Shawn Ryan Show - #203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Dave Mustaine is the co-founder, frontman, primary songwriter, and sole consistent member of the thrash metal band Megadeth. A pioneer of the American thrash metal movement, Mustaine formed Megadeth in 1983 after his departure from Metallica, where he served as lead guitarist and co-songwriter. With Megadeth, he has released sixteen studio albums, sold over 50 million records worldwide, earned six platinum certifications, and won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 2017 for the title track of Dystopia. Known for his intricate guitar work, snarling vocal style, and lyrics exploring war, politics, and personal struggles, Mustaine remains a towering figure in heavy metal. Despite overcoming challenges like substance abuse, a 2002 arm injury, and throat cancer in 2019, he continues to tour and create music, with Megadeth’s latest album, The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, released in 2022. He is working on his 17th album. Mustaine is also expanding his family’s wine venture, House of Mustaine, and mentors emerging artists. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www.americanfinancing.net/srs nmls 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://www.tryarmra.com/srs https://www.fastgrowingtrees.com/srs – USE CODE SRS https://www.shawnlikesgold.com https://www.hometitlelock.com – USE CODE SRS Go to https://www.hometitlelock.com/srs and use promo code srs to get a free title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim and 14 days of protection for free! Make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock Protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://www.hometitlelock.com/warranty https://www.lumen.me/srs https://www.ziprecruiter.com/srs https://www.rocketmoney.com/srs Dave Mustaine Links: Website - https://www.megadeth.com  X - https://x.com/DaveMustaine  FB - https://www.facebook.com/davemustaine  IN - https://www.instagram.com/davemustaine Megadeth - https://www.megadeth.com House of Mustaine - https://houseofmustaine.com As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases (paid links):Megadeath’s Greatest Hits - https://amzn.to/4m5cnJc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Mustaine, welcome to the show. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Ben, I've been super excited about this. Huge Mega Death fan, grew up listening to that stuff, and just to have you here is like, unreal. Thanks. Thank you for coming. Of course. But yeah so we're gonna do a life story on you. Starting a childhood all the way to today so could be a long day. You in for it?

I remember I was there so it should be pretty easy. Cool. Well everybody starts with an introduction. So here we go. Dave Mustaine, co-founder of Metallica where you helped lay the groundwork for Thrash Metal before parting ways in 1983. Mastermind behind Megadeth, a band that sold over 50 million records, earned six platinum albums and even a Grammy in 2017 for Dystopia. Working on your 17th Megadeth album to be released later this year, in June you'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of Megadeth's debut album Killing Is My Business and Business Is Good.

Thrash metal pioneer whose guitar prowess has landed you among the top guitarists of all time influencing generations of headbangers. Cancer survivor having beaten throat cancer in 2019 while still crafting one of Megadeth's fiercest album, The Sick, The Dying, and The Dead, which is the topic of a book you're working on called In My Darkest Hour. Now a Wittner with House of Mustaine, blending your passion for music with fine wine making, relaunching Megadeth beer in the UK and Europe with a Pilsner IPA and Zero beer called Rattlehead, a family man married to Pamela since 1991 with two children, Electra in Justice and most important out of everything, you're a Christian. Did I miss anything? I'm sure I missed a lot.

No, I think that was very, very honoring. Thank you for that. I did sell about 40 to 50 million records with Metallica,'s about about a hundred million records. So, wow. A hundred million records. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a third of the country. That's insane. That's insane.

But, um, so everybody gets a gift on the show. Nothing crazy. gets a gift on the show. Nothing crazy. vigilance league gummy bears made here in the USA legal in all 50 states. It's horrible. 38% I'll be eating these during the show man just candy. Yeah, candy. And then you my pleasure and then lastly we have a patreon account it's a community and subscription service that's actually turned into a community and they've been with me since the very

beginning when I started this in my attic and then we moved here and now we're moving to a new studio and they've just supported me and they're the reason that I get to sit here and do this. And, um, yeah. So one of the things that I do is, uh, I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Steven Casey. I heard Dave practiced, excuse me.

I heard Dave practiced Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. How did you get into that? Also, how does your worldview affect your music, theme and focus? I'll ask the second question first. How does it affect my worldview and focus? How does martial arts affect my worldview and focus? I think that's where he's going. I think he's talking more about your music. How does your worldview affect your music, name and focus? That's what I thought. So my worldview is, it's in flux, it changes over time. Something that I thought was okay when I was a teenager

certainly isn't okay now. Stuff that I thought wasn't okay seems absolutely normal right now. My thinking evolves. Just like anybody who has an open mind, I've been around the world and I've seen so many things that it makes me really grateful for where we live, but it also makes me grateful for the

the way in which we live. Going to some of the other countries that are socialist countries or other countries that maybe are third-world countries and the poverty level is extreme. You know, you want to say, hey, this person is just like me, and they are physiologically, but when it comes down to anything beyond them just standing in front of you, their whole existence is completely different. I can't go down to South America, for example, and expect somebody who's a fan, who is living under those pressures of poverty to know what

it's like to have your own house. I learned a long time ago that young people in Japan had a decision to make whether they're willing to purchase a vehicle or a house. They could not do both. And then to get back to your first question about Brazilian martial art, I'm working on my fourth black belt right now in BJJ. And it started with Benny the Jet Yukitas, who is in the Black Belt Hall of Fame, and he was my first black belt that I got in Yukito-Con.

And that was back in the 90s. And after that, I moved to Arizona, so I was unable to train with Sensei Beni anymore. And the closest, most convenient place for me to go work out was a Taekwondo school that was there. And I got a black belt in that really fast. And I was going for the master program, and I started to notice there were holes in the program.

Like I was teaching a kid's class and I grabbed the bottom of his gi and I pulled on it and he fell. And he started crying and I felt terrible. And then I thought, you know, this program doesn't teach people how to fall. But in the meantime, I got my black belt with that organization. And then we went to Korea and I got my third black belt in Taekwondo. And I got my fourth degree with the World Taekwondo Federation. And Mr. Chung was the president at the time. He was the one that had presented me my awards and my belts. And then the one thing that I always wanted to do was ground fighting because Yukito-Kan is a hybrid of nine different styles and one of the styles is Jiu-Jitsu. And it doesn't mean that it's

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or man on the moon Jiu-Jitsu, it's Jiu-Jitsu. But I found a school here. I went there and I didn't like the instructor or the owner, but I liked the head instructor there. And so much so that I helped him get a school on his own. We moved away from that original school. He opened up a school in Spring Hill and he opened up a second school in Columbia and it's a Renzo Gracie Jiu Jitsu.

So I'm, I have my night and my brown belt right now. And, and if everything goes according to plan and I stay in, in my training routine, I probably will have my black belt sometime the end of this year or next year. Wow. Wow. Long question, I'm sorry. No, that's, I mean, what got you interested in it at the beginning? Getting beaten up. Getting beaten up?

Yeah. The one thing I did know before I knew how to fight was that I didn't like taking shit from people. I didn't know how to defend myself, but I knew I did not like taking shit from people. Twelve years old, I joined the YMCA. My brother-in-law was the chief of police in Stanton, California, and he told me that the YMCA across from the police department was doing free karate classes. And I went, it was show in Rio. So it was more the traditional karate style. And I remember when I went and started taking classes there, the first thing we did, it was like within the first couple of classes was a tournament. And you know, I was still a white belt and you know, there's no striking to the face,

no striking to the grind. And first guy that I competed against kicked me in the grind and smacked me in the face and he was DQ'd but didn't change the fact that I could not finish. And so I just said, that's it for me and I went a different route and I started training in

Kung Fu Sansu after that for a little while. So I've had various training in different styles but I still think the best defense is to keep your eyes open and don't be a dick. Wow. Wow. Four, soon to be four black belts. Yeah, soon. Holy shit, man. That's a lot of training. What's your training regimen like?

Do you train often? Well, I have two privates a week and I have a gym in my house. One of your friends knows where we're at and has been there. So it's a little bit more than home gym. It's kind of like a semi-professional gym. We still need some stuff there but it has everything that you need to get a good workout in. Dan, that's awesome. Well Dave, let's get into the life story. Where did you grow up? All over the place. My mom and dad got divorced when I was four

and I was born in La Mesa and at that time all I really remember was about four years old when I was baptized as a Lutheran and then my mom and dad got a divorce and thus started the leapfrog game divorce and thus started the leapfrog game with my mom and the two youngest children that she had, myself and my sister Debbie. And whenever we would move, my dad would find us and usually would show up drunk and I loved him. I didn't understand alcoholism at the time. I was just a kid. And I certainly didn't understand why they didn't try to get him into a program, like a 12-step program, because they weren't in existence at the time. But, so, four years old until 13, I was with my mom.

We'd move from one sister to another sister, to my aunt on our own, back to another sister, back to the other sister. And it was always me and my sister Debbie who would be doing this leapfrogging because my two older sisters had both been married and had families, so they had some stability. I never knew that. My mom was Jehovah's Witness and when I was 13 I started playing guitar and at about 15 years old she said she'd had enough and she moved out and left me alone in an apartment and no money to pay rent. So I did not know what to do and I knew it was just a matter of time before I was going to lose the apartment.

So I did what any kid would do. I became an entrepreneur and I became a distributor of sorts. And so I was able to sell some stuff and be able to pay my rent. And eventually I was making enough money where I had a car and I was able to get some musical equipment. But in the meantime, we're still facing all the moves that had happened before then. And then as soon as I hooked up with Metallica,

the moving continued and moved from Huntington Beach up to San Francisco, out to New York, back to California to Costa Mesa, then up to Los Angeles where I finally started Megadeth. Whoa, let's rewind a little bit. There's a lot to unpack there. Sure, you asked. So four years old, your parents

separate. How many siblings do you have? I have three. Debbie is three years older than me and the other two were 15 and 18 years older than me and are both deceased. Were you close with them? The oldest one, yeah, but after a while, because they were following the guidelines of their religion. And I was supposedly a worldly person, and they did what their religion calls for. I was disfellowshipped, not officially, but basically I was not allowed to be around anybody. I couldn't come to meetings, I couldn't go to witnesses' houses and stuff like that, and I didn't care because I hated that religion. So were you,

I mean my editor and good friend grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, and then I don't know if you would call it escaped it, but that's what I would call it escaped it, but that's what I call it escaped it because it sounds very Extremely cultish. Yeah, and And they have they have destroyed his his relationship with his son and the rest of his family Is did you get sucked into the religion? No, I didn't like it. I'm a kid, I want to watch fucking cartoons, man. I don't want

to go to church. And when they would say, okay, you're going to, not only are you going to go out to church, but on the other day on the weekend, you're going to go out and knock on strangers' doors and try and sell them shit that they don't want. Right? I mean, there's people that the houses you knock on the doors probably have the same outlook I do. I don't want to be bothered on Sunday because I'm scratching my belly in my pajamas and I'm watching college sports. That kind of a thing, to me, it just sucked.

Then having the holidays taken away, not being able to hang out with friends. You know, you make friends in school and then they say, hey, you want to come over? Oh, I can't. Why? Because my mom's nuts. Geez. What age did that start? What age did you start getting sucked into? I think I was seven when she started.

And it went on until she moved out because I was selling pot for a living. What else does a 15-year-old have to do? Sell his ass, sell pot. I wasn't gonna sell my ass, so I sold pot. And I would go to rehearsal, and I would say to my mom before she had moved out, I would say to my mom before she had moved out,

I had a beginning of a relationship with marijuana. So sometimes I would have some and I would leave it and I would say, hey, somebody's coming by, just, there's something by the door, just tell them to leave the money. I think that happened maybe like two, three times. And then that was it. She was gone. Wow. Older sisters, Michelle, the oldest one, she actually was not one of the witnesses for a very long time. She actually went into witchcraft. That's where I learned my witchcraft from was my oldest sister Michelle. And then she somehow got re-recruited,

and she ended up being a witness again at the end. And she would talk to me, but it was kind of like an aunt kind of thing. And then my sister that was younger than her, the one that was 15 years older than me, she didn't want to have anything to do with me. She just died and even though she was awful to me, I did the right thing and paid for her to go to hospice

and paid for a nurse to be with them. For me, I work really hard for my money and it was for anybody else, it would have been a difficult decision if I would have thought about, this is the sister who's treated you like shit your entire life. Why are you going to do this? It ain't about what she thinks. It's about what God thinks. Am I doing the right thing with what I'm getting given? You know, my funds, my gifts. You know, it can be used for very bad stuff.

Was that a tough decision for you? To help my sister try to pass into the next world. You know, I thought she, being a Jehovah's Witness, would be so eager to get into heaven, you know? I mean, I don't understand the concept of heaven, so I would have thought she would have said, Chuck this old body, man, I'm out of here, but she fought and fought and fought and fought

and fought and fought and fought. And finally, the government out in California put her into hospice. I'd been paying for a very long time for a nurse for her. When people wonder what I spend my money on, that was a lot of it, was paying for my sister's transition into death. And then the youngest one, who's a little bit older than me, she's got a little bit of a mental illness, so I don't know what you would call it if it's depression or if

it's what? I don't know. But, um, we still talk, but she kind of talks like a baby when she talks to me. So, um, that's a little weird and, um, you know, every family has this stuff. We all do. We all, we all, you know, it's either, it's either your immediate bloodline, your, your family of origin, you know, maybe your immediate bloodline, your family of origin, you know, maybe your family of choice, your best friend, you know. I mean, I know a lot of people who I've been close with that aren't here anymore

and I'm thinking, for fuck's sake, man, I'm only 63. How is it that you've died already? I feel like I've still got a lot of life left in me. like I've still got a lot of life left in me. Man, did you ever get to make amends with your sister before she passed? Oh yeah, I did that a long time ago. I did go through the 12-step program and I made my personal moral inventory

of everything that I'd done and I read it to my sponsor and then I got prepared to go out and make amends to everybody except when to do so would injure others. You know, I'm not going to save my skin at somebody else's expense. And then I just continued the last three steps, you know, keep taking moral inventory of my stuff, carry the message in all my affairs. I'm not in the 12-step, but it shows you how it worked in my life. I can recite a lot of it.

If you boil it down, it goes back to the Sermon on Mount anyways. It's just the attitudes. That was adopted by the Washingtonian group who got adopted by AA. And then AA was the groundwork for the other fellowships that came after that like CA and NA and GA and OA. I know we're going to dive into this in a little bit, but how did your sister get involved in witchcraft? Oh? Michelle was

She was a very determined woman. She was one of the first people who applied to join the Navy in our our county and for some reason the Navy wasn't accepting women at the time and they just they just, I don't know if it was a moment where they weren't accepting them or if they hadn't opened up the idea of having women in the Navy, because I seem to think that there were women in the Navy

that were really old and it just kind of defies logic that she wouldn't be able to do it unless there was a moment where they said, and we're not taking any more women. But she was really determined and she married a guy that I really just, I looked up to him so much. He's my brother-in-law, Stan. And I already told you about the first one who was the chief of police

in Stanton, California. Well, this one was a motorcycle cop for the California Highway Patrol. I don't know what's up with my sisters being drawn to Leos, but you know, it is what it is. So that particularly sucked when my mom would move in with my sister because they were both very large men and they would have to do the unthinkable.

