MEGADETH

The monumental Countdown To Extinction didn’t merely place Megadeth at the forefront of a newly energised 90s metal scene, it may just have saved a reborn Dave Mustaine’s life

WORDS: RICH HOBSON

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Megadeth entered the 1990s on a high. Happily, for co-founder Dave Mustaine and David ‘Junior’ Ellefson, that status was figurative rather than literal.

The debilitating impact of the serious drug habits both men had been cultivating, since investing half of the recording budget allocated to Megadeth’s 1985 debut album (Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good) in heroin and cocaine, had been brought sharply into focus during the summer of 1988. Booked to play the biggest show of their lives, in front of 107,000 metalheads on the supporting bill for Iron Maiden’s first headline appearance at Donington’s Monsters Of Rock festival on August 20, the quartet limped through an embarrassingly moribund set, with Ellefson horribly dope-sick. Management immediately pulled a week of prestigious European stadium shows with Maiden, and flew the band home to put Mustaine and Ellefson into rehab.

“I’m lucky, with my intake of drugs and drink, that I didn’t end up as a glob of shit,” Mustaine admitted to Q magazine in 1992. “For five years, I was spending $500 a day on cocaine and heroin. Every single day. [My] loved ones were watching a man become a hollow shell.”

By 1990 however, clean, focused and rejuvenated with the recruitment of guitarist Marty Friedman and drummer Nick Menza ahead of the recording of Rust In Peace, Megadeth were on fire and on the rise. Two days before their fourth album dropped, the band kicked off an ambitious European arena tour, co-headlining with old friends Slayer. With Testament and Suicidal Tendencies on the under-card, the three-week tour, billed as the Clash Of The Titans, was a triumph, offering all four bands a teasing first taste of what true success might look like. Mustaine and Ellefson were both completely hooked.