Author: fgt

A few years ago, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was asked about his band’s aspirations when they got together in the wilds of Massachusetts all those years ago.

“We weren’t too ambitious when we started out,” came his reply. “We just wanted to be the biggest band on the planet.”

It was typical Tyler: funny but honest, and brimming with bulletproof confidence. Most bands would have said the same, and those who didn’t were lying. But the difference was that Aerosmith delivered on that promise. Eventually.

The band’s stellar history is well documented. The commercial, artistic and chemical highs of the 70s; their against-the-odds resurrection in the 80s; the ongoing five-way soap opera that sporadically simmers, boils over then calms down again.

But their early years were a different matter. They might have wanted to be the biggest band on the planet, but they weren’t going to get there without a fight. There were obstacles and setbacks, failures and fights. And there were drugs. Lots of drugs.

Aerosmith made it, of course. But that bulletproof confidence would be tested to the limit.

They might be the ultimate Boston band, but three of Aerosmith’s founding members were New York born and bred. Steven Tyler grew up in the Big Apple with original guitarist Ray Tabano, where they both ran with the same teenage gang. Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer were in different years at the same school in Yonkers, though it was pure coincidence that they ended up in the same band 200 miles up the coast a few years later.

Tyler came from a musical family. His Italian grandfather, Giovanni Tallarico, had been a classical cellist, and his father Victor was a Julliard-educated pianist. The young Steven cut his teeth playing drums with his dad at social events. “Girls would come in, look at the band and go, ‘Ugh,’” he recalled. “I’d try to look over at them and go, ‘No, look, I’m cool, check it out, don’t leave.’”

The polite world of classical music and natural born wild-child Tyler were always going to be a bad fit for each other. He began listening to The Beatles, the Stones and The Yardbirds, dropping acid, smoking pot and taking speed while he did it. The social events fell by the wayside. “In my mind I was always a rock star,” he recalled.

It wouldn’t be long before he was making that dream a reality. Or trying to. An early band, the Yardbirds-inspired The Chain Reaction, had released a couple of singles, but it hadn’t led anywhere. The fame Tyler craved remained tantalisingly out of reach.

All that changed in the summer of 1969. Tyler’s family owned a holiday lodge in the small Massachusetts town of Sunapee, and he split his time between there and New York. It was in Sunapee that Tyler was invited to watch a covers trio with the unpromising name The Jam Band playing a gig at a local club, The Barn.

Tyler grudgingly accepted the invitation. The Jam Band featured a lanky blond bassist called Tom Hamilton and a singer/guitarist with a mop of thick black hair and a jaw that could crack concrete by the name of Joe Perry.

“They were horrible, but the way they did [Fleetwood Mac’s] Rattlesnake Shake was something else. Joe was really into [Ten Years After frontman] Alvin Lee,” Tyler remembered. “And I went, if I can get this groove with this guy and start writing songs…’”

Perry and Hamilton knew who Tyler was. He would regularly come up to Sunapee to stay at his parents’ lodge and make like he owned the place. Sometimes he’d be with whatever band he was in at the time. Joe Perry worked at a local diner, and he’d sigh whenever Tyler and his crew came in.

“They’d be wearing clothes from Carnaby Street and real long hair,” said Perry. “They were loud and obnoxious, behaving like rock stars are supposed to behave – especially when they’re in a little town and nobody knows how not-so-big they really are. They’d come in and throw food and shit, and I’d have to clean up after them.”

When this fast-talking brat approached Perry about getting a band together, the guitarist was understandably reticent, but some underlying ESP stopped him from telling Tyler to go screw himself. For starters, they were drinking from the same musical well: the British invasion bands, American R&B singers, blues rock pioneers like The Yardbirds and The Animals. It didn’t hurt that Perry and Hamilton shared the same burgeoning chemical proclivities as Tyler – the bassist had even been arrested as a teenage for dealing acid.

Perry and Hamilton didn’t take a lot of persuading. Within a few months, they had moved with Tyler down to Boston, then the centre of a burgeoning rock’n’roll movement headed up by local heroes the J. Geils Band. The trio were joined by Tyler’s old buddy Ray Tabano on second guitar. Not long after that, the singer’s former schoolmate Joey Kramer – who had moved to Boston to study at the Berklee College Of Music – had agreed to play drums. They had a band, and, in a shared apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, a base.

