My Life With Deth (2 page)

The boom in farming didn’t last, though. After Ronald Reagan came into office, the Russian grain embargo was enacted, which was all part of the continuing Cold War. All of a sudden piles of surplus grain were scattered all over the Midwest, and grain prices came tumbling down.

Between 1978 and 1980, land prices were at an all-time high, and my dad went out—as a bunch of other farmers did—and took out adjustable-rate, high-interest loans, which created the landslide in the farming industry. Suddenly, high mortgages on land, coupled with falling grain prices, created a perfect storm and a lot of families lost their farms. I later chronicled this time period in Megadeth’s hit song “Foreclosure of a Dream.”

I loved the farm, but I didn’t love farming quite so much, so my brother, Eliot, was always the one who was going to take it over from my father when the time came. He showed an aptitude for farming from a very young age. When I started getting into music at eleven or twelve, Eliot was focusing on being disciplined and working around the farm.

Because of that, my dad was comfortable letting me pursue my passion for music. My father’s passion was architecture: as a young man he studied it formally for a year at the University of Minnesota before returning to take over the family farm, and he always had blueprints, plans, and drawings lying around. He built the swimming pool and remodeled the house himself, drafting it all beforehand. It was pretty impressive, looking back on it now.

My family belonged to Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Jackson. My dad became very involved in that the church, and my mother sang in the choir. Eliot and I spent our youth there, eventually receiving our Lutheran instruction and confirmation at that church. In fact, he and my mother are still members there to this day, and I visit it every time I go back between world tours.

The pastor of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, Pastor Tange, had a son named Dwight who was a longhair—not a disrespectful partier guy, just a typical ’70s kid. He drove the school bus. Dwight would always listen to rock ’n’ roll radio on the bus, especially WLS, which was an AM station out of Chicago, and that’s when I started hearing things like Styx and their songs “Lady” and “Lorelei.” I also heard the Sweet and songs like “Ballroom Blitz” and “Love Is Like Oxygen.” As soon as
I heard rock ’n’ roll on the bus, man, my life started to change quickly. I loved distorted guitars: I didn’t know what they were, but I knew I liked them.

My dad had hired a farmhand named Gary Regnier, who had an eight-track cartridge of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s
Not Fragile
album, which came out in 1974, when I was nine years old. I’d ride with him in the tractor, which was one of the first tractors to have an eight-track player and be soundproofed and air-conditioned: it was a really nice piece of machinery. I’d listen to the music and I loved it. My buddy Greg Handevidt, who eventually moved to Los Angeles with me after we graduated in 1983, had the twelve-inch gatefold LP of that BTO album. You opened it up and it had the full band photo. I remember seeing Randy Bachman with a Fender Stratocaster, Blair Thornton with a Gibson SG, and Fred Turner with a black-and-white Rickenbacker 4001 bass.

I’d never known there was such a thing as a bass guitar. The neck was long, and it had big fat strings, and it sounded different . . . and cool. Then I heard KISS. Their song “Shout It Out Loud” was so special to me: it turned my ear entirely. Gene Simmons was playing a Gibson Grabber bass guitar on the cover of KISS’s
Alive
LP, and something about that instrument drew me.

Meanwhile, as I was getting into rock ’n’ roll, things were starting to change a little at home on the farm. My family started to attend evening parties at some of the nearby neighbor homes. I had never known my parents to drink, and all of a sudden I’m nine or ten years old, and we’re hanging with these families that drank a lot.

I remember one night coming home from a neighbor’s house, and it was almost like my mom and dad were joyriding. We pulled over, and one of them opened the door and threw up on the side of the road! It was very disturbing. I was like, “This is chaos—what’s going on here?” Even at a young age, I found it scary and I didn’t like it. It was my first introduction to the unsettling ways of drinking and the erratic behavior that came with it.

We also started to go to concerts at the Armory in downtown Jackson, which held about a thousand people in a big dance setting. Country music bands played there, and I would always watch the bass players. I was instantly drawn to the instrument. Back at the house, we’d watch a TV show called
Hee Haw
, which was very popular. I hated the music, but I was drawn to the instruments and the flash and the showbiz; it just drew me in. I couldn’t get enough of it.

My mom was cool with me getting into rock music. She sang in the church choir, but she had grown up with rock ’n’ roll—she had seen Elvis play at the Veterans’ Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. She told me that the place wasn’t even full because this was right before Elvis got popular. He tossed a scarf out into the crowd, and my mom actually caught it. She recently told me that when she passes away, she wants Marty Friedman, who later played guitar in Megadeth, to have that scarf because he’s the biggest Elvis fan ever.
She loves Marty and thinks the world of him. She was always cool with rock ’n’ roll. She got it.

We had a cassette player in my mother’s Wurlitzer organ at home, which was pretty new technology at the time. One of the tapes we used to listen to all the time was
Jesus Christ Superstar
, which I loved because it was rock. It felt dangerous, even the title. It was kind of like church, but it didn’t sound like it was approved by the church.

I learned how to play music on that Wurlitzer organ, which was excruciatingly boring. Then in the fifth grade I took up the tenor saxophone, mostly because it looked like the coolest instrument in the ensemble. I later learned that women like a sax man, so I should have gotten better at it, but it just wasn’t my bag. I mostly did it because I wasn’t into being a jock, and I needed to take some sort of elective.

