My Life With Deth (22 page)

While I’ve never taken my political beliefs into the public arena, one of my primary motivations for reading the Bible as an adult was perpetuated because I continually saw a “moral majority” conveniently aligning themselves with political parties of the same belief, somehow insinuating that if you belonged to a certain political party you needed to be Christian, and vice versa. Well, I’m not cut from that cloth, so I had to get some answers.

I set out to do some discovery of my own, and that was really my initial motivation to read the Bible, to gain my own understanding of what was in it and to see if there were real political overtones in it or not. Ironically, much of what I discovered in the New Testament about Jesus is that he spent vast amounts of his ministry trying to liberate the people of his day from the restricted and legalistic views of the time. Too much law and not enough grace. I was actually relieved to learn this, because it answered my basic question about religion, politics, and Christianity. The bottom line is, I had to read the Bible to understand it. Rather than judge it for what I
thought
it said, I finally read it to know what it really
did
say.

With that understanding, I try my best to leave both politics and religion out of my public life, because as soon as you align with one side, you instantly alienate yourself from the other.

“Life is a lot like jazz—it’s best when you improvise.”

—George Gershwin

A
fter F5 formed in 2003, I got a call from Don Salter, who owns the Saltmine Studios in the Phoenix area. He gave up the lifestyle of a commercial real estate mogul to go and live the dream of being in the music business. He did well enough in real estate to open his own studio. Don wanted me to transition into producing, because touring with a band is a young man’s game. He told me that he knew a guitarist named Yan Leviathan, who had a band called Avian, and that he wanted me to come down and produce it. I went for it.

At Don’s studio I produced Yan’s record and played bass on it, thinking that maybe another swing at producing for hire might not be a bad thing. Getting paid to do something is very different from everyone expecting you to work for them on a spec deal, in the hopes that one day the money will come in from a record deal. I had been doing that my whole life with rock bands, and I wasn’t going to start all over as a producer, especially this late in the game. This opportunity was different,
because Yan had the concept and funds for the album, to be named
From the Depths of Time
. I brought F5’s then-drummer Dave Small in to play on it. This taught me the value of having a deep reserve of resources in the music business.

In the business of entertainment, the depth of your phone book often determines your success, and all those years of being the diplomat was now paying off. As it turns out, I was a pretty resourceful person in my eight years away from Megadeth. I had a lot of contacts, but they meant nothing unless I was actually going to utilize them. There’s a lot to be said for that, and there’s a lesson there for everyone. Getting out of our comfort zones is a requirement if things are going to be different moving forward. Do the same thing, get the same thing; do something different, get something different.

Producing was not the right career choice for me at the time, though. After some time locked in the studio, I tend to get cabin fever and go stir crazy. I don’t like sitting in a dark room all day when the sun is out: I’d rather be out among the living.

God bless Don Salter for getting me those producing jobs, but ultimately I didn’t want to be the guy producing—I wanted to be the guy playing. Some people, like Ross Robinson and James Murphy, successfully went from being musicians to producers, but that was not for me.

After a while I came up with a baseline for considering offers of musicians or bands to work with. It was that, in order to say yes, I had to like the people, and I had to like the music. I didn’t want to be in a situation where I didn’t like one, the other, or both.

One of the big lessons I learned about networking is that it’s nice to reach out to people when the chips are down, which I did with guys like Billy Smiley, who were very quick to reciprocate with all of their resources. However, the other part of it is that you can create really beneficial partnerships with people. That really became my modus operandi in 2002, and it remains that way to this day.

Now, let’s talk about adult education. I had dipped my toe in the waters of academia with the University of Phoenix’s online degree program back in 1998 while on the Cryptic Writings tour. I had never done any college courses whatsoever, and with the recent developments in online education I felt that it was something that I could at least try out while on tour.

