GIGANTOUR 2013 with MEGADETH, BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, DEVICE, HELLYEAH, NEWSTED and DEATH DIVISION at Molson Amphitheatre (909 Lakeshore W), Sunday (August 11), 3:30 pm. $29.50-$69.50.
Dave Mustaine is music’s biggest loser. For sure.
More than Jim Messina. More than Clay Aiken. More than a hypothetical Ringo Starr who, when the other Beatles were like, “Oy, Ringo, want to go to the States and perform a number on the Ed Sullivan program?” was like, “No thank you.” Even more than Scott Weiland.
In 1981, Dave Mustaine responded to an ad in L.A.-based classifieds paper The Recycler. An upstart rock band called Metallica was looking for a lead guitarist. Mustaine got the job. Story goes that he didn’t even have to audition. Singer/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich heard him warming up and said, “Okay, you can be in Metallica” (paraphrasing here).
During his short tenure in the group, Mustaine co-wrote four songs that appeared on Metallica’s debut record, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All, and two on its follow-up, 1984’s Ride The Lightning. He was instrumental in defining Metallica’s early sound: that synthesis of snarling West Coast punk and gymnastic, New Wave of British Heavy Metal-style riffing.
Dave Mustaine wouldn’t make it to see Metallica become the biggest band the world, the defining act of 1980s American heavy metal (or just straight up, non-U2/REM-sounding rock music). In April 1983, while Metallica was recording Kill ‘Em All in New York, Mustaine was fired. Ulrich, literally pulling the short straw, rousted Mustaine out of bed first thing on a Monday to tell him he’d been sacked. The band packed up his gear and bought him a bus ticket back to Los Angeles. The whole thing was notoriously unceremonious. As his revenge, Mustaine minted the faster, shreddier, angrier thrash metal band Megadeth.
After booting him, Hetfield and Ulrich cited Mustaine’s problems with drinking and drugs as reasons for his dismissal. But this doesn’t seem to add up. More than a hard-partier (de rigueur for the 80s American metal scene, certainly), Mustaine seemed just straight-up disagreeable.
He can play guitar, sure. But that’s not enough to mitigate a more essential unpleasantness that seems to gush out of every one of his pores, that dogs him like a bad stench. As Hetfield described him in a 1991 interview, Metallica-era Mustaine “was obnoxious.” That’s part of it. But there’s more: his whiny pitch, his pouty grimace that makes him look like sad cartoon baby. He’s more than obnoxious or unlikeable. Like Gwyneth Paltrow or Anne Hathaway, everything about him seems to invite overwhelming, irrational hatred.
I say this as someone who likes Megadeth a lot, who has paid to see them a handful of times and thinks they’re a great band, maybe even better than Metallica when they’re at the they’re best. I say all this as someone whose favourite Metallica song is the Mustaine-authored The Four Horsemen. (I also think the Megadeth redux of that song, The Mechanix, sucks. Like most bad Megadeth songs, it’s a pointlessly fast exercise in pure virtuosity, sacrificing that booming, socked-in-the-gut affect of really great thrash metal to a bunch of show-offy widdly-widdly crap.) I say this as someone who has an old “I KILL… FOR THRILLS” t-shirt that I still jimmy myself into from time to time even though it’s way, way, way too tight.
So I like Megadeth. A lot. Or enough, anyway. If I didn’t like Megadeth, I couldn’t properly hate Dave Mustaine.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Dave Mustaine. There’s the way he’ll contemptuously refer to Metallica as “the other guys” during Megadeth shows. There’s the way he licensed his silhouette to several blends of coffee manufactured by Net Worth Coffee Brokers. There’s his asinine politics. And not just in that adolescent “all politicians are robot puppet masters and we sway like marionettes dancing to the symphony of destruction” kind of way. He told Alex Jones (!) that Obama’s birth certificate was fake and asserted that the president had masterminded public shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin to advance a gun control agenda. He called gay metal fans “homos.” This sort of sentiment maybe stems from his totally grating born-again Christianity and the maybe connected fact that all he seems to wear onstage are billowy white button-down shirts that look like baptismal gowns. There’s his stupid double-guitars, a perfect articulation of Dave Mustaine’s needy “Hey, me too!” ostentation. There’s the time he publicly railed against a Men’s Warehouse outlet in Utah for witholding a gift certificate.
