On April 24^th, 2007, KSJS had a chance to sit down with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth before his San José show on the Heaven and Hell Tour with Black Sabbath and Machine Head. Here’s what Dave had to say about the new album, new band members, politics, and life in general.

KSJS: What are your thoughts on the new album “United Abominations?” What did you set out to accomplish?

Dave Mustaine: Basically, when I make a new record, I wanted to make sure that I kinda returned to my style of guitar playing. I learned a lot about guitar playing over my career but I didn’t really learn a lot about melodies. I learned a lot towards the end of my career and having learned more about melody and singing and stuff like that it was easier for me to go back to playing the kind of music that I like. When you’re learning about singing and stuff, you have to have something to sing over. If you have a real accomplished singer singing over shit music, it doesn’t matter.

KSJS: As far as your style goes, how much of an influence have your new members had on your playing?

DM: On my playing? Well, when I was growing up, I used to listen to Glenn, so, umm…I’m just kidding. (laughter) There are a lot of people that, in um, in their careers as players, that we like the same kind of music. He used to play with King Diamond and King was in Merciful Fate and I like Merciful Fate, although I don’t agree with the lyrics, um, I like the music and that was cool and he and his brother I guess had been fans for a really long time and so that was neat and having LoMenzo come in, James he’s not necessarily a thrash guy but he’s a consummate professional and I didn’t know that it was going to be easy to, well it wasn’t easy to replace David Ellefson, with all due respect to him. When James MacDonough came in I thought, “Ok, it will be just as easy to move on like I did with the previous members, like I did with other guitar players.” It just didn’t happen. And then, when James came in, he was like, it was just like chemistry, it just clicked from the beginning. He had a really long beard like down to here and I said “Ok, what about the beard?” And he goes: “It’s gone, man.” It was part of the, what was it, the BLS, the BLS wardrobe is what he said. So, I got him a razor and a bar of soap, and then…ya.

KSJS: On this album, lyrically, you’re still touching on a lot of political themes. What are some of your topics on the album this time around?

DM: Well, it’s kind of the same person saying, just maturing, continuing on this world, the fate of this world, and what I can do about it and what I really can. So, a lot of the political stuff that’s in the song is really just part two of a previous song. “America’s Stand” is like part two of “Holy Wars,” “Washington’s Next” is pretty much part two of Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying.” “United Abominations” itself is, is about my disdain for the U.N., and I think all you need to do is just look at what the U.N. is doing right now. They’ve got sanction on top of sanction on Iran and they’re still continuing to manufacture yellow cake, and I’m not talking Twinkies, I’m talking enriching Uranium, and trying to you know, and putting it into centrifuges and getting ready to, make bombs, you know. I mean, uh, they don’t need an alternative energy source, they’re the second biggest, uh, producer of natural gas in the world and I think it’s the fifth biggest producer of oil. What the fuck do they need nuclear energy for? They certainly don’t use razors over there.

KSJS: So, do you feel like you’re having to repeat yourself, being that these are continuations of previous songs, that people aren’t listening to you yet, or is it just that you’re moving on the same message?

