My Life With Deth (5 page)

In late 1979 or early 1980, the whole new-wave thing was coming around big-time, and the Cars were huge and the whole Gary Numan skinny-tie parade was on. This local band Survivor went to California and came back a year later with a new name—they’d really polished their act up, with skinny jeans and Capezio ballet shoes and really cool, fashionable short haircuts like Sting. It was totally impressive, and we were like, “Wow, these guys have been to rock school!” They’d sped all their tempos up, and their music was almost like a new-wave punk thing. That really made an impression on me.

That’s why I thought I had to get out to California. Things were happening there. I’ll never forget rehearsing on the farm in one of the barn buildings with my band, when I had the overwhelming feeling come over me that I had to get to L.A. as soon as possible. I immediately went up to the house and told my parents that I was going to dye my hair blond, put an earring in, change my name to David Schaller, and move to Hollywood that year. I still don’t know why I chose the name Schaller, other than there were tuning pegs of that name. It sounded very rock ’n’ roll. Plus, I didn’t think Ellefson was a very showbiz name, so I needed something easier to pronounce.

My favorite new image was that of Rick Savage of Def Leppard, with the blond hair and the bass by the knees, the quintessential rock bassist. I was also watching Van Halen, who were just starting to pop at the time, and thought their look was so cool. Dean guitars had just come out, and they were supercool, too, along with B.C. Rich basses. I loved pointy guitars, and I wanted to move away from Fenders and Gibsons. I read magazine interviews with Eddie Van Halen, and I immersed myself into this new up-and-coming rock culture of the early 1980s.

Another reason I moved to California was that I didn’t want to stay on the farm—it repelled me. I hated farm work because I hated being told what to do by my dad, who was very authoritarian. I also hated the physical labor. One chore that I especially hated was picking rocks out of the soil in the spring and summer. It is a common farm practice to
drive across the fields and remove any large rocks that may damage the farm equipment during the next season of crop work. My buddies would come and help pick up those rocks, and my dad would yell at them—because for all intents and purposes, they were city kids and slackers who didn’t have very strong work ethics.

One of the other brutal jobs was called “walking beans.” On the farm you had rows of soybeans planted up and down the fields. In order to eliminate the weeds, we would employ up to thirty people to line up and walk down the rows to pull the weeds. It was hot, dirty, hateful work. I’d say “This is horrible. I certainly can’t do this for the rest of my life!” and I couldn’t wait to get back inside and plug in my bass and just lose myself in music and the continued thought of rock stardom. Music was my obsession; farm work was not.

That said, being raised on a farm kept me obedient, and there were times when I took pride in my farm work. A job well done does give you self-esteem. By my midteens I could drive a tractor. I learned to drive a car real young—long before I had a license—and I was responsible for it. I learned many wholesome skills that became helpful later in my life, and as I matured, I was actually proud that I learned them on a farm. But at the time, farm work ethics felt brutal.

I still managed to get into trouble. I skipped school one day and went over to Sioux Falls with my girlfriend, and we made up some story to tell our parents about staying at friends’ houses so we wouldn’t get caught. Sure enough, by the time we got home the next morning, our parents had put the story together. I was given the sex talk.

My dad said to me, “Sex is like shaving: once you start, you never stop. If you get some girl pregnant, the rest of your life is just gone, with all your dreams and aspirations.” Again, he saw that I was really into music, having done it for a few years now and devoted every spare moment to it. He didn’t want to see me blow it over getting a girl pregnant. Even more important, sex before marriage was against my church upbringing. To my father’s credit, he started giving me safer farm work that meant there was no chance of losing a finger or getting hurt in machinery.
He assigned me to jobs such as cleaning the pool and mowing the lawn, chores that needed to be done but that were quite safe from a career-threatening injury.

