was a big deal, but it was heartbreaking for Marty. This is the first time since that time back in 1992. She's been 30 years since that episode happened, where we got a chance to play Budacan. And I talked Marty. He was down for it, and then it's scheduling. That would have been huge. That would have been huge for people.
Yeah. It would have been really cool. I asked him what song he wanted to play too. And he said, tornado. And he goes the only one that's played tornado right besides Marty. It's great to see how much emphasis the guitar world has put on that particular solo. When you're writing a song, you never really know what's going to happen. When we did my first book, I'm a best-selling author. And I had book come out several years ago. It was my autobiography.
And one of the things that the attorneys kept saying was, you've got to make sure that she don't invade anybody's privacy. And I didn't really know how me telling my story would invade other people's privacy. But there were a lot of instances. And there are too long to go into. But there were a lot of instances where by me telling my story would implicate somebody else or reveal something about somebody else that they don't necessarily want somebody to know.
Right. Yeah, I was with my one friend, and he was a chronic toenial bider. You can get sued for that. Oh my god. You mentioned Marty. And then you mentioned Kiko. I've been an anger fan since 1994. So when you brought Kiko Lerero into Megadeth, it was a big deal. It was a big fan. And now it's two albums later. And he's actually helped write quite a few songs on this record. So the chemistry is there. The trust is there for you to take his riffs or whatever it was.
I mean, obviously, that's worked out hugely for Megadeth and for you to have him in the band. Right. With everybody, there's a learning curve. Sure. And he had to learn a lot about me. And one of the humorous sides about us trying to get Kiko into the Megadeth mindset, I asked them to read the lyric prior to playing the part.
I said, it's important that you know what the song is about so that you can move out to the proper amount of emotion, emoting and not knowing what the lyric is about, you have a frenetic solo or something that should be a little bit more somber. You've missed the plot. Interesting. So we were goofing around and I was working. It's a little video clip. I don't know if it's ever got to many people to see it. But we posted a while ago.
And I said, and I'm looking like this right now, I'll put the monitor on my protools, rig, right? At that face that you get, right? And Kiko's sitting next to me in a chair and he's whittling away on his guitar. I'm trying to do one of his solos. And he goes, hey, dude, I think I have a guitar. An idea for the solo. And they said, okay. And I look at him and he starts playing reggae. And he has something with me, of course. But I wasn't no mood at that moment for him to do that, right?
So, you know, Kiko has a very playful nature. He's very much like a cat, you know, with the way that he kind of plays around with certain things. You know, I think the difference between dogs and cats are pretty obvious. Kiko's very cerebral with his thoughts they're very calculated. And he's very much in his, I don't want to say his own world because that sounds disrespectful. But Kiko is very happy with his life and where he's going, you know, we all face challenges at every stage in our life.
And this is no different than anybody else going out on a two-month tour when you have a set of five-year-old twins is challenging. But I think that the success of the record right now is setting the stage. And you know, as things change for us with our careers, as we start to learn how to conduct herself as businessmen, start to put a little bit of money in the bank, start to get a car, get a house, you know, start to save some money and plan for the future.
You know, those are things that are all happening right now with Kiko and Turk, as you know, him being an angry fan. He's been at this a long time. This is really great now because I told him when I first met him, I said, your life's gonna change, man. I don't care how big you think angry is, you know, because I like anger too. But I said, you're gonna go from being angry to being a star in mega-death. And I said, if you play a car drag, you'll end up being a superstar.
You know, I've always tried to paint a picture of the dynamic, I think, with the band, you know, you sometimes the success of a band is based on the makeup of the pyramid of the band. You know, you've got your marquee player, much like in hockey, you've got your goal score, you're so guess it will. And then you've got your B-grade players, usually you're supporting cast, then you're seeing great players, your defensemen and then D-grade, which are your grinders, you know, your utility players.
So, right, you know this more than I would be in Canadian and probably miscated a lot as a youth. So you know the establishing that hierarchy around your franchise player is what the success of the team is built on. So when you have a band that's got, say four guys, we'll keep it simple. And all four guys, they just play an instrument. They're not musicians, they just play instruments, they'll never make it. They'll never make it. So you have a band of four guys in their own musicians.