And I know they hated it, but they would come home, and my sister would say, well, David was the oldest, and these guys got in trouble, so he's had his nose in the corner for an hour, and you need to give him a spank. And the fuckers both had gun belts, and that's what I got spanked with, was the leather belt that they kept all of their tools on.

But I thought it was cool. So your sister's husbands would discipline you? Yeah, because I didn't have a dad in the picture. My mom would empower them to be my surrogate role model, surrogate father kind of thing. So it was really fucked up. It was psychotic. This is part of that whole witness thing. So, um, you know, What do you mean it's part of the witness thing? Well, we have problems with somebody who needs to be disciplined. They, uh, they help, uh, women that have kids that aren't listening by singling them out and getting people around them to talk to them in usually a less than

edifying way. I was never put in one of those situations where my sister Debbie was. She had done something, gone out somewhere with another guy that was in the church that they went to, and some girl that liked the guy made up a story that they were... and never happened. But the church believed this other girl because her dad was one of the executives in the church. They call them overseers, so of course you're going to believe

the daughter-in-law is an overseer because they're a hierarchy. They're, you know because they're a hierarchy. They're pious. They're without any spot, no blame. They're spotless. So their kid can come up with a story like my sister banging some guy and never happened. And of course, she's disfellowshipped and traumatizes her because, again, the social circles and what happens when you don't have people that you associate with on a regular basis. I was talking to Darren earlier and I told him, I said, you know, we have the people

that we would associate with and there would be two days that we would see people on Wednesdays and on Sundays, unless you went out in service on Saturdays. And you didn't really get a chance to associate with people, so your social life was very stunted. I feel like a lot of the young people in organized religion, this particular one didn't think about the social hardships that it was going to be for young people growing up.

You know, it's kind of like the M. Night Shyamalan's movie, The Village, you know, we were in the village. Wow. Wow. And your sisters were okay with her, were they husbands or their husbands? Yeah, yeah, my brother-in-law's how bad did it get? The spankings. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know the gun belt's like two three inches wide it's about three eighths of an inch thick leather so one swat with that hurt like hell and You know, it wasn't like I was beat every day

But whenever anybody got in trouble, I got it, because I was the oldest. And I had both of those sisters had kids that were just a little bit younger than me that were boys. So we would all be together. Even though I was their uncle, we would go out and do stuff as three kids, because we're all we had.

We didn't have anybody else. We weren't allowed to play with normal people. And we would go someplace, we would shoplift something, we would light a fire in a field, we would break something, we'd throw a ball, break out a street light, throw somebody's shoes over a wire, whatever. And they would just go nuts.

So damn. How did she get into witchcraft? Oh, Michelle. Yeah. So she got into this thing with with Stan. She married Stan. Stan was like I said, he was a really, really creepy guy. He's a really awesome guy. Good looking and and. You know, wrote a Harley. I mean, First thing in the morning the whole neighborhood vibrated and who wouldn't want to be married

to a cop like that? And his tour that he had to do every day was Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. That doesn't suck. suck, right? So anyways, he left her and she was heartbroken and she went crazy and she started pursuing alternate means because God had not worked for her. The God of the witnesses that she'd been praying for her husband to come back didn't work for her. And she... I had ran away from home and I moved up to Idaho and I was living with her and her kids in a trailer, which was awful, just fucking awful. And she went to work one day and I started playing hooky from school

because my nephew had told people at the school I was a martial artist guy and the first day I got there I got cold cocked and I figured I'm not going to the school because I'm not going to deal with this every day. So I started playing hooky I figured I would run away back to home but one day I went back into where her bedroom was and there was a candle that was on her desk that had melted and it had some substance in the top of it, looked like moss. There was a picture that was burnt in half and it was a hex to have him leave the girl he left my sister for, who was a big blonde bombshell from a bar and to come back to my sister, who was not a big bombshell blonde. And I'll be damned if he didn't come back.

Are you serious? He came back. He came back. So I figured, wow, this has got to work. And I saw the book. It was just a little piece of paper. It was like, you know, you fold it in half and that's a page. And it was like a 20 page booklet or something like that.

And it had a couple of hexes in there and I tried two of them and they both worked too. So at that point, I had to tell my wife what I had done and we started on the journey of trying to get the oppression, the demonic oppression that had happened to me by opening up my defenses and asking for the dark prince to help me put a hex on somebody. That really fucked my life up. And it took years for us to get out of it because we were going to San Francisco up to Filipino priests that would lay hands on you.

And I had some Indian Rajahs that would do cupping and acupuncture and crazy stuff like that. What were your hexes? Well, one was, um, one was something that had to do with the guy that actually punched me at school. Um, what happened was we, uh, we went to school that day. Excuse me. It went to school that day and, um, the guy walked up to me and just slugged me. I went to school that day and the guy walked up to me and just slugged me and he said he was going to see me after school.

Now we rode a normal school bus to one point and then the bus stopped and all the kids got out for a smaller bus that would take us out into the rural area. And so we stop, we get out, and everybody circles around the two of us like we're gonna fight right there. And I'm thinking, Oh my god, this is going down. So everything I'd learned up to that point, you know, was was going through my mind. And the second bus shows up and we get in the bus and we take off. And he's coming up to his house and he walks through the

walkway in the bus and elbows me in the back of the head as he's getting out. And I was trying to fit in, so I had a mouthful of red man. And I was trying to get into the whole chewing tobacco thing because that's what everybody else was doing. And when he hit me, I went, oop, and I swallowed that shit. So I went back to my sister's trailer and I got really really sick and I figured that's it I'm

gonna do something about this so I looked through the book and I found something that would do what I wanted and and I did that hex and then there was another one what did you want to happen? I really don't want to get into it, because I don't want anybody to be misled and try and figure out what I did and go down that route, because it was a terrible deviation from what was good and right in the world for me.

Of course, that power's out there. Without black, there's no white. But it was just, for me after that happened, I realized that I really don't wanna talk about this. Really don't wanna get anybody interested in it. So I'll talk about it to the degree that I'm comfortable with, where I know that nobody can be misled from it.

And then you did another one? I did a second one and that one was, it was something when I had moved back to California already. And there was somebody that I wanted and I was just, you know, I was an ugly redheaded freckle-faced kid with short hair and sweat rings. And I didn't have any chance of being with this girl, but everybody in school wanted to be with this girl. So I figured, what the hell? I say that quite a lot in my life. Right? And we were together, and then we weren't.

And it worked again. Wow. Yeah. So what is, I mean, I don't know much about witchcraft. You don't want to. What is the, in a snapshot, what is it? Is it... Well, there is a understanding that there are black witches and white witches, that there are witches that do good.

But witchcraft is still witchcraft. It's the use of the elements and there's alchemy, there's wizardry, sorcery, electricity, magic, there's use of blood, use of spit, use of sperm, use of all of these things that are all part of what was created and being used in an unnatural way. So for me, when I walked away from practicing any kind of witchcraft, cause I, I didn't practice it. I did it two times and both of them worked. And then I went, this is bigger than I am and I'm not going to mess around with this. And so, um, both the song, the conjuring and, uh, and there was another song that was kind of along

from that inspiration from that experience it was Bad Omen. Wow. You know earlier you had mentioned we were talking about your sister passing you had mentioned that you don't understand the concept of heaven. Do you still not understand the concept of heaven? Well, see, that's probably, you know, as soon as I said that, I thought, you know, there's probably going to be some people that think I don't believe in heaven. See, the thing is, I'm willing to believe in it, and I'm willing to believe in it and I'm willing to be wrong. It's like Pasquale's equation when he said, it's better to live like there's a God and die and find out there isn't one than to live like there is no God and die and find out that there is one. So God. And I like to look forward to my life. I want to live

a long time. I don't want to die and go to heaven right now because I'm in a very human way selfish and I want to spend time with my family, with my granddaughter, with my son, with my daughter, with my wife. I love making music. My career's full stop right now. And, you know, the idea of just saying, oh, I give up, let's go ding ding. That to me is not what I wanna do. Do I believe in streets of gold and all that kind of stuff? Well, there's a lot of documentation about that in the Word, but I don't necessarily

remember everything because of part of the cancer treatment. The chemo brain is something that happens when you get chemotherapy and the radiation and chemo treatment that I had was really gnarly. So, do I believe when I die I'm going to go to heaven? Yeah, hope so. What do you envision heaven like? I don't know. See, that's the whole thing. I always have this picture of clouds and a gate,

and you walk through it, and then it's like I think, you know, do I want to go to heaven? No. I want to spend more time with my wife, because if I go to heaven and I'm time with my wife because if I go to heaven And I'm not with her if I go to heaven and and we're not together as a couple anymore that that would make me sad and You know I get real emotional when I think about that, so I don't want to talk about it Rewinding just a little bit of

If you don't mind I'd like to dig a little bit more into childhood. You can do whatever you want. It sounds like you've had a rough go as a kid. And I find that a lot more common than I'd like to, especially during these interviews. It blows my mind how many kids grow up in a dangerous, It blows my mind how many kids grow up in a dangerous, abusive, uncomfortable, shit environment. And so, growing up with an alcoholic father, and you'd mentioned that he would find where

you guys live and you would have to move again. What kind of stuff were you dealing with? And the reason I'm asking is because I know there's a lot of kids that watch this that are going through that. And I know a lot of them feel trapped in where they are and they're looking for hope. And so I just want to kind of talk about your

experience with, with an abusive father and the stuff that happened with you, with your, with your sister's husband. Well, see, I loved my dad. I didn't know what was going on. I was still really young. I remember to this day when we were living on one particular street in Costa Mesa and my mom and my dad were still together. They must have tried another time because I don't believe I was four at the time. I believe I was a little older, but they for sure got divorced at four.

And I remember kissing him good night and his stubble on his face, and he always smelled like a pipe, like cherry vanilla pipe. So I grew up to love that smell. Now, the things that I was told about my dad that I never saw was that my dad had slashed on my mom's tires so she couldn't get away. That he had cut his hands and he rubbed his blood all over my mom's face.

And that he'd smacked her a few times and spit in her face and what do I know? Do I think that's real? Probably is. It probably is. Do I wish I knew? Yeah. But do I know now after going through treatment so many times that a lot of times when people are in the throes of spirits or medication or street drugs, any kind of thing like that, the whole

reason that people do anything like that is to break the reality, just to have a momentary break in reality so that you can feel anything but what you're really feeling right now. I just want to feel something different. I don't know if I want to go up or go down or go sideways. I just want to feel something different. I hate my life. I hate my job. I hate my life, I hate my job, I hate my relationship, and I have nothing to live for, and I know I don't want to kill myself because I'm afraid of killing myself.

And the choices sit there and, you know, just be miserable, or someone will come around and say, like, hey, man, let's have a drink. And it's usually at stars. A drink, another drink, another drink. And if you're someone like me, the reason why I don't drink hard liquor is because once I get to the point where I take one

and I go, ah, the second one I'm gonna go, oh. And the third one I'm gonna go, whoops. And it's just a place in my life right now for that. I'll see people when they're in our presence, meet and greets, concerts, stuff like that, and they'll be clearly inebriated, and we'll try and be real considerate of that and make sure that they're being handled in a proper way because sometimes they say

stuff that makes them look like they're an aggressor but they're just a rambunctious fan who's intoxicated. So back to the thing with my dad, there was those stories that I had heard, but then again I go back to the same thing I said previously about I don't know why they didn't try and take him to a treatment facility because he was a vet. He was in the Army. I know he had a problem with the VA. And I know he had some kind of disease.

He had gout. That was one of the things he had. And he had some other kind of diseases because when he passed away, I went to his apartment and I found his Masonic ring and then I found these jars that were full of medication and they were big jars. They were like peanut butter sized jars, not the little ones you get from the pharmacy. They're big. So whatever he was dealing with, he had enough medication there to last, in my estimation, a very long time, unless he was eating them like candy.

When did he pass? How old were you? I was 17 when he died, and he had been working in a bar. He was working for National Cash Register at the time. He went from being the West Coast branch manager of Bank of America to being a guy that worked on cash registers because of his alcoholism. And I'm sure that that was unbearable for him. So he's in a bar, he's working on a cash register.

They said he fell off a stool. All I know is that he was in a bar and his head hit the ground. Whatever transpired between him walking through the front door and him walking out in a stretcher, it's an enigma to me. But he had a mass cerebral hemorrhage and he was in the hospital. My sister called me up and they said, Daddy's in the hospital. You need to come now. And all I had for transportation at the time was a moped because my mom had left me. I took the moped with my surfboard down to the beach every day. That's all I needed transportation for.

I got the call and I grabbed a bottle of whiskey. It was this stuff called Old Granddad. It was awful. I started driving down Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach to Costa Mesa to go to the hospital where my dad was. He was already dead, he was in a coma and he was in the fetal position

and I walked into my sister Suzanne, the middle one, goes, you're gonna end up just like daddy. And I hated her from that moment on. Before then, I didn't hate her. I was confused why she had ostracized me. I hated her from that moment on. Before then, I didn't hate her. I was confused why she had ostracized me, but when she said that, I just figured, you're just rotten. And I'm not gonna have anything to do with you anymore.

And we stayed out of touch for a very long time. How much time had passed since between the last time we saw your father and when he when he died? Well the funny thing was when my mom moved out I I had called him up and it was the first year and I like I said it was 17 and I had it was Father's Day and I called him up and I said, hey, Dad, I'm living on my own now and I'd really like to come down and see you for Father's Day. And he said he'd really like that.

So I went down and I saw his apartment and it was just bare bones. And I opened up his fridge and there was a piece of meat in there on a plate like a pot roast Nothing else and and at the time I didn't put everything together that this is this is Not acceptable. This is not this is not okay. This is my dad. What's going on here? I just went down and I figured this is the first step because it's the first time I'd ever seen my dad in a neutral territory where my mom wasn't saying her mantra which was you're gonna go live with your father. So I was always

threatened with my father at the end of the sentence you know you're gonna get your head shaved with your father. Anything like that stupid shit they would just say you're gonna get this with shaved with your father." Anything like that stupid shit. They would just say, You're gonna get this with your father. And when they would say I was gonna go move with them, after a while I started to fear that. And I needed to find out for myself. And I went and I met him.

I saw him for the man that he was. He was a sick man. And he wasn't weak by any means. He was sick. What was the conversation like? It was very, very shallow. It was very strained. I think he knew how badly he had let me down as his son. I can tell you, when I do stupid stuff like cuss around my son's daughter,

I feel like I've done the unthinkable. So when my dad had to face what he did, I'm sure it was 100 times manifest and so many times worse, all the things he had to face and think of. Because I've never done anything like bled on my wife, or spit on her, or slash her tires, or anything like that. Whenever we get in an argument, I know that I love her too much to say anything

that I would regret. So I usually walk away. And you know, I get hit with stuff as I'm walking away. Don't walk away. Come back here and fight. But, you know, it's usually better. I let her cool off. And then, you know, every couple has that. You know, if you really love somebody,

you got to face the fact that you're two completely different people trying to live together. Did you, did the relationship with her with her dad develop more or was that the only time he saw him before he died? That was the one and only time I had seen him. Damn. Ever without any kind of conditioning by my mom. Damn. Usually he would come over the first week of school and my mom would let him bring over stuff like pencils and school products for the list that they give you when you start each school year.

