DAVE MUSTAINE DISCUSSES GUITARS, HIS INFLUENCES, AND PLAYING WITH MARTY FRIEDMAN, AGAIN

Greg Prato of Heavy Consequence spoke with Megadeth‘s Dave Mustaine, highlights from the interview appears below.

Heavy Consequence: What does it mean for you to have your own Dave Mustaine Collection with Gibson?

Dave Mustaine: God, it means the world to me. I guess to some people it means that I’ve arrived [laughs]. It’s an American success story. If you keep trying and you do your best, great things will happen for you…

Heavy Consequence: Do you remember the first guitar you ever owned?

Dave Mustaine: I think the first guitar that I ever really owned that was anything worth mentioning was the first BC Rich that I got. I bought it from a music store up in Hollywood. I lived down in Huntington Beach – I was a little surf punk – and I got someone that I knew – one of my big-mouthed drunken friends from the time period back then – to take me up in her Volkswagen Beetle. And it came in a flight case. So the guitar was the BC Rich “Rich Bich 10-string” in a flight case, which was enormous… and we couldn’t fit it in her Bug. So, it was my entry into the world of being a guitar owner – the first journey home with the baby from the hospital was probably more memorable than the first year or so of even playing it.

Heavy Consequence: Who were some of acts that influenced and inspired you?

Dave Mustaine: Well, as far as really great guitar players at the time, everybody was kind of gravitating towards just a few bands. The lesser bands really didn’t get the time of day. So, of course the bands on everyone’s lips were KISS and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. A lot of people were talking about Aerosmith, as well. And I had just kinda stumbled onto AC/DC. And from there, it was pretty much off to the races – the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the British Invasion, both of those musical eras had really affected me. The rhythm playing and the songwriting from the British Invasion – the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who… surprisingly more of the Who than I even realized until later on in life.

And then the New Wave of British Heavy Metal for the soloing and the riff playing – because Americans play a lot of chords, and the people that are in the modern riff era are more of the speed and thrash metal players. And of course that includes death, black, all these other offshoots of metal. But unlike the rock and heavy metal bands in the States, where they do a lot of chords and sweep picking and stuff like that, the British metal players relied more on riffs, I believe.

Heavy Consequence: And speaking of guitarists, you welcomed back Marty Friedman for a gig in Japan earlier this year. What was that experience like?

Dave Mustaine: That was awesome. So, here’s the backstory: Marty and I were in the band together for a long time, and Marty had fallen in love with Japan. He was reading and writing and speaking it almost fluently – and married a Japanese girl. We were pretty big in Japan and we got offered a show at Budokan. And then I got sick and I had to be hospitalized. So, I canceled the Budokan show, and I didn’t really think about how that was going to affect Marty – because I was thinking about the good of the band as a whole. And he was heartbroken, ‘cause he wanted to do it so bad. So, that was part of the reason why Marty and I parted ways [in 2000].

And when Budokan came back up 23 years later, I knew I had to extend an invitation to see if he wanted to play with me. And he was on fire – he played great. You know, we all played really well… So, the fans that were there to watch this got to see something magical. We live-streamed it around the world, as well. So, there’s a lot of people who got to see it as it was going down. And the last point on that, we have the recordings of everything and are going to be hopefully releasing something in the future – either audio or video – containing those performances by Megadeth and special guest Marty Friedman.

Read more at Heavy Consequence.