Will they make it? They'll probably be a really good cover band. If you have a band and you have one star in it, will you make it? Probably. But the other guys in that band won't be there when the smoke clears. Mm-hmm. If you have several stars in the band, it's a good chance they're gonna stick together the whole time. And it's a good chance that you're gonna go on to superstar them. That makes sense. If you're a superstar, you don't really need a band.
You want a band sometimes, you find people you really like, but they don't always keep pace. And it's very much like being a wagon train. You can't have an ox next to a horse. They're unevenly paired up, right? Right. I don't know if you've had to make any of those terrible things we call lineup changes. The worst part is when you have to make a line of change with the friend.
If you are playing in a band and you've put it together with high school mates and you have to say goodbye to somebody, that's always painful because usually, the saying, I'll always say, if you get in the band with the friend, be prepared to lose both. I think when you have to say goodbye to those guys, a lot of times the friendships over.
So that's a caveat for young musicians to, if you hire somebody based on their ability to play, then you don't ever have to explain to anybody why you've got a bad bass player. Right. Well, I'm just fading my sister. No. Great. It's not getting to play against them confused. When we started writing our thoughts down on paper, it opened up endless possibilities. Ideas could grow beyond the borders of the mind and it changed the world.
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Is it difficult when you have to get a new guitar player from Chris Poland to Jeff Young to the Broadrick now with Geekode? To learn the new style, do they have to connect with you? Do you have to connect with them? Is it take a while to kind of get that blending? Sometimes they're all different animals. I think a lot of it had to do where they were centered. If it was a mega-death centric, then everything would be great. If they were self centered, then it wouldn't work.
Because mega-death is a band. Although people identify me as being mega-death, I go out on stage with a supporting cast. That's my bandmates. And they sing and they solo. So I look at mega-death as being a band. And I'm the leader of it. But I know I couldn't do it on my own. Having said that, are there times in history where there were better guitar players than others? Yes, numerous times. An example, we'll use the drumming area because that's a fairer way to explain this.
Having a jazz drummer with Gar, and then going to a punk rock drummer with Chuck, was a dramatic change. And the songs had the songs on so far so good. So when we recorded by Gar, it would be a totally different record, completely different record. And the person that we used to record that album was kind of Paul Annie. I think he did this a pretty terrible disservice recording that record because he had Chuck record the songs on drums with no symbols.
So he played the whole drum set with no symbols. And then when it was time to do the symbols, he came back after the fact and played the symbols. Really? Very, very strange. He did that for separation. And I couldn't see the merit in doing that. And it wasn't long until I let him go. Because his way of recording just didn't jive with yours, right? Well, I'd never heard that before. I had heard that Peter Gabriel had done the War Without Tears record without symbols.
The whole record didn't have symbols on it from when I heard. If I remember right, do you know that one song? Yeah. With Fluxing Kill, they probably will with days without looking for a frontier death. So no symbols on that record. That's why front of house guys use that to tune the PA's so many times when you go in concert, if you're there early. And you're hearing the front of house engineers tune the PA for the upcoming bands.
They'll use that track because there's no high end white noise coming off of the track from the symbols. I know you know this, but I don't know if you're listeners would know that. And there's always interesting stuff to learn when you the night talk. I learned stuff about you. You learn stuff about me. And there's always stuff about the industry that we talk about. And most people wouldn't hear. I wanted to ask another question on those lines. On the We'll be back video.
It's a great clip on the beach. There's a big violent fight. It's a very almost saving private Ryan fights to the death. But it's both like the origin of the scene we were here. No, we were speaking we were a big rattle head. Vick was about seen and we will speak no evil. And here no evil. My mom needs to sell imported junk. She would get stuff from these magazines.
And I don't know what she was thinking because she lived in an apartment about the size of one car garage and had two little bedrooms. There were about the size of two Volkswagen garages. I was the size of the whole apartment. Head filled with there with me when we lived together at the end of Metallica once we let Ron McGovernie go. James had to move out so he moved down there with me in that place. And my mom would have this stuff. So she by no means was a distributor of anything.
