Night Beat (47 page)

THE NEXT DAY’S show in Lubbock, Texas, proves to be something of a letdown. The turnout is one of the smallest that the tour will see—a little over two thousand fans show up in an arena that can hold over twice that many—but a bigger problem seems to be the sound. The members of each of the bands come off the stage complaining that they could not hear themselves playing, and that the mix in the sound monitors had been messy and dim. In particular, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine is coldly furious. At the end of the evening, he stands in the backstage area and tells his tour manager that he wants the sound man suspended from the board for the following evening. It is plain that the tour manager will not find this an easy request to accommodate, though it’s also plain that Mustaine—who has a formidable reputation for being arrogant and headstrong—isn’t about to give ground.

It’s only two days into this trip, but already Dave Mustaine is beginning to wear on the nerves of some of the others involved in the tour, particularly Slayer. A former heavy drug user and drinker, Mustaine these days is scrupulously clean and healthy. As a result, he insists on keeping himself at a distance from the members of Slayer, who still enjoy drinking and acting up. In a
Los Angeles Times
article that appeared at the outset of the tour, Mustaine told an interviewer that he had been embarrassed by Slayer’s behavior during their recent European tour together. “There were times where it was detrimental to my sanity,” he said. “When we travel and we’re stuck on the same plane, and they’re completely inebriated, swearing at the top of their lungs and belching and guzzling. . . . I felt like I wanted to crawl off into the bathroom of the plane and die. . . . I have more respect for their luggage than their behavior.” Needless to say, these comments haven’t gone over well, nor has Mustaine’s insistence that Megadeth stay in different hotels than Slayer and that the band’s two dressing rooms are located as far apart as possible.

But there is also another side to Dave Mustaine, and it can be surprisingly affecting. A few minutes after his tantrum about the sound problem, the thin, blond Mustaine sits on the band’s bus in the parking lot of the Lubbock Coliseum and talks quietly about all the years and friendship that were lost to his drug abuse. In moments like this, there is nothing in Mustaine’s manner that is arrogant or taxing. Instead, he comes across as somebody who is smart, conscience-stricken, and deeply sad—as if he has endured a long nightmare and is just now coming to terms with how he managed to inflict so much damage on himself and others over the years.

In some ways, Mustaine’s long bouts of self-abuse were probably an extension of the ruin he had felt as a child. When he was seven, his parents divorced, leaving Mustaine and his sisters and mother living in poverty in the suburbs of Southern California. By his early teens, his mother was absent much of the time, and Mustaine spent the next few years residing with his sisters and their families. One day, when he was fifteen, says Mustaine, one of his brothers-in-law punched him in the face when he found him listening to Judas Priest’s
Sad Wings of Destiny.
“I decided right then,” says Mustaine, “that I was going to play this music. That would be my revenge.”

In the early 1980s, after playing in a series of pop and metal cover bands, Mustaine hooked up with Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, from Norwalk, California. Together, they formed Metallica—a band that, within a few years, would become the most important heavy metal ensemble since Led Zeppelin. It was Metallica, in fact, that codified speed-metal as a music derived from the rhythmic brutality of hardcore punk and the yowling melodic drive of early-1980s British denim-and-leather metal bands like Motorhead and Iron Maiden. But for all its gifts, the group was also beset with serious personality conflicts. Mustaine and the others fought frequently—sometimes about drug use, sometimes about leadership of the band—and in time, the tension became unbearable. “One day,” says Mustaine, “they woke me up and said, ’Uh, look, you’re out of the band.’ And I said, ’What, no warning? No second chance?’ And they said, “No, you’re out.’

“To this day,” continues Mustaine, “I have a hard time seeing those guys. Something inside me feels like saying, “You know, you guys are really fucked for firing me. You didn’t give me a chance—and I really miss you; I miss playing with you.’ And while they’re responsible for their own success, I don’t think they ever would have developed the way they did if I hadn’t come into the picture. I was a key part of that band.”

Back in Los Angeles, Mustaine settled deeper into his drug use and thought for a time about quitting music altogether. But in 1984, after he met Dave Ellefson, a bassist who had just moved to California from rural Minnesota, Mustaine decided to take another stab at band life, and formed Megadeth. “I thought of this band as not just the return of Dave Mustaine,” he says, “but also my revenge. I thought, “This is the music I want to play: a jazz-oriented, progressive music that’s going to alter heavy metal as we understand it.’ ” Mustaine proved good to his promise. Though Megadeth shared Metallica’s passion for hard-and-fast riffs, the best tracks on albums like
Peace Sells . . . But Who’s Buying
and
So Far, So Good, So What!
demonstrated a melodic and textural versatility that no other band in metal has matched.

But Megadeth has also seen its share of problems—including numerous band firings, as well as Mustaine’s worsening drug problem. “One of the earlier members in the band,” he says, “finally got me into heroin. He had told me it was like being back in the womb, and, I mean, I was a slut. Pussy was my favorite thing in the world and for me to be fully
inside
a pussy was the fantasy of a lifetime, and that’s what heroin was like to me. I became like a dope-seeking missile, and after a while I was losing my mind. I got to the point where I just
could not play
anymore. I knew that I was going to die if I didn’t get sober, and even that wasn’t enough to make me stop. I would have done anything for coke or heroin. I would have even gone into prostitution.”

