A backstage media exchange at Finland’s Tuska Festival in Helsinki briefly spilled onto the stage during Megadeth’s set on June 26, when frontman Dave Mustaine reacted strongly to a question he had been asked earlier that day during press.
The moment unfolded just before the band launched into “Let There Be Shred,” when Mustaine addressed the audience and referenced an interview he had done with Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat earlier in the day.
Rather than immediately introducing the song, Mustaine used the moment to describe his frustration with a question involving his former band Metallica and frontman James Hetfield.
He said: “Okay, so before we took the stage tonight, we were doing some press backstage and I was doing an interview with some guy from a newspaper here, a big newspaper. You can probably figure out who it was, and the guy was such a f**king d**khead. It really was. He asked me if I fight James Hetfield, who would win. And I thought what kind of a f**king idiot would say something like that. So I want to dedicate this next song to him, but we don’t have the song called I’m an a**hole. Instead we’ll do another new song called ‘Let There Be Shred’.”
While the onstage comment appeared spontaneous, it also ties into a long history between Mustaine and Metallica dating back more than four decades, to his early days in the band before his 1983 departure.
Despite that history, Mustaine has recently made efforts to distance himself from the idea of an ongoing feud. In a recent interview with Brazil’s Ibagenscast, he spoke at length about revisiting the Metallica-era track “Ride The Lightning,” which he originally co-wrote during his time in the band.
”I’ve got a really good explanation for you. That was one of the songs that I wrote with [Metallica frontman] James [Hetfield], and just like the other songs that I wrote, something happened when I left. Parts were changed, credits were assigned to other people, and I thought of all the songs, ‘Ride The Lightning‘ showcased my guitar talents the best: the spider chord that I invented, the grunting chords. Those were things that bands weren’t doing. And it happens in ‘Ride The Lightning‘,” he shared.
Approaching a legendary track decades later required a delicate balance of respect and aggressive reinvention. Mustaine detailed how the current Megadeth lineup worked to elevate the classic material.
“I’ve always thought that James was an excellent guitar player, so when we set out to do the song, we figured we needed to do it as good or better than the original,” Dave said. “And we figured, how are we gonna do that? Metallica‘s an amazing group. So we sped it up just a little bit, made it a little bit more frantic, and then we kind of spiced up the solo a little bit. And then, at the end, there’s some drum fills that the Metallica guys had played, and I told [Megadeth drummer] Dirk [Verbeuren], I said, ‘Have fun there. Just have fun.’ So he did a drum fill at the end in the four spots that there’s drum fills. And I think that they’re really stunning drum fills. They may be similar to the original stuff, but I’m not sure how similar. And he recorded his parts, and I love it.”
The decision to tackle the iconic 1984 thrash anthem wasn’t made overnight. Over the past year, Dave Mustaine has consistently praised Metallica‘s contributions while explaining the strategic and emotional process of bringing the song into the Megadeth catalog.
During an appearance on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk“ earlier this year, he revealed that the idea initially came from his son, Justis Mustaine, who serves on the band’s management team alongside Danny Nozell and Steve Ross.
“Well, we were past the halfway point in the album. ‘Cause that song ended up being song number 13. And when the time came to do that, we were talking about — what we usually do is a rendition of somebody’s song that we like or something like that, or a remake. And when I was talking with [my son] Justis [who is part of the Megadeth management team], he had said, ‘Why don’t you do ‘Ride The Lightning’?’ And I kind of looked at him like, ‘Hmm.’ And then I thought about it. I said, ‘That’s probably a good idea.’ And I said, ‘Let’s try it.’ We tried it. It was cool. And I said to the band guys, ‘Okay, if we’re gonna do this, let’s make sure that we do it as good as the original or better.’ ‘Cause we gotta do that,” he recalled at the time.
“If we’re gonna honor those guys by doing a new version of the song that I did with James, I think it’s important to make it as good or better. And what we did was we sped it up a little bit, and the drum fills at the very end, I told Dirk, ‘Have fun there. And you can beef it up if you want’. And I talked to Teemu [Mäntysaari, Megadeth guitarist] and I said, ‘The guitar solo that’s in there, try and stay close to it, if you can.’ ‘Cause it really is Kirk [Hammett] doing an improvisation of what I was doing. ‘So, let’s have fun with it.’ And the solo was a little different — close to the original that Kirk did, but it was a little different. And then there was the singing. James and I have instantly identifiable voices, but they’re not at all alike. And I was listening to James sing, and it was fun for me to be able to listen to his vocal parts and break it down and hear how he sings, and then to go back and approach the song and try and sing in my style, which I do believe I put my DNA on that.”
He added that doing a track he had a hand in creating made it a natural fit for the band: “It would’ve been different if I would’ve done a song by a band I was in that I didn’t write. That’s kind of like doing a weird nepotistic cover song. But this is one of my songs. So, yeah, I loved doing this. I loved writing it with James, and I loved playing it with Megadeth.”
