In a raw and exhaustive interview, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine has provided his most detailed account yet of his explosive and brief tenure in Metallica, leaving no stone unturned from his unusual audition to the violent clashes and controversial firing that would fuel a four-decade rivalry. Speaking with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan on the Shawn Ryan Show, Mustaine gave a step-by-step chronicle of the events that shaped metal history.
Mustaine’s journey with the band began with a classified ad in a local Orange County newspaper, The Recycler. “The biggest band in the world would advertise in this newspaper,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). The ad led to a fateful phone call with drummer Lars Ulrich. A shared appreciation for an obscure Welsh three-piece, Budgie, immediately broke the ice.
“He goes, ‘You like f**king Budgie, man?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I do,'” Mustaine recalled. “By me listening to them showed that I had credibility in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal world.” The connection was immediate, and their first in-person meeting at Ulrich‘s Newport Beach apartment revealed another strange coincidence. “My mom was a maid and she had actually worked a event for catering in his complex,” Mustaine said. “I’m thinking, ‘Go figure… What a story that is, two different sides of the same coin.'”
The audition that followed was anything but conventional. After hearing an early version of “Hit The Lights,” which Mustaine noted was written by Lloyd Grant, not Metallica, he cheekily remarked, “Wow, this song needs way more lead solos in it.” His confidence proved well-founded. At the rehearsal space in then-bassist Ron McGovney‘s home, Mustaine never even played a song with the band.
“I set up my amps and I plugged my guitar in and I just started warming up,” he explained. “They wouldn’t come into the rehearsal room… I walked out and I said, ‘Guys, are we gonna do the audition?’ They said, ‘You got the gig.'”
Once in the band, Mustaine quickly established himself as more than just the lead guitarist; he was the enforcer. “If there was ever any stuff going down, I had to take care of it,” he said, describing his role in collecting money from often-corrupt club owners in San Francisco. This aggressive streak, however, bled into his personal interactions, especially when fueled by alcohol.
“When I got drunk, I got violent,” Mustaine stated bluntly, explaining why he was singled out for dismissal in a band where everyone drank heavily. He recounted two specific, brutal altercations. One involved him confronting a man allegedly beating a woman in an alley, where Mustaine says he “started rabbit punching him until he stopped moving.”
The other, more infamous incident, involved James Hetfield and Mustaine’s puppy. After Hetfield kicked the dog, a furious confrontation erupted. “I said, ‘You better shut up or I’m gonna punch you in the mouth,'” Mustaine recalled. After interventions from both McGovney and Hetfield, Mustaine followed through. “I said, ‘Okay, you win.’ And bang, I hit James in the mouth, and then I hip-tossed Ron into his television set-up… And Lars was pulling his hair going, ‘I don’t want it to end this way.'”
The final breaking point occurred during the band’s fateful 1983 cross-country drive to New York to meet with Jonny Zazula of Megaforce Records, who had heard their No Life ‘Til Leather demo. Mustaine claims a harrowing crash on black ice, during which he saved soundman Mark Whitaker from being hit by a truck, was unfairly used against him. “When we went to the U-Haul place to get our truck… James and Lars had made a decision to replace me because they tried to pin that driving thing on me as the last straw.”
Upon arriving in New York, the end was swift and, in his view, unjust. “They woke me up one morning and said, ‘Look, you’re out of the band.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’… ‘No warning? No second chance?’… And I thought that was unfair. And it showed a grotesque lack of character. And so that pissed me off and was a huge part of the fuel.”
Fired and put on a bus back to California, Mustaine left with a warning: “Do not use my music.” He maintains they ignored him, claiming credit for numerous iconic tracks. “[The] ‘Ride The Lightning’ [title track] I wrote. ‘The Call Of Ktulu’ I wrote… There’s ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Jump In The Fire’, ‘The Four Horsemen’. And I wrote a bunch of ‘Leper Messiah’ too… all the solos on that first record were mine.” He concluded with a final shot, suggesting Metallica’s biggest song has questionable origins: “Their biggest song, ‘Enter Sandman’, go look up the band Excel right now… Pretty similar.”