All these years later, when I look back at my childhood, it’s not obvious why I later became addicted to drugs and alcohol. There was nothing in my background that made me predisposed to drink and take drugs. I wasn’t abused and I was a reasonably happy kid with a secure background. But addiction is like Russian roulette. Some people can drink, take drugs, smoke pot, and even go further than that occasionally without much effect. Then they can stop doing those things without damage to their lives. However, for me there was a bullet in the chamber when I drank for the first time. This made it hard for me later on when I tried to face my addictions, because I thought, “I’m a pretty normal, well-adjusted guy: I’m not a screwup, except for when it comes to putting down drugs and alcohol. For some reason I just love to be high—not to escape anything—but just because I like to have a nice little buzz going on.

Even in my recovery, all these years later, I’ve met people whose backgrounds involved abuse, incest, jail terms, divorce, and so on, but I never experienced any of that, and it’s made me wonder why I was an addict. I realized later that those things don’t really have anything to do with addiction, although for some people they do form part of the road that leads to it. Ultimately the D-day is what happens the first time you put the substance into you, and that’s what you have to deal with from that point onward.

Back to 1979. Right around this time, my buddies in Toz and I met a guitarist named Jerry Giefer, who came from Windom, Minnesota. He was a tall, lanky guy with long, black hair, and he could really shred on guitar. He was hands-down the most ripping guitarist any of us had heard locally, and he was our age! He could play beyond anything. More than that, he was really in touch with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Iron Maiden, Venom, Tank, and Motörhead. When we first met him, he walked in with Iron Maiden’s first album
and Motörhead’s
No Sleep ’til Hammersmith
, and all of a sudden we lit up. Around this time our drummer, Justin, had just discovered the Scorpions’
Lovedrive
album, and we were like, “This is the next new thing!” This music didn’t come from California; it was from Europe. Because it came from overseas, to us it had a certain magic about it. California was a long way away, but it was still attainable, whereas Europe felt like it wasn’t.

I heard Iron Maiden and realized that Steve Harris was the bass player, the songwriter, and also the leader of the band, which really changed my assessment of a bass player’s role in a band. I’d been listening to Geddy Lee of Rush a lot, and I was playing in the jazz band at school, too. I was taking bass lessons from our high school band instructor, Bob, who was an accomplished jazz head and a pretty good drummer. You could tell he had gigged out before he became a band teacher. He had long hair, and he would show up for jazz band rehearsal at 7
A.M.
before school.

Thus began formal jazz studies for me and a friend, Ethan, with whom I carpooled from the farm on those mornings. Ethan was a great musician, and it was his mother who gave me my early Wurlitzer organ lessons during the fourth grade, which was my first official introduction to playing music. Jazz band actually made me feel better about jazz music in some way, as if it was rock ’n’ roll of a different sort. Bob got me into Spyro Gyra and Weather Report, with their amazing bass player, Jaco Pastorius. I’d seen Stanley Clarke play on
The Midnight Special
at Greg’s house years earlier, so I was already hip to some jazz bass playing.

Right about this time, the
Rocky
movie came out, and Maynard Ferguson, the trumpet player, wrote the theme song for it. One fall evening, Maynard played in the neighboring town of Windom, Minnesota, so Ethan and I went to see him. Even though I was into Rush and progressive music, I had never heard music played like this before. It seemed impossible to me to be this inhumanly good. Everybody in his band was unbelievably great. Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine
was in his band, along with the Minneapolis bassist Gordon Johnson, who floored me with his fluid touch. As much as I respected Rush in the rock ’n’ roll realm, they suddenly seemed like kindergarten musicians compared to Maynard’s band.

In between playing in the school jazz band and listening to the other musicians I liked, I was exposed to a wide variety of music. I’d come home from school, put the needle on a record, and shred away on bass while listening to it. Toz was playing a lot of gigs. In order for our band to get hired, we had to do three or four sets a night, and we’d get maybe five hundred dollars. My dad bought us a trailer, and he also let us use the family van so we could have a vehicle to get to our shows. He even converted one of his sheds on the farm and put a furnace and insulation in it, so we could rehearse all year round.