One morning in early 1990, while driving home in a drug-and-alcohol stupor, Mustaine was pulled over by the police. He had heroin, cocaine, speed, and liquor in his blood system, and he also had some of those same substances in his car. He was arrested, and a short while later he was given a choice: Get clean—and
stay
clean—or go to jail. It turned out to be the impetus Mustaine needed. Within a few weeks he had joined a twelve-step addiction recovery program, and has stayed clean since. “In fact, tonight,” he says, seated aboard the bus in Lubbock, “is my birthday: A year ago today was the last time I used any drugs. And you know what? Now a lot of my dreams are coming true. In the last year I got married, we put together our best version of Megadeth yet, and we also finished our best record,
Rust in Peace.
I think it all has to do with the fact that now I pray and meditate a lot. I don’t sit at home by the phone waiting for some fucking creep to come over with powder.”

Mustaine glances at the clock on the wall. It is now past 1 A.M. The bus should already be on its way to the next stop, but everybody’s waiting for a final band member to arrive. When somebody suggests that the musician is out having sex with a young woman that had been seen backstage, Mustaine turns momentarily livid. The woman, says Mustaine, is a recently recovered addict, and he won’t tolerate anybody in his band using her. As it turns out, the rumor is false—the person in question had barely even met the woman—and a few moments later when the woman shows up to say goodbye to everybody, Mustaine and bassist Ellefson (who is also a recovered addict) spend several minutes talking with her and encouraging her to keep up her sobriety.

“A lot of things have changed for me,” Mustaine will say later. “I think I now have a more genuine concern for others—though I’m still not strong enough to be around people who are drinking or using drugs. Also, I don’t have the same kind of interest I once had in the occult. I think it’s simply that now I know that there
is
a God, and, uh, it’s not me.”

THE NEXT DAY—when the Titans tour appears in San Antonio—is a Sunday, and one of the local newspapers bears a story on its front page under the headline: “Face to Face with a Devil.” It is a flimsy story of a woman who was reportedly exorcised of a demon by a local priest, but it is covered as if it is major news, and it also serves as a reminder that these Texas cities that this tour has been visiting the last few days are strongholds for conservative religious values. On the surface, towns like these might seem unlikely places to harbor a substantial heavy metal audience. (In fact, a few years back, San Antonio’s city officials considered banning heavy metal concerts within the city, but instead settled for an ordinance restricting kids under the age of fourteen from attending “obscene performances.”) But as Donna Gaines points out in
Teenage Wasteland
(probably the best book written about contemporary youth culture), conservative communities tend not only to breed a fair amount of repressed anger and fear, they also tend to breed conservative fears—like fears of the devil and rock & roll. And, if you’re young and have had to live with these sort of values too long, what could be better as a way of rubbing against the local ethos than subscribing to the symbology and values of heavy metal?

You can see signs of the local youths’ appetite for offense as the crowd begins to arrive at San Antonio’s Sunken Gardens amphitheater. Most of the fans here are young, and many of them are wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with the names of their favorite metal bands (besides this show’s headliners, big favorites include Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Danzig). These shirts are rife with horror-derived imagery, including depictions of rotting ghouls, greenish skulls, and apocalyptic demons. The iconography may sound gruesome, and yet when you’re confronted with an endless variety of these shirts in mass quantity, there’s actually something mesmerizing—even lovely—about it all. Plus, it’s simply a kick to draw the attention or disapproval of others by wearing these shirts. It’s a way of boasting your toughness and your proud status as an outcast. Conservative moralists can fume all they like about the question of what art is tolerated inside our museums, but they’re missing an important point: The canvas has shifted in this culture, and it is kids like the ones who are gathered here in San Antonio who are bearing the defiant new art on their chests. And the best part is, there is no way this art can be shut down or deprived of its funds. It has already spilled over into the streets, and into our homes.

At 7:00 P.M., Slayer takes the stage in San Antonio, and begins to slam across its fierce music. There is a dense and pummeling quality to the band’s sound—the bass rumbles, the drums explode at a rat-a-tat-tat clip and the guitars blare and yowl in unison—but it’s all played with a remarkable precision and deftness. Meantime, the audience that is jammed up close to the stage erupts in frenzy, with some kids slamming and bounding hard against each other while others clamber atop one another so they can dive over the barricade. This goes on and on until even the band can’t take its eyes off the action. On a night such as this, there isn’t anything in all rock & roll like a Slayer show. Watching the melee and hearing the fulmination of the music, you feel like you’re seeing a live band as exciting as the Sex Pistols.

At the same time, this is a band that deals with some fairly unsettling subject matter. When Slayer first emerged in the mid-1980s—chasing hard after the punk-metal coalition that had been made possible by bands like Black Flag, Metallica, and Venom—the group’s repertoire (written at the time by guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman) was heavy with songs about Satan and hell. But in recent years, under the influence of bassist and vocalist Tom Araya—who is now the band’s chief lyricist—the emphasis has shifted. Araya—whose family fled Chile during a time of political unrest and who has lived around some of the rougher sections of Los Angeles and witnessed the effects of gang warfare—decided the band should write more about the human and social horror of the modern world, and over the course of the band’s last three albums, he has developed a special affection for topics like political oppression, modern warfare, gang killings, and serial murders. Perhaps the band’s most chilling song is “Dead Skin Mask,” told from the point of view of Ed Gein, the famous mass murderer who killed numerous children and adults and flayed them, and who later served as the inspiration for such works as
Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and
The Silence of the Lambs.
In “Dead Skin Mask,” Araya enters into Gein’s heart and mind, and tells the story of his crimes from inside that dark and awful place.