My Life With Deth (14 page)

In February 1990, that was the point I had finally reached. It’s known as hitting bottom. That is the feeling you have inside, and it does not depend on how much money you have in the bank, or whether you still have your family, job, or any status in this world. It depends on nothing whatsoever, because it’s about your soul.

For me, that point came when I was still in Megadeth and I still had some income and status, although I hadn’t paid my taxes in two or three years. Not because I hadn’t made any money, but because I’d spent all my money on drugs. When I got sober I looked at my tax bill, and I could barely afford to pay the interest on what I owed.

There was a defining moment in March when I was one month sober and the only one around really giving sobriety an honest go. Suddenly some close friends and running buddies started to slip and use drugs again. It was frightening because I was faced with the stark realization that either I was staying sober for my friends or staying sober for myself.

I’m so glad that I had that moment, because in a nutshell that’s what staying sober these past twenty-three years has been about. It’s what I say to myself on a daily basis: my sobriety is numero uno. Even ahead of my family and career, because if I don’t have sobriety, everything else will go away. Under sobriety come a lot of blessings, like being married, having a job—and mine is playing the bass—and having children.

The day I married my wife, Julie, I grabbed her hand and I prayed, because I knew that by myself I’d mess it up. I really felt that I needed to give our marriage to God. It was the same when my son, Roman, was born. I’ll never forget the day. I was driving up 104th Street, which is right by where we lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the epiphany hit me that Roman was not our kid, he’s God’s kid, and has been entrusted to us. This requires stewardship of our time, our money, and our resources. Everything that had been given to us
was to be used to raise Roman and, later, my daughter, Athena. Ultimately they are here to perform whatever duty for which the Lord has put them here.

These are just a few of the lessons I have learned since getting clean in 1990—but at the time, the struggle was far from over. Here was Marty Friedman, for example, joining Megadeth. He was excited musically and on every other level. He came in when the whole ship was just turning in an entirely new direction. It was a good direction, and the right direction, but here we were, sitting in our living rooms doing these counseling sessions, and Marty’s going, “Dude, I just wanted to come in and play guitar—I didn’t know I was going to have to bite off all this drama!”

Marty got involved with a lot more than he’d ever bargained for. He came up with the phrase “Megadeth: it is what it is, and it ain’t what you thought it was going to be.” This meant that there is a whole lot more to being a big rock band than just playing the notes and hitting the stage, especially with newfound sobriety in the camp. It was cool, though, because he’d been around and he had a bit of a fan following himself. Plus he had plenty of credibility as a guitar player. It was nice for us not to have to groom somebody from the start, especially when we had toured the world and were about to make our fourth album.

So now Megadeth was still made up of the two Daves and the two new guys, but we all looked the same and we thought the same. We listened to the same kind of music. Marty was from a small town in Maryland and I was from a small town in Minnesota, so we had grown up on a lot of the same kind of music. Marty had the theory that you either liked KISS and Black Sabbath or you liked Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. Marty and I were both from the first camp, whereas Dave and Nick were more from the second. So we all fit in the band, which I think is why it became the favored Megadeth lineup for so many years. It looked, sounded, and felt right.

It’s amazing to realize now that we wrote
Rust in Peace
completely out of our minds on very hard drugs during 1988 and ’89, but then got all sobered up in 1990 to record it, which meant that the execution of it was note-perfect. Also, the tempos were at breakneck speed.

Since then, all of the years that followed have been the best of my career. In rehab they said to me, “Try this sober way of life for a year. If you don’t like it, we’ll gladly refund all your misery.” I remember coming up to a year of sobriety in March 1991 and I knew I wouldn’t trade it for anything. There were still a few bumps in the road from time to time, but I was in a much better place than I was a year before.

When we started the Rust in Peace tour, I didn’t have a credit card and I owed almost $80,000 in back taxes. I lived on twenty dollars in cash per day, because all of my tour salary went to pay my debts. I still had an apartment, though, and I had managed to buy a car before everything went bad for me with drugs. Fortunately, we had a new business manager who had restructured everything internally with the band.

Rust in Peace
made Number 23 on the
Billboard
chart. It was like
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?
in that it was recorded after a complete retooling of the band. We hadn’t just replaced a couple of guys: we’d renewed the band from the ground up. We were sober and we had a different set of marching orders for ourselves and for everyone around us, including our manager and our business manager. We’d transitioned from being a partnership to being an actual professional corporation. I’d made enough mistakes and squandered enough money along the way to know what not to do, and sometimes that’s one of the best hands you can be dealt in life because we often learn more from our mistakes than our victories.

