My Life With Deth (17 page)

The initial idea for
Youthanasia
was to rent a big house out in Arizona, where Dave and I now lived, and move a studio into it and make a record there. The producer Max Norman flew out, but we couldn’t find the right house where we could effectively carry out our endeavor. We started looking at some commercial spaces and found a 10,000-square-foot place just southwest of downtown Phoenix. Definitely not a great neighborhood, but the building was perfect.

We leased the place for six months. Max built three isolation rooms for recording in the building, which he would later dismantle and take back to L.A. to build his own studio. Mick Zane of the band Malice was Max’s buddy, and had a day job building sets at one of the Hollywood film studios. He became one of the chief carpenters on the project to help Max build the studio. It was incredible that Max not only oversaw the record production but also designed and built a studio in Arizona, all the while tending to his family back in Los Angeles. Truly a man of many talents and much energy.

At the same time, we were rehearsing at Phase Four Studios down in Tempe, where we spent five days a week running through song ideas
and getting them together. We had realized that a lot of music you hear on the radio is at 120 beats per minute, because that’s around the same pace as an active human heart rate. We talked to Max about the tempos and also the tunings, in order to refine the songwriting. We went to another studio in central Phoenix called Vintage Recorders, where we did the final writing.

Since
Rust in Peace
, we’d had a sort of spiritual sobriety guru around us, to help us work through our issues as they arose. Having a counselor available to help us communicate and resolve things was quite effective. Most big companies have a human resources department; most rock bands don’t. Counselors fulfilled that role for us. Friends and fans would sometimes remark about the same matters in the Metallica movie
Some Kind of Monster
, to which I would reply, “Yep, been there, done that!” Honestly, I understood it, because we’d been through something similar, which had been helpful in the rebuilding process around
Rust in Peace
.

In Phoenix we were introduced to a business development coach named Daniel. One of his main areas of focus was team building. Businesses hire these people to analyze their structure, spot weaknesses, and help fix them. There was almost a corporate mind-set about Megadeth at this time. It was quite a contrast to be asking how we could create and control our business in the middle of all our creativity, though. Somehow we made it work, as we were heading into uncharted waters with our success.

We rolled into
Youthanasia
with a lot of optimism, and the first single, “Train of Consequences,” was greeted with a lot of fanfare in the press. MTV had us come out and play a Halloween show called Night of the Living Megadeth in New York City. During the set, Dave made a comment when introducing a brand-new track called “A Tout le Monde” along the lines of “This is a song about how I tried to kill myself.” He was actually referring to another one of our songs, “Skin o’ My Teeth.” Regardless, “A Tout le Monde” was scheduled as our next single, and we’d spent a lot of money shooting a video for it with
Wayne Isham, who had done the video for “Train of Consequences” and other videos from
Countdown to Extinction
. When we submitted the video to MTV, they rejected it. We were shocked and asked them why. They told us that they didn’t like the lyrical content, so we reedited it for them, but it was dead in the water. It was a real blow to our campaign in the U.S.

Adding to this mishap, times were changing musically, too.
Youthanasia
was popular internationally, but sold only half as much in the United States as
Countdown to Extinction
, though not because of its merits as a record. The bigger issue was that, in 1994, the Seattle bands were coming to the fore. The only real metal band to survive that change was Metallica, but even they cut their hair and changed their look and their sound. They were still very popular, though, and when you’re that high up, any glide downward takes a very long time.

For the most part, thrash metal fell from its throne, and Megadeth spent the rest of the 1990s, with
Cryptic Writings
and
Risk
, trying to navigate a very challenging music business. We had to think like businessmen—almost like marketing executives—rather than simply musicians with guitars around our necks. This was the reality of us simply wanting to continue to be Megadeth, unlike so many of our contemporaries who just got swept away by the winds of change.