You need to get your notebooks and you're this and you're that. My mom would have him provide that for us. I don't know that he ever gave her child support. That could have possibly been a problem, but she's, like I said, it's an enigma. I just don't know. How did the, so your mom left at 15. Did you continue a relationship with her? Tried.

We talked. She would come over and maybe once every couple of weeks and do stuff like clean my house or come over to maybe cook something. I think it was her way of making sure I didn't die, but you know, because she still was a mom and I still was her son no matter what religious organization had a hold of her mind, her heart still belonged to her maternal production, for lack of a better word, that I was. How did you get into dealing?

That was, like I said, I started off messing around a little bit and then I figured out I would sell it. It wasn't like something that happened overnight. I was going to Marina High School. There was a place they had that went over this moat that ran around the school. It was called the bridge and all the kids that were the bad kids would go out on the bridge so I would go out there and people would sell joints. And stuff that you hear on Cheech and Chong records, Acapulco Gold and Colombian and

Sinseme and stuff like that, that's what the pot was called back then. And I remember we would go out there during lunch and everybody smoked joint, you know, you'd get one puff off of it and then you'd go back to go eat lunch and then go to class. Unfortunately for me, algebra was after lunch and I got an F in algebra. But all the other classes I had that were philosophical in a sense like English, stuff like that, social studies, those were things that were enjoyable for me when I was in high school. Did you deal with any other types of abuse, any sexual abuse, anything like that?

Me, myself? Yeah. You know, it depends on what people say abuse is, because if you see stuff that you shouldn't see, that's abusive. And see stuff that you shouldn't see, that's abusive. And I saw stuff I shouldn't see. And for me, I think that, you know, it's one of those things that you have to break the chains.

You have to. Because maybe it wasn't my dad, maybe it was his dad, but doing something like that, I believe is a spiritual trespass on somebody. You're talking about generational trauma. Yeah, any kind of bloodshed or any kind of sexual abuse, stuff like that, because the sins of the father are revisited

onto generations. And, you know, I was having a hard time with stuff and we did a bunch of ancestral research and found out that there was a lot of war in my family and a lot of warriors and a lot of bloodshed consequently. So we had to really face a lot of that stuff. And I'm not a violent person by nature. Like I said, one of the best things I've ever learned about fighting is not to. If you don't mind me asking, we don't have to go there. What kind of stuff did you see?

Oh, sexual stuff? Well, I saw stuff with some cousins that I had that were kind of fooling around with other people and it was something that they thought it was kind of fun to show us kids and to me I think that's sexual abuse. Yeah, nine years old you don't need to witness somebody having intercourse with somebody else. As far as anybody trying to sexually abuse me, that hasn't happened, fortunately for me. As far as my family is concerned, we're golden. Ever since our children were born, they've been treated like gold. And

there was never anything that we would make sure that they didn't watch any inappropriate movies for their age. Even at this time with Electra being in her mid-20s, when she's in the front room watching movies with her mom and there's too much cussing, I'll go, you guys, you know? And here I am, you know, I can't get to a sentence without saying fuck, and you know, it's like that guru that's on the internet that says all the great ways you can use fuck in a sentence. But when I hear it and I hear my family saying it,

I'm like, come on, man, don't do that. You're late, stop it, you know? Goofy, right? I get it, come on, don't do that. You're a lady, stop it. Goofy, right? I get it, I get it. Well, I wanna ask you, we'll take a break here in a minute, but before we do, like I had mentioned earlier, there's a lot of kids that are in broken homes right now and facing the unthinkable.

And so, what advice would you have for a kid that's in that kind of a situation? The first thing is to say something about it. As embarrassing as it is to let it continue to happen is in a very twisted way, kind of allowing it to happen. And you know, you don't want to be a co-conspirator in your own sexual abuse, you know. There are certain circumstances I'm sure of,

I have a vivid imagination where people are in circumstances where they cannot get out of a circumstance where they're being sexually abused. And that's where I think you need to say something to who? To anybody. First person you fucking see, say something. You know, because if you're being sexually abused in your child, that person is doing the unthinkable. If you're adult and you're being sexually abused, there are laws for that, equally the same ones with children. And stuff that's taken by force, there are laws for that.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we should go back to the death penalty for rapists. Part of me says yes and part of me says no. But I think when you do that, because you're taking a piece of somebody's life away forever. Yeah, you're destroying their innocence. Yeah. And they're going to think about that moment for the rest of their life. Something's wrong with me. Do you, I mean I think it's pretty obvious, I bet you know some of your family downstairs, your wife and your son,

seems like you've broken the generational curse. Yes we have. Did your siblings, did your siblings, were they able to break that? I don't know. Let's go down the chain. Michelle, she passed away recently from leukemia and a bunch of blood diseases. And I think that could be because of what she did. I talk to my uncle, her husband Stan, every once in a while because he's still kind of like my childhood hero. My next sister Suzanne, she passed away from

Parkinson's disease just this year and her husband died a long time ago, and he was the police chief. And I made amends with him before he passed away, which was good. And the amends with him was really weird, because I told him, I said, I needed to make amends for you, and I'll never get over my drinking unless I clean up the wreckage of my past. And I've seen I've done the following harm to you. I made you have to discipline me,

and I know you didn't want to do that. And I need to say that I need to know what I can do to make it right. Not sorry, because I said sorry so much it became a fucking character reference. But when I would say I need to make amends to you and I see I've done the following harms, you know, and what can I do to make this right? Some people would say I don't ever want to see you again. Some people will say you know what,

I'm looking forward to see you in heaven, but not down on earth and other people would say you know know what, just stay sober. Or one guy said, I want a guitar. And I went, inside I was rolling my eyes. But on the outside I went, OK, that's what you want, and that's what I'll do. That's the price, the dummy tax that I spent. Right on. Right on. Well, Dave. Let's take a quick break sure

All right, Dave we're back from the break Let's get into how you got into heavy metal Alright Dave, we're back from the break. Let's get into how you got into heavy metal. Well that was, again, not having a social network of people that were my age that I hung out with my sister's boyfriend's little brother. So my sister got married when she was 17. Oh, wow.

Yeah. To this guy, who they're divorced now. And he's not anybody I ever want to see again in this world. And he had a guitar, but his little brother had a bass. And I remember going to the little brother, his name was Mark, to his house. And he was listening to some records with his friends. And we just smoked a joint and we thought that we were the coolest kids in the world. And we had some, there were some girls

that were in the neighborhood. Mark had a girlfriend, and her girlfriend had a friend, so I hooked up with her, and we had everything to be in a rock band except talent and instruments, right? So my brother-in-law, Mike, the older one, had this guitar. It was a piece of junk called the Supra. And he was playing guitar. He was playing some Deep Purple at the time, which is not a band that I'm really fond of. I respect the players tremendously, but it's not really my type of music. But I did understand the playing was very cyclical.

It was something that did not reminisce in any way American music, because American music was a lot of rock and roll stuff. So there was a chord, followed by another chord, followed by another chord, which would go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, little bit of a middle eight section, like a refrain, and then a chorus and the song's over, maybe two minutes, three minutes, then it started getting a little longer. So I had my first introduction to playing the guitar through Mark and Mike Balli. The first time I ever actually played the guitar was my cousin John O'Dell. He had Gibson Les Paul back then. God, what I would give to have

that guitar from him. He showed me how to do a a bar chord and I knew how to do that. And one of the first songs I ever learned was a song called Panicking Detroit that was done by David Bowie. And the next one was All the Young Dudes by Mata Hoopal. And I can't remember which one was first. It was one or the other of those two, but those were basically the two songs I started playing and then I heard Led Zeppelin and I thought, God, this is just amazing but it's so difficult. And I started to learn how to play and started to get drawn more to the guitar. Right after Led Zeppelin it was Ted Nugent and Kiss. Those were really influential bands and so now I'm starting to see the

visual. I'm starting to hear the mystical with Led Zeppelin. And I'm hearing the blue collar stuff with Deep Purple and so on. Ted Nugent being, back in the day, the Motor City Madman, he had some really amazing songs for the time. I still think he's an amazing guitar player. I know that a lot of people don't like Ted, but I think that my guitar playing has a lot of influence from Ted Nugent, as well as once I started to get into the new wave of British Shave Your Mouth, because the first time I got involved in music was the British Invasion.

So for my songwriting, learning how to songwrite, it was primarily bands like The Stones, The Hoob, The Beatles, so on and so forth. And then when I started to pick up guitar, I started to learn the new wave of British Heavy Metal, which was bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Diamond Head, Motorhead, so on and so forth. And there was a total difference

because how I write a song is not based off of what I can play on guitar. Because I can play guitar to the level that I can, I can write songs that are a little bit more explorative. So you learned how to write before you learned how to play? Well, no, that's not exactly right. What I learned about songwriting was from the British Invasion. Okay. So, from listening to The Beatles. Also, my sisters were very much into Motown. So Megadeth has its swing and its groove from the Motown influence that I had.

You know, Sam and Dave, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family, Stone, Chaka Khan. There's so many bands from back then that the R&B stuff would be played at my house. Plus, it was sometimes the only thing you could hear on the radio. There's a radio station in Los Angeles called K-Earth, K-Earth 101, and it plays oldies. And I love the oldies. So you picked that up, it sounds like you picked it up relatively quick. Picking it up, it happened at a really good time in my life where I was looking for something because I was playing Little League and I was really, really good at it. But I also knew the reality was that I was never going to be a professional baseball player

because, you know, I'm not stupid. So, um... You know I'm not stupid, so I became a rock star instead. Well, that's not... That's hilarious. It's not a dichotomy. It's it's more along the lines of me knowing the the Odds for being able to become a professional baseball player. I was not

Huge in stature. It was not a big person in order the position I played was a catcher and most catchers in professional baseball are solid guys. They're much more are solid guys. They're much more tolerant and heavier than I was. So I was thinking, you know, part of the reason that I liked playing that position was because I got to almost sit there in the whole game. It's just, excuse me, it's just funny that, you know, what are the odds of becoming a professional baseball player? I don't know. What are the odds of becoming a rock star?

Well, see, that was, I made up my mind I was going to do that. That's different. You made up your mind that you were going to become who you are today all the way back then or it just happened? When I was a child, after I stopped playing Little League, I knew that I needed to make a decision in my life, obviously. Living on my own, I'm selling marijuana, and I'm not happy. I'm alone.

And as bad as things were, this was worse. Being alone was worse. I knew that I needed to do something. How old were you when you started? Playing guitar? I was 13. My mom had gotten me an acoustic guitar when I had graduated from some grade. I don't know what it was, but she got me an acoustic guitar from Pier One Imports and it was a piece of shit, but I started plucking around on it. My sister was playing piano and my mom had got her a piano and me a piece of shit acoustic guitar.

So again, here I am, the last kid getting the tough kid's blue jeans that somebody else's already for a few years. So I started playing guitar to play along with her and then it became clear to me that she wasn't getting any better. So I stopped playing with her and I started playing by myself. And once I met her boyfriend and her boyfriend's little brother, That's when I started really focusing. And I just, the thought of me not being that person, not being a rock star, it just didn't cross my mind because I had nothing else to, you know, it's like an officer in a gentleman where the guy says,

I don't have anywhere else to go. I didn't. Damn. And so when was Panic Born? About when I was't. Damn. And so when was Panic Born? About when I was 18. 18 years old? Yeah. Had you done any live performances before then?

Little weird stuff. Like I went with the little three piece group that I was in for like a day for, it was for a dance. And they were having a battle of the bands and we only knew one song and they said we were too loud. So we missed out on that one. And then I started playing at my cousin's house down in Dana Point.

And we did several concerts down there. And that's basically where Megadeth was born was out of my cousin John's front room in Dana Point. Wow. Wow. You mean, you mean Panic? No, Megadeth was born there because the songs that are in Megadeth were being played in Panic at that time. So Megadeth was born at that time, although I

didn't know it. I was in the guise of panic, but really Megadeth had just broken surface tetraferm and now I'm going to watch this whole thing unfold before my eyes. Am I going to Now, I'm going to watch this whole thing unfold before my eyes. Am I going to be able to handle the pressure? I think so. I've had a lot of pressure in my life. Am I going to be able to stay relevant? I think so because I've had to almost teach myself because of dropping out of school and having to figure everything out for myself.

Right now, I'm writing a song on the art of war because I've got a song that just sounds like a fucking samurai song. And I thought it'd be really great because I've read the art of war so many times to maybe put that book as a muse to help me write a story about something related with the samurai culture or the way of life. How did you get into the art of war? I've read a lot of really good books to help me. I started very early reading all the self-help books you could get, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, all those books.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, I read a bunch of C.S. Lewis books, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read a bunch of C.S. Lewis books, read tons of books, and just stuff that gives you a different perspective on stuff. It may not be real, it may not be appropriate, it may not fit, but it helps me to maybe understand somebody else a little bit more. And how did you guys come up with the name Panic? Panic? Man, I was a teenager. That was the best thing I could come up with. Pretty good name. Yeah, it was pretty good at the time. And I remember there was

another band that was called Panic at the Disco, and I always wondered who had it first because I never really did the research and see when those guys actually started started but I think there was another band that was called panic to at some point what was I mean so let's just talk about your first time doing something live, how many people showed up and was that a rush to you to see? Well, the first time that we played we were in my cousin's apartment and you know, apartments, they're not generally gigantic places to live in. So I think the room probably was, his front room was probably about two thirds the size of this room and we had our gear set up and

my cousin was very well known in Dana point and He had let all his friends know hey my cousin David's coming I hate when he calls me David my cousin David's coming down from Huntington Beach to do Jam with his band. People there, it's a block party. Oh shit. Yeah. So I'm hiding in the bathroom and getting ready to play. We go out and we start playing the song set we'd learned

and we played a couple originals I had. We played what ended up being Hangar 18 there because it was called N2RHQ at the time. It was a tail number on a plane that I had seen one time and I thought, what does that say? And I wrote down N2RHQ. It's probably not what the fin had on it anyways or the tail had on there.

And I thought about what it would be like to have a place in outer space that was a new existence like for example skyline and So that was how that song started and it morphed as it went into Megadeth we changed the name and changed the lyrics just a little bit. How did it I mean? as we changed the name and changed the lyrics just a little bit. How did it, I mean, just like five minutes ago, you're talking about how alone you felt as a kid and that got you into kind of got you into music and stuff. And so what's it like to go, I mean, how did it feel for you to go from completely alone to an entire block party wanting to see you play?

to go from completely alone to an entire block party wanting to see you play? Well, it was... it felt wonderful, obviously, but it was very foreign. I'd never experienced anything like that. I mean, the games at the Little League Park, that was great. You hit a home run. I was tied for first place for our home runs that were hit in one of the last seasons I played down there. And I wasn't by any means a ringer, but you know, it was two kids. He hit four, I hit four, but kids weren't hitting home runs.