What they didn’t have was a name. At one point they considered calling themselves The Hookers. Another time, they talked about calling themselves Spike Jones, after the 50s comedian and bandleader. The words ‘spike’ and ‘jones’ both had drug connotations – whether that was coincidental or not isn’t clear, though it did dovetail neatly with the band’s growing pharmaceutical activities (Tyler and Tabano had graduated to injecting cocaine, though they would ultimately prove to be early adopters rather than outliers within the group).

In the end, it was Kramer who gifted the band their name. He was a fan of Harry Nilsson’s 1968 album Aerial Ballet, and loved the sound of the word ‘Aero’. An old band of his back in Yonkers had called themselves Aerosmith, but they’d split up a few years ago. Why waste it? It didn’t mean much, but it was still better than The Hookers.

Aerosmith made their live debut at the Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton, Massachusetts in late 1970. They didn’t bother hiding their influences: the set consisted of Stones and Yardbirds covers, including their version of the latter’s take on the old blues number Train Kept A-Rollin’. During the gig, Tyler and Perry got into a ruck over the volume of the guitars. “So began an Aerosmith tradition,” a wry Tom Hamilton later said.

That tension would fuel Aerosmith from the start. Tyler was older and gobbier; Perry quieter and more stubborn. They frequently butted heads, but both knew it was for the greater good of the band. The same couldn’t be said of Ray Tabano. The guitarist was lagging behind his bandmates musically, but that didn’t stop him making a play for control of Aerosmith in the summer of 1971. “Ray gives the band this Looney Tunes ultimatum that he was taking over,” said Tom Hamilton. “He said, ‘Either you line up behind him [Tyler] or you line up behind me.’ From that moment on, Ray was gone.”

Tabano’s replacement was 19-year-old guitarist Brad Whitford, a friend of a friend from Reading, Massachusetts who was playing with a band named Justin Thyme. They didn’t know it, but the classic Aerosmith line-up was in place.

There were few places in Boston that let groups play original material, and Aerosmith had too much ambition to play sets full of covers for too long. They hit the frat parties and high school dances instead. Occasionally they headed down the Eastern seaboard to New York to check out the competition.

“When we started I imagined that these people like Rick Derringer were like Lord High Doodledums who sat in the corner with servants pickin’ their toes,” scoffed Tyler. “But we played Max’s Kansas City with some of those guys and I knew we had more than they had.”

Aerosmith had picked up a manager along the way. Frank Connally was a Boston promoter with some shady friends. Joey Kramer recalled walking into a run-down greeting card shop run by associates of ‘Father Frank’. “It took me a while to realise it was actually a bookie joint and that they were basically gangsters,” said Kramer. “I think they loaned Frank money to finance our management.”

It wasn’t just mobsters that Aerosmith were mixing with. “Our best friends were drug dealers,” said Perry. “We identified with them because we felt like outcasts, outlaws, menaces to society.”

The dealers liked Aerosmith too, mainly because they were such good customers. But the music industry was taking longer to warm to them. Labels came to check out Aerosmith, only to pass on them, deciding that they weren’t ready or, worse, that they sailed too close to the Rolling Stones.

But their perseverance eventually paid off. In 1972, they finally bagged a deal with Columbia Records after label boss Clive Davis caught a show in New York. Davis was the music industry power-player who had turned Janis Joplin and Santana into stars, and a good man to have in their corner. The $125,000 the band received for signing didn’t hurt either.

“God, I know we stayed up all night,” remembered Hamilton, “but we weren’t looking down the road. I don’t think anybody thought that everything was going to be fine from now on, and that we were going to have a thirty-year career just because Clive Davis said so. We still had to get up the next day and get to the next gig.”