All of a sudden, MTV was very clearly not playing heavy metal videos. It was all Seattle and grunge bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains. By the time we released
Cryptic Writings
in 1997, we had realized that mainstream music channels were simply not going to play our videos any more. Fortunately, MTV didn’t make Megadeth, and we had a fan base that we knew was going to be there even when our videos weren’t being played. That is the power of heavy metal and our fans. Nonetheless, MTV had taken us from being a band that played 500-seat clubs to arenas through sheer exposure, so we certainly weren’t unappreciative, either.

I remember when our booking agent flew out to present us with the schedule for the Youthanasia tour: it was a list of midsize halls. Although
it would have been wise to start small and build up, we wanted to keep the profile of the band large and still play arenas. We went out with four trucks and three buses to commence the U.S. tour. This wasn’t a fatal move by any means, but we ended up coming home and having to readjust our game plan. We had to, if we wanted to survive the music business changes, especially those that affected heavy metal. We always liked to quote Clint Eastwood in the movie
Heartbreak Ridge
when he said that sometimes one has to “overcome, adapt, and improvise.” That became us.

As we went around the world promoting the new record, I had the idea of writing a book. I’d been writing a few columns for magazines, and I’d been reading a lot of self-help and motivational books, and although that wasn’t my area of expertise I certainly knew a lot about the music business. Although you can go to college and learn how to play your instrument, there’s nowhere you can go to actually learn about the industry—at least, there wasn’t in those days. For the most part we were all just winging it and learning the business on the fly.

So I wrote this book, which was published in 1997, called
Making Music Your Business: A Guide for Young Musicians.
At the same time
Bass Player
magazine, whose publisher later issued my book, asked me to become a regular monthly columnist. This process started around the time of
Youthanasia
and gave me an interesting creative outlet as I traveled around the world during that twelve-month tour cycle.

By the end of 1995, our manager Ron Laffitte was getting disheartened. We’d been through the
Countdown to Extinction
years of popularity, with all those huge highs and lows, and with all of the music industry changes I often couldn’t help but feel as if our ship had sailed. It felt as if there were so many things in our lives that were out of our control. It was a sad reality that we never discussed, but that we all recognized.

Ron accepted a position in charge of the West Coast division of Elektra Records, and although his plan was to manage Megadeth and work for Elektra, I could tell that Ron—who had pulled us out of the
scrap heap back in 1989 with
Rust in Peace
, only to see us get knocked back over and over again in ensuing years—was getting burned out.

For whatever reason, there’s a two-album cycle for most people around Megadeth, whether they’re producers, managers, agents, or road personnel, and Ron had survived three. Ron had initially brought us to a meeting with Iron Maiden’s manager Rod Smallwood back in 1987 or ’88, but Rod was not that interested in us at that time because we were pretty unstable and all of his bands were successful. However, in 1995 Dave and I took another meeting with Rod over dinner in Paris, with the idea that he would begin to manage us. His view was that we should make another album and come back to play in Europe, and then tour and tour and tour. Dave and I felt that while this would be great for our overseas audiences, we had sold millions of records in the U.S., and we’d be risking our appeal back home, which was still our primary market.

We did one final U.S. tour in 1995. Our support act on the tour was Corrosion of Conformity. Dave struck up a correspondence with their manager Mike Renault, a former soundman for Journey back in their glory days. One thing I’ve always found about managers who have come from the road is that they’re all about the nuts and bolts, and they really service the mechanics of a rock band on the road very well. They understand the fundamentals and, most important, they understand how to balance a budget.

A lot of guys in the music business have a top-down approach up in the stratosphere, and they like to drive fancy cars and live in nice houses, but they don’t like to get their hands dirty. The guys who come up from the bottom are the opposite of that, so we hired Mike and his senior partner Bud Prager. I was a little unsure about this. Mike was very pragmatic but Bud was an older, white-haired gentleman and he didn’t seem to have much interest in us, probably just because of his age. Anyway, we hired them as managers by early 1996.