And that was cool. I don't know why I keep going off on this baseball stuff, but you know, the people that were in the bleachers cheering and stuff like that, that felt good. That felt good. But it wasn't a routine occurrence. How routine did it become? It was a weekend thing with Little League. Sometimes you would have an after-school game,

but usually it was weekends, and not always did we win or not always did I have VIP performance. I mean the the the the concerts the concerts. Okay, so that would happen about maybe once every And what's a month maybe once a month? It only happened I think four or five times down there and then we did a couple parties up in the Huntington Beach, George County area and then I left because it was just getting because it was just getting the drugs that were going around. There was a whole other scene that I never knew about until we started playing. As soon as we started playing, we were at a friend's house, there was a party,

and some people from another neighborhood came to this party and they dumped a bunch of things that were called reds I think it's barbecues and they dumped that into the fruit punch that they made this they had fruit punch and vodka and somebody came there and dumped a bunch of these other drugs in there and Everybody was falling out in the place and they ended up getting robbed. It was just a bad scene so that and everybody seemed to start showing up with somebody who did or somebody who knew somebody who did or had cocaine. And it was just, that was the time of the, in my life where cocaine

was prevalent everywhere. It was in the eighties and yeah. How old were you at this point? everywhere. It was in the 80s and yeah. How old were you at this point? It depends what part of the ages I'm talking about. If it was when Megadeth started, that started later. Panic didn't go from being functional to being Megadeth overnight. Yeah. I, when I was in Panic, obviously I went to Metallica and then got back in Megadeth. And the stuff that I learned in Panic, I took with me to Metallica and I think that's part of the reason why Lars was letting me help settle shows and being the spokesperson for

the band until we got management. I mean, I'm talking about the very beginning of Panic. How old were you when that, when that started? That probably, like I said, it was probably around 18 maybe. Wow. Yeah, I think so. Maybe about 18. Wow.

And you mentioned this other scene. What else was going on in this other scene. What else was going on in the other scene that you did not like? It sounds like Panic was kind of a dark, not kind of, a dark period in your life. I know you lost some friends. Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people died. And it just kind of seemed like there was bad stuff that was supposed to happen to just test me.

What did happen? Oh, well, that first band, Panic, there was a lot of death. The guitar player, myself, the drummer, the bass player, and the singer were down in Dana Point and it was our first show. And it was time for everybody to go to bed. Right? So my cousin says, you can sack out here, you can sack out here, you can do this. The drummer and the sound guy, guy's name was Joe and the drummer's name was Mike. They say, no, we want to drive home. And I said, it's day and a point, it's nighttime, you guys are buzzed, and you're going to drive all the way back up to Huntington Beach.

Bad idea. Don't do it." And they did it, and the driver, Joe, fell asleep while he was driving on Pacifico Sideway right south of the Huntington Beach Pier. He hit a control box for the traffic signals, and the car flipped on its side and burst into flames. The driver Joe was impaled by the steering column and he broke his neck and he died at the scene and

Mike never woke up in the backseat. He was burnt to death. And then shortly after that Tom, the guitar player, And Mike never woke up in the backseat. He was burnt to death. And then shortly after that, Tom, the guitar player, had driven off of the freeway where there was a huge embankment like roads up here. You know, when they had those things that are down the side, you can look down, there's a parking lot down there. Well, he went off the freeway and he hit the parking lot and his Jeep somehow pinned him underneath it and slid for a long distance and just ground him into nothingness.

So that was really sad. And I know that our singer had some issues, but he's doing great now from what I hear. It was just the whole scene, the drug scene. We did a concert out in the woods for these bikers one time. It was down in Fallbrook area, and we specifically learned songs like Bad Motor Scooter by Montrose. We were out there, and we play play our set and we're done. We're getting ready to go. And the guys come up and they go, you're not done.

You're going to play again. And I said, no, we already played our set. You go, you ain't leaving until you play another set. And I thought, this is bad. We're out here with a bunch of bikers and they're pissed and drunk right now. So one of the guys that was with us, two of the guys that were with us decided it was an awful idea to go try and steal a keg from the bikers.

They had taken it and rolled it up a hill and lost grip on it, and it rolled down the hill and went, bong, bong, bong, bong, swish into the water. So you know the sound a keg makes. It was like the ringing of bells in Notre Dame. And all of a sudden, these guys are wanted men, and the bikers are on the hunt. So I hear one of the guys, he's up in a tree like a moron

going, cool, cool, trying to talk to us, and I thought, this is not going to end well. So they said, you can play again, we'll pay you to play again, and we'll give you this big giant bag of magic mushrooms. So everybody passed him out, everybody ate him, and then the singer, I remember him walking around with a trash bag full of beer with a hole punched in the bottom and he was just drinking like a giant Boda bag. It had gotten so out of control.

And the next morning we woke up and it was time for us to get out of there. You can imagine what else could go wrong. The car that we drove down then in there burns out its clutch. So now we have to hitchhike from the woods out in the forest of Fallbrook back up to the freeway and try and hitchhike home to Huntington Beach. It was probably one of the worst days of my life playing music. Shit. How did you, I mean, were you guys close within the band? In panic. We were kind of, Pat the singer was much older than we were, so he kind of

had a fatherly, you know, I'm not going to say condescension, but just a little bit of a, he just seemed like he was older than us, and it just felt like that was being made clear. He's the guy that's responsible, he's the guy with the wife, he's the guy with the kid, he's the guy with the house. We're all derelicts that do drugs and live in apartments. How did you get over the death?

All three of them? Well, Mike's was really hard to deal with because he was the drummer in the band that I was in. Tom hadn't passed away yet and Joe I barely knew. So Mike was hard for me to lose. And he was a good guy. He was a left handed drummer too, which is very rare. And he, yeah, that was hard to get over. Starting the process of looking for a drummer again seemed very artificial. Because deep down inside I didn't want another drummer, I wanted Mike

to be alive. And so for Panic, you move into Metallica, correct? How did that come about? I was done with Panic and I said I'm going to find something else to do. So I got a newspaper called The Recycler. And it's just a rag from Los Angeles, Orange County. It's like a county classified ad magazine. And I'm looking in the classified ad magazine. Go figure the biggest band in the world would advertise in this newspaper. So I look at it and it says wanted lead guitar player

and mentioned a couple bands. So I called up and I got Lars on the phone and I said, yeah, well, I like Motorhead, I like Budgie and he goes, you like fucking Budgie man? And I went, yeah, I do. And that was the icebreaker because Budgie is a Welsh band. It's a three piece, it's very obscure. And by me listening to them showed that I had credibility in New Wave of British Heavy Metal world because of the bands I was listening to. They were not a band like a white metal band

or a progressive metal band. They were a three piece from Wales that kicked ass. They didn't have to have all those silly names in front of it. And how did that develop? What part? Joining Metallica. Joining Metallica.

Yeah, so we were on the phone and he made that comment that I know them and I said, yeah. So we talked about meeting face to face and I drove down from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach where he lived in a place called, I think it was called Park Newport. And the funny thing was my mom was a maid and she had actually worked event for catering in his Complex he was in and I'm thinking go figure my mom was a maid here and your mom has a place here What what a story that is the two sides of a different coin, you know, or two different sides of the same coin and

So I went into his his place and started talking to him. And he played this song called Hit the Lights that was written by a guy named Lloyd Grant. So Metallica didn't write that song. Lloyd Grant wrote it. And then he was friends with Lars and then Lars introduced him to James and then they started playing Hit the Lights. That's the song that I heard from them first and I said, wow this song needs way more lead solos in it. It was just me being cocky, being me. It needs more lead solos in it. And he was trying to figure out if I was for real.

And he was trying to figure out if I was for real. And so we went to rehearsal. He said, we're going to try you out. I said, okay. So, I mean, I knew how good I played. I have been gifted and I know it's not by my own doing, so I don't try to take any credit for it. So I don't care how good I am or or not or what people say or anything like that. So I just knew what I knew what I knew and I went to Ron McGovernay's parents Fourplex. They had this place that James was living with Ron and I went up there with Lars and I set up my amps, I plugged my guitar in,

and I just started warming up as it. And they were impressed. They wouldn't come in. What do you mean they wouldn't come in? They wouldn't come into the rehearsal room. So I put my guitar down and I thought, this is really strange. And I walked out and I said, guys, are we going to do the audition? They said

you got the gig. No shit. Yeah. How did that feel? Good. Good. I knew I was going to get it. You knew it. Yeah. Because I could play that stuff. I mean there weren't very many guitar players like me around at the time. You know, who were they? Randy

Rhodes, there were people like that. Guy from Ratwood, Warren D. Martini was really great, you know. But real shredders, there wasn't a lot of us around at the time. Damn. Damn. What was the experience like joining that band and becoming the spokesman and the lead guitarist? I mean, was that surreal for you at all? Well, again, it's kind of like I said, it seemed like this was what my destiny was. And when it came time for us to do our first concert, we played at a high school, or maybe it was a junior high school, Lars might have gone to.

I know he went to it, but I can't remember if it was elementary or junior or high school, whatever. And from that point on, it was just clear that whenever there was any kind of altercation that was going down, I would be the one that would take care of it. James was very peaceful, and Lars, he was a little bit of a devil. You know, he liked to have fun. But yeah, if there was ever any stuff going down, I had to take care of it.

When we went up to San Francisco and did our first couple shows up there at a place called The Stone, I was the one who had to go and collect the money. And there's a million ways to embezzle or to be corrupt when it comes down to running a club or a bar, when it involves a band getting paid. They can say all kinds of stuff. And if you don't know, you don't know. And most kids my age at that time don't know. And they try and get money and they'll

say, well, you sold 200 tickets and you have a bar tab here and so we're going to give you 150 bucks. You know, and you know that they made a killing on their booze. You know that they made money on the food and snacks that they have there and the ticket prices, you know, plus they take a giant whack of your merchandise. And that was my gig. I would go do that. When we decided we were gonna move out to New York, that was because Lars had found somebody he wanted to manage us, this guy Johnny Zazula, who had Megaforce records, and he heard our demo taped, the No Life Till Leather demo tape, and he lost his mind, just like everybody else in the world.

And they wanted to get the band to come out and record a record. And while we were on the way out there, we got in a car crash. We were driving through the snow. None of us had to drive through snow except for Lars because he's from Denmark. And I'm driving this rider truck. It's a 24-foot truck. And it had a tow bar and it had James Pickle on the back. So when we were driving, we hit black ice. And the whole thing spun around while I was driving.

And I managed to keep it upright in the middle of the freeway, but the truck stopped. And oncoming traffic was coming towards us. And the events that happened at that location, the guy that had produced, I think he produced the first record, his name was Mark Whitaker, He was the guy that was doing our sound and stuff. He almost got died. I had to push him out of the way and a truck was into the right or right where he was standing. So if I wouldn't have seen that truck coming and saved his life, he'd be dead right now. And when we went to the U-Haul place to get our truck replaced and move all of our gear into the new truck. James and Lars had made a decision to replace me because they tried to pin that driving thing

on me as the last straw. We all drank. That's why they called it alcoholica. I mean, they didn't call it Dave alcoholica. We all drank. And they continued to drink like that even after I was gone. But that was the, I think, the beginning of the end. And when we got out to New York, I had a reel of tape, this quarter-inch tape. It had probably two days' worth of guitar riffs on it, just me playing and playing and playing. And we took that tape player and the reel of tape with us out to New York. And when we did two shows out there and after those two shows, they woke me up one morning and said, look, you're out of the band.

And I said, what are you talking about? You're out of the band. I said, no warning. No second chance. You're not going to give me a warning. You're just going to kick me out. And I thought that was that was unfair. He's just going to kick me out. And I thought that was unfair. And it showed a grotesque amount of a grotesque lack of character. And so that pissed me off and was a huge part of the fuel.

But at the time, I was really mad and I didn't want to forgive them for what they did. And I told them when I left, do not use my music. And of course they used it. They'd ride the Lightning I wrote, Call of Cthulhu I wrote. Let's see what else. There's Phantom Lord, Metal Militia, Jump in the Fire, The Four Horsemen. Jeez. And I wrote a bunch of Leopard Messiah too. They didn't give me credit on that.

You listen to the riffs, you know they're my riffs. It's like, boing, you think I'm going to all of a sudden hear my riff and say that's not me? Damn. Yeah, I wrote a lot of their music that made them, and all the solos on that first record were mine. The best Kirk could try and copy them.

Wow. Yeah. And so, if everybody was drinking that much, were there drugs involved too? I liked Smirpot, but there were no drugs. Why do you think they singled you out of the bunch? Because when I got drunk I got violent. James and I had gone out to a club one time and it was the old Mabuhay, it was across the street from the Stone and we were out front and some guy came out of the alleyway and he said,

there's a guy beating some girl up in the alleyway. And of course, I being the champion for justice did not want to hear that and not do anything. So I went down the alleyway with James. And of course, James not being a fighter, started yelling out, kill him, kill him, kill him. And the guy comes out from behind a van and he was much bigger than James. he said who's gonna kill me and

James goes Points to me So I immediately grabbed a guy and Put him down in a submission and started rabbit punching him until he stopped moving and then we ran out of the alleyway And we stood out front until the paramedics came. And that was it. So I imagine he saw that and he figured, I don't wanna be part of this.

Dave's already beat me up back down in Los Angeles and he's just too violent. Damn. Cause James did get a punch in the mouth from me. He kicked my puppy. He kicked your puppy? Yeah. I was selling pot for a living, as you know, so one time I did a concert and people knew

I was on stage, so they just jimmied the window. There's nobody there. They took all my pot and I was pissed. So I I Got two dogs my nephew took one and I took the other one and I had taken her up with me to rehearsal and she was Playing and she's looking up at me. I'm standing over here Ron McGovney's got this really nice GTO and she leans up against the car and puts her paws on the front quarter panel and he Goes bang and kicked the dog and puts her paws on the front quarter panel and he goes, bang, and kicked the dog.

And I went, what did you just do? What did you just do? And it went from the front yard into the house and there's still stuff being said. And I said, you better shut up or I'm gonna punch you in the mouth. And then Ron McGovernay says, if you hit him, you're gonna have to hit me first. And I said, you stay out of it. And then James said the same thing, if you hit him, you're gonna have to hit me first.

And I said, okay, you win. And bang, I hit James in the mouth. And then I hip tossed Ron into his Intellivision setup, and that was it. Two strikes, and it was over. And Lars was pulling his hair, going, I don't want it to end this way. And I thought, you know what?

I've already told you. It's either me or James. And we did that a bunch of times because James was doing stupid stuff. And I told James the same thing. I said, man, it's either me or Lars, because Lars sucks. Damn. And I got the axe in the end, so it's good. It's fine. What did you do after you got axed? I went home and I contacted a friend of mine

and I said I quit. She said, no you didn't, you got fired. And I said, yeah, I got fired. So I quit, I got fired, whatever, you know, I'm back home. Wrong word, not changing the outcome, you know. And I made sure not to ever say that I quit. Because I wanted people to know that I was unfairly dismissed and that I didn't give a shit. Because we may not be as big as they are. Hell, their biggest song, Enter Sandman, go look up the band Excel right now look up their

song I think it's something into the unknown pretty similar how long was it before you got back in the saddle it wasn't very long I moved up to Hollywood I knew I needed to go up into LA. And I was really disappointed that I'd moved to Hollywood because everything about Hollywood was what I despised, what we despised in Metallica. You know, we didn't like the short hair, we didn't like the eyeliner, we didn't like the glammy clothes, we didn't like the ballads. And those are all the things that we stood against. And I don't know where I'm going with that. You moved up to Hollywood.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what I was going to say about that because when I first came up there, I had been friends with a bunch of people that were in pen pal kind of a position this guy named Brian Lou was a guy who had a metal magazine called Metal Militia or no what was it called was it Metal Militia I think that might have been the name of his magazine but anyways Brian Lou is still a friend of mine to this day and I told him that I was planning on getting together and I had met this guy and this other guy and I was thinking about the name Fallen Angels, blah blah blah, okay, okay, okay, bye.

