My Life With Deth (6 page)

Now I was seventeen, nearly eighteen, and there was a part of me that was going, “Okay, I get this. Now I’m an adult.” Over the next couple of months, Bill and I dropped out of Renegade. We didn’t want to
be there anymore, which was an interesting lesson for me. I realized that I am not a guy who can just take a gig only to make money, and I can’t take a gig just to be playing: there has to be a means to an end with it. The music has to be intrinsically intertwined into my DNA. Renegade’s music wasn’t metal: it was more like Loverboy than Iron Maiden, and my heart was definitely not into it. Plus, I knew I needed to get to California, so my days in the Midwest were numbered.

I was completely steeped in Maiden at the time. I went up to Minneapolis to see them play with the Scorpions and Girlschool. It must have been 1982, and I knew that was what I wanted to do. It was definitely my future to play the newer style of metal music. Maiden brought metal home to me. It wasn’t wimpy and glittery; it was cool and accessible. What they did in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was very similar, in that sense, to what Megadeth later did in thrash metal, in that it was music inspired by a real street-level honesty.

I completed my classes and graduated high school in late May 1983. That month I’d started investigating the Bass Institute of Technology in Hollywood, California, which was really coming of age. A lot of cool guys were teaching there, like bassists Tim Bogert and Jeff Berlin, and it was a hip one-year school for guys like me who wanted a foray into the L.A. music scene. It provided education and, hopefully, the skills required to survive the scene in Los Angeles. I thought this was my ticket to L.A., because I could tell my parents I was going to school there—and what parent doesn’t want their kid to go to school? It was a one-year vocational music course in Hollywood, so it was a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree at a university. I applied and got accepted.

So that was it. Greg and I, plus two friends, Brad Schmidt and Brent Giese from the neighboring town of Windom, Minnesota, moved to Hollywood together five days after graduating high school at the end of May in 1983. We got into my van, hooked up a U-Haul trailer, and drove off. My parents waved us good-bye. I remember so clearly driving down the driveway of my house on the farm, turning
left to go south, and looking back—and there they were, waving. No doubt my mother was crying as her little boy headed west to pursue his dream in the big city of Hollywood. I’ll have that vision for the rest of my life.

Driving to Los Angeles took four days, and we partied all the way to California. Game on.

A THOUGHT

Follow Your Instincts

A defining moment on my musical journey happened at the age of sixteen on the farm in Minnesota. My band was rehearsing in one of my dad’s work sheds, and out of nowhere the thought hit me that I had to get out to Los Angeles as soon as possible. It was such a powerful conviction that it suddenly precluded everything else in my life. That became the driving force for the remainder of my high school years, and ultimately led me out the door to L.A. upon graduation.

The events that took place from there can only be described as divine inspiration and guidance. So often, that little voice inside, often in the form of gut instinct, is the one that needs to be obeyed in order for us to know the path we’re meant to follow.

“Discipline, not desire, determines the outcome of our lives.”

—Dr. Charles Stanley

M
an, I hated Los Angeles. I’d seen the city on TV, and it had looked beautiful; but when I got there, I thought it was the pits. There was a ton of traffic and way too many people. To come from a rural farm in Minnesota to Hollywood couldn’t have been a bigger 180-degree shift for me. I was bummed, but I couldn’t go home unless I wanted to suck it up and be a farmer, which I wasn’t prepared to do. I’d never thought of any other career besides music and rock stardom.

The only connection that any of us had in Los Angeles was a woman named Alvira, from a neighboring town in Minnesota. The Bass Institute of Technology’s apartment referral system had passed us on to her. Alvira was from Mountain Lake, a town about a half hour from Jackson, so there was a nice little connection there. In hindsight, I’d like to think that God somehow lined all that up. She had an apartment building that she managed with her husband at 1736 North Sycamore in Hollywood, at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and
Sycamore, right by La Brea and two blocks from Mann’s Chinese Theatre. That was where Greg, Brad, Brent, and I moved to straight from the cornfields of rural Minnesota. Greg and I had one apartment and the other guys had the one next door.