Looking back on it, my father really stepped up to help us with all these band endeavors. He basically gave me a vehicle and a building, and he helped me buy a $5,000 PA system for the band. Those things helped me learn about mixing, EQ, crossovers, power amps, and how all those things in the signal path worked. In fact, I started experimenting with bi-amp and tri-amp bass rigs and even tore my PA apart to take components of it with me to L.A. a few years later. Some of that gear was actually used on Megadeth’s first two studio albums.

Jerry joined our band, along with a new drummer named Brett Fredrickson, and started exposing us to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Because we had become so enamored with Iron Maiden’s music, we changed the band name from Toz to Killers, as a tribute to Maiden’s second LP. It’s funny that in years to come, younger bands followed suit by naming themselves after Megadeth songs: the principle was exactly the same.

From playing with my bands, I’d learned that some songs move people on the dance floor and a lot don’t. A lot of Killers’ songs didn’t. At the time a band out of Minneapolis called Chameleon, who had three or four records out, came into the area to perform. They were always on tour in the area, complete with their own original
material, albums for sale, road crew, and semitruck. They were the real deal and their keyboard player was actually Yanni—yes, the Yanni who later became the famous New Age solo artist.

Killers actually opened up for Chameleon for a couple of shows, which was a major achievement, but showed me how far I still was from making it to the big time. This made me realize even more acutely that there was no way to make it big in Minnesota: I had to get to California.

I spent the next two years of my high school education filling out college entrance forms, but I didn’t care about them because I knew I was going to California as soon as I graduated high school. I remember filling out a form once with my careers counselor, and it came back saying that due to my interests, I would be a really good forklift driver! I didn’t care. I knew that what I wanted to do couldn’t be measured by academic standards.

Around this time I had an interesting drug experience in high school. Somebody showed up at school with a bunch of Black Beauties, which are speed. I took a handful of them and got all fired up and excited. It happened to be the day when we were filling out our requests for classes for the next year, and I picked all these really difficult classes, going, “Trigonometry! Geometry! This will be great!”

At the beginning of the next school year, I got my schedule and I was like, “What in the world was I thinking when I filled this out? I can’t take all these classes; I hate all this stuff!” I realized that it was because I’d been all jacked up on speed. So I immediately started dropping the classes so I could do study hall. That way, I could have an easy schedule and go back to the band room and practice bass in the soundproof practice cubicles every chance I could. I wasn’t trying to be a dropout or a loser, but I wouldn’t allow academics to get in the way of rock stardom. I made my life easy and got rid of the academics.

Killers split up by the fall of my senior year. I was now a guy without a band. This was when I started to realize that bands have personality problems and musical-direction shifts, and that splitting with your
band is just like breaking up with a girlfriend: remaining friends afterward is near impossible. So I got interested in another band called Renegade, out of a little town called Estherville, Iowa, just over the border from Jackson. This band was a covers act with a few original songs. Like Killers, they were young guys from the same hometown but with a more mainstream set list, not so much a metal band. As a result, they did a lot of gigs and got paid well.

Renegade needed a bass player because their singer wanted to concentrate on vocals rather than playing bass, too. They had a really good guitarist who had just moved up from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, named Bill. He was a cool guy and I liked his style, so I auditioned. It was weird to audition, because I’d had my own band for so many years, but I played really well and got the gig—and next thing you know we’re gigging, opening for Johnny Van Zant and other national bands, including Chameleon.

Renegade definitely took me to another level. The singer’s dad, who was a high school teacher, was the manager. He was a bit like my dad; he looked after his son’s band and made sure we didn’t get ripped off. We were making money, and bought a school bus and converted it to a tour bus. Bill and I did a lot of drinking together; for a while he even lived at my house. We were always out late at night, drinking and hanging with girls.

In the fall of my senior year, we did a show, and someone at the show had some cocaine—from the Iowa cocaine cartel, mind you, which was not exactly Peruvian flake. So I snorted some up, but since I was sick with the flu, I didn’t feel any effect. It felt rad, though, to be on a tour bus doing coke while playing in a band. In fact, I remember that the back of the April Wine album
Harder, Faster
had a band photo, and in it I swear the guitar player is holding a bag of coke in his hand just above the fingerboard. So here I was, living the dream, too.