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Vice Blog

Dave Mustaine: Still Screwing the PMRC After All These Years

The last heavy metal memoir I read was Gene Simmons' Kiss And Make Up, and I had to stop every few paragraphs to point at the book and be all "You tell 'em Gene," because the hubris dripping off the pages was just way too out of control. And Gene isn't even a drinker.

Dave Mustaine's new memoir, Mustaine, doesn't sink quite to those levels of boasting and depravity, however the shredder's exploits still have to give you pause. After writing what is arguably their best song, "The Four Horsemen," Mustaine was summarily thrown out of Metallica for being way too drunk all the time. Thankfully that cataclysmic event led to the formation of Megadeth, and later provided ample fodder for one very memorable scene in the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster. I caught up with Dave to talk about his new tell-all and some of the fan-favorite bits of minutia sadly left out of the book.

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Vice: Hey Dave, I just finished your book and there were a couple of things that were glossed over that I would have expected to find more of and a few things that weren't mentioned at all that I wanted to ask you about—like your appearance on Rock'N'Roll Jeopardy.
Dave Mustaine: Well, the reason that wasn't included was because that's sort of a self-aggrandizing type of thing, and I've had a pretty successful career as it is. I didn't need to have every single thing I did great put in there. That really didn't express who I was, it was more about "hey look at me!" I could have put that in there but it really didn't serve any purpose. Well it's a total fan-favorite; it has over a half million views on YouTube alone. You wiped the floor up with Moon Unit Zappa and George Clinton. That's nothing to laugh about. Was there any blowback at all from the Zappa or Clinton camps?
I didn't get any kind of blowback. I think that Moon Unit was very cool and funny and I thought that George was bizarre as usual.

It's really up there with the Weird Al vs. James Brown and Little Richard playing as one contestant Celebrity Wheel of Fortune clip.
Oh my god, Little Richard and James Brown as one contestant? That seems like it would be kind of tough to beat.

Yeah you're right, but those are like number one and two, for me at least. When you started Megadeth you claimed to have a distinct vision of what a heavy metal band should look like—long hair, leather, studs, muscles—and through 23 lineup changes you've more or less stuck with that vision, but do you still feel the same way? Specifically about the long hair thing.
I think if you're honest with your fans then whatever the initial ideas you had when you set out will have room to grow. If you're not and you try to do a Spinal Tap Mark II kind of thing it doesn't work--it backfires. There's been a lot of bands that have done that. We came close to making a serious career-ending mistake with Risk. I like that record, and a lot of other people do too, but our hardcore fans don't. They prefer more the heavier, faster stuff. Because the album said "Megadeth" they expected a certain type of thing and it wasn't what they expected.

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Well, the reason I ask is because another band you were in previously, Metallica, when they cut all their hair off, that was the beginning of the end—at least so far as their hardcore fans were concerned. If you had you stayed in the band would you have cut your hair and gone down that road?
If I was still in the band and it was a band decision, I'm sure I would have.

The book also barely touched on the evolution of Vic Rattlehead. Old Vic has seen a lot of changes over the years…
Vic was something that was germinated from an idea for a tattoo. As a kid I had seen those junkstore three monkeys with their hands over their ears and face and mouth; the whole "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" thing. That was one of the things I thought was really funny when I was getting ready to do the first album cover. I wanted to have that on the album cover, but I got the record back and it was totally not that.

So where exactly does Vic stand in the pantheon of heavy metal mascots?
Oh I think he is definitely in the top five. I mean there's Eddie, there's Vic, the pinhead from the Ramones, the lips from the Stones…I mean, what else is there?

Well Danzig has his skull and Motörhead have the snaggletooth but those are actually more just disembodied heads.
Yeah, those are just like two-dimensional things.

So if there was a post-apocalyptic war and it came down to Vic and Eddie who would ultimately win?
Tipper Gore.

The new memoir, Mustaine is out now via It! Books/Harper Collins

Aaron Lefkove