DM: That’s a good question. Um, I think that anybody who is dedicated to their cause is going to have to understand that you need to reiterate to the masses because as human beings, we’re stupid. We’re very short with attentivity. That’s why you need to do something so long in order to make it a habit. You know, I can tell you something right now and unless you’re an idiom savant, you won’t remember it, you know, a lot of the details. For example, I’m really good with numbers. Music is based on numbers, and that’s why I was a natural at it. I’m self-taught. I don’t know anything about chords or notes or scales or anything like that. Of course, if I sat down I could count up the sheet music and tell you what each note was, but it would take me all day and you’d be bored and I’d be pissed. But, um, for the most part, I think that if you have, I like to teach people I really enjoy that and being a dad and, and having a 15 year old and having a 9 year old daughter, um, I’m in that process right now where I’m, I’m doing some of the birds nest that happened to me growing up. I grew up the product of a broken home and was pretty much a latchkey kid, so I taught myself. You know, I, there’s so many things I learned the hard way that I want to tell my kids to do but, you know, and you can say “don’t touch the stove,” but what do they do? They’re laying butt-naked on it in the morning when you come in there and its like (sniff sniff). What do you do? You just can’t, you gotta let people experience their, I mean sometimes, they’ll they’ll they’ll listen to you, but for the most part they won’t. It’s like, there’s an old saying that say a smart man learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from other people’s mistakes. So yeah, I do have to repeat myself, but I mean think about Robert Plant, how many times has he sang “Stairway to Heaven?” When you put a song down into lyrical form, you’re gonna repeat it. And a lot of times in the studio, guys don’t think about, you know, uh, having to repeat the same thing over and over again. It’s like, Nelly Furtado has this one song, that “fly like a bird” song. (KSJS: Oh yeah, oh yeah…) Why would you know that song? (KSJS: Because I worked at a music store…) Riiiight…(laughter) Ya dance to her, don’t ya? (laughter KSJS: Oh yeah). So, there’s this one part in the song where it goes “woo woo woo woo” right in the song, and I thought, “Oh my God, how did the producer let that slide.” You know? So I imagine when she was doing that in the studio, she never thought that was going to be a hit and every night on stage she was gonna have to go “woo woo woo,” cause it’s pretty gay after the second time you’ve heard it, right? But yeah, not very many people take into consideration the longevity of a song. When you write music and it gets published and it gets put out there, it’s forever. Forever and ever and ever. You know, you send somebody a text message, it’s forever. You know, it’s just the information age that we live in, especially with people taking stuff and reading into the meanings much deeper than what it’s supposed to have been, alright? Dawson, up in Colorado, they had that shooting up there and the guy tried pinning that on me, saying that he was listening to “A Tout Le Mode” before he went and committed a murder, and committed suicide, and I had to take a very proactive stance on that. Being a Christian, I really needed to, to watch what I said, so, you know, cause people will think ‘oh, you’re just in it to sell it’ or ‘you’re some kind of freak and you caused it and you’re in denial.’ So, I flat out told them, I said: “The bottom line is, this guy was not a fan of mine, because anybody who’s fans of Megadeth know how I feel about that kind of stuff.” And, if anything, this is one of the few bands in this entire metal community that really invests in their fans to make them better people, instead of saying ‘hey, go out and punch a cop,’ or something stupid like that, cause that’s really to prey on people’s insecurities and to challenge them to act out, cause its really easy to do the wrong thing. But, to go on record and stand up and say: “You know what? You’re better than that. Let me help show you how to achieve. Let me, let me show you some things that, you know, will make your life a little bit easier for you in the long run. Let me show you what it feels like to feel good.” You know? Not a lot of people want to share that stuff, they just don’t. So, sometimes, yes, to answer your question, I do have to repeat myself because, you know, my career is actually, I have nowhere else to go. I, I, I, I can’t, you know, I’ve been as big as I wanted to be, and, and I have everything that a man could possibly want. What is it at this point that I’m doing? Well, its kinda like being a sage and passing on wisdom to younger musicians, and being an elder statesman and showing, you know, people how to do things, and in this business, without getting ruined by the industry itself and also making sure that the stuff that I sing about isn’t going to be use as a catalyst to perpetuate some kind of psychopath like the guy in VT.

KSJS: In a recent interview, you said you felt this album was your last chance to create something meaningful…

DM: That was a joke. People are, see, the thing is, you’re sitting here, so you can see it, and the people that have, when they read it, they don’t see the influx. You know, and I mean. Even still, when I said, “What are you doing listening to Nelly Furtado?” You know? I mean, you’ll see that in (KSJS: You caught me there, yeah). Oh, I can tell! (KSJS: No, I worked at a music store, but anyways…) The point is that, you can’t always see the, the humor, and stuff like that. I have a dry sense of humor, you know. I’m not Steven Wright by any means, but I certainly, you know. There’s a lot of innuendo in what I speak about because its fun to kind of talk, you the clerk, around you. And some people are intimidated by me. I don’t know why, I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy. But, um, you just, you hear what they say sometimes and it’s just so…silly, you know? And you’ve gotta answer them back with something equally silly, you just have to.

KSJS: It was a funny thing to hear, because when I think back on your background, on all the stuff you’ve done, it’s like, “what can he possibly mean?”

DM: Right, if we reverse the tape, I just told you, I have everything that I want.

