My Life With Deth

Praise for
My Life with Deth

“David is a great guy: he and Dave Mustaine are unique characters. Guys like them are few and far between.”

—Jay Reynolds, Malice

“David is one of the most genuine people you could ever meet. I’ve become a Megadeth fan through David. MEGA Life! Ministries, which David founded, has been a great thing for our church. He brings in a new perspective.”

—Pastor Jon Bjorgaard, Shepherd of the Desert, Arizona

“David is such a great bass player. You can tell when you’re playing with a professional, and he was always a pro—a real musician.”

—Max Cavalera, Soulfly

“David Ellefson is the epitome of the solid metal bassist. He’s also a great ambassador for sharing his style with so many.”

—Rex Brown, Pantera, Down, Kill Devil Hill

“David Ellefson is not only a great bass player and songwriter, he is my friend. He is one of the good guys in music and has always been a great source of knowledge. We’ve done a lot of touring together throughout the years, and Dave has always been and still is that good guy.”

—Frank Bello, Anthrax

“David is one of our industry’s good guys. I always love spending time with him. Need someone reliable, who will always show up, rain or shine, with a spring in his step? That’s David Ellefson.”

—Glenn Hughes, ex–Deep Purple, Black Country Communion

“Whenever I’ve met Ellefson, he’s always been the nicest guy. He’s a sweetheart and a great bass player.”

—Scott Ian, Anthrax

Foreword by Alice Cooper

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One
   Farm Boy

Chapter Two
   One Is Too Many (and a Thousand Isn’t Enough)

Chapter Three
   California Dreaming

Chapter Four
   Back to the Womb

Chapter Five
   Hitting Bottom

Chapter Six
   Hollywood Nights

Chapter Seven
   New Beginnings

Chapter Eight
   The Countdown Begins

Chapter Nine
   The End of an Era

Chapter Ten
   Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Chapter Eleven
   Transformed

Chapter Twelve
   The Age of Reinvention

Chapter Thirteen
   MEGA Life!

Chapter Fourteen
   Coming Full Circle

Chapter Fifteen
   Back to the Start

Chapter Sixteen
   New Frontiers

Selected Discography

Acknowledgments

About David Ellefson with Joel McIver

Index

This book is dedicated to the Ellefson family, past, present, and future.

H
ard rock can sometimes take people to many dark and unexpected places. David Ellefson has traveled down this rough road for many years: like many of us, he has been to hell and back.

There are sometimes immense outside expectations for rock stars to be dangerous, mysterious, and self-destructive. Some of us get through it sober, but unfortunately some of us burn out and die before our time: it’s a difficult thing to endure without help.

David was able to see what was happening to himself and to those around him. He accepted that he needed help, and he is now living his life the way he wants to. Ironically, sometimes the most rebellious and controversial thing a rocker can do is become a Christian.

Alice Cooper, 2013

A
t first, I didn’t want to write this book. Not because I didn’t want to share my life with you, but because it seems that celebrity tell-all books are in vogue and a dime a dozen these days. In fact, most of the ones I’ve skimmed at the bookstores begin with tragedy and go downhill from there!

Well, that is not my story—and that was not my life. Fortunately, my friend the journalist Joel McIver bugged me for more than two years to start recording my life with him via Skype while I traveled the world. I agreed to do at least this much and contacted my pastor in Scottsdale, Arizona, for some direction: he suggested that, rather than just write another tell-all tale of rock ’n’ roll woe, I should consider another angle for my book—one that was a bit more truthful about my journey as a man, not only as a rock star.

He suggested that I give a testimony of my life instead, and that this book could be more than just a fascinating read: it could also be a fantastic opportunity to share with you my struggles with faith and addiction. It hit me that people everywhere need to feel inspired, and to know that they can keep their dreams alive and their faith in tow, yet still prosper in a world that tells us to bend the rules and compromise
ourselves in order to win. I learned these lessons the hard way, and they—along with friendships, forgiveness, and reconciliation—are the basis of this book.

I began having casual conversations with Joel, back in his office in England, from various locations around the world. As we talked, the stories unfolded and the manuscript was born. Those conversations led to the volume in your hands. A note before you begin the first chapter: this book is not solely about Megadeth, the band I cofounded in 1983 and which has been my home for the majority of my career. It is about the lessons I have learned while in Megadeth and beyond.

I’ve been blessed with a good life. I have, for the most part, been spared the devastating elements of show business to which many of my contemporaries succumbed. In fact, my life is fairly normal when you consider the circus of rock ’n’ roll that enveloped me during my professional years in the music business and, indeed, as far back as the age of thirteen. But hey—at least it was a fun circus!

Without further ado, let’s pull back the curtains and let the show begin. . . .

