It turned out to be a handbill authored by California senator Alan Cranston. I picked it up and began reading, just to pass the time, really. “At one point I was sitting at the back of the bus, my stomach rumbling, my head throbbing. The cliche ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ could apply to what happened next, Mustaine finding the key to his future in some junkmail at the back of the bus…Serendipity?
Allegedly James Hetfield drove Mustaine to the bus station with the bus ticket to California that the band had purchased for him, but no subsistence money whatsoever, meaning poor Dave had to beg food and drink from his fellow passengers for the duration of the trip. Mustaine travelled with Metallica from San Francisco to New York and played two shows with them in ‘The Big Apple’ in 1983 when he was famously thrown out of the band, an incident which would leave him embittered for many years to come. Rehab, rehab and more rehab…Mustaine sums up his life on the cover of his autobiography. It was a life of utter decadence (and at times one hell of a lot of fun). We shared homes, money, equipment, drugs, alcohol, girls. It wasn’t unusual for one or more members of the band to pass out during those trips and wake up to discover that his face or body had been painted. We practically lived in our cars, driving up and down the coast, drinking before and after rehearsals and gigs. I was aggressive, driven, and unpredictable, and I drank way too much. “I will never deny that I was a handful in those days. The band’s lifestyle at the time was, as Mustaine describes in his autobiography, ‘completely out of control’: When Metallica release their first album ‘Kill ‘Em All’, thosen four songs were all included, ‘Mechanix’ reworked and renamed as ‘The Four Horsemen’. Mustaine wrote four of the seven songs on the first Metallica demo ‘No Life Till Leather’ – ‘Mechanix’, ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Jump In The Fire’ and ‘Metal Militia’. Their leader, Dave Mustaine, was in the original pre-fame Metallica line-ups, according to the man himself performing a prominent role in the band as the lead guitarist and one of the primary songwriters. Megadeth are one of the so-called ‘Big Four’ thrash metal bands, along with Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax.
It is music taken to its most hyper extreme…’ Long hair, tight jeans, t-shirts and high-top ‘sneakers’ (in the USA – ‘trainers’ in the UK) were the fashion choices of the thrash/speed metal bands, at least in the early days of the genre…often accompanied by a snarl. In the 1980s, a new wave of bands ‘combined heavy metal with the rebellion of punk rock, and speed and thrash metal was born…’ This became ‘a firmly established and distinctive style, featuring odd syncopations, tempo changes, shifting time signatures, ‘ear-twisting’ dissonances, driving doublebass drum rhythms, screaming vocals and a heavily distorted, chunky, mind-numbing guitar tone.
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