KSJS: So how do you feel about this tour? I know you just started this tour one or two days ago…

DM: We’ve already done a leg with these guys, and there’s probably a way better question for you to ask me because I don’t feel very, uh, very much like giving an answer about that. Not to invalidate your question, but its just that, I don’t want to say anything bad, and I don’t want to say anything too good, because, you know, my whole thing here tonight is: when I’m on stage, I don’t give a shit about who’s on after me, and I don’t care who’s on before me. I’m here to entertain you, not to say, “Hey, come on you guys! Let’s hear it for the headliner!” When people do that when I’m on stage, I think: “What a patsy.”

KSJS: You mentioned before you felt the need to come to the defense of your music with the shooter and what not. What was the initial impotence behind reworking the song?

DM: “A Tout Le Mode?” Well, that song had been banned a long time ago by MTV because we had used a director that had done a bunch of our videos, his name was Wayne Isham. And, Wayne was doing everybody, you know, uh, you couldn’t watch five videos in a row without seeing one of his. And MTV said to us flat out, ‘listen, don’t use Wayne Isham on your next video.’ So, the manager, what does he do? He uses Wayne Isham on the video and changes the name on the video and turns it in “Directed by: Justin Keith.” Well, if you put Isham at the end of Justin Keith’s name that’s Wayne Isham’s son, alright? So, they sent it in under a fake name and when MTV found out they got pissed at me, banned Megadeth. I went from being their press darling, doing everything for them, having their theme song for the MTV News to being a guy that, you know, they don’t play any more. Now, they’ll have, um, girls giggling around in thongs and stuff like that, but I put a poignant political song out there, they won’t play it. So, I mean, where, what, I don’t know. I just think that it has to do with, in America, radio follows MTV anyway, so and still, to a degree, does now, and it did then exactly, and when they banned the song, it was an international success. Everybody around the world loves it. MTV said it was a suicide song. Now, there’s a line in there that says, “I’d love to stay with you all,” not “I wanna slash my wrists and, and, and go to hell in bathtub full of bloody piss and water.” You know? That’s not my idea of going out. If I wanna commit suicide, you know, I could think of a million other, uh, cleaner ways to do it. I, I hopefully plan on, you know, living a very, very long life. But, the song, um, was misinterpreted and it didn’t get to see the light of day and I always felt that I could handle that if it was my failure, you know? But it wasn’t my failure, it was somebody else. Now, can you see me sweating bullets and kicking my own ass in the corner and in the next video you see Boyz II Men, four black dudes up on the North Pole, you’re going like: ‘Ok, this director’s pretty much covered the entire gamut. We need a new director.’ So I understood, and I told the managers, you what, don’t, don’t use this guy any more and that’s what happened. The duet was just a stroke of luck. We, we, I’d always wanted to do that. We had two girls try out and we even had Lisa Marie Presley scheduled to it, and in the end, Christina was the right choice for my voice. And, uh, the video, the single got banned again Wednesday (18 April, 2007) in America. So, it came out, it got banned, so it’s, it’s out of America. I took it out of the set-list last night, or the night before, and it, it just ain’t gonna get played in America anymore. You know, there’s somebody, somebody’s got a hard-on for me in, in this business here in America. I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s just really, really weird cause the video’s great, the song is great, why not play it? They said it was service to radio six years ago. “Youthanasia” came out in ’94, it didn’t come out in 2001. Somebody needs to count.

KSJS: And it’s an entirely new song now. The lyrics are the same, but it sounds differently, the vibe is completely different.

DM: And see, that song wasn’t supposed to be on the record. It was supposed to have been a B-Side on the Japanese release. It was only something to soothe my wounds because I had felt that this was a song that was very important to me but was taken away from me because of a misinterpretation and by a manager who just didn’t really care. You know, and, and this isn’t the first time you’ve ever heard of an artist that had a manager that’s done something really dreadful to them. It happens a lot.  And you know what? You just, because you’re in such a, uh, vulnerable position in this business, if you have talent, people come around you, and a lot of them will prey on you. It’s very rare you’ll find somebody that really will say: “Hey, you need to do this and don’t do that.” Like, I mean, how many people, do you think Axl Rose would still be in the studio if someone would have said “NO” to him? You know? Or how about get the fucker a watch? You know? “OK, its stage time!” (laughter)

KSJS: Thank you, Dave.

DM: See you later, take it easy, hope you have a good time tonight.

Transcribed by Scott Evans for KSJS