My Life With Deth (11 page)

Jay suggested that he bring in his guitar teacher, Jeff Young, to record the solos on the album and then later show him how to play those solos. However, while Jeff was obviously a studied player, having graduated from the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, he was just as obviously not a heavy metal guitarist. Jeff did create some amazing solos and he played them himself on the record. He became our new guitarist shortly thereafter. I’m glad to say that Jay remained a good friend of mine afterward, in spite of the transitions.

Jeff turned out to be a fantastic guitar player. We often roomed together on the tour and he would show me a lot of things on the guitar. Effectively, I studied with him, and we made a good musical partnership.

Around this time, my heroin use really escalated and I was looking for options to get off the stuff. One of those was detox through methadone. But the other problem with methadone is that it is very addictive, and withdrawal from it is even worse than withdrawal from heroin. It also really hurt the arches of my feet for some reason. I would get out of bed in the morning and my feet would be in agony as they touched the floor. Some mornings I’d take methadone in an attempt not to take heroin, but then I’d get really tired, so I’d score some cocaine, and then I’d get so high on coke that I had to take heroin. So now I was on methadone, cocaine,
and
heroin!

*   *   *

Jeff Young was friends with producer/engineer Michael Wagener, who mixed the
So Far . . .
record. I loved the sound of Michael’s records in those days, but for some reason that production style didn’t work so well on the
So Far, So Good . . .
record. I’d always been impressed with Michael’s mix on Metallica’s
Master of Puppets
album, but
So Far . . .
sounded nothing like that. Perhaps the Metallica guys were looking over his shoulder when he mixed
Puppets
to make sure it sounded right, with no reverb on the drums and so on. Michael was a good guy and a top-notch producer/engineer, but that record just didn’t turn out the way we’d hoped.

By this time, Mercedes was out of my life. She had really broken my heart, and with all of our touring I was able to support myself, no longer relying on girls and their apartments to have a home. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone would do escort work to pay the bills, and highly dangerous. Oddly, and in spite of my lifestyle, I was always loyal to my girlfriends.

After the release of
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
, we traveled around the country and did a tour with Dio and Savatage. We played the Long Beach Arena, and I met a girl named Charlie there after the show. After being on the road for the better part of a year, I was ready to settle down with a girl at home. Charlie and I hit it off well, and pretty soon we moved in together into an apartment over in central Hollywood on Cherokee Street, just off Highland Avenue. She hated that I did drugs, so I did them in secret.

One night, Slash and Steven Adler from the up-and-coming Hollywood band Guns N’ Roses came over to our apartment. They looked around and were like, “How did you get this?” The GNR guys had basically grown up on the streets of Hollywood, and here I was, having sold a couple of gold records. I didn’t have a load of money, but I was a fairly together guy with a car and my bills paid. It was as if they were amazed that the guy from Megadeth could have a civilized home life.

A THOUGHT

Substance Versus Content

Life in a rock band is largely about selling perception, the rock star dream. Being homeless and completely broke for several years wasn’t the dream I’d come to L.A. for, and it really changed me. The allure of Hollywood nightlife brings something hauntingly romantic to your life when you’re woven into its fabric. For me, I was living the dream, but at the same time, two worlds were colliding: my passion for music and my enslavement to addiction.

“Sometimes the longest twelve inches are between the head and the heart.”

—Anonymous

T
hings got pretty crazy during the So Far, So Good . . . So What! tour period. I was at the party where Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe overdosed and died for a few minutes, a story he chronicled in his book
The Heroin Diaries
. Guns N’ Roses’ drummer Steven Adler had invited me over to the Franklin Plaza Hotel in Hollywood, where he and the band were staying at the time. He had broken his arm and wasn’t playing during that period. However, GNR was playing a series of shows up in Pasadena and had hired drummer Fred Coury from Cinderella to fill in.

I went over to the Franklin Plaza with a friend of mine named Matt Freeman, an engineer over at Music Grinder studios. Matt had also worked as a studio assistant on
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
At one point, Slash and Nikki came barging into Steven’s room, completely trashed out of their minds. I hadn’t met Nikki before, and although we later became good friends, that night he was a real mess. Imagine a guy possessed by the devil when on drugs: that was Nikki. He had a look in
his eyes that was terrifying. Nevertheless, I thought maybe they had some smack I could be dealt in on. No such luck. They eventually left our suite and went into the room next door and we carried on partying.

A short while later, a young woman partying next door came crashing into our room, saying, “Quick! Get some ice, Nikki overdosed.” Fred frantically looked at me and said, “Dude, do you have a car? Get me out of here!” We immediately scurried out the door, just as the police and ambulance sirens began to wail. Matt and I took Fred over to the Hyatt Regency on Sunset Boulevard, which is also known as the infamous “Riot House.” It’s the hotel of legend where bands like the Who and Led Zeppelin built a reputation on excessive wild parties.

Fred wasn’t a drug user; he just liked a couple of beers. He was a seasoned professional and said to me, “I do not need to be around any of this.” I could tell he was mad about the situation and didn’t want that kind of trouble in his life. Even though we were musically very different, Megadeth, Mötley Crüe, and GNR came from the same fabric of wild living, so I understood this evening in a demented sort of way.

