MEGADETH

Whether United Abominations is their final album or not even frontman Dave Mustaine can’t say. But if it is, he knows he’s going out at the top of his game.

By Dan Epstein
Photo by Ari Michelson

It’s 10:30 in the morning, and Dave Mustaine is fuming. It’s not having to be awake at this relatively early hour that’s set him off, or the fact that he’s just had to endure a nearly three-hour, traffic-clogged car ride from his home in San Diego to his manager’s office in Los Angeles. In fact, Mustaine arrived at this morning’s interview in a sunny mood, and even offered Revolver half of his toasted bagel before our conversation commenced.

No, the subject of his wrath at this moment is no less than the United Nations, the self-described “global association of governments” that inspired the scathing title track of Megadeth’s new album, United Abominations (Roadrunner).

“The whole premise of the U.N. was to prevent war,” he rails, “But they’re totally ineffective. What just happened with Israel and Lebanon, and why did it take that long to stop? Look what happened with Saddam Hussein—17 resolutions, and he just kept spitting in their face. And now the ‘blue helmets’ are raping women and little girls in these African countries? Come on! How long is the public going to be blind to this?”

“I know I’m not making any friends at the U.N. with this album,” Mustaine continues with a harsh laugh. But, frankly, he’s not too worried. Like many born-again Christians, Mustaine favors the interpretation of the Book of Revelations that views the founding of the United Nations—and its eventual demise—as part of a series of prophesied events that will inevitably lead to the Second Coming. “I got saved a few years ago, and I believe what the Bible says, that the U.N.’s gonna fall. In order for the predictions in the Book of Revelations to take place, it’s gotta fall. I don’t ever expect to go there, except to look where the building used to be, you know? I’m hoping that someone’s going to pull the chain, and that’s where the butthole of the United States is, and it just disappears!”

With incendiary lyrics like “You can bury the bodies/But you can’t bury the crimes,” “United Abominations” is just one explosive example of what is easily the most compelling Megadeth album since 1992’s Countdown to Extinction. Coproduced by Andy Sneap (Arch Enemy, Cathedral, Exodus), United Abominations marks a full return to the band’s classic thrash sound. Head-snapping guitar riffs and skull-searing leads, played with precision and fire. A battering ram of a rhythm section that’s also capable of dishing out a Seventies metal groove or swinging like Hell’s own jazz band. Lacerating lyrics about topics both political and personal. It’s all present and accounted for, and topped off with Mustaine’s instantly recognizable snarl.

But United Abominations is more than just a blast from the sonic past; lyrically, songs like “Amerikhastan” and “Washington Is Next” offer urgent up-to-the-minute musings on the precarious state of our nation, much as the album’s title track grapples with the state of the globe. And from a musical standpoint, Mustaine and the rest of the band (brothers Glen and Shawn Drover, previously of Canadian thrash-metal band Eidolon, on lead guitar and drums; and bassist James LoMenzo, formerly of White Lion and Black Label Society) sound lean, mean, and ready to show the new generation of thrashmeisters how it’s done. In short, it’s the kind of new record die-hard Megadeth fans have been dreaming about for more than a decade.

“It was the most fun I’ve had working on a record in a long time—just watching a great artist rediscover what made him great in the first place,” says Mike Gitter, Roadrunner’s director of A&R. “I think Dave Mustaine has finally come home to Megadeth.”

*****

But as anyone who’s followed Mustaine’s “colorful” 25-year career—one that’s been marked by conflicts with bandmates (first and most infamously involving Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield in Metallica, and then with numerous Megadeth members over the years), other bands, record companies, and a whole host of personal demons—might guess, the road back home wasn’t a quick or easy one.

“The journey with this record actually started after Risk,” says Mustaine, referring to the 1999 Megadeth record that was short on old-school shred and long on electronic sounds and dance beats. Rejected by most of the Megadeth faithful, the album also failed to lure new listeners and eventually went down in history as the band’s worst-selling release since its 1985 debut, Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good. Longtime lead guitarist Marty Friedman left Megadeth soon after.

“I realized that Risk was a record that was very much for me, to show myself that I could write differently,” Mustaine continues. “Fans didn’t really receive it very well. It’s kind of like if you order a taco and get a burrito—it’s like, ‘I’ll deal with it, but it ain’t what I wanted!’ If it would have said, ‘This is Dave’s solo project,’ people would have said, ‘I can take it or leave it.’ But because it said Megadeth, they expected something.”

After Risk came 2001’s The World Needs a Hero, which Mustaine describes as “kind of like turning the boat around—you can turn the wheel all the way to the left, but it takes a while for that sucker to turn around. And this isn’t some little dinghy—this is a big aircraft carrier!”