She had a couple of shoe boxes of junk. She was trying to sell people and had that one little thing. Three monkeys. Yeah. It's seen over here in Illinois. And so that was kind of like what I took with me through life. Do the right thing to others treat them the way that you want to be treated. See, no, we will speak. No, we will hear. No, we will. And you know what? You'll get through life. And by the time I had gotten to be an adult, I had pretty much simplified it.
And I had said something to someone when they'd asked me about what I had hoped for my son. I said, you know, I have only two things. I hoped that he will at some point in this life read the Bible. And I hope that he's a black belt in a martial art style because he'll have all the wisdom he needs. And he'll have to take care of himself and he'll be able to pursue any line of work that he wants to do if his heart's right. I'm very proud of both of my kids. I think that they've done really well.
A lot of people thought that my kids would end up being, my son would be Keith Richards. And my daughter would be like Nancy Spongeon or whatever, just burgeoning whatever her name was. But yeah, I've been really blessed in that area. You know, having a strong wife really had a big part to do with that. Less of your kids just started to wind down. I noticed too, once again, you guys do a lot of jujitsu on the road.
Do you have a sensei teacher that travels with you so you can work out during the day? Yeah, he's a forest degree black belt in Gracie Bachat, jujitsu. I've been training with him for a couple of years. I'm getting ready to have another test coming up, which it's great for me because I'm learning two different angles because of all my other martial art background.
I'm learning the Olympic style and I'm also learning, you know, self-defense style, which is a little different, you know, to move in self-defense. They're obviously defending yourself, life or death kind of thing. The Olympic one is where you're just going for points and stuff like that. So learning the history, I had to learn when I got my black belt in Yukito, Conn with Vanujaet. I had to learn about him, about Native Americans, about his career. That's how I fell in love with the guy.
He was just such an amazing hero. And when I got my second black belt in Sangam, I had to write an essay on Korea, which was interesting. So, you know, I just didn't go into some place and just go to a multi-level marketing martial art place and go buy a black belt. It's been a lifelong process since I was 12. Professor Reggie trains me. He trains Kiko. He trains my son. Several of our crew train with him.
It's just a fun environment because the guys in five-finger death punch have their trainer out with them too. When we were out with Trivian, the singer for Trivian had his trainer out. There's a lot of people that do BJJ. And there's not really that big of a difference between Gracie and some of the other Jujutsu schools. I like Gracie because there are 900 schools. I like it because it's consistent training from one school to another.
I like the fact that when you go in there, you don't hear the art styles better than your style stuff. They used to do that in the beginning, but I don't have to deal with that. That's one of the things that usually makes me know I'm in the wrong place when you go in there and the guy saying his style better than anybody else is because you know what, a gun is going to eliminate your style in one click.
I went to a school up in Canada where he's George St. Pierre trained and I was so thrilled, Chris. It was so awesome. You know, I don't know if you know him personally, but I don't know. I'm a big fan of his, he's classy like you are. And I've noticed that the UFC is starting to do a little bit more of the drama stuff, a little bit following in line with what you guys are doing with the backstory. I've never heard anything that he did.
I do know that the TV show that they have now with the UFC does a lot of that backstory stuff and trying to build, you know. Sure, the characters, rivalries and stuff. Yeah, yeah, but he was the guy I just, I'd like when I first saw Connor and I dug him. And then towards the end, I so much stuff happened where I just kind of lose track. You know, the phenomenon wears off and you go on to a new fighter. Sure. If I've always been a fan of George ever since first time I saw him fight.
There's a lot of other guys that I really dig too that are real classy fighters and way back in the day when the ice man used to fight. Yes. God, yeah, Chuck, he was the man. He came to one of our concerts before and I remember meeting him. And I was just standing there like, I'm scared. I'm scared. First time in my life, I'm really scared standing in front of somebody. It was so awesome. So you mentioned five finger and and and you two are with five finger, two words, Lama God.