My first go at it was during a tour of Japan in 1998. I took my laptop and printer with me and did my homework in my downtime away from the stage. These were the days before e-mail was used by the general population, so I would print out my homework in my hotel room and go down to the hotel reception to fax it to my professor back in the U.S. I really enjoyed it, and it piqued my interest in world history and business. I spent so much of my life flying around the globe making great money and living the life of a successful rock star and business owner, but without having the academic fundamentals under my belt. These initial courses built some of that self-esteem for me. However, due to excessive travel and family duties, I decided to put the endeavor on hold after two courses and suspended my studies.

Then, in 2005, I enrolled in an online bachelor’s degree program in business administration and marketing through American InterContinental University (AIU) in Illinois, a course that was moderately intense because it was designed to be completed in two years. With legal matters behind me, and my head clear, I felt that this was the best time to step up and finally get that degree completed once and for all. Plus, from working with Peavey, I realized that most people in the corporate workforce hold some sort of college degree, which allows them to move up in the ranks.

I realized how lucky I was to have landed a job at a corporation like Peavey without a formal degree. I also knew that I would need a degree to continue earning the respect of other successful people in the corporate world. This qualification would put me on a level playing field
with them and help ensure my employability moving forward. Playing in a rock band didn’t require a degree, but life outside a band probably would.

More musical projects continued to occupy my time outside my Peavey gig. A call came to me from Jon Dette, who had played drums with Slayer in the mid-1990s. He knew a guitar player named Peter Scheithauer, whose real name was actually Pierre Mougenot, and they were forming a band called Killing Machine. I’d never heard of the band, but they were working on some music Jon told me was really good. James Rivera of Helstar was the singer.

I liked the music and told them to count me in, but first they wanted to launch another band called Temple of Brutality, with a singer named Todd Barnes. I recorded an album with them in about a week, and man, I had fun with them. The music had a kind of thrash metal groove and it was a great experience. It was like the old days of thrash metal up in Berkeley and San Francisco, real fun and rowdy music. I called my friends at Jägermeister and they gave us a slot on the Arch Enemy/Chimaira tour that year. The band bought a motor home so we could go out and do the dates. I really felt like my life was in danger sometimes because the lifestyle hadn’t changed. It was like the Killing Is My Business . . . tour: everyone was partying, except me.

I don’t care if people party, of course, as long as it doesn’t screw up the productivity. The problem was really that I was in my forties and a seasoned musician, as opposed to a young guy who would be happy to tour at a basic level. I enjoyed the creativity, and the experience confirmed what I already knew, which was that being in Megadeth had been a very special experience indeed.

Killing Machine came right after Temple of Brutality, and I called Jimmy DeGrasso in to play drums, because I loved playing with Jimmy any time I could. We cut the tracks for the album
Metalmorphosis
in Los Angeles. It was a fun project to do. For me it was about the camaraderie as well as making a really cool power metal record. Juan Garcia from Abattoir and Agent Steel was in there, too, as were James, Jimmy,
Peter, and I. It was a great chance to get a band of friends together, and this really contributed to my development as a person, because I became a kind of leader from behind.

I wasn’t the guy up front like the singer, or even the songwriter, but I put things together and rallied people, plus I had a big hand in putting the album together. I was becoming a guy who would help projects develop from behind the scenes, a role that suited me.

Just before Christmas 2005 Dave called me up and we met for dinner in Phoenix. We’d seen each other once before, right in the middle of our lawsuit, but not since then. I took the opportunity to apologize to him for taking the legal route. I told him that I’d been reading the Bible and that 1 Corinthians 6 talks about not bringing lawsuit against your fellow Christian believers, and that, rather than wage that kind of war in the courts of law, it is better to suffer your losses and move on. It was good. We talked and he sent me a text on the way home offering forgiveness.

A week later he phoned again and asked if I wanted to do some touch-ups on the bass parts for a live recording he was mixing, presumably on Megadeth’s
That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires
DVD. I was on my way down to Nashville to play with Billy Smiley anyway, and I was also doing a lot of work for Peavey down there. I had opened up their Nashville artist-relations office, so this period was very productive for me on many fronts.