All these things led up to me asking my mom for a Gibson bass in the summer of 1976, when I was eleven years old. I wanted a Gibson because I’d seen the brand name on the back of a KISS album: I figured that if KISS used it, it must be the only one to have. Gibson had to be a go-to brand. We found a used Gibson EB-0 bass that came up for sale in the neighboring town of Fairmont, and we bought it for $150. Then we went to Worthington Music in a town about thirty miles away, and bought a little twelve-watt Fender Bassman amp with a twelve-inch speaker.

It sounded awful, believe me. That combination of a Gibson EB-0, with its single pickup at the neck, plus flatwound strings and that little amplifier was terrible, especially at the volumes I wanted to play it. I got home and plugged in and I thought, “What the heck is this? This doesn’t sound like Gene Simmons at all!” I took note of this in my later career: when a kid buys one of my signature Jackson basses, I want it to sound like
Countdown to Extinction
or
Rust in Peace
. Even if the guy can’t play it, just striking the strings should make the bass sound something like “Holy Wars . . . The Punishment Due.”

Even though it sounded terrible, I’d come home after school every
day and for many hours I’d sit in the basement and learn to play that Gibson bass.

My brother wasn’t like me: he played trombone for a couple of years in the school band, but my mom and dad had to stay on him the whole time to practice. He didn’t enjoy it; his musical tastes were different. He was into pop acts like Elton John and the Bay City Rollers. I didn’t appreciate Elton John until years later, because I regarded the piano as a lightweight, sissy instrument, and I didn’t care for it. I was into really heavy hard rock. Eliot also integrated more into the community than I did, and he started to get into country music, but music was strictly background for him.

I really diverged from the family in that sense. My parents remained supportive, but both of them were very cautious because they knew about the allure and the dangers of rock ’n’ roll. I remember the father of a friend of mine telling me that I should go down to the Armory and play country music gigs, because I could make fifty bucks a week doing it. I thought, “Forget the fifty bucks. I’d rather play rock ’n’ roll for free!”

I didn’t want to be a working guy: I wanted to be a rock star. The ’70s were such a cool time for rock ’n’ roll: bell-bottoms, platform shoes, long hair, sex appeal, cool guitars, glitter, studs. It was all so attractive to a young, impressionable person like me.

So here I am in the summer of 1976, age eleven and heading toward twelve. KISS’s
Destroyer
had just come out, and my number-one ambition was to be a rock ’n’ roller. I had the Mel Bay
Electric Bass Method Volume 1
and
Volume 2
tuition books that I’d bought from the music store, and I basically taught myself to play bass from those books in my basement. I was so desperate to learn the instrument that at one point, I even called on one of the church music leaders, a guitar player, to come over and show me things as best he could. I would go to any lengths in small-town Minnesota to find musical camaraderie, so I could play the bass.

But I didn’t want to just sit in the basement and be a great player
for myself; I wanted to play in a band. I wanted to be onstage and emulate the musicians I’d seen. What’s interesting is that I wasn’t an extrovert or a kid who needed attention; I was actually rather shy and didn’t always like being the center of attention. But the bass guitar lit me up: it was the thing that gave my life purpose and direction.

Eliot had two high school buddies, a guitarist named Mike Cushman and a drummer named Kent Libra, who were both pretty good players. We formed a band within three months of me starting to play the bass, and played covers of songs by Bachman Turner Overdrive, Kansas, KISS, and other bands, just copying what our heroes were doing. We did our first concert out on the porch of Mike’s farmhouse one night, in front of all the parents. That was the first time I performed live in front of an audience in a rock ’n’ roll band.

The band was called Headstone, because that was the darkest thing we could think of at that age. I wore a cool pair of black platform shoes, because I’d been watching what KISS was doing. I had some bell-bottoms, too, white flashy ones, with a wine-colored satin button-up shirt. I was taking fashion cues from my idols, mostly ’70s rock stars. The parents looked at me with a bit of amusement, raising their eyebrows, but I didn’t care. I was gonna be a rock star, and it was all starting now.

I started to grow my hair out about this time. When I was a little kid, I killed one of my front baby teeth with a Tinkertoy and it went yellow and died. So when my permanent teeth came in they were all messed up, crooked as could be. As a result, I had to get braces at around twelve years of age, which was so not cool for a budding rock star, and I had real bad acne till I was seventeen. It was right about that time that I started to have long hair around my ears. I remember wearing that maroon silk shirt around, which I’d have open, with the buttons undone. I was starting to look at the world in the way that I thought a rock star would, even at this very young age.

My father saw me getting really into this rock star stuff, and one day we went over to a music store in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where they had a Dan Armstrong acrylic bass guitar. It cost five hundred dollars
new, and he bought it for me, so now I had a collection: my Gibson EB-0 and my new Dan Armstrong. My father didn’t have a musical bone in his body, but he could tell when something had real value, and even to him this Dan Armstrong bass was something special.

This set a precedent: throughout my whole career, I’ve always had flashy instruments. I’ve never had just a standard Fender Precision bass, for example, even though I temporarily wanted one because many of the 1970s rock bassists seemed to have them. That said, at the store in Sioux Falls, they had a really old, beat-up Ampeg SVT amplifier, and I looked at it as if I was worshipping in front of an altar. Every hero of mine had an SVT, and even though this one didn’t sound that good, it was an iconic piece of gear to me, through which all the arena rock gods played. However, I couldn’t afford it at the time and didn’t buy it, but this was a blessing in disguise because I was able to create my own individual sound. Ironically, not having the standard Fender bass plugged into an Ampeg SVT helped me to develop a unique tone. It was largely because I didn’t have these tools that I was forced to develop a style that would allow me to cut through the mix. One of those was playing the bass with a pick instead of taking the typical two-finger plucking approach.