With “Dystopia,” Megadeth edges closer to Dave Mustaine’s utopian lineup

The remastered version of Megadeth's "Behind the Music" episode ends with footage of the band sharing the stage with fellow members of the Big Four — Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax — in 2010 at the Sonisphere Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria. The scene seemed like a fitting cap to a captivating career that had seen as many ups as downs.

While that sequence played like a fairy-tale ending for the embattled Megadeth frontman, with him finally claiming his rightful place in the pantheon alongside his estranged bandmates, if you watch closely just before the credits roll, Dave Mustaine offered some parting thoughts that, now, some years removed, proved to be pretty telling.

"If you stop at number two, you're a quitter," he declared then. "I want to be number one. It's not that I'm not happy. I'm just not happy not being number one."

The knowing grin on Mustaine's face said his story wasn't over then, and he knew it. No lingering on laurels: There was still lots of legacy-building to be done with Megadeth, and you get the sense that there still is in his mind, even now with the exceedingly well-received release of the band's latest record. Featuring Mustaine and longtime bassist David Ellefson with Lamb of God's Chris Adler on drums and Kiko Loureiro on guitar, "Dystopia" is easily the band's strongest album in years.

"We came in at number two again. We matched our best ever," Mustaine says from his home in Nashville, Tennessee, referring to the previous chart position of "Countdown to Extinction" in 1992. "I wouldn't have even noticed that, but Chris Adler did and he brought it to my attention. Because I'm still kind of in denial, I guess, that's it's been received so well. We've been scratching and clawing for so long, and the adversity and the haters and stuff make it where sometimes you kind of don't take time to lift your head up and look around. You've always got your nose to the grindstone and you're working. So for now, it's kind of like, son of a gun, I can't believe it. It's such a great feeling."

"Dave Mustaine is a perfectionist," observed Jeff Barton of Classic Rock Magazine, in that same "Behind the Music" episode, a few frames before Mustaine's musings about being an also-ran. "That directly spills over, I think, into his quest for the ultimate lineup, which will never be fulfilled."

Don't be so sure of that. With "Dystopia," Mustaine is edging ever closer to his utopian ideals, having assembled yet another laudable lineup, perhaps the best yet. While Mustaine and Ellefson have been surrounded by some stellar sidemen over the years, including guitar greats like Marty Friedman and Chris Broderick, the performances on this platter are incredibly inspired, particularly on the part of Loureiro, someone whom Mustaine praises not just for his playing style, which is pristine, but as a person.

"He genuinely likes the music and we have fun when we're together and we talk about stuff," Mustaine says. "He's very, very wickedly smart, which, intelligence, I really respect a lot." Loureiro has made for a massive addition to Megadeth's sound, and that's really saying something, especially considering the fantastic fretmen who have been in the fold previously, a breakdown of which is so broad that it genuinely requires its own Wikipedia page.

The same could actually be said for a full rendering of Megadeth's storied saga, which is probably why the programmers at VH1 saw fit to remaster the band's original "Behind the Music" episode, which ended with Friedman parting ways with the group. There was so much more of the story to tell after that, including Mustaine finally finding sobriety, the death of timekeeper Gar Samuelson, the freak nerve damage that almost ended Mustaine's career, and the entry and exit of many more members.

If anything, the original cut of that broadcast serves as the midpoint of the band, which Mustaine formed with Ellefson in 1983 a few months after being expelled from Metallica — and for those familiar with his famous firing, expelled is exactly the right way to describe the way he was separated from the act. On the way to New York, a hungover Mustaine was abruptly awakened by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, told he was no longer in the band and driven to a bus station where he was dropped off.

That period proved to be pivotal and painful enough for Mustaine that it was still a sore spot for the frontman years later when he sat down with Ulrich to reflect on his dismissal, a vignette of vulnerability captured in Metallica's "Some Kind of Monster." More than three decades later, Mustaine now sounds like a man who's made peace with his past. "In hindsight, we look at the fact that there are two really great bands, and we changed the world," he says, adding, "We did something that's so beautiful, and it changed the f------ world forever."

Indeed. Much like the sounds and solos that first inspired Mustaine as a young musician, the music of Megadeth has made a monumental impact on metal fans all over the world. Little did he know as a kid growing up in a dysfunctional family situation in Southern California that someday a legion of fans would see him and his band in the same light that he saw Angus Young and AC/DC, whose music and playing style helped shape Mustaine's sensibilities.

"I was learning Zepp, I was learning Kiss, I was learning Ted Nugent and UFO," Mustaine recalls, "but it wasn't until Angus that I knew what headbanging was about. Mind-blowing. None of those other guys headbanged. Angus did, and that was, I honestly believe, Angus was the guy who created the headbanging move. I don't know. I'm sure you can probably trace it back to somebody he was influenced by like Chuck Berry or something.

"But the heavy metal influences for me are so broad. They go back to stuff for me in the '70s, like 'Hocus Pocus' by Focus is one the most metal songs ever, except for the yodeling crap. The solo at the end — you know that solo. Come on, bro, that's one of the greatest solos ever. Another great song, and maybe I'm getting a little bit too obscure, but the 'Sails of Charon' from Scorpions, Uli Roth, the solo on that song! Remember that one? Mind-blowing."

Plenty of people feel exactly the same way about some of Mustaine's solos, only these days, fans have the chance to talk directly to Mustaine about things like that on Twitter, and there's a really good chance he'll respond, directly, something that wasn't even a possibility when the Megadeth maestro was growing up.

"It probably would've been as great for me as it is for the fans to be able to talk to the musicians they love," he says. "I still, as goofy as it sounds, I still get kind of excited whenever anybody says anything about, 'Are you a Led Zeppelin fan?' and I get to add Jimmy's Twitter to my reply."

From the intelligence of his lyrics, which he says were influenced by Aesop early on, to the intensity of his music, Mustaine has clearly made his mark with Megadeth. Clearly he's reached a point in his career where he no longer needs to answer to anybody.

And yet he does, every day on Twitter, faithfully, no matter how inane the questions may sometimes seem or how many times the subject of Metallica is still brought up, which happens about as frequently as you might imagine. Scan his timeline even just briefly and you'll see that Mustaine is consistently engaging and gracious to any fans who take the time to reach out. "If you interact with everybody," he explains, "you have a chance of winning some people over.

"There's a lot of fence sitters and they are evaluating whether they're going to follow the band or not based on how I respond to certain things, because they'll sniff out that the band's got a new record out, and they're digging on it, and they'll come over and watch how I respond. Again, there's a lot of people on social media who are really young. So they don't know the story."

Luckily, it's a story that's still being written.

— Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com or follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.