Megadeth have rolled out a new “Behind The Song” video in which Dave Mustaine digs back into one of the more talked-about moments on the band’s self-titled final album — his own take on “Ride The Lightning“, the title track of Metallica‘s 1984 classic that Mustaine earned a co-writing credit on before his 1983 departure from that band.
Explaining why he reached for this song in particular, Mustaine framed it as a full-circle gesture. “ We chose to do a version of ‘Ride The Lightning’, partly because I wrote with the band on that song. So it just seemed like the natural thing to do — close the circle, pay my respects to the band that I got my break in, and let James [Hetfield] and Lars [Ulrich] know how I really feel about stuff,” he said. “I believe that James is an excellent guitar player and that Lars is an amazing songwriter.”
From there, he drifted back to the earliest days of that lineup and the moment he realized what he had in James Hetfield. “We were playing one day. We had a guitar player. He says, ‘I want to be called Damien Phillips when I get up on stage.’ And I went, ‘Uh, beat it, buddy,'” Mustaine recalled. “So we ended up going to the venue, we’re playing and I look over and he’s got a feather earring in his ear. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be so bad.’ So, the next day I got to rehearsal, and he’d been fired, and James is playing guitar. And he’s not playing guitar like somebody in this room would. He’s playing guitar like me. And I thought, ‘No f**king way. This guy is that good, and he doesn’t wanna be known for his guitar playing?'”
Mustaine then broke down how Megadeth made the song their own, right down to his signature technique. “So it was really fun for me to do ‘Ride The Lightning‘ [with Megadeth]. One of my chords that I invented, the spider chord, where you fret with these two fingers and you fret with these two fingers at the same time and you alternate, that’s in ‘Ride The Lightning‘. It’s in [the Megadeth song] ‘Wake Up Dead‘ also,” he explained.
He said the goal was to at least match the original, so the band sped it up slightly and turned the drums and solos loose. He told drummer Dirk Verbeuren to do whatever he wanted on the final drum fills, and split the solo section three ways with guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari — Mäntysaari taking the first and last thirds, Mustaine the middle — so it wouldn’t sound like Kirk Hammett‘s original improvisation. “‘Cause I don’t remember what I initially did on ‘Ride The Lightning‘, and I can’t find any recordings of me playing it,” he admitted.
The vocals, it turns out, were the real test. “But I think that the version that we did was great. It honors James‘s playing and singing. He’s a great singer, too,” Mustaine said. “F**k, I was trying to sing that song and some of it really pushed my vocal ability.”
Mustaine had first laid out his thinking on a February appearance on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk,” where he revealed the idea actually came from his son Justis, part of the band’s management team.
“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. 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,'” he said at the time.
When the topic of potentially adding “Ride The Lightning” to Megadeth’s live shows came up, Mustaine offered a response that left the door open and fans speculating:
“Oh, s**t, Eddie. You don’t have to ask me that. [Laughs] Maybe. Maybe. We do play ‘Mechanix’.”
Mustaine co-wrote “Ride The Lightning” with Hetfield, Ulrich and then-Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. His history with that band runs deep in Megadeth‘s own catalog: “Mechanix” was the original version of “The Four Horsemen“, a song Mustaine co-wrote that Metallica later re-lyricized and renamed after his exit, before he reclaimed the original on Megadeth‘s 1985 debut Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good!