Joe Perry would describe Aerosmith’s self-titled debut album as “the stuff we had been playing in the clubs. We just left out the Yardbirds songs.” The fluid songwriting partnerships that would help turn them into one of rock’n’roll’s biggest draws were yet to be established. Instead, Tyler was responsible the lion’s share of the songs, taking sole credit for five of the eight tracks that would eventually appear on the album. Among them were Mama Kin, written on a warped acoustic guitar Joey Kramer fished out of a garbage can, and Make It, a song that found Aerosmith wearing their ambitions on their voluminous sleeves.

But best of all was a showstopping slowie titled Dream On that Tyler had written in his parents’ living room in the lodge at Sunapee. He knew it was promising, but it was only when he brought it to Perry and Whitford that he realised how special it was. “Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano, I got a little melodramatic,” he said. “The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”

Aerosmith were a razor sharp live band, but they would quickly find out there was a big difference between the stage and the studio. The five men who stepped into Boston’s Intermedia Studios in October 1973 to record their debut album were greenhorns in that situation.

“The band was very uptight,” remembered Tyler. “We were so nervous that when the red recording light came on we froze. We were scared shitless.”

Matters weren’t helped by tensions with producer Adrian Barber. The Yorkshire-born Barber had been the in-house engineer at Hamburg’s Star Club when The Beatles played there in the early 60s, before going on to work with the likes of Cream and The Allman Brothers Band. But he was oscillating on a different wavelength to these wired Yanks.

“Our producer was practically useless,” Perry later claimed. “When I heard the playback, I kept thinking, ‘We’re better than this. We should sound better than this.’”

Tyler: “It was like being with a retarded child in there, and I’m not sure if it was because he was so high, or because we all were.”

The singer wasn’t afraid to take matters into his own hands, albeit with a little chemical assistance. “I put the string section on Dream On sitting at this Mellotron while a friend of mine kept laying out lines of crystal THC that I was snorting while I was playing,” he admitted.

The finished album was a promising start, if not a great one. The bones of the band they would become are in place, but the muscle was missing. Much of this is down to the sluggish mix that irked Perry so much: One Way Street and the choogling Write Me A Letter are decent songs that sound like they’re dragging great bags of wet laundry behind them.

Weirder still is Tyler’s voice. The future Demon Of Screamin’ decided at the last minute to rework his singing style, swapping out his jive-talking rasp for a mangled attempt at old-beyond-his-years authenticity. “I changed my voice into Kermit the Frog, to sound more like a blues singer,” he later rued.

For all that, Aerosmith was far from disastrous. Make It and Someday were cocksure enough to paper over any cracks, while their cover of Rufus Thomas’ Walkin’ The Dog was a textbook example of early 70s white-boy R&B. And it possessed two out-of-the-gate classics in Mama Kin and Dream On. Ironically, Perry was initially unimpressed by the latter – a song which would eventually become one of the band’s signature numbers and draw up the template for the modern power ballad.

“To me, rock’n’roll’s about energy and putting on a show,” said the guitarist. “I didn’t really appreciate the musicality of it until later, but I did know it was a great song, so we put it in our set. We also knew that if you played straight rock’n’roll you didn’t get played on the radio and, if you wanted a Top 40 hit, the ballad was the way to go.”

At least that was the idea. Aerosmith was released in January 1972, and Dream On came out as single that July. Both were greeted with deafening silence by radio DJs and the public alike. The album shuffled embarrassedly to No.166 in the US charts.

“There was no nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party,” said Perry. “Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out.”

The band had no choice but to hit the road. They toured with everyone from Mott The Hoople to jazz-rock pioneers Mahavishnu Orchestra. “[Mahavishnu leader] John McLaughlin and the band would meditate before they started playing,” remembered Tom Hamilton. “And as you might imagine, we weren’t really into meditating. We’d already found our own ways to meditate, chemically.”

The album hadn’t gone completely unnoticed. In the mid-west, future Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin’ had fallen hard for it.

“Growing up in Indiana, I loved fucking Aerosmith, man,” said Stradlin’, whose vagabond image and Olympian drug intake owed a debt to Joe Perry. “Smoke a joint, listen to the first record.”

Aerosmith might not have flown out of the traps at the first time of asking, but at least they were doing something right.