I was excited about working with Dave again, but I suffered a serious attack of bronchitis and asthma shortly afterward, which I still experienced from time to time. I had to go to the hospital because I couldn’t breathe, and the doctor gave me some numbing medication, after making me sign a waiver in case I fell back into drug use. I couldn’t do the Megadeth session after all. Thankfully, this wasn’t the last time that opportunity came around.

About this time I got involved in another interesting gig, with Montrose. Jimmy DeGrasso and I played with them in 2006 and 2007. Ricky Phillips, formerly of the Babys, had been playing bass with Montrose,
but he got the call to go and join Styx, and Montrose’s subsequent bassist was going off to play full-time with Pat Benatar, so they didn’t have a bass player. They had one headlining show and two gigs coming up with Def Leppard; one down in Jacksonville, Florida, and another out in Alabama. So Jimmy said, “You should do it,” and I said, “Okay, I’m in.”

I talked to Ronnie Montrose and he wanted to know if I could groove, despite being a heavy metal guy. I said, “Don’t worry, I can groove. I know I play with a pick, but I’ve got the whole thing down.” So I woodshedded hard, influenced for this type of run-and-gun gigging by DeGrasso: I remembered he had joined Megadeth and nailed eighteen songs in front of five thousand people with no rehearsal. I knew that was how I needed to be now on this Montrose gig, because we were going to show up in Florida, do a sound check, and be onstage a few hours later. I needed to be the guy who turns up and knows his parts. I’ve been like that ever since, whether it’s a church gig or on the last Megadeth album: I show up completely prepared. It was really good for my musicianship.

Just like Jimmy’s coming into Megadeth, my audition with Ronnie Montrose was at a sound check, of the first show in Tampa, Florida. We continued to play together for about a year and a half, and they were fun gigs. I’d go to bed after each gig on such a high. His approach was “Play this song just like the recording until the solo, and then I’ll see you later. At some point I’ll come back around and we’ll hook back up again for the main riff or chorus and finish out the song.” It was such a cool approach, one that I hadn’t taken before, but that I really enjoyed. Jimmy said to me at one point, “I’ve never heard you play bass like this: you’re throwing in runs and licks everywhere!” It was a totally liberating approach for me.

An unusual request came in 2007 by e-mail from rapper Ron Braunstein, whose stage name is Necro. I didn’t know anything about rap music or rap-rock, although I was familiar with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More. What got me excited about playing with
Necro was that Scott Ian of Anthrax was playing on his album
Death Rap
, so I did it, thinking that, if nothing else, it was a great way for me and Scott to work together.

I’d never played on anything like that before, and I decided not to close my mind to it but to see if I could learn from it. I did it remotely, recording my bass tracks in Pro Tools and e-mailing them over. That same year, I recorded a couple of instructional metal bass DVDs for a company called Rock House Method, who did a lot of work with Peavey. I did one DVD for beginners and the second for advanced level, rather than just one that was all about shredding. Life was suddenly full of exciting, but very different, projects of this kind.

In 2007, I was invited to play the tenth anniversary of the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas. It was a big one, with Slash, Vince Neil, Roger Daltrey, and Nicko McBrain, who I persuaded to come out and play at the event. I was pretty good at putting things together with people, and I felt Nicko would be a good addition from the metal world. Plus, he and I had gotten along very well in years past. I was hired as a counselor for the camp. My job was to put together a curriculum for each day, which involved my group of five musician camp attendees learning a song and playing it to a live audience that night, the big finale being a concert on the last night at the Mandalay Bay House of Blues. I loved it. I had real momentum at this point, because everything I did fed into the next project I got involved with. It was a lot of fun. Mark Slaughter, whom I’d known for years and always got on real well with, became a close friend and mentor to me that week.