Next thing I know it's a story that I have a band with three people and it's called Fallen Angels. There never was that band, there never was. But the guitar player that I met, Robbie McKinney, was the guy I first played with when I came to Los Angeles. And he actually introduced me to the people I ended up playing with. Because when we started trying to get people, one of the first drummers we had

was this kid named Lee Rausch. And we'd done a couple shows up in Palo Alto with Kerry King sitting in on guitar for us. That was really neat, but it ended in a very weird way because we'd been playing together, I'll backtrack to David Ellison being in the band, but we were playing together with this guy named Lee Roush and this was a show up in Palo Alto. It was New Year's Eve and we were at the rehearsal place we were at and something happened,

so we were all running out of the building as fast as we can. The power went off or something weird. So we're running down the stairs. He falls, breaks his leg. And we've got a show in a couple days. And I said, Lee, you're an idiot. What did you do? And he goes, man, I'll just break the cast off. And he gets a pair of pliers, gets the cast wet, rips the cast off and does the concert. His foot is black and green. Looks

like he's got gangrene on it and it should have been cut off, but he played. On the way back to Los Angeles, he goes, man, I'm going to go take some acid and find myself. And I never saw him again. No shit. Yeah. The next drummer we got after that was somebody who was introduced to us by a manager named Jay Jones, but I've skipped the part about David Ellison. So do you want me to talk about that? Yes.

When we first got the drummer, we were going through, before that happened, when I moved to the apartment I was living in in Hollywood, right underneath me there was two kids from Minnesota. They were living in Jackson, Minnesota, which is a podum town out in the middle of nowhere. And their parents both saved up and sent them out to California to make it big. They would go to the Guitar Institute of Technology and then they'd be discovered and everybody lived half-liver after. Well, I was there in my apartment. They were there in their apartment underneath me playing Running with the Devil. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Right? Real difficult bass riff. Gene Simmons actually played that, did you know that? No. Yeah. And so I'm hearing this and I'm mildly hungover. Nah, I was really hungover. So I, uh, I opened up the window and I said, Shut the fuck up! Just lay in the window.

It seemed to have worked. I go lay back down. Boom, boom, boom. And I opened up the window and I grabbed this potted plant that was on the windowsill and I went. And I threw it down and it burst on his air conditioner and I'm waiting. I open up the door. What? They're both stunned.

You know, they've got these long fucking ridiculous looking leather jackets on that have a belt around them, it's like a smoking jacket, and they had canvas high tops and bell bottoms on, like they were really styling. And I look at him, and I look at him, and they go, do you know where to get some cigarettes? And I thought, oh my god, I said at the corner, wham, and I shut the door. What? Can you buy beer?

And I went, now we're talking. So we became friends. I found out Dave was the bass player. Greg Handavid was the guitar player of this twosome that came out. They were both in the band for a little while. Greg married a bong and we fired him and it was just me and Junior for a little while. And then I found this drummer that was brought to us by a manager we had named Jay Jones

Jay Jones is dead his brother knifed him with the butter knife over a bologna sandwich So it shows you the kind of people we had managing us to holy shit Yeah Killed him over a bologna sandwich right his dad was in the war and he got hit with some shrapnel So he'd sit out in the front yard each night and stare at the moon like a dog, right? And his brother got in a fight with him. They both lived at home still, and they were both way old adults. And the guy stabbed him. Jeez. Yeah.

Jeez. So, Elifson came into the band, Hand of It exited. We got a meeting with this guy named Gar Samuelson. Me and Alifson are working at the studio at the time and Jay brings this guy, Gar. His name's Gary. So Gar sits down and he's smoking a cigarette and he nods because he's a heroin addict and he had just gotten well before he came to see us because Jay was his dealer who became our dealer. So Gar's sitting there on the couch with a cigarette and it goes right through his fingers and I thought, fuck, this guy's a masochist, man. This is going to be great.

So we go in there and we go to audition him and he was amazing, just amazing. So we created Megadeth. It was a metal jazz band that had classical and punk influences. And we were a three piece for a little while. And then we met Chris Poland. How did you come up with the name Megadeth? It was on a hand bill from Senator Alan Cranston on the way back from New York to California. There was a hand door on the bottom of the floorboard of the Greyhound I was riding in and I picked it up because I needed something

to ride on. I figured I was going to start writing lyrics. The first lyric I wrote was on the back of a hostess snow cones, those cups with the pink chopped up mutant stuff, whatever it is. So I had written on the back of that and and I needed more paper. And there was this thing on the floor, the seat in front of me. So I kind of reached my foot and grabbed it, and I flipped it over, and I read it, and it said, the arsenal of Megadeth can't be read. This is Senator Alan Cranston saying this.

And there was much more stuff there about why he should be retained as a senator. And I thought, Megadeth, that's a great song title. So I wrote it down as a song title. And I wasn't thinking of a band name yet. But we got to LA, we got a band together, we played, we were driving around in the van and by now we had hired Jay, I mean, a car, David Ellison, myself.

Greg Handivet was still with us, and there was a singer we tried hiring named Lawrence, but he went by Lor. He was the one that was talking to us, and he goes, you know, made us a great band name. Because I was thinking something like a foreign word, like fire, you know, something bomb or something in a foreign language. But then, you know, you can't really say it when you go into the foreign language speaking territories. On stage, bomb!

Everybody runs for the doors, right? So yeah, we gave a lot of thought to Megadeth and funny thing is as soon as I chose that name this little douche from the Circle Jerks, it was a drummer, his name was Keith somebody, went out and registered to name Megadeth so I had to pay him off to get it. He knew because he was friends with Jay Jones, our manager at the time. Jay told him we're called Megadeth and he ran right out and cost me $10,000. Damn. Yeah.

Damn. So this is the stuff I see that I don't like. Yeah. Yeah. And how fast was it? How fast did Megadeth develop into what it is? Well, we had, I had been writing songs and I had several songs that I had in Metallica, several songs that I had before Metallica, and I was just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing,

writing. And I think the first time we went into the studio was in 83, and we started doing a demo. It was a three-song demo. I might be wrong on the date, but it was somewhere around there. And that started to circulate and people, I remember Scott Ian from Anthrax had been doing a show at the Rosita Country Club in Rosita, California. And I went to go see them because we were friends. And I said, I want you to hear this song. And I played him Love to Death. And he lost his mind. He'd never heard anything like that before. And that was beginning of our friendship. And it's lasted a long time. And when it came

time for the album, we had gone down to a record company, it was called, what was it called, Prodigy or something like that. It was like a new wave, alternative kind of a, Enigma was the name. As much as I say Enigma, that's the name of the record company. So we went to Enigma and we talked to them and they were not interested because we weren't the kind of music that they know what to do with. So I thought that was respectable because they didn't say, oh yeah, we want to sign you but we don't know what to do with you. So then we went to Combat. Combat was owned by Important Records and I went and talked to this guy named Cliff Coltrary.

And Cliff was the vice president at the California side of important records. And we went in and we played the record for him and he goes, okay, let me make a call. And so he calls up his boss out in New York. And meanwhile, we left. We were walking to the car and we heard this coming down the road and this fat guy's running after us and all of a sudden we recognize it's the guy we just met and he goes wait wait wait come back

in come back in we want to talk to you. So we signed our first record deal, The Combat, and that was my introduction into the music industry. What is the life of a rock star like? Now you're in it, you've got a record deal, you're doing concerts, tons of people are showing up. What does a day in the life look like? Back then or now? Back then.

Well, it was just a constant party. I had a significant other at the time, so I wasn't really counting around. But there were loads of people partying all the time. And you know how that ends, you know? Constant, constant partying, money going out the window, you know, people getting arrested or getting in accidents or stuff like that. Never ends well. Was it a good time? For me, it was not really a good time. It was, I got off on it, but it wasn't a good time. It was a bad time, but I enjoyed a bad time because I was dangerous and people knew it. The headlines used to say we were the most dangerous band.

I saw that headline once before from Molly Crew and I thought, what a fucking mistake you made there. Those guys aren't dangerous. And because, you know, you talk about the real deal, did they practice what they preach? Are they willing to go live in a van to go get their music out to the masses? We traveled around the nation for years

from a station wagon to a van to a camper. And we got a motor home and we thought, shit, we've arrived. You know, and then when we got our first bus, that was a big deal. That was a big deal. It's kind of like the bus from Almost Famous. Yeah. It probably was a bus from Almost Famous. But, you know, now we travel, we travel well. We don't do a lot of the crazy stuff we used to do.

We don't outlaw that. People want to be around us and drink and celebrate. The only thing I'm not really cool about is illicit stuff like powders and stuff like that. That to me, people that are in that circle, they're dangerous people to be around. Because if ever there was a momentary flip in their mentality, they could become very dangerous. How old are you in 1983 when, when Megadeth was born? I was 22. 22 years old? When Megadeth was born? 22 years old? When Megadeth started, yeah.

Were you ever into the... We'll save that for later. I want to get into some addiction stuff, but we'll save that for later, but I mean... What is the first... When's the first concert when you show up and there's just thousands and thousands and thousands of people out there? That was a long time coming because, you know, the scene was so small in the beginning. show up and there's just thousands and thousands and thousands of people out there. That was a long time coming because the scene was so small in the beginning. We were doing it when a big concert was sold out stone or sold out Mabuhay Gardens or stuff like that.

That's what the scene was like. You could always have Fairweather fans when Symphony came out and the Counter-Intestinction album came out. That was a record that got huge commercial success because the time was right. And there was a lot of Fairweather fans that bought the album just because Megadeth is the cool band right now. Right? I don't know if that answered your question or not. Well kind of what I'm getting at is the adrenaline that I'm... I've never done anything like that. Yeah, don't. I think I've passed my time even if that was on the cards for me. But I mean, you know, but I'm no, I'm no stranger to adrenaline.

I mean, going out on operations and, and, and hitting targets and stuff like that. There's a major adrenaline rush and you get addicted to it. And so I'm, I'm kind of in a weird way way maybe trying to relate to you a little bit with the rush that maybe you felt. Well, I got a rush when we were back down at Dana Point. Really? Yeah, sure. People listening to something, you know, you've been an outcast, you've been a child that

your family has made to feel less than at everything that he does, and now all of a sudden you do one thing right. Maybe this is meant for me. And that was kind of my way out. I didn't see, I don't think I would have ever done anything harmful to myself, but I just did not see any kind of an existence with the way I was going before I started playing music.

It just, God, what would I have been? Cash register repair person like my dad? Was it like a light switch? Did it go from a hundred, couple hundred people to tens of thousands? Well, I'll tell you what you're asking, and I'll save you the incremental questions. The one concert that really blew me away was in 1988 at Castle Donington when we played with Iron Maiden and Kiss and David Lee Roth and Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses played before us at that time.

Two people died there, but excluding the unfortunate deaths, that concert was 140,000 people. Holy shit. The Guinness Book of World Records has the sound system used for that concert as the biggest, most powerful public address system ever assembled for a concert.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And of course we did Rock in Rio, which had, you know, there was another concert over 100,000 and then we started doing the Sonospheres. One of those got up, I think it was around 200,000. But for me, those really, really, really big concerts, they don't feel like I'm making a connection

with people in the back. You know, the people have fun, I can see them, I can see them cheering, I can see their signs, their shirts, you know, who they're with, how they're acting, they're moshing, if they're just throwing their hands up in the air, if they're singing, you know. Those are some of the greatest shots we've ever gotten is the fans when they're just loving the music. Because you look at the cross section of our

audience, there are a lot of different types of people, not just all middle-aged white males or young white males. It's people of color, it's people that are young, they're people that are old, they tend to stay in the back and there's a lot of girls there. And you just don't see that with metal, you know, very few metal bands. Why were you called the most dangerous band? Because we were. What does that mean? Well we went to our release party for P-cells but who's buying.

We took two limousines there and we were inside the bar getting drunk and they called it the Firefly bar because they would pour alcohol down the bar and light it on fire every set amount of minutes, I guess maybe it was hourly or something. And I was getting entertained in there. And of course it came time to go get more drugs. And we went outside and one of the limousines were gone. And I was pissed.

And I said, where's the limo? And Chris tells me that his girlfriend and the rest of the girls got in the car and took off. We got into the limousine and Chris started saying stuff to me. So I started beating him up in the limo and then... I can't remember if... Gar was sitting next to me and then Chris came toward me and I kicked him in the face. Yeah, that's what happened.

So I mean, you know, people know that kind of stuff and it gets around. People were talking and we were the, you know, there was a set of acts that each label had that were there, dangerous people. You know, Capital had Megadeth, they had Poison, who was a different walk of life than we were. But to some people, they were dangerous just as well. You know, but for us, I think it had to do with how we were living, how we were, you know, flopping at people's houses. We squatted on a couple people.

I remember we went to one kid's house named Billy Cordero, who was a really great guy, and he let us spend a night there for, I think it was six months. Supposed to just spend one night and... Yeah, thank you Billy. What was the first album that went platinum? Countdown went double platinum and then Peace and then Euthanasia was certified platinum when it came out, because it had sold a million records before we even saw the record company, that campaign. And yeah, Countdown was, I think, the first one.

I think so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sorry to keep asking, but how old are you? Mid-20s when first one goes platinum? Yes. I mean, how are you intaking at that young age all the fame and all the notoriety and albums going platinum? And I mean, was that, how do you navigate that?

I didn't understand the question. I'm sorry. How do you navigate the rise to fame and all the exposure that you're getting and, and, and the fans and all of that? I mean, that's a lot to take in for somebody at that age. I wasn't doing very good with it. Um, the, I was't doing very good with it. I was 30 when Countdown came out.

OK. Yeah. And fortunately for me, I'd already met Pam. And we'd gotten married, and Justice was born. So let me get my dates right. His countdown came out in, I think, I think 92, and we got married in 91. May 3rd, March 3rd, 91, Justice was born, February 11th, 92.

Trying to think, I can't remember the date, but it was pretty, Youth in Asia got certified way faster than Countdown did and retroactively a lot of the albums prior to Countdown has been certified gold and or platinum. How did you meet Pam? That was funny. This guy that was a personal assistant for Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses, his name was Ronnie Schneider. And Ronnie was helping Steven and ended up getting addicted to heroin while in that circle.

