MEGADETH: Rust In Peace

Despite the fact that Megadeth had been conceived and whipped into shape as an act of retaliation following Dave Mustaine’s unceremonious ejection from Metallica, the most musically adventurous members of the Big Four had pursued a calm and purposeful course between the release of their debut album and the chart-busting success of 1988’s So Far So Good… So What!



Lineup volatility aside, Dave was beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labours, as international acclaim and respect for his efforts to push metal forward led to bigger tours, bigger hits and a very evident upward trajectory. Unfortunately, as their momentum increased, the lineup that made So Far… – Dave, bassist David Ellefson, guitarist Jeff Young and drummer Chuck Behler – were in the midst of a collective addiction to heroin that was threatening to derail the band. Things came to a rather calamitous head during what should have been a triumphant trip to Europe to play several shows with Iron Maiden, culminating in a fateful performance at Donington’s Monsters Of Rock Festival on August 20, 1988.


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“When we went overseas the drug thing was over the top,” Dave recalls. “We did seven shows with Iron Maiden and the Monsters Of Rock festival – we’d died and gone to heaven. We’d gone there before and when we ran out of drugs, we’d swap to booze. Unfortunately this time the transfer didn’t happen as gracefully as we might have hoped; we had to abandon the rest of the tour and go home. That was the beginning of the end for Jeff and Chuck.”

Despite their problems with drugs, Megadeth were still very much a band in the ascendancy, and expectations surrounding their next album were high as Dave and right-hand man David Ellefson began the task of finding replacements for the departing Jeff and Chuck. Drummer Nick Menza was the first to be recruited, his remarkable skills and knowledge of jazz drumming perfectly suiting Dave’s plans for his band’s next move. Finding a new guitarist would prove to be slightly more challenging, not least because of Dave’s exacting standards.



“It was tough, man,” says Dave. “We were auditioning guitarists and all these guys would come in and start playing and it was terrible. This one guy came in and goes, ‘Alright, I’m ready! Just show me the songs!’ and I just thought, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ Two days after we’d finished doing the auditions we heard that the manager of the studio was found with his head chopped off, dead in a dumpster. Thank God we weren’t there that day! So we finally go to visit our management company, and there’s a tape of Marty Friedman there. I’d looked at it and he had this crazy coloured hair and I just thought, ‘What a clown!’ and threw the tape down. A couple of months would go by and I’d look at it and throw it down again, but eventually I listened to it because my manager was relentless about this guy. So I heard it and thought, ‘Wow, he wants to play with us?’ From that point, Marty was going to be the guitarist in Megadeth. When I first saw him play for real, I self- destructed. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this guy is good and I’m so terrible!’”

Prior to Marty’s arrival, Megadeth had already begun work on pre-production demos, at which point the dazzling technical precision and ferociously forward-thinking songwriting that would eventually turn Rust In Peace into such an undeniable metal landmark began to take shape. With reservations, Dave called upon an old colleague to perform lead guitar on the rough recordings.

“We went into the EMI Studio and did a demo of the album and we asked Chris Poland [guitarist on Megadeth’s first two albums] to play on it. I put the demo tracks on the Rust In Peace re-masters because I wanted people to see that Marty, as great as he is, was actually inspired by what Chris did on the demos. We’d already written all of Rust In Peace. In fact, some of those songs had been written a long time before. Rust In Peace… Polaris was a song I’d written and it was called Child Saint, and I’d actually played it when I was in Panic [Dave’s pre-Metallica band].”

With the lineup finalised and all the new material in place, work on Rust In Peace began in earnest late in 1989. Mindful of the fact that the previous lineup had reached the point of collapse and squandered its potential, Dave had no intention of allowing his fourth album to fall short of anyone’s expectations. And so it proved: the songs were the band’s most ambitious and impressive to date, with startling epics like Holy Wars… The Punishment Due and Tornado Of Souls showcasing a whole new level of musicianship that surpassed any- thing else that was going on in metal at the time. Nick and Marty had helped to turn the band into an unstoppable machine.





“It happened like that because we were in the studio playing these songs for so long before we made the record,” says Dave. “It was the repetition, going over every song over and over again. We’d gone from having the luminescence of a candle to being a photon beam. I wanted to make this super-metal, jazz-influenced record, and I had the guys to make it happen. When we finally went into the studio it was like, ‘OK, it’s time! Let’s make some magic!’”





The album was recorded at Rumbo Studios in Canoga Park, California, which was owned by peculiar pop duo Captain And Tennille. Megadeth’s choice of producer made far more sense, however. Fresh from helping Guns N’ Roses to conquer the planet with Appetite For Destruction, the now legendary Mike Clink had also produced albums for UFO, Heart and Jefferson Starship and was one of the most in-demand studio gurus of the age.

“I asked Mike to produce the record, mainly because I was a big UFO fan and I expected him to constantly get me Michael Schenker tones, because I love his guitar sound,” explains Dave. “But Mike said, ‘Look, if Axl calls I’m gonna have to leave. I’m doing his record at the same time as this one’, and I said, ‘No, you’re not!’ and that was the beginning of the end of our relationship. He had a black Labrador puppy which ate a hole through the wall and knocked over my guitar, so we fired him in the middle of the project!”

As the recording sessions neared completion, Dave realised that, having shown Mike the door, he needed someone to come in and assist with the final mixes. Enter Max Norman, master- mind behind Ozzy Osbourne’s first two solo albums, Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman.

Dave Mustaine has long intimated that his inability to bring former Megadeth electric guitar player Marty Friedman back into the fold several years ago was due to a disagreement about finances.

Now, Friedman, who left Megadeth in 1999, has gone on record stating that money did indeed factor into his decision to not rejoin the band following the departure of guitarist Chris Broderick in 2014.



At the time, drummer Shawn Drover had also left the group, and Mustaine and bassist Dave Ellefson were looking to resurrect the famed Rust in Peace-era lineup with Friedman and drummer Nick Menza.

"My main thing was I'd be happy to do it, but I'm not going to take less money than I'm already making to do it," Friedman says (via Blabbermouth) in Mustaine’s new book, Rust In Peace: The Inside Story of the Megadeth Masterpiece.



"I'd been in Japan for more than ten years cultivating a career with solid rewards. I was making money not only for myself but also for my management and staff. My manager has been with me 15 years.

"Everything was sound and solid professionally, and when the offer came up to all of a sudden join Megadeth again, as long as I would not be making less money, I was ready to go. But I was certainly not going to take a loss to join a band that, frankly, at that point, didn't seem like they had too much to offer musically. A couple of members of the band had recently quit, and musically I hadn't heard anything that they've done in a long time. I didn't know about how relevant they continued to be in the music business.



“It wasn't like Megadeth was on the tip of people's tongues, at least not in Japan. I had reached the point where people stopped immediately connecting me to Megadeth and were talking about the things that I had done in Japan."