This whole period was a lot of hard work. I was still completely broke. When you go to the record company and borrow money so you can use it as tour support and go out on the road, usually that money is 100 percent recoupable against your album’s future sales. Even if you sell half a million records and you make $1.25 per record, an album usually costs a couple of hundred thousand to make, plus you usually shoot a couple of videos, which are at least 50 percent recoupable against your future royalties. If you borrow even more for tour support, you can see that your record royalties don’t go very far even on a fairly decent-selling record.

It’s like any business, in that it takes money to make money, and one thing that the general public doesn’t understand about the music business is that when the Internet changed the record industry in the 2000s, it basically took away the capital resources that artists need in order to be able to do what they do. I was really lucky to have gotten in under the wire, back in the mid-’80s when we signed with Capitol, because we got to spark up this beast called Megadeth with the proper artillery—banking, marketing, sales, and manufacturing—that we needed from a major label. We weren’t rich by any means, but we had a resource to draw from, at least.

Songwriting and publishing soon became a bone of contention in Megadeth. At first we agreed to split everything four ways. Dave got the publishing for the songs that he wrote, and of course those songs were and remain the heart and soul of Megadeth. I started to compose, and was credited and compensated on
So Far, So Good . . . So What?
for “Hook in Mouth,” “Mary Jane,” “In My Darkest Hour,” and “Liar,” which I composed on guitar, a much easier instrument for me to write riffs on than the bass. I never rated myself as a lead singer or a lead guitar player, but I’ve always been a pretty solid bass player and rhythm guitarist. In the early days we used a lot of Dave’s publishing money to pay the bills, and eventually he got very protective of it. This was not unreasonable, and it served to inspire me to write, although money is never the best reason to write music.

One of our major challenges was how to keep Megadeth sober on the road. We called the tour managers and told them to remove all the alcohol from the minibars in the hotel rooms, to shield us from temptation. We also had a security guy who took care of us, although it should
be noted that if an addict is determined to get high, he’ll get through any security guy. I’ll never forget flying to Amsterdam for a show and looking out of my hotel window to see people smoking heroin off tinfoil in the alley below. I thought, “Where were these people when I was getting high? Now they’re right outside my window!” But I didn’t stumble: I maintained my prayer life and recovery disciplines when I was traveling, and still do.

I was still full of anger and hostility, though. I was a very raw, exposed nerve. In fact, when I see old videos of myself I can see just how angry I was. I started to apply a recovery program in my life, but there is a saying, “Twenty miles in, twenty miles out,” which is to say that you don’t get sick with addiction overnight, so you probably won’t become cured overnight either. I’ve never relapsed in all my time sober, because through prayer I think that part of me was removed. It just never came back. I’m lucky.

The day you start getting loaded is the day you stop growing emotionally—if you’re an addict, at least. I started getting loaded when I was fifteen, so there I was on the Rust in Peace tour, a twenty-five-year-old teenager. And I behaved that way. I treated women as if I was fifteen, and my general responses to life were those of a fifteen-year-old. I was still growing up. I really felt that I’d turned the corner when it came to alcohol and drugs: it was the other temptations of life that I struggled with.

My back taxes were finally settled around this time. Megadeth made a profit from merchandise and sales of
Rust in Peace
, which came out in September 1990. It’s a strange business, though. This is how the formula generally works: When gross income comes in, a manager takes 15 percent off the top, a business manager takes another 5 percent, and if the money comes in from a live concert, the agent will take another 10 percent. Out of a week’s income, then, if you make $100,000—which would have been a lot of money back in those days—$30,000 would be gone off the top. So you’d be left with $70,000—but hold on. It might cost you $75,000 a week to be on tour, in which case you’d actually be losing money.

It doesn’t work like that in any other business: for example, if I own
a McDonald’s and hire a manager, he doesn’t take a percentage off the top. He is paid a salary, and if anything goes wrong, he is responsible for it and he might get fired. My dad used to say, “Your business is nothing but a bunch of con men and shysters,” and the more I look at it, the more I know he was right. AC/DC said it best when they sang in “Let There Be Rock,” “The guitar man got famous / The businessman got rich.” It’s like at casinos in Las Vegas: it’s attractive for the gamblers and the tourists, but at the end of the day, all the rules favor the house.

It’s the same in the music business. As attractive as it may be for a bunch of young kids to get onstage, be rock stars, and get all the chicks, drugs, and other rewards, the contracts are in favor of the record company, the concert promoter, the booking agent, and the merchandise company. These people aren’t in business to lose money.

I finally figured all this out when I was clearheaded and after I’d squandered my income from our first three albums. Those years had been productive in terms of building a fan base for Megadeth, but there is a saying, “It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you save,” and I understood that very well now. Merchandise now became crucial for paying the bills and, in my case, paying off some of my tax debt.