Nikki was revived by the paramedics with a cardiac adrenaline shot. The next time I saw him, he was nine months sober, having been through rehab. He visited me during my first drug and alcohol rehab stint at the Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys less than a year after the Franklin Plaza incident, an act of friendship I have never forgotten. He looked great: he was trim, because he was going to the gym, and he was calm and totally present. He had a very easy, natural, uplifting demeanor that was the polar opposite of the demon who had been at the Franklin Plaza with me just a few months earlier. He was a real testament to sobriety and its life-changing effects.

All in all,
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
was really the culmination of what had started in 1983: my transformation into a person that I really wasn’t. I put so much dope and booze into myself that I behaved like a completely different person. Was I born with the mind of an addict? I don’t know that I was. All I know is that after repeated use of these substances, I became addicted to them. I couldn’t moderate it, because my
body had become used to having this stuff in it, and I became dope-sick when I didn’t have any. In effect, I was denying my true self and letting my addictions turn me into someone I was not.

My smack use continued, because compared to some of the guys I was hanging with, I could get high and keep it together. I would do a line of coke and keep a joint in the ashtray of my car, and still be able to drive over to see attorneys and business managers and have reasonable conversations with them. The other guys didn’t keep it together as well as I did. That perpetuated the lie and made me the most deceitful kind of drug addict, because you couldn’t really spot it in me, especially when I stood next to others who were faring much worse.

My moral compass was pretty skewed at this point, too. I’d become very sneaky. When I thought someone in the room was holding on to some dope, I simply gave the nod or the look and asked, “Hey, are you holding?” All I had to do from there was the little handover, and then I’d sneak off to the bathroom and snort up a line.

When I went out on the road and couldn’t score any heroin, I knew I’d be dope-sick from the withdrawal, so I’d drink myself to oblivion to dull the suffering. Off the road, I would go to downtown L.A., where I could buy heroin and cocaine out of a hotel-room window on Ceres Street. On the road, I could control my addiction, but at home, I couldn’t. This type of lunacy couldn’t last, though. A turning point was coming, and it finally arrived when we went to England.

In June 1988 Megadeth was booked to play at the Monsters of Rock festival in Donington, England, one of the most prestigious festivals in the world at that time, and a high point of our careers to date. A few days before our flight, a friend called me while my girlfriend Charlie and I were lying in bed. I thought Charlie was still asleep, and my friend asked me, “Hey man, you got any dope? Can I get some from you?”

After I hung up the phone, Charlie said, “I heard that! What’s going on here?” She freaked out, went into the bathroom, and found my stash of brown Persian heroin—which she dumped all over the
brown carpet in our living room. I knew then that I was going to be really dope-sick in about half an hour. Even worse, she called my parents and told them, “David’s on heroin!”

Now the cat was really out of the bag. My parents were terribly shocked. My father was especially upset. He’d really supported me and my chosen path of music, and he’d warned me on many occasions about drugs, girls, and anything else that could get in the way of my dream. “Don’t do anything stupid and mess this up,” he would tell me. “You’ve got a shot at something.”

The flight to England was two or three days away, and I was dope-sick. Charlie wouldn’t let me go anywhere without her, so I couldn’t sneak out and score. It was horrible. She gave me an ultimatum, saying that if I wanted to be with her, I would have to go to rehab at Van Nuys hospital after the trip to Donington.

Sobriety was already in the air in 1988. Bear in mind that at this time Aerosmith had gotten sober, as had the Mötley Crüe guys. Veteran musicians from the 1960s and ’70s like David Crosby were sober, as were musicians and actors from all genres. Everybody was going public about getting sober, and the entertainment industry was excited about this new lifestyle of clean living. Furthermore, we had recently acquired new managers at McGhee Entertainment, Doc McGhee and his partner Doug Thaler. They told me, “If you want to get sober, we’ll help you, we’ve got the right people,” but they also made it real clear to me that they weren’t going to drag incapacitated people around the world anymore. “We’re done with it,” they said. “We’re not going through that anymore.”

While the managers and labels were embracing sobriety for their artists, I was like, “This sobriety movement is way ahead of my time!” I was a kid from a farm in Minnesota and, having found all this sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, I was thinking that I’d made it. Now was the time to let the candle burn! I’d seen the
Sid and Nancy
movie where Sid is asked by Nancy’s father what his goals are in life, and Sid answers, “I think I’ll move to Paris and go down in a blaze of glory.” That
was how Megadeth lived, to some degree: we were about lighting the fuse and letting it burn until the explosion.

We flew from L.A. to New York and played at the Ritz on our way to England as a warm-up show. I was able to get some dope and “get well,” as we called it, so that little two-day trip was fine. Charlie met me in New York and flew with me to London, and of course, you can get as high as you want
before
you get on a plane. I managed to stay as high on smack as I could, for no other reason than I knew the inevitable was coming.

We arrived in England and drove up to the show in Leicestershire. The Guns N’ Roses guys had just gotten there, and I thought they might have some drugs, but they were like me in that when they were at home in L.A. they might be a mess, but on the road their partying was restricted to drinking. No one had any smack. The inevitable detox, which I knew would be painful, was coming at a moment in time when I needed to be at my best for the biggest show of my life. So I went to our hotel, the Holiday Inn in Leicester, and became so sick that everybody found out about it. Many of them were angry because I had lied about my addiction, but they also knew that inside I was a good kid, and their concern trumped their anger.

The insidious nature of drug addiction is that while you’re reaching out for help with one hand, you’re reaching out to your dealer with the other. A doctor came up to the hotel and gave me a prescription for some codeine aspirin, which did nothing for me. But he had no sympathy. “You junkie American!” he said in disgust.