Diamonds, Rust...and Peace · Rock Singing Success

Diamonds, Rust...and Peace

Dave Mustaine has an inspiring story. He’s a world famous musician now and has been since around 1986, when his breakthrough second album came out, but he hasn't always led a life of luxury.

Dave Mustaine earned everything he's got.

As a child, Dave Mustaine had a tumultuous home life. His father, while a hard working man, was an alcoholic. Dave’s parents divorced when Dave was only four years old. His family was left in poverty and relied on government assistance to get by.

Turns out he didn't know that his mom was an alcoholic as well! She was a high functioning enough alcoholic that Dave never even saw it. He only found out about her alcoholism after she passed away.

He had three sisters but one was 15 years older than him and the other was 18 years older. Dave says “It was really weird when we would stay with my sisters. We would move. My dad would find where we were because my mom and dad were divorced. As soon as my dad finds us, we move. We moved to a place, temporarily stay with a relative until we could find a new apartment, and it’s almost always my two oldest sisters or my aunt.”

It was a chaotic, turbulent childhood. Throughout that time when they were moving from one place to live to another, Dave started getting closer with his younger sister Debby, who played the piano. Dave decided to learn to play the guitar. It would become the one thing that gave Dave’s life some direction and purpose.

At fifteen years old, Dave left home to be on his own. He remained on his own and he describes his childhood as “pretty abnormal.”

“Pretty abnormal” is an understatement. Mustaine’s teenage years are probably unimaginable to most of today's kids. Even by the standards 70s, a fairly carefree time when youths in general were given considerably more freedom to do what they wanted, a time when, for example, hitchhiking was considered fairly normal behavior, Mustaine's upbringing was exceptionally rough. It left him wide open to all types of experiences...and risks.

It's not some fluke that so many kids of his generation went on to pursue a life in rock 'n' roll and succeeded so admirably. Without stress, a diamond never forms. Dave Mustaine handled the stress of his formative years incredibly well. Today he's got gold and platinum albums on his walls, but he was far from there at this point in his life.

He got kicked out of high school. He got kicked out of night school. Then he got kicked out of junior college. Problematic doesn't quite get the point across. Dave says: “My teenage years were as rowdy, as rambunctious, as any teenager could be.”

The guitar was the only stability Dave had in his teenage years. It was the only thing that was actually guiding him somewhere. Call it destiny, call it good fortune, I hate to think of where Dave Mustaine would be right now had he never picked up a guitar.

Mustaine says there wasn’t any single guitarist who inspired him to play. To begin with, he didn't even know he was going to be a lead guitar player. It's not as if he picked up the guitar with a clear vision of what his musical goals were.

He was thirteen when he started getting serious about the guitar and at the same time, he was just learning how to hotwire cars. Fortunately, he decided to get more serious about the guitar.

Good choice!

He decided the best rhythm guitar player he knew of was Malcolm Young of AC/DC and second to him were the guitarists in bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Diamond Head. For lead guitar, he cites Angus Young, Ace Frehley and Ted Nugent as significant influences.

Prioritizing guitar over hotwiring cars was a choice. For Dave Mustaine and James Hetfield to meet was destiny. They were a couple of young guys with incredibly bright futures, only they didn't know it yet.

Metallica wasn't Dave’s first band though. His first band was Panic, a band that Mustaine describes as “plagued by death and destruction.” He’s not exaggerating. Besides himself and the singer, there’s only one band member of Panic who is still alive.

The road to success was testing Dave Mustaine. It had to be that way. Hard times make strong men, Strong men make easy times, Easy times make weak men, Weak men make hard times, Repeat.

You want quality new music again? You want rock stars again? Just watch what happens to music when the result of these easy times comes to bear. EDM and hip-hop ain’t gonna cut the mustard for that generation!

It takes one hell of a lot of pressure to form a diamond.

One day Dave answered an ad in the Recycler paper. A guy with a Danish accent answered. Lars Ulrich. He had already met James Hetfield and they were looking for a second guitarist for Metallica. Of course at that time Metallica was just starting out and not well known at all.

Lars was impressed with the bands Dave liked. He was exactly what Metallica was looking for. Or so it would seem. This is not an oversight success story!

Metallica were off to a great start. They had the two guitarists who would go on to be known as the two best thrash metal rhythm guitarists ever, and along with Malcolm Young, maybe the best rhythm guitarists in hard rock and heavy metal. For them to both meet when they were starting out, to call it good fortune would be an understatement.

The only problem was that Dave had inherited the same problem his parents had. He was an alcoholic.

All the guys in Metallica liked to drink, but Dave would sometimes get violent when he drank and as great of a guitarist as he was, in the eyes of Lars and James, he was becoming more of a liability than an asset.

Metallica recorded a demo titled No Life ‘Til Leather and went to New York where Megaforce Records was. It was on that trip that Lars and James decided to fire Dave Mustaine. He asked: “What? No warning? No second chance”? Looking back on it, the harshness of it does seem pretty Saudi Arabian! It certainly doesn't paint Lars and James in the best light.

These are not saints. They are not role models. They are rock stars.

No, there was no second chance. Dave had to take a bus from New York all the way to California. To say he was pissed off would be an understatement. He decided he was going to make it his goal to form a better band than Metallica. He was gonna form the state of the art thrash metal band and when he became famous, he’d shove his success right down the throats of the guys in Metallica.

Dave formed Megadeth. It was a productive way to handle the stress. Mustaine channeled the pressure the right way. The diamond was almost formed.

Megadeth recorded their first album Killing Is My Business…and Business Is Good!

It was some pretty groundbreaking stuff, musically, but commercially it didn't sell a whole lot of copies. Their next album was their breakthrough album. Peace Sells…but Who’s Buying? was released on September 19, 1986 through Capitol Records. They were finally being distributed by a major label.

From there the success just built and built. In 1990, Megadeth released the album that a lot of people consider Megadeth’s greatest album: Rust In Peace.

Holy Wars..The Punishment Due and Hangar 18 are two of the songs that make Rust In Peace such a great album. It was a state of the art thrash metal album. Megadeth had made it.

Dave Mustaine went on to have a career that has made him one of the biggest stars in heavy metal. He even kicked his drinking and drug problems. He's become that diamond…and he's at peace.

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