David Ellefson

Scottsdale, Arizona, 2013

W
hat’s withdrawal from heroin like? Well, it’s like being very sick with the flu, while knowing that if you could just go and score, you’d be better within three to five minutes. Your stomach is upset, you’re aching everywhere, and it’s just plain horrible.

This was how I was feeling on August 20, 1988, as my band Megadeth was flying to England to play for 107,000 people at the renowned Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. I should have been feeling on top of the world. Instead, I was in a hell of my own making.

We arrived in England and drove up to the show, about two hours north of London. I had to get rid of my smack on the plane before I arrived at Heathrow Airport immigration, and the inevitable withdrawal hit me like a punch to the stomach. I went to our hotel and became so sick that everybody found out about it. Everyone was shocked. I’d been such a good addict—so sneaky. “You junkie American!” said the doctor.

Once I got off the stage, I was so sick I just went to the bus.

It was all such a long way from where my story began. . . .

“If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs.”

—Tony Gaskins

I
grew up on a farm about six miles north of Jackson, Minnesota, in a little town of about three thousand people. My very first memory, from when I was two years old or even younger, is of my grandmother holding me while I was looking out of the dining-room window, watching the cattle trucks come in and out of the yard.

Ellefson is a Norwegian name, though my combined ancestry encompasses Norway, Germany, England, Denmark, and Sweden. My paternal grandparents were Henry and Anna Ellefson. I didn’t get to know them well as I was very young when they both passed away from congestive heart failure, the same illness that would claim their son, my father, many years later. I knew my mother’s parents, Arthur and Isabel Jorgenson, much better and spent many weekends on their farm in Gillette Grove, Iowa, about twenty minutes southwest of Spencer.

Grandma Isabel was very strict, but Art was a funny little bald grandpa who liked the occasional girlie pinup magazine and firearms
and was fascinated with the railroad. He had a terrific Winchester .22 Magnum rifle with which we would target-shoot in the pasture outside the front window of his old farmhouse. I always had great aim and good shooting technique and once even pegged a sparrow right off a telephone wire, although we were expressly forbidden to shoot in that direction because if we hit the wire itself, the house would be out of phone service for several days until the company could get out to repair the line. Once Grandpa Art saw that I was fascinated with guns, he eventually gave me that rifle as a present, which is at my brother’s house to this day. In many ways, firearms were my first obsession, just before I discovered the bass guitar.

My mom, Frances, was a registered nurse and had studied nursing in North Platte, Nebraska. They had my brother, Eliot, on May 15, 1963, and I was born on November 12, 1964. My mother gave up her nursing career to raise my brother and me. She was very hands-on and very sweet and happy: the quintessential good-Samaritan church mom. She was wonderful. My father, by contrast, was very much a no-nonsense kind of man: he would flip out whenever he heard me swearing, for example. He was the stern parent, and my mother was the friendly one.

My dad was a beef farmer in the early days. He had a heart attack when I was two years old, no doubt because he smoked and because the midwestern American diet is rich in meat, so he ended up selling off the beef cattle and transitioned into grain farming. My dad was not a traditional overalls-and-pitchfork farmer: he was an astute businessman. In fact, generations of Ellefsons were astute businessmen. They were a conservative, educated, traditional pack of men.

Ours was an eleven-acre farm in the middle of a square mile of flat farmland. In fact, everywhere in Minnesota where I grew up was sectioned into square miles, with big open areas of either corn or soybean fields. It was great to grow up there because you could shoot guns, fire a bow and arrow, or drive a golf ball, and you wouldn’t hit anything. We were surrounded by wide-open spaces and never had any fear of danger,
kidnapping, or burglary. We would even leave our houses unlocked and the keys in our cars. Neighbors would stop by to visit over coffee with my parents for hours at a time. Life on the farm was simple and founded on industry and the strong work ethic that carved out the character of that part of the Midwest.

I was brought up Lutheran, and our family meals always began with a mandatory Lutheran prayer of “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let this food to us be blessed. Amen.” That was the prayer, said by all in attendance; no negotiation! Meals were very much family times—morning, noon, and night.

I was not silver-spooned by any means, but by today’s standards, much of my upbringing was upper middle class. When I was a small child, my family was of fairly humble means, but there was a period in the 1970s when we did quite well in the farming industry. All of a sudden we were remodeling the house and getting new furniture. Probably the biggest indicator of our newfound prosperity was when my dad built an indoor swimming pool and some new farm buildings, and we had five cars in the garage.

I remember my parents teaching me how to understand our new wealth, saying: “Hey listen, we’re going to have a swimming pool. There are only one or two other families in this entire county who have a pool, so don’t go to school and brag about it.” They were almost warning us that this wealth could lead to us being perceived as arrogant and snotty, and we didn’t want that. The truth is that farming is much like the music business, literally feast or famine, with so many elements that are beyond one’s control. We were taught to continue to work hard on the farm and be humbly thankful for our blessings.