Unfortunately, before Mustaine could build upon the relative success of Hero, he was waylaid by a freak injury; after falling asleep with his left arm draped over the back of a chair, he awoke to find that he had lost most of the feeling and strength in his arm and hand. Diagnosed with a compressed radial ulnar nerve, Mustaine was forced to undergo several months of intensive physical and electro-shock therapy in order to be able to play the guitar again.

The experience strengthened Mustaine’s commitment to Christianity (“I’ve always had Judeo-Christian beliefs,” he says), but it also motivated him to disband Megadeth—a decision he now feels was further vindicated by longtime bassist Dave Ellefson’s 2004 multimillion-dollar lawsuit against him, which alleged that Mustaine had libeled the bassist in an Internet posting and had illegally cut him out of a substantial portion of the band’s profits. (In 2005, a U.S. federal court rejected Ellefson’s claims.)

“I didn’t want to continue working with the people that were in that lineup, and the lawsuit only made that more clear to me,” says Mustaine. “I was planning on going solo at that point. I was going to do a double record—record 24 songs, cut it in half, and put the first one out, then wait a few years and put the second record out, without having to go back into the studio. But partway into the recording, EMI [Megadeth’s European label] said, ‘You owe us another Megadeth record, and if you don’t give it to us, we own you forever as a solo artist.’”

Mustaine wound up fleshing out his “solo” tracks with help from two former Megadeth members, guitarist Chris Poland and drummer Nick Menza; the results were released in 2004 as The System Has Failed, which debuted in the Top 20 of the Billboard album charts and was widely hailed as a return to form for Megadeth. But despite its positive reception, Mustaine kept insisting that the album (and the subsequent shows to support it—like the massive October 2005 concert in Argentina that was captured for the recently released DVD That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires) would be Megadeth’s last.

“I planned on breaking Megadeth up after System,” he says. “I wanted to pursue my solo career. Even if it meant playing smaller places, I would be able to see what I really could do on my own and how much was the Megadeth legacy. There was just so much negative memory for me, because of the previous band members—you know, my part in it, their part in it—and it just felt kind of cruddy. But everywhere I went, everyone I talked to kept reaffirming that I should keep the name.”

It also didn’t hurt that Mustaine actually found himself enjoying the band’s latest lineup. The Drover brothers had joined the band in October 2004 for the Blackmail the Universe tour; LoMenzo came aboard in February 2006, replacing bassist James MacDonough.

“People may think of the Friedman-Menza-Ellefson-Mustaine lineup [of the 1990s] as the classic one,” says Gitter, who signed Megadeth to Roadrunner around the time LoMenzo joined. “But truth be told, the Drover-Drover-LoMenzo-Mustaine lineup is better suited to be Megadeth these days. There’s a much more shared musical vision between the members of the band, particularly the Drovers—those are guys who grew up on the early Megadeth records. On this record, everybody who was there was there because they loved the band, and they recognized Mustaine as one of the architects of heavy music today.”

Armed with several songs originally written for Mustaine’s “solo album,” the new lineup began recording with Jeff Balding, a producer-engineer who had worked with Megadeth on a number of projects, including The System Has Failed, Risk, and 1997’s Cryptic Writings. “But partway through, we realized that we were on to something,” says Mustaine. “In order for it to come to its full potential, it needed to have a more metal element to it.” The band parted ways with Balding, and—after returning from the 2006 Gigantour—picked up again with English producer Andy Sneap at the controls.

A massive Megadeth fan since his teens, Sneap knew he was the man that the project needed—even if the idea of working with one of his heroes was rather intimidating at first. “It’s such a daunting prospect, coming into a situation like this,” Sneap laughs. “It’s a very important album for him, and I’ve been brought in to sort of steer the ship—so I basically have to tell Dave how to do things at times and sort of get the project focused and back on track. But he was actually very easy to work with.

“From my understanding, Jeff’s more of a Nashville engineer, and he was producing the record not from a pop point of view, but definitely trying to simplify things,” Sneap continues. “It was not really what Megadeth was about, in my opinion. I was always about Rust in Peace, Peace Sells[… But Who’s Buying?], and Countdown—the more technical side of things. To me, that’s what Megadeth is, and that’s what the fans like, knowing as a fan myself. I don’t think Jeff was coming from that angle, so Mike at Roadrunner brought me in because he knew I understood this type of metal and that I’ve always delivered him the results he wanted.”