We felt a new, but more realistic, optimism on the next cycle as we went into Vintage Recorders studio in central Phoenix to begin the
songwriting for our next record,
Cryptic Writings
. My son, Roman, had been born on February 2, 1996, and the sleep deprivation for Julie and me was a nightmare. I’d never experienced anything like it. Thankfully, the songwriting sessions became a sort of mandatory schedule to settle our home life a bit, as we determined 10
A.M.
as the start time for the sessions. This meant we had to get some sleep in order for me to not feel deliriously like killing everyone each day from the lack of rest.

During the writing at Vintage studios, I would hit noon sobriety meetings a few blocks away, where my sponsor Craig S. oversaw a halfway house for newly sober clients. This gave me a priority for sobriety and some time away from our guitars. Incidentally, that halfway house inspired Dave to write the song “Use the Man” on the upcoming album, based on an incident at the time where a client relapsed and was found dead with a needle in his arm. The morbid, sad reality of addiction remained with us, despite the sobriety around us.

We ended up with eighteen new original songs, and headed to Nashville in September 1996 to begin the recording of
Cryptic Writings
with producer Dann Huff, whose work with the rock band Giant had impressed us. Our new management team of Mike Renault and Bud Prager helped us team up with Dann, as Bud had managed Giant in years past. Dann had been a major player in the Los Angeles session scene back in the 1980s and early ’90s and had relocated to Nashville at the forefront of the new-country movement, which included superstars like Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and Alan Jackson. That movement welcomed the L.A. session players with open arms, as guys like Dann were real guitar shredders. They brought with them a modern rock and pop edge that ultimately changed Nashville and the sound of country music.

Dann had just launched his producing career with a country group called Lonestar.
Cryptic Writings
was his second production job, and it was a good pairing because we were all great musicians. Personally, I was a little nervous about the session due to the heavyweight roster and caliber of bassists in Nashville, so I took some bass lessons in
Phoenix in mid-1996 with my friend Ray Riendeau, who later became the bassist in Halford.

When we arrived in Nashville, we set up several days of preproduction at a large rehearsal complex called Soundcheck on the east side of town. All the major artists rehearsed there, although it turned out we were the first major metal band to ever record in the town. With Dann, a true renegade in his own right, we brought a lot of attention to the session, and to this day Megadeth enjoys a certain level of musical respect in Nashville.

Soundcheck was also home to many artist-relations offices for the major musical equipment manufacturers. This led me to an introduction to Peavey Electronics. Unhappy with my Ampeg SVT rig for the band’s sound at that time, I wheeled in two Peavey 810 TVX cabinets and their KiloBass 1,000-watt digital bass head, which blew all of my gear out of the water. Even with the volume set low, Dave and Marty would continually ask me to turn down the volume. I was in heaven. After all those years I had finally discovered an amp that was actually louder than the roar of the Marshall guitar stacks I was always competing with. To this day, the bass tone on
Cryptic Writings
is my benchmark favorite of everything I’ve ever recorded.

I stayed in Nashville for three weeks, rehearsing and recording my bass parts for the album. It wasn’t all fun: the pillows at the hotel where we stayed gave me a terrible kink in my neck and I was missing my six-month-old son, Roman, more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. It was killing me to be away from him. I realized that the love you feel for your children can never be equaled by love for anything, or anyone.

When I got back to Phoenix in October, Julie and Roman met me at the airport. As I was putting my bags into the back of our Jeep, Roman suddenly looked up at me, as if to say, “It’s that guy again!” I picked him up out of his stroller and he clung to me like a little koala bear. That began a father-and-son relationship like no other. He cried incessantly when I left for tours, crawling and walking around the house looking for me. I don’t know which of us missed the other more.

A few months later Dave came to my house to play me the mixed and mastered version of the album. I was blown away. For the first time ever, our records had a seasoned professional sound that made them come off like star records, not just recordings of our songs. There was magic in the mix, and we sounded much better than I remembered when the songs were being recorded. That gave us something to shoot for in the quality of the live shows that followed.