And he went to treatment and he got out and he called me and he said, I have to go do a show tonight. Please come with me and help me stay sober. And I said, okay, you got, I'm your man. I got your back. You were sober at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

So I went with him and I'm in this club and I'm there with Nick and this friend of Nick named Juan. Juan's really dark complexed and he's got these gigantic white teeth. And Ronnie, so Ronnie goes and does this thing and I'm sitting in here bored. There's not a lot of fun things to do in a bar if you're not drinking. I don't know if you've ever sat in a bar and you're not drinking. Oh yeah, I have. It's a shitty place to be in. So, I'm looking around and I see this woman.

She was very young at the time and I just thought, wow, she's really pretty. And I'm looking and I'm thinking and I'm looking. And I finally say, hey, Juan, go over and tell that girl I want to meet her. That's how I roll, right? And rolled. And so he goes over there and it's kind of dark and I see his face and all of a sudden his giant white teeth are flashing. I'm thinking, what's so funny?

So he comes back and I said, what's so funny? He goes, she said, do you want to meet her? You need to go there yourself. And I went, Spice, I like that. So I walked over to her and I said, hi, I'm Dave. She goes, I know who you are. I thought, this is gonna be great. So I said, listen, I'm Dave. She goes, I know who you are. I thought, this is going to be great. So I said, listen, I just am here helping my friend stay

sober and sober myself. And I want to get out of here. I'd like to see you again. Can I take you out to lunch? And she didn't know what was going on. So I got her number, and I left. And that was it. And then a couple days later, maybe,

I don't even think it was that long, I called her back and we went out for a little while and I was falling for her and I knew that I was falling for her so I broke up with her. I needed to make sure. So I broke up with her, it was really painful. I went to Hawaii with my bodyguard and he, uh, he was talking to me while I was out there, philosophical kind of stuff, not Aristotle or anything about that,

but just, just life, you know? And I said, you know, Tony, I think I love this chick. I think I want to, want to marry her. So we had a concert in Hawaii and, and I had invited her to come out and her mom and her stepfather, who I didn't like, and her grandma, who I loved, and her brother. And I think he brought his girlfriend. And my three sisters and my sponsor and the guy who was going to be the best man at my wedding, a bank robber who had murdered two people.

I thought that was a pretty street cred kind of guy to be your best man. Just kidding. So Pam's in the hotel and I knock on the door because we just got to Hawaii and she was there ahead of me and I said, hey, what are you doing on Tuesday? And she got mad because she didn't know what I was doing. I said, do you want to get married? And she flipped out.

So we now are on the hunt for a wedding dress for my skinny, rail thin wife in Hawaii. And we're trying to find a nice suit for me. So Pam got lucky and found like some eight-year-old wedding dress from some playhouse or something. And I had a suit that looks like it was made out of Wrigley chewing gum wrappers. And it was, actually, I look like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, but it had a little bit of some fashion to it. It's this bright, shiny, aluminum looking suit. And it's all I could get, it's all I could find. And I remember we were standing at the base of Punchbowl, in Waikiki, Diamond Head, the volcano.

And that's where we got married, right under the volcano. Wow. Yeah, it was really neat. Wow. How long it was really neat. Wow. How long have you been married? 34 years, almost. What's the secret to a successful marriage? You have to say this.

Honey, I've been thinking. And you're probably right. And I'm going to try harder next time. And mean it, you know, if you really mean it, because if you tell them, you know, I've been thinking that, first off, that confuses them because they don't think we know how to think. And then when you say, you're probably right, inside they have pinatas being burst and all kinds of Sky Streamers and stuff.

And then when you say you're going to try harder, they go, it's good, game over. So I'm just playing, but you know, you need to have to look at things as two different, completely different organisms that are trying to coexist in the same body. And you have to make sacrifices, and you have to make, I don't want to say consolation because that's not the right word I want to say, but you do have to make some, and sacrifice is the wrong word because it's too much, but

you do have to make some adjustments. And I think the better that the opposite spouses of being aware of the other spouses' needs and wants, the better the relationship's gonna be. Because sometimes you just gotta walk away. When Pam fights with me, I just walk away. You know, she'll throw shit, she'll scream, she'll call me names, but you know what? At least my side stopped. And sometimes cooler heads prevail.

Sometimes I walk away and then she'll say something and I gotta do a U-turn and go back and jump right in the fight. But most often times, you know, we, we, uh, we try and be really respectful of one another and, and, you know, I really try and help Pam with support from the kids too, because they're, they're adults now and they don't want to be looked at like kids. They want to be looked at as adults. Mm-hmm. How long after you guys got married did... was Justice born?

He was born in Wedlock. We'd been married 11 months, I think. We got pregnant about second or third month, I think. Wow, you guys aren't messing around. No. No, I think it was just meant to be, you you know because we weren't really getting a lot of time to Spend together I was touring a lot so it was meant to be I love my son How do you how did you manage?

Being a husband being a father to your two kids touring All the exposure. I'm sure women are throwing themselves at you, left and right, I mean, how do you manage all that? No, they walked. The women walked, they didn't throw themselves. That was a joke. I know.

How was it? Well, you know, it's, I guess it's like anything if you know what your priorities are. You know, some people can walk into a candy store and want one of everything. You know? And then you end up sick at the end. You know?

I got to a point in my life where I knew I was ready to find the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And you know, I came really close. I was engaged to somebody for six years one time. And she was the muse for a lot of the early songs because our relationship was so toxic. But if I would have stayed engaged to her just a few more months, it would have been a common law marriage in California, because it's seven years you're married. So I don't know if I took that into consideration or just happened that way,

but it happened that way. And you got sober before you guys met? Me and Pam? Yeah. Yeah. How bad did your addictions get? Well, I mean, it never got bad did your addictions get? Well, I mean, it never got bad. I had money.

You mean how down did it, how much did I do? Yeah. I used a lot, but I had a high tolerance. And, you know, as far as doing my job, when it was time to go out on the road and it was time to get on stage, we got on stage and then when everybody got off stage, that was when the party started up again. You know, it was just a way of life at the time in Los Angeles. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm three years, three years off is a little over three years. And I mean, I can totally relate with addictions. I mean, I was addicted to pain pills, benzos, volume, Xanax, hydrocodone, tramadol, oxy, ambient, putting down a damn near two-fifths a day of vodka. That's the only thing I haven't done that you said. Which one? The two-fifths of vodka.

You've done all those? Yeah. Was it a regular? No. It was whatever anybody had that was partyable. You go to a party and, hey, I got some Ambien. You want some? Sure, what does it do?

What's going to make you fall asleep in your food? Well, that sounds like a really fun drug. Consequently, I don't really like Ambien. The other stuff you said, Valium, Valium might need to go get x-rays, CAT scans. I can't do it. When I have learned scopology now that I've had ear, nose, throat cancer, head and neck cancer,

they have to look down my nose with that camera. I can't do that. I have to take a volume for that. But am I addicted to it? No. What is it that got you so? Why did you... I was in Texas and I'd hurt my arm really bad. And I was talking to this pastor and he goes, man, you need the Lord, Dave. And I went, no, I don't. I've had enough God. So he goes, why don't you go up onto the hill? Up on the hill was a fire ring, and there was two sections of building that went together like this,

and it had a cross hanging down in the middle of it. Of course, I was brought up a Jehovah's Witness. The cross was a torture device, and Jesus wasn't hung on a cross. He was hung on a tree, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff that they believed that I don't. So I'm looking at the cross and I'm just thinking to myself, man, what have I got to lose? And those six simple words set me on my road to a new lifestyle and new existence because

I went down the hill and I told the little pastor, I said, yeah man, I think I wanna try this. I just was up there and I said, what have I got to lose? And he goes, okay, well let's do the sinner's prayer. And he goes, get down on your knees. And I said, nope. We need to get on your knees to do the sinner's prayer. Nope, not doing it, not praying on my knees.

I'll say the prayer but I'm not getting on your knees to do the sinner's prayer? Nope, not doing it. Not praying on my knees. I'll say the prayer, but I'm not getting on my knees. And I did the prayer, and I didn't get down on my knees. And I just couldn't bring myself to that place yet. I was not at that place yet. I mean, I prayed. I prayed all the time because I thought that was what you're supposed to do. But the sinner's prayer, what is that? I don't know if I like the sound of that. So we did it and I told my wife and she started laughing and said her friends knew that was going to happen. And from that point on it was just a series of learning stuff,

learning how to coexist with other people that may or may not be enlightened. So many sayings that I learned growing up, like walking a mile in another man's shoes, you think, what the hell does that mean? And then something like that happens where your life changes. Something that's been a part of your existence every day. I was telling somebody the other day that when we lived in Silver Lake, California, David Ellison would come into my bedroom every morning, well not every morning, he would come into my bedroom

and he would have a mirror and he would give it to me and we were off to the races. So it's kind of how we lived. It was just, I didn't know any better. What brought you to the pastor specifically? My arm injury. Your arm injury. Yeah. Is this about the same time that you stopped doing, I mean, I've read that you stopped

doing witchcraft around 30. Sounds like it went on for about 15 years. That ended way before that. Okay. I'm pretty sure. You know, I think about it all the time. Whenever somebody pisses me off, I think, man, I'll just, no I won't. You know, I've actually, when my sister was alive, I called her up a few times and talked

to her and she talked me out of it a few times because I was at the end of my rope and I knew it worked, so, but didn't do it. It sounds like you were in, I think you described it as a satanic depression. No, oppression. It was like a possession, not depression, like having a spirit on you. How so? Well, when you open up the doors to the dark,

they're not going to wait to be invited in. They're coming. And if I believe in God, then I have to believe in the devil. And I believe in God. I believe in Christ. I believe in the devil. I believe they're demons. I believe they're angels. Still don't know what the real estate looks like up in the heavens, but I've got a pretty good understanding of a lot of that stuff. I don't know, the stuff that happens when you get really drugged out a lot of times, you start to do really unnatural things because you're on drugs. Why wouldn't you?

You're not yourself. You either have liquor in you, which is called spirits for a reason, or you're on stuff that's like an opiate, which makes you think everybody's your friend, and you know, or you smoke pot and you're paranoid of everybody, or you take sedatives,

which for some people they need them. They need them to be able to not wear the people out around them. And other people need stimulants like children who have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, you know? But when somebody starts grinding pharmaceutical speed because they like it, you know, it's kind of what meth is. because they like it, you know, it's kind of what meth is.

So do you think you were possessed? Oh, I know I was because we tried to get my life in order and stuff just kept happening and we would go see people who were spiritual in nature and they would say that they see something, the priest that was in... We went to go see a... I forgot, I told Darren all this stuff too. We had been talking about what had happened, Pam and I, and I said that I wanted to get rid of this.

So we went to this person, her name was, I think it was Caroline Somebody, and her husband was a Green Bay Packer football player, so I thought it was legit. And she was a doctor, so she would do these kind of clearing things. And she had this Indian guy that was a Raja come over. He was like a preacher that did laying on hands, cupping, acupuncture. So he came over and he said, when he was doing the acupuncture on me, he was meditating behind me and he fell over. He said that there was a man with a silver turban that came out and said, I release him, and that's when he fell over. When we went to San Francisco to go see the Filipino priest. He said that he laid hands on me and the bull,

the head of a bull came out of my chest, out of my stomach. He said that's... Holy shit. Yeah. And I didn't see it, I didn't feel it. I don't know what the fuck happened, but in the spirit world, I don't know if I would see it because I don't know if I have that gifting to see the demons. But he had said the same thing. So there were several people that had nothing in common that knew that there was something going on with me. And finally it broke.

And I remember getting baptized at some place in Northridge, California, and somebody, and this is Ricky, this is Ricky, somebody had said that there was a lot of weird stuff going on in that room at the time, like chairs were moving around, because there was a bunch of people in there that were getting baptized and there was a lot of tongues being spoken and stuff. I didn't see any of that stuff, so I got to see it myself to believe it. That's what I heard was going on in there, and I was thinking, man, that's pretty cool, because if this whole God thing's real, and I live my life like there is a God,

then I'm not going to regret it. Have you ever seen anything supernatural? Demons? Nice. Like a demon? Anything. Not in the physical. Visions, yeah, but not in the physical. But you know, you do too.

You say you have dreams. Oh, I've had several occurrences where I've experienced things. Not necessarily seen, but heard or... Feel. Walk into a room that's really cold all of a sudden. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that. We have a song we wrote about some young girl named Mary Jane Twilliger who was a witch and her dad found out and he buried her alive.

And this was in the city right north of where Ellifson lived. And we went out there to go visit that place. And it was creepy. It was really creepy. But that was it. It was just creepy. I didn't hear any owls. The wind didn't blow.

I did hear, and this could be another bit of folklore, but somebody pushed her headstone over and when they went back to their car, they found their car keys on the hood. That's wild, man. Yeah, that's crazy. It's wild. We had a... I've had a bunch of these experiences. One of them I was interviewing, a friend of mine, priest, said it's Father Dan Rehill.

He's an exorcist. And I remember when he came in here, he was like, look, he's like, weird shit happens when I start talking about this stuff. He's like, the cameras might go out, who knows what. And he was talking about exorcisms and then he brought up Christ and the AC in it right there just went on full blast, like immediately just started whooshing. I've had a bunch of these experiences, but that's awesome. It's made me realize how real the spiritual realm is.

It's real. And just to move on a little further, at some point after you found Christ again, you quit singing. You quit performing certain songs. What songs were those? It was only because I didn't really know what, I mean, I knew what I was singing about, but from a spiritual point of view, I didn't really know if I wanted to sing it anymore because one of the songs had almost all of the hex in it that I used,

and I didn't want to sing that anymore because what happens if somebody figures out the rest of the stuff that's missing? And I haven't seen anything but I know stuff happens to me. I know people have put curses on me. I know that they've cursed our dogs. We had a dog who died and I prayed over her and she came back to life long enough for us to get her to the veterinarian where she said goodbye to us all and she passed away there. But she was dead, dead, dead, dead. Pam was hysterical and I said, let me pray over her.

So who put curses on you? People that don't like what I sing about. People that don't like Megadeth, that may like other bands. There was a guy in the past, there was a band called Diasyde and we were playing in Israel and I was really excited about playing in Israel and I wanted to see what Megadeth looked like in Israeli font, right?

So I look at the website for the festival, and it says the name of the thing, and it says our name, and then it says this band Diasyde. And I went, what is that? So I looked it up and the guy said that he's a Satanist and that I was his mortal enemy. Are you serious? Yes. And he'd already killed two people.

And so I figured, man, I walk in the light and I'm covered in the blood. And motherfucker, you're going to try anything with me. You're going to know. And so I went there. I went to go do the concert. I wasn't backing down and, uh, my manager had got there before me. And he said he walked next to the kid and he bumped into him and the guy goes,

Oh, sorry, sir. Sorry, sir. And I said, well, where is he? And he goes, he left. Wait, the guy that wants to kick my ass, we're in the same spot for the first time and who knows how long or ever will be, and he leaves? So much for wanting to have a confrontation with me.

And he's dead now. He's dead now. He's dead now. Commit suicide. Wow. So what I think happened is the guy, he was probably a good musician. He probably had some kind of abuse happen in his life where he turned away from, you know,

love and kindness and what's good in the world and started drawing towards other people who had the same kind of hardships that he did, because misery loves company, right? You get a guy that has the same things happening to him or he says he understands, and then they start drawing you in. And pretty soon, you know what you're saying,

I hate my parents, pretty soon you're stealing stuff from them, and then you're asked to leave. Like I was. After you got sober, I mean, are you still clean today? I'll drink wine. And I take my cancer medication, that's it. That's it?