Still. Rack up all these public boners and defects in character and weigh it against how good Megadeth is and it breaks about even. There’s something more, some dangling remainder that makes Dave Mustaine such a fit receptacle for boundless contempt.
The problem is that he has exhausted his afforded allotment of pathos. He got a raw deal from Metallica 30 years ago, yes. But he won’t shut up about it.
There’s a scene in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 2004 Metallica doc Some Kind Of Monster (essential viewing even for people who don’t care about metal, if only to watch all the ballooned millionaire egos swirl around for two-plus hours) where Mustaine is invited to a therapy session with Ulrich. “It’s been hard to watch everything you guys do and touch turn to gold,” Mustaine whines to his former bandmate. “And everything I do fucking backfires. I’m sure there are some people who consider my backfires complete successes. But am I happy being number two? No…. Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through? People hate me because of you.”
Ulrich, naturally, rejects Mustaine. Just as he rejected Mustaine in 1983. Megadeth is a top-selling band, moving tens of millions of records, racking up nearly a dozen Grammy nominations. Yet Mustaine moans about it. Worse, he actively seeks recognition from the person who so famously scorned him, the source of all this apparent pain and personal anguish. And on camera! He attempts to settle his own pain by attempting to stir guilt in someone who alleges to care about. He is so obviously a self-undoing masochist, so clearly the architect of his own victimization. It’s impossible not be exasperated by the blatancy.
Even the plan that birthed Megadeth – “I’m going to found a rival band of the same genre to compete with the biggest band in the world by doing everything just a liiiiittttttle bit faster” – was doomed to fail, all the group’s many victories fated to be configured as defeats. Dave Mustaine is wrong. People don’t hate Dave Mustaine because of Metallica. They hate him because of Dave Mustaine.
Everyone loves an underdog. Mustaine had all the fundaments of being one of popular music’s great underdogs, the Rudy of American heavy metal. His talent is abundant. He had the sympathy of early thrash metal fans. He had all the narrative set-up for a real-deal, come-from-behind, hundred-to-one victory. In a way, he managed to make good on this narrative. Except with none of the class of someone who’s at all grateful, or even deserving, or their success.. Instead of being a true underdog, Mustaine’s just an also-ran.
The whole underdog arc doesn’t really work when the underdog keeps complaining about not being on top. Every time he opens his mouth, it’s like Mustaine is actively working to spoil the goodwill he’s been afforded. It’s frustrating. And, yes, just plain obnoxious. And who has time for it? Why go to a concert to cheer for a guy who, with every atom of his being, would rather be somewhere else?
Hating Dave Mustaine is a corrective to this, a neccesary intervention in his squandered come-from-behind story. He’s so weirdly and pathetically eager to repudiate his own success and assert himself as thrash metal’s sad-sack second banana that we – Megadeth fans, metal fans, music fans – are duty-bound to put him in place. Hating Dave Mustaine renders him truly pitiable and pathetic. Hating him reinvests him with the compassion he’s so inclined to squander. Hating him makes him an object of utter scorn and, in so doing, allows us to feel sorry for him for being such an object of scorn. Hating him makes him a proper underdog.
So let’s go see Megadeth, not just to boo Dave Mustaine, but to deflate that show-offy masochistic ego. Let’s go to tell him to shut up when he’s baited into talking politics on a late-night talk show. To stress that he’s not good enough for Metallica but good enough for us. To remind him that he’s kind annoying and, at the end of the day, just a big loser. And that that’s exactly why we liked him in the first place.
