What would have happened to Metallica had Dave Mustaine stayed in the band? Would he have knuckled under as the group diversified their sound in the 1990s? Would he have cut his hair?
That’s the question author Greg Prato asked Megadeth’s Dave Ellefson when he guested on the bassist’s podcast. Prato has recently published a book on Mustaine’s post-Metallica outfit, The World’s State Of The Art Speed Metal Band: The Megadeth Story 1983 – 2002, and he was curious whether Ellefson thought Metallica did his colleague a favour by kicking him out of the band early doors.
"Not at all, and there's a reason," Ellefson replied. "Look, things go the way they go, right? As much as it sucked to start over, I saw Dave become a vastly better guitar player pretty quickly after Metallica. I met him about six weeks after he got let go."
The bassist then explained what might have been a factor in Mustaine’s sudden improvement as a guitarist: "I remember that summer we had this friend that would go to GIT, Musicians Institute, and he'd come over and he'd smoke pot with us and he'd show us shit that he learned. Like, he'd go, 'Hey, here's this harmonic minor riff, this is exactly what fuckin' Uli John Roth is using in Speedy’s Coming or Sails Of Charon.”
"And we would sit - and his name was Ed - Ed and Dave and me we would sit there and we would go over these, and I'd learn the bass parts. I'd learn the guitar parts on bass."
So in other words, Mustaine knuckled down, improved and with a simpatico bass player alongside him was able to launch Megadeth within a year of his exit from Metallica. The rest is rock history.
The World’s State Of The Art Speed Metal Band: The Megadeth Story 1983 – 2002 is available now.