We moved into our apartment around June 1, 1983. We wanted to start meeting some people, and one day Brad said, “I saw this guy walking around. He had long blond hair and he was barefoot, and he looked like a rock ’n’ roll guy!” We decided to try and meet this dude: maybe he could become a buddy.

A couple of days later, Greg and I woke up in our little studio apartment and started jamming some tunes. I was playing the introduction to “Running with the Devil” by Van Halen at about nine or ten o’clock in the morning, when all of a sudden we heard this loud “Shut up!”

Something came crashing down on our window air conditioner. We looked out and saw a ceramic flowerpot. We stopped playing. My first thought was, “People in Hollywood aren’t very friendly, are they?” Where we grew up on the farm, we left our keys in the car and our houses unlocked, and people would drop by whenever they wanted. Everybody knew each other, and it was very “come as you are.” Now I’m in Hollywood—and this is my first introduction to my neighbors.

Within a day or so, Brad confirmed that the blond-haired, barefoot guy he had seen was the dude who lived upstairs from us. So one night, a day or two later, we went upstairs and knocked on the door. We heard some music playing through the door and thought, “That’s got to be him.”

Dave Mustaine cracked the door open, with the chain still on it, looked out and gave us the infamous Mustaine smirk. He had a glass of wine or cognac in his hand and said, “Who is it?”

I said, “Hey, er, we live downstairs. Do you know where we can buy some cigarettes?” He gave us a snarl and said, “Down the street on the corner,” and slammed the door in our faces.

We stood there and Greg said, “That was definitely the guy—but
that didn’t go very well. Let’s try a new approach.” So we knocked again.

He cracked open the door again. “What?” Mustaine asked, clearly annoyed.

We were like, “Hey, do you know where to get any beer?”

He paused for a minute. Then, realizing that although we looked like hoodlums, we were pretty harmless guys who just wanted to hang out, he finally unlatched the chain and said, “All right, come on in.”

Though at first Dave appeared skeptical, he made us feel at home. There was a singer there named Lor, a big, tall, black-haired, sunglasses-wearing, Nikki Sixx look-alike—a guy Dave was working with on some new songs. He was dark and menacing in appearance, but he was actually a friendly guy. Dave’s roommate, Tracy, was there, too. Music was playing, and it wound up being a very casual, sociable evening.

We decided to go down to the corner liquor store, right on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore, where Dave—who was the California legal drinking age of twenty-one, while the rest of us were eighteen—picked up a case of Heineken for all of us. I noticed as we walked back to the apartment that with his flip-flops and blond hair, Dave had this typical California surfer look. He had the case of beer up on his shoulder as he was walking, and he told us stories about some band he’d been in called Metallica, which none of us had ever heard of, but he was a good storyteller, and we were wide-eyed with wonder.

Although his tone was angry and resentful when he mentioned Metallica, you could tell he was proud of his achievements with them and that he had been around the block a time or two in show business. I was intimidated but impressed. Having had my own experiences over the last several years gigging in the Midwest bar and ballroom circuits, I was intrigued to learn how the scene operated on the bigger stages, where I soon learned that Dave was a budding celebrity rock star.

In the apartment Dave had two Marshall half-stacks and a B.C.
Rich Bich guitar, which he’d brought back on the bus from New York after his stint with Metallica a couple of months before. He played a couple of songs for us. They included an untitled song, which would go on to be “Devil’s Island” on the
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?
album, and essentially his first post-Metallica song, “Megadeath.” That song was later retitled “Set the World Afire” but it didn’t get released until the
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
record in 1988. It had been inspired on his bus ride home from New York, when he’d seen a quote on a handbill from California senator Alan Cranston, who said, “The arsenals of megadeath can’t be rid,” meaning that America had built up so much nuclear firepower that we couldn’t get rid of it, no matter what we did. That was the basis of the song.

I remember hearing those songs and going, “Wow!” It was really heavy, unique music, and scary-sounding because it was so dark. Immediately, there was something extremely compelling about Dave and his music. While he carried himself with the air of my teenage idol David Lee Roth from Van Halen, he had modern-day skills that went a step beyond the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that had inspired me just a few years prior. Clearly, he was the real deal.