The results of the Megadeth-Sneap collaboration are indeed impressive. “Blessed Are the Dead,” “Play for Blood,” and the spooky “Black Swan”—a song of self-realization inspired by a C.S. Lewis line about shadows creeping across a churchyard—all combine thrashy guitar assaults with Seventies classic-rock grooves; the latter track even bears more than a passing resemblance to early Alice Cooper, while “Out on the Tiles” is a hot-rodded cover of a lesser-known Led Zeppelin song, complete with some sizzling Jimmy Page–style lead work from Mustaine.

But there’s nothing remotely nostalgic about the agonizingly complex chord progressions and time changes of the vengeful “You’re Dead to Me” or the nightmarish swirl of guitars on “Burnt Ice,” Mustaine’s missive on the crystal-meth epidemic that’s been sweeping the country. “I wanted to write something that would make it easy for young people to look right into the abyss [of crystal meth] and see what it’s all about. I’ve never done it, so I asked a guy I knew who had been a crystal-meth user to give me some lingo,” he says. “It’s so insane what that stuff does to you, because of all the stuff it’s cut with. It’s like taking a drill bit to your brain!”

Asked about his own drug use, which sent him to rehab several times over the past two decades—he also briefly died in 1994 from an overdose of Valium—Mustaine rolls up his sleeves, revealing two pale, sinewy arms completely devoid of needle marks. “I never shot up, actually,” he says. “No, I gotta take that back—I did for one day, and it was so disgusting. I thought, Now I know why y’all suck dicks to shoot up!” He laughs. “You stick a needle in your arm, and the next thing you know, there’s a dick in your mouth!”

As for alcohol, Mustaine says he still drinks wine on occasion but nothing else. “I’ll have a little bit of some red wine, but as far as being an alcoholic anymore, it’s not my bag. I got set free from that when my life changed. I’m actually thinking of planting a vineyard on my property. Now, the wine will probably taste like sweat, but I think I can probably sign the bottle and sell it for 10 bucks!” he laughs. “Gonna give Mad Dog 20/20 a run for its business! My nickname used to be ‘Mad Dog,’ so I guess I’ll have to call this Mad Dog 100, or something.”

*****

Indeed, aside from the powerful rage that burns through much of United Abominations, the hair-trigger temper that once earned Mustaine the nickname “Mad Dog” seems to be very much a thing of the past. “Ever since I’ve turned my life around, I’ve become a much more peaceful person,” he says. “The dichotomy between when I’m pissed and when I’m normal is so much more glaring. People don’t see me angry very much anymore, but I still am capable of raging and goin’ off. It still comes out in my songs, but that’s a good place for it to come out in!” he laughs. “I’d rather take it out on my guitar than on a particular individual’s face.”

There’s righteous fury galore on “Amerikhastan” and “Washington’s Next,” two songs that take extreme issue with what Mustaine sees as the Bush Administration’s half-assed policies on immigration and the Middle East. Asked his opinion on the ongoing Iraq War, Mustaine pulls no punches.

“We needed to drop a really big bomb on that country about 16 years ago, and then we wouldn’t be having this problem,” he growls. “I think Bush made a tragic mistake invading Iraq. I voted for the guy, so I’m absolutely ashamed of my vote, but it was better voting for him than John Kerry. The fact that we’ve been humiliated to the degree that we have, because of our president’s ineptness… I think in America right now, there’s a lot of hope for the future. But I also think that our country has never been hated as much as we are right at this moment.

Mustaine’s uniquely artistic form of anger management takes a personal turn on “Sleepwalker,” a United Abominations track that belongs in the same pantheon as “Peace Sells” and “In My Darkest Hour.” Wrapped around a hissing chorus of “No one is safe when I close my eyes,” the song recounts in grisly detail the type of personal vengeance he metes out in his dreams. “It’s about me killing people in my sleep,” he grins. “I wake up and they’re still alive, but at least I’ve gotten my ya-ya’s!”

“Over Thanksgiving break, Dave was demoing ‘Sleepwalker’ in his garage,” Gitter recalls with a chuckle. “There were people over at his house, me and my wife included, and it was like a normal family scene—and there’s Dave basically waxing like he’s Guido Manson! It’s like, as his life has gotten happier, his music has gotten darker.”

And, one might add, better. For all its darkness, United Abominations is gratifying proof that Mustaine has finally turned the Megadeth ship around. “Oh, it’s more than just turned around,” he says with a laugh. “The boat dropped anchor, they lowered the cigarette boat into the water, and I said ‘fuck off’ to the past. I am creating a wake all my own right now, and I am not gonna look back.

“If this is a new beginning for Megadeth, then so be it. If this is the end, so was it,” he concludes with a smile. “I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been. And if this is the end of my career, if this is the last record I make, I’ll be happy listening to it in my rocking chair.”