My Life With Deth (8 page)

After those first Megadeth shows in the Bay Area in February and April 1984, I could see that the fire to rekindle Slayer was truly alive in Kerry’s eyes. It was as if the Bay Area shows with us opened his eyes to another way of doing it, different from how it was done in L.A. with hairdos, makeup, studded belts, and so on. I truly believe that those early shows with Kerry set a new course for him to reinvigorate Slayer and allowed them to be the global phenomenon they are today.

So Kerry returned to Slayer, and once again it was just me and
Dave. However, by May 1984, we had started to get label and management interest, especially from Brian Slagel at Metal Blade and Walter O’Brien at Combat Records, who would later manage Pantera. In the middle of 1984, we were put in touch with a guy named Jay Jones, who became a kind of quasi-manager to Megadeth. He introduced us to a drummer, Gar Samuelson, because our first drummer, Lee Rausch, had told us he needed to go up into the mountains and find himself—and that was the last we ever heard of him.

In mid-1984 Gar joined the band. He was a very avant-garde drummer: he did a progressive jazz thing and cited Billy Cobham and Keith Moon as his two main influences. Initially I wasn’t particularly keen on his style—which was a light, wispy kind of fusion drumming—because I’d been visualizing the drum style of Clive Burr of Iron Maiden or Phil Taylor from Motörhead. Gar was formerly in another band called the New Yorkers with a guitarist named Chris Poland. Jay Jones wanted Chris to audition for us because he had fancied himself as a quasi-manager of the New Yorkers a few years prior.

Chris was really good, but now we had a situation where Dave and I were the two metal guys and Gar and Chris were the jazz guys. Initially it wasn’t always a good fit. Chris was the first real jazz musician drug addict I had met.

My father always told me, “Whatever you do, don’t take cocaine,” so I said, “Of course not, Dad, I would never do that.” But in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Man, I can’t wait to get out there and do some of that coke,” because it just seemed like the L.A., rock ’n’ roll thing to do.

My relocation to L.A. allowed me to re-create myself in whatever way I wanted. That’s dangerous when you’re only eighteen, and you don’t know exactly who you want to be. I hadn’t been to college, and all of a sudden I was leaping out of the nest for the first time: from the humble, wholesome farm in Minnesota to what is probably one of the most decadent, seedy places on the planet—the armpit of Hollywood.

As we put the various lineups of Megadeth together and as drug use increased, every lineup became darker and more corrupt and sinister. It started with pot and beer when Dave and I first met, and then guys started coming around with cocaine—and then in 1984 I discovered a new drug, one that would have devastating consequences.

A THOUGHT

On the Road

My move to California was not an easy road to hoe. A lesson I quickly learned is that opportunity is often disguised as hard work. My early days in L.A. were downright painful and horrifying at times, but being young, I was resilient and able to bounce back quickly. I also know now that if you’re going to go after a seemingly impossible dream, you’d better try it while you’re young, especially in the music business. My
theory became that eighteen years of age might be too young, but by twenty-one you might be too old.

While age may not be a factor in many lines of work, showbiz likes the young. I believe this is largely because of looks and agility, but also because young people are idealists and willing to put everything on the line, while naïvely allowing themselves to be manipulated. However, if a threat to your dream is on the line, it’s easy to be motivated. You’ll do things you never thought you were capable of doing in order to see your dreams come true.

The upside is that as a youngster, you also have time to recover from setbacks. So often, our youthful energy and ideals give us the strength to overcome the obstacles in our path to success.

“If you hang out in a barbershop long enough, you’re eventually going to get a haircut.”

—Anonymous

I
remember clearly the first time I took heroin.

Dave and I were rehearsing with Gar and Chris, whose jazz background had given them a kind of smoky, barroom mind-set when it came to heroin. Gar warned me not to try it, but I was curious and asked him what it felt like. He said, “Dude, it’s like going back to your mother’s womb: it’s like swimming in a bowl of liver.” I also remember him telling me, half-jokingly, “Hey dude, if you really wanna be great, try some of this. If you wanna be great, you gotta do heroin!” He even made a joke along the lines of “Think about all the people that did it, like Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix.” I was thinking of Janis Joplin and Sid Vicious, who both died of overdoses. Eventually my curiosity won out, and I decided to try some.

I discovered that snorting heroin brought me down off cocaine. Soon I was doing heroin as often as I was also doing coke. It was like that with a lot of things: the first time I drank I thought, “This isn’t bad—it’s awesome!” Then a couple of months later I tried pot and I was like, “This is awesome, too!” Then I did some cocaine and I thought, “Okay, this feels kinda funny—but I’m not dead, and I’m not in jail, so it can’t be that bad.” They teach you in high school that every drug is a gateway to the next drug, and they’re right, because the next thing I knew, there I was on heroin.

I remember very clearly in 1984 when Combat Records put Megadeth under contract. We got an $8,000 advance and went into the studio in December of that year to record our first album,
Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good!
It was around this time that I finally realized that I had a problem with heroin. I’d been partying a lot, and doing smack and coke for a few days in a row, on and off for several months. Then one day I didn’t do any—and I woke up feeling really crummy. I snorted up some heroin, and all of a sudden I felt great. That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh . . . I think I understand why our guitarist and drummer have to score before they rehearse.” It was about “getting well,” as we called it; or “getting the monkey off my back.” I’d stepped over a line I never thought I would cross. I was becoming a bona fide addict after only a single year in Los Angeles. By mid-1984 I was drinking, smoking pot, using cocaine, and taking heroin. Those became my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I was never a huge fan of psychedelic drugs. I took acid once and didn’t really enjoy the effects. The next day I was in a very deep, reflective frame of mind: sometimes I wonder to this day if that one trip changed me permanently. I became a much more thoughtful, cautious character afterward, and not in a good way. My one experience with mushrooms was absolutely horrifying. Never again.

I could feel the drugs interfering with my vision for my life and my passion for rock ’n’ roll. Other people could handle it. I felt as if I’d sold my soul.

Meanwhile, we made the first Megadeth album. Eight thousand dollars wasn’t a lot to make a record with, even back then, and we probably spent half of it on lifestyle and living expenses. We moved in with our coproducer Karat Faye, who had once been a staff engineer at the famed Record Plant. He had big stories about the rock stars he’d met in the business over the years, which impressed me.

We went up to Indigo Ranch Studio in Malibu to do the album and stayed at the guesthouse there, the bummer being that there was just one very narrow dirt road leading to it, and whenever we ran out of drugs we had to either drive back down the hill or call one of our Hollywood friends to bring some drugs up to us, which was a nuisance. I remember one night, when I was very high on cocaine,
Scarface
was on TV. It scared the living daylights out of me. That’s not a good film to see if you’re high on coke! I saw my future in that film and it looked pretty freaky.

I was intensely aware of what I was doing to myself, even if I wasn’t honest about it with anyone else. In recovery we talk about rigorous honesty being required in order to get sober and stay that way, and I’d been honest with myself all along—just not with other people. I would call my parents and tell them what was going on with the band, without ever telling them about any drug use. I acted as if I was keeping it all together, even though I was essentially homeless and squatting in people’s houses.