It was Bob Ezrin who hooked Aerosmith up with the man who would help turn them into the superstars they wanted to be. Ezrin was the wunderkind Canadian producer who had helped mould Alice Cooper into America’s favourite bogeyman, and Columbia wanted him to work his magic on Aerosmith. Ezrin declined the offer, but suggested his friend Jack Douglas was the ideal man for the job.

“Bob said, ‘They’re two years away from being anything, they’re too raw, they’re just too much work for me, I can’t do it,’” Douglas later said. “But I like to get in on the ground floor with a group, and I’m an old Yardbirds fan.”

The first time Douglas saw Aerosmith play was at a high school dance outside of Boston. He was instantly sold. “It was full of sweaty kids going crazy,” he said.

The failure of their debut album had lit a rocket under the band’s collective backside. The biggest change was that Tyler and Perry had begun writing together. The first fruits of their labour would become the album’s opening song, the strutting Same Old Song And Dance, written in one drug-fuelled night in the front room of the apartment they were sharing.

Most of the groundwork for Get Your Wings was laid in an unlikely environment. “The preproduction work started in the back of a restaurant that was like a Mob hangout in the North End [of Boston]. They started to play me the songs they had for their new album. My attitude was: ‘What can I do to make them sound like themselves?’”

The band put in the hours in the studio, fuelled by whatever substances were available. “We had some hassles because we had some people there that shouldn’t have been there,” according to Douglas.

The band’s extra-curricular activities impacted on the recording process. Perry was otherwise indisposed when it came to recording the cover of The Yardbirds’ Train Kept A-Rollin’, so Douglas enlisted session musicians Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner to play on it instead.

“For some reason Joe wasn’t there to do it and I never really questioned it,” Hunter later said. “Jack called me up at like ten o’clock in the evening and I went in and did it and that was it.”

Studio stiffness and the occasional unavailability of some of its chief participants aside, Get Your Wings was more confident and recognisable as an Aerosmith record than its predecessor. Same Old Song Dance, Lord Of The Thighs and Pandora’s Box ramped up the grooves and, in the case of the latter, the not-so-subtle innuendo that would become a ’Smith’s hallmark. Seasons Of Wither was another killer ballad, though the uplifting optimism Of Dream On was replaced by an altogether darker vibe – something that presaged the deep narcotic hole the band would soon find themselves in. And despite not featuring Perry, Train Kept A-Rollin’ remains a cornerstone of their set more than 45 years on.

Tellingly, Get Your Wings found Tyler reverted to his natural singing style. “On the second album, the songs found my voice,” he said. “I realized that it’s not about having a beautiful voice and hitting all the notes; it’s about attitude.”

But that attitude still wasn’t enough. To their annoyance neither the songs nor the attitude supplied Aerosmith with the hits theywanted and needed. “We were angry as fuck at radio stations who weren’t playing Aerosmith,” said Tyler. The media had started to notice them, but most of the write-ups drew unfavourable comparisons with their idols the Rolling Stones, only compounding their frustrations. “I got pissed,” admitted Tyler. “I was using drugs at the time, so I was in denial.”

There was a silver lining, and that was that Aerosmith were becoming a popular live draw beyond the East Coast. Audiences were getting bigger and louder, and the band were only too happy to head to any town with a venue and a drug dealer or two.

“We were the guys you could actually see,” says Joe Perry. “It wasn’t like Zeppelin was out there on the road in America all the time. The Stones weren’t always coming to your town. We were America’s band – the garage band that made it real big, the ultimate party band.”

The guitarist was getting ahead of himself. It would be another few months before Aerosmith became “America’s band”. But they were well on their way. And once they got there, there would be no stopping them.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Aersomith

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

Formed in 1989 by ex-Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian, Cathedral were one of the longest-running and most influential doom metal bands of the last 40 years Although they split in 2013 following swansong album The Last Spire, their legacy still runs deep. As the band prepared to wind things up for the final time, Dorrian looked back over the smoke-wreathed career of a band who helped keep the doom flag flying.