Was it hard for you to get sober? Yeah, of course. It was harder to quit cigarettes than it was to quit anything else. No shit, so you just quit everything cold turkey? No. I had to go to a clinic to stop smoking cigarettes. And they gave me a shot in my neck.

And I had to wear these little transcapillaring patches for a couple days. And then I had to go wash all my clothes and clean my whole house out, all ashtrays and smoking paraphernalia. And it took psychedelics for me. I went to... Microdosing? No, I went down to a facility in Mexico called Ambio Life Sciences and now the guy that runs

is a good friend of mine, his name's Trevor. But I actually went down there when this show started really getting big because I could not be in the moment with my kid and then my son was just born and so I was trying to manage it all be a good husband try to figure out how to be a good new father and I just I couldn't be in the moment and I was still addicted to pills and I was still addicted to still an alcoholic and although I toned it down quite a bit, but really what I went down there for was

anxiety of the rise of the show and being in the moment. And I went down there and I did this stuff called, have you ever heard of Ibogaine? Ibogaine? It's Ibogaine comes from a root in Africa. I think the only place you can find it is Gabon. And I'd had former colleague after former colleague come on the show and talk to me about psychedelic therapy for PTSD, traumatic brain injury, curing addiction, especially opiates. And because that's just something that the veteran community really struggles with.

You go to the VA, you get a doctor, they put you on pills or any doctor. And then rather than weaning you off the pills, they just feed you more and more and more. And then if they do cut you off, a lot of guys wind up on the streets looking for heroin. That's how I, we were talking about my best friend earlier. Yeah. That's how, how he died. And I went down there, like I said, just to be in the moment with my, with my, with my new family. And I came out of that experience, like a 12 hour experience. Take a capsule.

And it had. It was like everything that was poison, that was that I was putting into my body. I had like this intuitive sense, and it took away all my cravings to get back on pills or to keep drinking. And I kicked it that day. That was Valentine's Day, whatever, 3, 2022. And so I've done a bunch of interviews on psychedelics and what I found was the science behind it is it replenishes all the receptors in your brain that have been beat to shit from opiates,

from Adderall, from cocaine, from all of them. Stuff. Booze. And when it replenishes the receptors, it takes the cravings away. And so it's literally like a light switch. It was just like... I had no cravings. I didn't want it. I haven't had a drop. Quit smoking weed for a long time and then that kind of came back. But... Must be part of your once in a while too. then that kind of came back.

But... Lost my part every once in a while too. Yeah. But just rarely. Yeah. And, uh, but all that shit went away. Even sugar and caffeine went away for a long time. I still haven't drank coffee and it's...

I got off coffee too. I'm drinking tea now, so... Yeah, same here. I'm back a bunch of grannies. I know, right? Shit. But... Megadeth and Sean Ryan'm like a bunch of grannies. I know. Right. But mega death and Sean Ryan, but it really like, it helped me and, um, it's helped. I have no idea how many people it's helped, but it's just about everybody that I served with, with the exception of a few have have because it's like the same story man everybody's story is different

But it all is very similar going down the addictions and and and and on top of that it it and it's just like it cures the mind and so another thing that it does is like with, with, uh, post-traumatic stress and TBI and post-traumatic stress, it puts a blocker. There's like the neurons in your brain move through a thing called the default

mode network. And that's basically from the front of your brain to the back or yeah and that's how they do but when we were born and you're younger the neurons communicate through these neural pathways in your brain and as we get older and you start seeing people get set in their ways and addictions and all that kind of shit it's because the neurons get lazy and they use the default mode network, which is like a highway.

And so what these psychedelics will do is they'll basically put a damn roadblock into the default mode network, and it forces the neurons to reopen all these neural pathways that have not been used in decades. Yeah. And you're able to look at a lot of things that have happened in your life from a different perspective, kind of like an unemotional perspective.

And it makes certain events, how do I say this? It makes, it makes certain traumatic experiences in your life. It spins it from another perspective and kind of makes, it puts you at peace with whatever happened to you. And then after it was like a week long thing where they, they like get you ready for it and teach you breathing techniques and all these other things and then you do it on a Wednesday. You do the Ibogaine on a Wednesday. It's like a 12 hour experience. Then you have what they call gray day, which is like the worst fucking hangover you could

ever imagine. And then on the Friday you smoke. Have heard of 5m EO DMT? No, oh man, man, you got some good It's it's a it's a toad venom. It comes from a toad. Oh, it's a poisonous toad Yeah, and you smoke it and you have it you have a full-on death experience. Oh, that sounds fun Well, it's not. But the death experience lasts maybe 30 seconds, 30, 45 seconds.

Is it constriction in your chest because he did something like that when he had a heart test? No. It's in your mind. So you smoke it, and then you do a count backwards from 10. account backwards from 10 and It's it's like the most anxiety most fear I've ever felt of All my time and combat everything that I did oh yeah, this was like

In your brain so but so what happens is is apparently I might be a little off on this, but when you die, your penal gland in your brain empties and whatever's in there. I can't remember the, the chemical. Maybe it's, maybe it's serotonin or I don't know what it is, but, but it dumps and it gives you like this euphoric experience, but before that you're in in your mind and That's what happens with five mao is you get a penal gland dump, but before Before you kind of cross over in your mind you are a hundred percent Certain that you are going to die and all the like you start you start separating from everything that you're attached to and it kind of starts with

like all the bullshit maybe like I don't know fucking possessions or money or whatever it is and in in like things just start offloading like you're like okay I can let go of that I can let go of that but it's a very it's a very like I said it's the most fear of most most anxiety I've ever felt and the last thing for me that I could not let go of that I was hanging on to is my wife and my son and I remember thinking, I cannot depart this fucked up world and leave my wife and my son behind.

I have to be here for them. And then I let them go. And once I let them go, it felt like there was this tar. Like, it was like, I didn't see anything, it was like a, it was like an intuitive experience and I felt like all this tar was like wrapped around my heart,

like covering my heart, and I could, I couldn't see it, but I could, it was like it was coming off my heart, and then my heart was pure again and then and then once you die and you let everything go you cross over into this other realm and then in the other realm that you cross over into is like pure bliss, very euphoric. And I swear, I think it's like a spiritual realm that we don't have access to, or maybe we had access to it like way early on for language and electronics and all that, these kind of distractions and shit, but

but you, I think you tap into the spiritual realm and like I'd always heard about energy and Shit like that Tesla stuff. Yeah. Well now not that kind of stuff like like hippies talk about it well good energy bad energy. Yeah, and I Never bought into that. I always despised hippies being a seal and a, say, a contractor. But after that, like, I opened my eyes and we're at this little beach house down in Mexico and I could see, I swear, man, I could see energy flowing from the islands into the water, up the beach, into the trees. And I could, it was like the first time I had realized that hippies say this shit too.

Everything is one, everything's connected. And I was like, I could just intuitively see it. And if there was- Can you see energy fields around people? I wouldn't say I've seen that, but can you? Yeah. Who do you see energy fields around? I see it on you right now.

What does it look like? It's just a... It's like a black shadow. It's mostly on this side. Do you see that on a lot of people? No. It's there. No, I don't. Is it freaking you out?

No, I'm just looking at it. Just looking at it, making sure it wasn't the building, but it's not shadows in here. Yeah, there's, it's like an energy field on you. Interesting. Well, when I crossed over, I could feel the presence of people that I love. Gabe was there. I didn't talk to him. I didn't see him. I could just... Is this Gabe?

Yeah. I could just feel him. Man, it was amazing. And that lasts for about 15 minutes, and then you come out of it. That's actually, I guess, what maybe sparked my journey back to Christ, because I never really thought about it when I left home and joined the SEAL teams. It just, I wouldn't say it doesn't have a place in the SEAL teams, but it's just not really discussed, at least in my experience.

And, um, it's all mission oriented and women and bar fights and booze and drugs and all of that shit, at least when I was in. And it all went away, man. It made me realize, okay, there's definitely something bigger than us in this universe. And that sent me down like, I don't know, man, I started looking into energy and I started looking at, I still watch them, but more documentaries than I can count on the universe and shit like that.

And then I had an experience in Sedona that brought me to Christ where we were kind of talking about this earlier, like weird coincidences and shit like that that happens. The vortex. Yeah. Well, that's why I went to Sedona because I was like, oh man I want to feel this energy fields cuz there's all these exposed energy fields out there. I went up there. I didn't feel shit and and And at the time like there was a lot of things going on at the world in the world

that I just thought were really fucked up. And I felt like I was the only voice out there that was, that was fighting this shit stuff. Like, you know, just all kinds of stuff, man, China, stuff going on in China, which I'm really spun up on China. And, and, and I'd started diving into the pedophilia networks and exposing that and my best friend here in Franklin died the day before we went there and The trans stuff with kids like that connected with your best friend

With with with best friend dying was that connected to what you guys are talking about? No Well, my best friend died from from heroin. Oh, right. Right, right. You said that I will so basically i'm like Talking to myself and i'm like man In my head. I told my wife because i'd I had uh opened Instagram and saw something that like triggered me again. And I was like, so I smoked a joint and I was like, we got to head

up to this fucking vortex and I was looking at crystals and all kinds of. Yeah. Wazzy shit. And, um, went up there, didn't feel a damn thing. I was like, this energy stuff's bullshit. And, um, walk down and walked through the security gate. We're staying at this resort called Enchantment. They got security, whatever.

But because of my background and because of the show, like people in the security business, law enforcement, military, it's just really big in those circles. So all those guys knew who I was and I would stop and say hi and talk with them and And I'd been there for a week. This was the last night I walked through in This old band walks out of the guard shack who I'd never seen

The whole week I'd been there we've been in and out all week and he fucking read my mind from front to back And he starts talking to me Is I'm walking through and I'm in a horrible place I felt like I just surrendered my soul to the devil because I was like well you know why do you care about all this shit Sean like really it doesn't even affect you it's it's probably able to shelter your kids from it and I was like just like like, quote, just surrender. Maybe I'm the fucked up one.

Maybe we should be doing all these things. I don't know. Nobody else seems to give a shit. And and so I'd had this experience where I felt like I had no shit. This is a conversation I'm having in my head where I'm just like, I shouldn't care about this. I should just surrender and give it up and Felt like I had surrendered my soul to the devil

Walked through this gate. This old man comes out. He's trying to talk to me. I'm not in the mood I'm like hey, like I'm not being rude, but I'm looking given body language Like I'm looking to him look talking to him over my shoulder. Like I don't want to be bothered right now So he engages my wife. Of course, my wife is like a social butterfly, turns around and starts talking to him. And I'm like, fuck. So I turn around and I look at him and he looks at

me and he just started reading my mind from front to back and I hadn't, I hadn't even told my wife this shit. And he goes, he goes, all the stuff that's going on with these kids. He's like, that's not your battle. And all the stuff that's going on in China right now between us and China relations, that's not your fight either. And I was just like, looking at this guy and he said a bunch of more stuff, stuff But I my mind went blank because he scared the shit out of me

I was like, how is this guy in my head right now? I haven't vocalized any of this It's impossible for him to know And you know, it's weird as it sounds. I think that like I said, I've never seen him there before we'd been there for a week I pay attention to security, because my background, and I was like, holy shit. Told Katie at the end of it, when we were walking back to our bungalow, I was like, hey, I think that was God talking to me. That's an angel, yeah.

And she goes, yeah, Sean. She goes, God's always talking to you. You just don't make any room for him. You're not paying attention. Oh, touche. And then we had gotten up to the bungalow and my friend Gabe, when we first got there, there was this guy that looked identical to Gabe and Gabe was always known as a protector. He was a pro hockey player. He was an enforcer on the hockey team. Then he became, he went pro, like semi-pro.

Wasn't gonna make it to the, he was on the Tampa Bay farm team. And then he became a SEAL. He was always the guy that took care of everybody else. Everybody knew they were fine if Gabe was around. Then moved into the agency, contracting for them, and that's where we met. And he was known for the same thing there. And then we had gotten out, and like I told you, he had died of a heroin overdose.

And I saw this guy everywhere we were at. If we were on a hike, this guy that was identical to Gabe was coming back. If we were out in town eating dinner, that guy was out there. If we were at the pool, he was at the pool. And it was just like, Katie, the whole trip, she's like, Gabe's watching over you. Because she knew as I was in a vulnerable spot.

We walked from the guard shack to the bungalow, and there's Gabe, the guy that had been everywhere we were at the whole fucking week, winds up, these were like duplexes, he's staying across, he's on the other side of the bungalow. I saw that, this was like maybe a five minute walk and I'm like, holy shit, did you see that? Gabe, this dude that looks identical to Gabe has been here the whole fucking time. And then, so then I have a breakdown, we go in,

and I told you my best friend at Franklin, who was also a SEAL, just died on a hunt trip with his son, he had a heart attack. And his daughter, who I'd never met, texts me, so she must have went through her dad's phone this is all within ten minutes mm-hmm and I'm breaking down and I'm talking to my wife and I'm like I can't believe this is happening and she's like don't say you can't believe like she's like it's here and he's

slapping you in the face right now we have this discussion and my phone my I got a text I got the ding, but I didn't look at it. After the conversation, when I kind of cleaned myself up, I look at the phone and it's his daughter and she says, hey, I just want you to know I walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he'd passed. He had this amazing gun room. And she goes, he spoke to me and I can't remember her exact words, but she said that I had recently become his best friend and that he just wants you to know that he loves you for who you are and that I should contact you because you had a relationship with him that nobody else had. Oh, was like whoa. That's very touching. Three things in ten

minutes and that's what brought me to Bud. But it was anyways circle him way back. No that's a good story. It was the psychedelics that kind of put me on the journey to figure out what this is all about. And that's where I landed. And I've really leaned into it since. But anyways, I can't remember how we got off on that tangent. Talking about Sedona, yeah, with the match of mushrooms and everything. Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever done any psychedelics? The motorcycle concert we did for the bikers up in the hills, they paid us off with magic mushrooms. You know, back in the early 80s, late 70s, people were, they were taking magic mushrooms a lot and also taking LSD, which was very popular at the time. I did that a couple of times. They didn't like it because they couldn't turn it off. Yeah.

I found out recently that if you just take an opiate pill when you're frying, that you could come down from it immediately. And I thought, I'm sure glad I didn't know that. You know, I just still want to know anymore. You know? Yeah. I just still wanna know anymore. You've never done them in like a therapeutic setting with a specific intention? Not yet. But your story sure made me think.

And by the way, that's not black, it's like dark purple. The aura? Mm-hmm. It's still there? Still there. I mean, what do you think that is? Energy? It's, uh, I'd have to probably know you a little better, but... Yeah, it's only on that side.

Kind of shows up a little bit on that side, but it's right by this area. Do you have anything going on in your mouth over here? Kind of shows up a little bit on that side, but it's right by this area. Do you have anything going on in your mouth over here? You sure? Not that I know of. I just got a cancer screening. Did they check your lymph nodes over here? They checked the whole body. Now you're worrying me.

