Dave Mustaine has never gotten over his ouster from Metallica. At least not if you believe what he said to former bandmate Lars Ulrich in the documentary Some Kind of Monster.
Megadeth: Dave Mustaine (second from left) and a bunch of random dudes who can't compete with Metallica.
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"It's been hard to watch everything that you guys do and touch turn to gold, and everything I do backfire," he says upon confronting the drummer after 25 years. "And I'm sure there's a lot of people who would consider my backfire complete success. But am I happy being number two? No."
Mustaine has a point. His band, Megadeth, which joins Metallica, Anthrax, and Slayer in Indio, California, this weekend for The Big 4 festival, has never achieved the sort of success his former band has since they booted him for partying too hard. Actually, on the official Big 4 bill, Megadeth is listed as thrash metal's number three — not two — below Slayer.
You can understand how that might make Mustaine bitter — especially considering that he's always thought himself a far more talented guitarist than his replacement, Kirk Hammett. I'm really not sure whether Mustaine was hamming it up in Monster (learned opinions vary), but being constantly compared to Metallica has to suck. Especially since it's not a fair comparison.
Metallica is an all-star team. Everyone who's ever been associated with the band — save, perhaps, little-known original bassist Ron McGovney — is fucking awesome. James Hetfield is obviously awesome. Ulrich, despite the Napster thing, is awesome. Hammett is awesome, too, no matter what Mustaine says. Cliff Burton was super-awesome, but when he died in a bus crash, he was replaced by Jason Newsted, who was also awesome. Newsted left and was replaced by Robert Trujillo, the band's awesomest bassist yet, in my opinion.
Mustaine, on the other hand, is just one dude. He's awesome, sure. But he's also, in the parlance of our times, a one-man wolf pack. And this is something he's never been terribly content with, on a constant search for a kindred spirit that'll propel his band where he wants it to go. Mustaine has had some help from steady bassist Dave Ellefson, but his band has employed 22 people over the years — there's a separate Wikipedia page for all the band's former members, if you're interested — none of them up to par with the members of his old band. Obviously, Megadeth has never been able to compete with Metallica. How could they?
This kills Mustaine. The Monster interview will forever be the way people remember things, but his public discontentment with being second chair behind his former band goes back as far as 1988, when he named his third record So Far, So Good . . . So What! Mustaine was ranked number one in Joel McIver's book The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists, but all he seems to remember is that he never got to play on Master of Puppets and didn't get credit for writing part of "Leper Messiah."
Here's the thing: If Mustaine wants to compare his team to their team, he'll always lose. Instead, he should compare himself to anyone else who steps on stage this weekend, from Metallica, Anthrax, or Slayer. Mustaine, I'd say, is the most productive man in the lot. He may not be able to single-handedly will his band to Metallica-level greatness — Metallica are The Beatles of metal — but he's certainly done more than any of that band's members individually. Mustaine is the only reason Megadeth is on the Big 4 bill at all — even Anthrax's Scott Ian couldn't make such a claim. Contrary to popular impression, Ian writes the band's lyrics, but most of the music is composed by drummer Charlie Benante. Slayer and Metallica are, of course, total team projects.
So we have Dave Mustaine, metal's rightful MVP. Sounds crazy, right? It's not.
First, consider what Mustaine went through to get where he is. He pulled himself up and started a successful project after getting the boot from one of the world's biggest bands. In fact, Mustaine is probably the most successful musician kicked out of such a big band so close to its birth. Pete Best quickly gave up on his post-Beatles project and went to work for the government. Doug Hopkins, the Gin Blossoms guitarist who wrote several of their biggest hits, was tossed out of the band because of his alcoholism and killed himself a few weeks after getting a gold record for "Hey Jealousy." Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd became a psychotic recluse.
Ulrich and Hetfield more or less left Mustaine for dead when they dropped him off at a bus station in New York, where the band was recording their first record, with his gear and a ticket back to L.A. Miraculously, Dave was done moping — and busy writing lyrics — before he rolled back home.
Second, and more important, metal fans of nearly every bent should concede that Megadeth actually surpassed Metallica at some point in their respective careers. Any cross in the bands' trajectories, for all the reasons above, is nothing short of amazing, and due solely to Dave's maniacal diligence. (Mustaine canceled an interview for this piece because I got swamped with work and called him five minutes late — no hard feelings.)