I think it's such a great idea. And so smart for you to tour with a newer band, not that Lama God or five finger or newer, but you could go out with, you know, other thrash bands from the 80s. But it's I think it puts me get at on a completely different level when you're doing these co-headlining tours with bands, you know, radio bands, shall we say in a lot of ways. Mm hmm. I mean, it's smart. Is that the idea behind it to kind of have different errors of fans come see you?
Well, we've been trying to do things a bunch of different ways. You know, we seven years ago, we made a management change to 5D and we started with the Dave Mustaine charm offensive and rebuilding the perfect piece. So we knew basically what we were comfortably was playing in theaters. And then you psyched that and to goal was to eradicate the image or the impression that Megadeth was a theater band.
And so we started working slowly, but surely on ourselves, on our image, on our performances, on our song selections, on the merchandise that we have, the things that we talk about that press, the interaction with the fans during the show, after the show, before the show, all that stuff. And really started taking this strategic approach to things, much like the predecessors we have that are still successful. A lot of times when you look at them, you think, well, I wouldn't do that.
Like for example, Kiss, Kiss is a huge marketing business and it's a brand. And a lot of people saying, you know, I wouldn't do that. But you know what? I think if you're talking about branding stuff, there may be some products that they put out that I wouldn't put out, but I think the way that they've made themselves successful and popular for 50 years, whatever it is, they've had a plan. They've had a strategy.
And that's something that we're really embracing right now, is thinking about longevity, thinking about how we can help other fans because they're good promotion devices. Come somebody goes out there and says, we want a great tour with Megadass. And that's great press. Yeah, it works. Last two questions for you, Dave. You've mentioned James and Lars a few times.
I want to ask you what your favorite Cliff Burton story is, if there is one, because as the years go by, people still talk about Cliff, but very few knew him. And you were in a band high out. Is there a story about Cliff that stands up for you that makes you smile?
There's not a lot of stuff that comes to mind that, you know, when we did spend time together, the extent of the time that we spent, whereas he would come and pick me up at this horrible place I was living at, Mark Whitaker, the guy that had done sound for the band at the time, James and Lars were living at his house in the Bay Area. And I lived way up Mall McCrieg. Cliff would pick me up. We'd ride to rehearsal, we'd jam, we'd ride back, he'd drop me off. And it was it. Didn't seem very much.
We would drink at rehearsal. He smoked pot, but he had commercial. And it was like homegrown stuff. It was really terrible, but he smoked pot. So the one thing that I remember most was the day that mechanics became the forehorseman. And we were at the rehearsal building, which was a garage at Mark Whitaker's house that we turned into a jamron, hung carpet inside and we played there. And I went in there and we'd been listening to Leonard Skinner because Leonard Skinner was Cliff's favorite bands.
We're playing the mechanics and Lars goes, man, we need to add this slow part now. I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, well, why would you put a slow part in mechanics? Because I wrote it after watching that movie with Charles Bronson, the killer that was called the mechanic, right? OK. And I worked at a gas station, so I kind of melded the two ideas together. And so I thought, all right, and I played, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then.
I'll turn it up. You come on, y'all. The muscles show, they love the good of them. Sweet home Alabama. Sweet home. Right. So, Lars goes, that's really it. And I felt like saying, home the fans and seem to think so. Or maybe Rosley Tins or Collins, one of those guys who worked in the song. So he left it in the song and I thought, oh my god, Lars. Dad, that was, it was funny to me. The rest is history.
Last question for you, Dave, is there a song or a solo that stands out in the sick, but dying in the dead? I know it's hard because they're all your children, but is there one that stands out for you today that you like the best? God, dang it. You would have to say that. Ha, ha, ha. Um, I'm on the spot. There's so many that I love. Night Stalker has got some red shredding in it. Yeah. Probably Night Stalker, because that's the fastest song we've done in a very long time, if ever.
Super fast. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great record, man. I really enjoyed it. It's almost the... I really enjoyed dystopia, but I think this one is better on early listens. So it's great talking to you, Dave. Me too. Hopefully we get a chance to see each other again sooner than later. Six years is too long. Yeah, it has been too long. Cheers, man. I'll see you in the road somewhere. Thanks, dude. You got it, buddy. Big good. See you later, dude.