Well, I'd love to say just kidding, but I'm not. I wouldn't have brought it up. Let's take a break. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind the scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes,

end of the month live Zoom calls with me, exclusive merch and more. Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Vigilance Elite. That's patreon.com slash vigilance elite that's patreon.com slash vigilance elite. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan show review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you.

Let's get back to the show. All right, Dave, we're back from the break. That was a good conversation we just had. Thanks, glad you liked it. You know, I've heard a lot about You know, I've heard a lot about satanic stuff going on in Hollywood, in music, and a lot of kids are aspiring to be a rock star. And actually, we have a mutual friend whose daughter is really into it. And I know he is very concerned about the satanic stuff, the frequencies and all that kind of stuff. Can you talk a little bit about what that

is? I don't know exactly what you're talking about with the frequency stuff. And the Satan stuff you're talking about, can you be a little bit more... I think what I'm getting at is more like satanic cults and kind of like the band that you were just talking about in Israel that you had, well, were going to have an encounter with. And some of the stuff that you used to be into, is that running rampant in those circles? I see that that's the whole thing that I have to go back to. I don't think anybody that is practicing witchcraft, that that would have been their natural first choice, unless they had some kind of

fractured paradigm for a functional healthy family. You know, I'm not saying that it has to be a two-parent family. Mine wasn't, and I turned out pretty good. My kids are great. Pam and I have always taken the approach that both of us have a very significant role and that is to do what we do 100% and be able to do what the other one does 100% in times of necessity. Is any of that stuff pushed on you?

Satanic music? No. I think the Heraldos of the world are in dire need of a severe censoring. They've got a microphone and they're just blathering holes for lack of a better word. They say stuff that they think will get listeners, viewers, readers. And I did something with... I think it was one of the network stations. They were trying to do an expose on satanic music and all that stuff. Same thing, basically what you're asking, but a different environment. And I was just saying, I believe that if somebody is trying something and it doesn't work, they're going to try something else, no matter what it is.

Even if it's making toothpicks out of logs, if it doesn't work, they'll find another way. They have to. That's the way we are by human nature. If we don't like something, we're going to say, screw it, and try and find something new. And I think that if you've got a young person that's very impressionable, it's like beautiful, clean, fresh clay,

and we're supposed to be responsible for helping form that person, not control them, but help keep them in the middle of the roof. And there's not a lot of people that really care about that anymore because of society and the environment and the economy, because most families need to have a two-income family anymore. And what happens when there's a two-income family?

Well, there has to be child care. And that's usually at the hands of somebody in the school, in an after-school program, or having somebody that comes to your home. And either one of those, any of those choices are very expensive and it produces diminishing returns because you've got to unprogram the nanny or teacher or substitute or whatever. I remember when I was younger, Justice was just a baby and I'd hired a nanny for him while we were on tour, we were in France. And I got off stage and he was crying because he was just a little kid and the nanny had not changed him. And I went, fucking ballistics.

You know, my kid don't ever, ever think that you're going gonna work for us again and and that was it she was gone and and you know I changed the diapers and and I don't know I going back to the thing about the satanic stuff though I think that usually occurs when people are desperate and they have nowhere else to go do you think there's anything that kids that want to get into this type of industry need to watch out for? In the music industry? Yeah. You have to be very careful from the pedophilia.

You have to be very careful from the rape, for lack of a better word, because if you're not a child and that same thing happens to you, what is it called? You know, there's a lot of stuff that's on TV right now with Sean Puff, Daddy Combs, with Jeffrey Epstein, with all these people that are coming out now getting busted for these crazy orgies and sex parties and everything. That breaks my heart to think that somebody that was an adult with a functioning mind, no matter how depraved it is, but that they would assault an innocent child and rape them, that to me is reprehensible.

And I don't know why there isn't stricter punishment for that. I think a lot of it is because people just don't know what's happening. Is that that common in these circles? Well there are a lot of people that are very famous musicians that the rumor has that they were executed because they were getting ready to expose pedophilia. Executed as in killed? Well the rumors going around about Chester from Lincoln Park and about Chris from Soundgarden was that they were making a movie on child abuse and child trafficking, I think it was. And they're both gone and it's very suspicious.

Geez. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because they don't want this stuff to come out. Well, it's out. It is. But yeah, it's pretty, pretty sad stuff to talk about. Yeah, yeah. You got any happy questions? Why did you, why'd you move to Frank, why'd you move to middle Tennessee? Well, I love my daughter and we moved out here because we couldn't find... The first place we went looking was Austin, Texas.

And I'm glad we didn't move there, not because of the people of Austin, but because of the interlopers that have started to invade Austin, that have done the exodus from California. We were looking for homes out there and had gone every Easter out there to look for three years. And I finally was out here playing and a friend of mine, I didn't know who he was. I had met him and we'd gone our separate ways and I saw him again and I went,

oh yeah, I remember you. So we started talking and I told him, well, my daughter wants to be a singer and he goes, why are you looking at Austin? You should move to Nashville. And I said, really? And he goes, yeah man, it's so much better here. And I was in a really good place

because we just played the show with Iron Maiden there and all of our friends and neighbors and all of our associates that we had here in town finally get to see me do my job and get to know a little bit about me in a professional capacity instead of me just standing in front of them and yapping. So we moved out here and she started pursuing her country career and then she decided she

didn't want to do country and I thought, well, that's great. And she started trying to sing pop again and she didn't like that either. And we had started our wine business when I played with the San Diego Symphony in San Diego. I had this opportunity to play with them and I wanted to make something unique for them to drink. I didn't think that the symphony would have a lot of beer on tap or a lot of hardcore alcohol that they would probably just have champagne or wine or something. So I said, I think I want to make a wine. So we made a wine and that took off really well.

And then move forward, fast forward a few more years. Electra is now a sommelier. It's one of the youngest sommeliers that was a female. And she's a what? She's a what? Sommelier. What is that? That's a wine taster.

They can take a little spoon and take a sip of wine and tell you where it's from. Wow. Yeah, they're very, very, very sought after people because they can taste the soil. They can taste the the group, the grouping of the grape like a red grape will have numerous red fruit tastes to it. That's the idiosyncrasy of the grape. It could taste like a cherry, it could taste like a raspberry, it could taste like a currant, it could taste like a strawberry, for example, plum. Those are all the red colors.

So when you're tasting the wines, to have an educated palate like that is very desirable for a restaurant and certainly desirable for a wine company. We want somebody who knows their stuff. Now Electra and Pam are running House of Mustaine, and if you're getting your wine graded when you make it into the 90 percentile you're You are very very desirable nice Is I is your daughter still here? Yeah, she's she's still living here. She has her own place that I bought and She's doing the wine and justice and I are doing the beer. And we just were an entrepreneurial family.

I thank God that my kids turned out the way that they did. But it wasn't for lack of trying. They certainly had a rambunctious spirit. And we had to, you know, we had, Lecter was like a little horse. And she did not want to be ridden, she did not want to be on a harness, she didn't want to be on a halter, she didn't want nothing. She was going to just live life her way. And Justice was kind of like that too.

He actually wanted to move out when he was young, so we let him move. He moved into the house we had in Oceanside, and I went down there one time and he had just had a little get together and I was looking in the house and I opened up one of the closets and I saw a smoking device that was about as big as your ore over there made out of glass that I don't know I guess the guy puffs on it for a little while another guy comes along along when it fills up. It's the biggest bong I've ever seen in my life. And yeah, that's the way things were going back then in Cali. Because everybody was getting their medical cards.

And as soon as that happened, everybody was smoking pot 24-7. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Do you like it here? I love it here. I think one of the things that happened when we first got here was the culture shock. My blood pressure went down. I started to really enjoy driving in traffic and I realized that people don't stick their finger up in the air as much here. They don't honk. I can tell when people are here that aren't from Tennessee when they drive out into the

middle of the intersection when they're going to turn. I used to make that mistake all the time. I don't now, but I can tell. Sometimes when I'm just beyond the point of any coming back to earth, I'll honk. Of course, I've said like eight cuss words while I'm honking, but yeah, it's been really good for me to cost a living. The people are wonderful. I love the fact that there's hardly any graffiti anywhere.

And our particular neighborhood where we're at has a very, very thorough police presence and sheriff presence, so we feel safe. Good. You know, there were some people in the property behind us, it looked like there were about 12 people walking with backpacks, and I thought, well, that doesn't look right to me.

If they were working over there, they'd probably have something resembling a tool, or something, but they're just a group of people walking one direction with backpacks on. So I called the sheriff and I asked, I said, are you guys aware of any migrant traffic up here? Because there's some people in my backyard. And they came out and they said,

no, it was the guy behind you. He was doing something and he neglected to tell anybody. And you know what I did? Nothing. If I was back in California, I would have made a way to let him know that I didn't appreciate him having people tromping through my backyard and make him very aware that I'm upset. You know, like what you were talking about with the tripping, you know, stuff. It's just like taking off a tight pair of shoes.

You just go, you know, life. It's just like taking off a tight pair of shoes. You just go, you know, life just kind of settles back. And I remember one of the times when I was staying down at my mom's house, David Ellison and I had just gotten sober and we were down in Elsinore trying to get away from Los Angeles. And I remember there was one day I woke up and I heard the birds chirping and I thought, I haven't heard the birds for so long. I just don't listen for them anymore. Wow. Now every morning I hear the birds. I listen to nature. I listen... I can tell when there's aircraft in the area. I can tell when the wind's blowing. I can tell when the horses are out.

I drove past our one pasture yesterday, or the day before, and I got a mare for my wife. We have a couple, we have three horses actually. So I got her a mare because her gelding just passed away. And she put her head up and just went, just did this huge whinny. And I thought, man, talk about the life these guys have made here in Tennessee. The weather's beautiful.

The grass is probably so delicious to them. And our neighbor is growing alfalfa in his grass for his livestock. So we have that too. And our field and our forest is full of lavender. Nice. How could you complain about stuff like that? You can't. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's new? What's coming new with you guys? With the winery, with the beer, with the music? There's a lot of stuff. We have a book coming out in my darkest hours, a book about my cancer diagnosis. I went to go see a dentist.

I was out on the road for the Jimi Hendrix experience. My mouth hurt. And I thought that the guy that had just done my work had maybe had a little debris in my mouth, some glue, maybe a instrument broke off, and it was hurting. So I went there and he goes, I can't see anything, you need to go see an oral surgeon.

I go and see the oral surgeon. The guy looks at my mouth, he leaves for 45 minutes, and I'm thinking, you cock. I'm just thinking, man, what kind of a doctor are you? This is horrible bedside manner. And I should have been prepared from what he did. I walked into the reception area, and I said, where's the doctor?

And the girl goes, he'll be right in. So I go in, and he walks in, he stands in front of me, and he goes, you got the big C. And I looked at him and I went. And I asked him, what did you say? Because I went into shock immediately. You got the big C. And I don't remember anything after that, leaving his office.

I just know I got up and I walked out and I got in my car and then I called my wife and I said, honey, I have cancer. And I didn't notice it, but I'd been sitting in my car for a little while and I had tears coming down my eyes because I was in shock. I didn't know. I just thought for the absolute worst. And that is the beginning of the book and how we made our best album to date, The Sick to Dying and the Dead, while I was going through cancer treatment. I think it was something like eight chemo treatments and 30 radiations, something, some ridiculous amount of treatments, maybe it was 51, I don't know.

Geez. But it was a lot. And they said they wanted to be really, really, really aggressive with it because I was a singer. And I love my doctors, they did great work keeping me alive and keeping my voice. So yeah, that's one thing we're doing. We also are resurrecting our big festival tour Gigantour. We have a couple one-offs. We're playing Vanaru soon, and we've got two big festivals over in Europe that we're going to be doing. We've got the record that's going to be coming out this year, because we've been in studio recording. I'm actually supposed to be there right now. There's We've been in the studio recording. I'm actually supposed to be there right now. And there's somebody we've been talking to about documenting the whole thing. So we've recorded the making of the record. We've done this several times with several records we've made, but it never really gets

out the door because as soon as we're done making the record, it's too much stuff to do. And of course it's there. We have the making of Dystopia, we have the making of The Sick, the Dying and the Dead. We have the making of this record already and at some point I'm sure they'll be worthy to put out, but we're just staying busy, busy, busy. I know that Pam and Electra are doing really great with the wine.

They just released a new wine. I think it's called a Vernaccio. Which one that is? Yeah, but all the wines we have have song titles to kind of give them a little bit of some connection to me for the House of Mustaine stuff. Let's see what else is there. We've been working on our vineyard over in Italy. We've got a piece of property over there we've been planting and building a house over there. And that's been really exciting because we figured out with the wines from California,

a lot of them have sulfites in it, and that gives you a headache. The wines from Italy do not, and they don't give you a headache. So that's been really neat, and we've been really successful with that. The kids have been moving around a lot. Justice just got a new house,

so we helped him move, and just getting ready for a tour. You got, what kind of cancer was it? Throat cancer. Throat cancer? What stage? Oh, I don't know what stage it was. We just, we discovered it

and we went to work on it right away. I know how big it was. I know it was a couple millimeters. It was a non-basal squeamish, squamish, whatever, I think. I tried to not dig into it too much because I didn't want to give it power over me. That's why I don't really know the amount of chemo or radiation numbers I have because I frankly don't want those numbers to be the definition of me. It doesn't define me.

How did your family react when you told them? I think Pam was scared. I know the kids were scared. I think Justice knew that I was a fighter and that I was going to fight this. I'm not sure that Electra knew that. And Pam knows that God's in control so that whatever happens is his way anyway. And you recorded an album while going through that? Yeah.

Our best one yet. Holy shit. It was hard. It was hard. And I fell asleep a few days in recording and, you know, for people that don't understand that, they think you're just getting drugged out and you're enjoying it. I wasn't enjoying it. I was getting drugged out, yeah, but that was because they were trying to kill me, to

kill the cancer in my body. Damn. It's hard to sing. It was hard to sing. My voice changed. I to sing. It was hard to sing. My voice changed. I could imagine. Plus I had my neck broken by a chiropractor back in 2012 and I had to have my neck fused together.

So I've got a plate in my neck and that's changed my voice too. Holy shit, man. Yeah, yeah. It's been a lot of stuff. So, um, I, I... You know, looking out the window appreciating the ride for me right now. Yeah, I do that. I do that.

Because there's a lot of stuff that tried to take me out. Well, Dave. What an interview, man. Hey, Sean. Thank you for coming. It's been a pleasure. It was an honor to have you. It's good to meet you too, sir. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for coming. It's been a pleasure. It was an honor to have you. It's good to meet you too, sir.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. MUSIC Former MLB All-Star Sean Casey, aka The Mayor, keeps hitting it out of the park. Take my 30 years of experience. Take the wisdom and knowledge I've learned from the failures when I got sent down my rookie year, all the injuries I had to overcome. Your mind is the most important tool you have in life.

Be relentless. Keep charging. It matters how you talk to yourself, how you look at the world. That matters. We talk about that. I don't know. I'm fired up. Baseball's back and it's gonna be incredible. I love it.

The Mayor's Office with Sean Casey from Believe. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.