The next day, Greg was really enthused. He was like, “We gotta play with that guy! We should go back up there and hook up with him.” But I was thinking, “Man, I’m way out of my depth here.” I knew I was a good bass player, but playing with this guy would mean taking a huge leap in my life, which was not simply about playing the notes on a bass. I’d be taking a step up to a whole new level, in terms of my lifestyle as well as musically.

But Greg pushed back. He was a loudmouth with an attitude: rebellious toward his parents, and he’d always been in trouble in school. Simply put, he was the perfect fit for rock ’n’ roll. I, on the other hand, was more mild-mannered because I’d been raised in a very different home. Without Greg, I don’t know that I would have had the fortitude to go up and knock on Dave’s door.

BIT wasn’t scheduled to start for about eight weeks, which allowed
me some time to find my way around L.A., find part-time employment, and give my life some stability. But this move to hook up with Dave was like starting a crash course in showbiz only a week after high school, and it instantly changed the direction of my life, possibly forever. I wanted in, but I knew it would be immediate and that there would be no summer vacation. This would be the beginning of the rest of my life. As scared as I was, I knew I had to do it.

As for Dave, he was sizing us up. He is a quick study in people’s character, and as much as we thought we were ultra-cool hoodlums, I think he quickly knew we were pretty harmless young lads doing our best to dress the part of rural metalheads.

But there was no going back. A couple of days later, we were hanging with Dave and playing some songs together. Dave had another guy there named Matt Kisselstein, a kid from Beverly Hills who was playing bass. Matt had been a bassist for about a year and I liked him, but he eventually conceded that it made sense for me to be the bass player. In fact, when we went through Dallas on the
Risk
album tour in 1999, at a radio station we visited, Matt was in upper management. He got to do what he was good at, and so did I. We had a good laugh about how things turned out.

Right from the beginning, Dave was earnestly formulating ideas for a new band, his first post-Metallica venture. This wasn’t just some random jamming hangout situation. Dave was creating something totally new, and he was determined to call the shots and be in charge. In most of my bands in Minnesota, I had been largely in charge; but this move now required that I be subordinate to Dave, which was not easy, due to my take-charge attitude. But this was not music that you could hear at the time from any other band. I had been mostly playing bass with my fingers, even though I had been a pick player as well. I’d honed my chops on Steve Harris’s playing in early Iron Maiden and Bob Daisley in Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne’s band—both of whom were different stylistically from what Dave’s music required. Despite the learning curve, Dave said, “You’re definitely a good bass player. You’ve
got chops, and you know what you’re doing”—which translated to “I can work with you.”

Another incentive for bringing me into the band was that I had a van, so now Dave had transportation. I don’t fault him for it, and to his credit, he was resourceful, a skill I quickly learned from him in order to survive in big-city show business. Dave’s persona cast a big shadow over me. Because the band was his vision, and we were together as a team in the early days, I was pretty much at the beck and call of the band and my duties to it, which was sometimes tough on my self-esteem. Often I wished for my own life, so I could grow up a bit on my own; but as long as we were forging the cast for the group, that wasn’t going to happen. My life was simply not going to be my own at this point in the game.

I smoked lots of pot and drove around L.A. with Dave directing the way, which is how I learned the streets and freeways of the area, completely stoned out of my mind. I went wherever Dave needed me to go. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: I had something he needed, and he was the equivalent of a big brother and mentor to me—someone who could show me the ropes and someone with a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve with his band and music. We moved forward together.

We jammed through the month of June. After a couple of weeks, Dave had Lor as the singer, me as the bassist, and Greg as the other guitar player: the beginnings of a real group. Dave’s original working title of the band was Fallen Angel, although you could tell he wasn’t sold on it. One day, after we’d been rehearsing over by Forest Lawn Mortuary in Burbank, we were in our downstairs apartment trying to think of a band name. Either Greg or Lor said, “Why don’t we call ourselves Megadeath?” That’s what turned the corner, and because Dave had some experience with numerology he figured out that by dropping the
a
in
Megadeath
, you’d have eight letters, which was the perfect number, because 8 is the symbol of infinity, rotated 90 degrees. Every single thing in our band was very much thought out, very methodical.
No details were left to chance, from the guitars we played to the shoes, stretch jeans, and leather jackets we wore.