During the 80s, doom metal was in a fractured state and barely a ‘scene’ at all. Candlemass and Trouble enjoyed some mainstream success, but others – including the likes of Pentagram, Witchfinder General and Saint Vitus – existed in their own little bubbles, starved of support and exposure. Their fans, however, although scattered and few in number, were extremely dedicated, and it took just one of them – Lee Dorrian himself – to help set the stage for doom to develop into the thriving underground movement it is today.

Disillusioned with Napalm Death’s changing musical direction and with the media circus which surrounded them during their first flush of success, Lee set Cathedral in motion following a drunken conversation with fellow doom fan Mark ‘Griff’ Griffiths. The pair hooked up with ex-Acid Reign guitarist Garry ‘Gaz’ Jennings – also a closet doom freak – and began working on material, determined to create the heaviest doom metal possible.

After demoing some painfully slow songs which Lee describes as “one chord a minute”, the band added Gaz’s former Acid Reign bandmate Adam Lehan on second guitar, fleshing out the sound and style which shaped their 1991 debut album, Forest Of Equilibrium. With chops honed following tours with the likes of Paradise Lost, Morbid Angel and The Young Gods, Cathedral hit the studio fully focused and raring to go, and Forest Of Equilibrium remains both a fearsome slab of doom and arguably the band’s definitive album.

“There are albums that are better produced or maybe have better songs,” says Lee, “but I think it’s the most focused album we’ve ever done. It captures a moment in time when we were doing everything against the grain and I think it’s the best.”

The arrival of drummer Mark Wharton – also ex-Acid Reign – and 1992’s Soul Sacrifice EP heralded a shift in style which pointed the way towards future developments.

“Gaz and Adam’s writing style advanced really quickly,” Lee explains. “From writing really doomy, droney stuff, they were coming up with more complex ideas. It was a real turning point, although I didn’t actually want the band to change. As much as I didn’t want us to feel restricted, I didn’t want the songs to become too bouncy. I hated that word! A song like Autumn Twilight is quite bouncy and it took me a while to be convinced this was the direction we should be going in, but I went with it and in the end felt it was a good move forward.”

The changes on Soul Sacrifice, however, prepared no one for the enormous leap taken with the band’s second album, 1993’s The Ethereal Mirror. Cathedral had just found themselves on major label Columbia Record in the US due to a deal made by their label Earache, and were under severe pressure to deliver. It was a big break for which they were desperately unprepared, in more ways than one.

“If we were gonna release a record on one of the world’s biggest major labels, they were gonna want it to sound good,” Lee recalls, “whatever your definition of ‘good’ is. They were gonna want it to have a wider appeal than Forest… did, even though they said they wouldn’t have minded if we’d done an album like that but with better production, which was kinda missing the point. So this meant big studio, big producer and all that went with that. So we went from being in a basement with a friend of ours helping us out to Manor Studios where [Mike Oldfield’s 70s prog classic] Tubular Bells and [the Sex Pistols’] Never Mind The Bollocks were recorded. The producer was saying, ‘You guys suck! You can’t play!’ I don’t know if that was a tactic to get us to perform better, but the songs just weren’t ready when we went to the studio. But somehow we managed to pull it out of the bag. All things considered, it’s amazing it turned out the way it did.”

Despite the stresses of the studio and the fact that, in private, the band weren’t particularly happy with the album, The Ethereal Mirror was a success. In the ensuing whirlwind of touring and promotion, however, trouble was brewing.

“We were put on tours that we didn’t really wanna do,” explains Lee. “It caused disillusion within the band and we started drifting apart. It was sad, because we’d got that far doing it on our own terms. Slowly the cracks started to show. Griff was the first to leave, then Adam. To me, they were both vital parts. Eventually the whole thing imploded and Columbia dropped us. It was just me and Gaz left.”

There then followed a period which Lee looks back on as “bewildered and confused”, during which he and Gaz struggled to meet the band’s commitments, enlisting a string of hired hands just to make it through.

Eventually, however, after much frustration, they recruited bassist Leo Smee and drummer Brian Dixon, both of whom went on to become longtime members. Wary of losing any more momentum, the band then hit the studio to record their third album, 1995’s The Carnival Bizarre.

“We had a new lease of life. Recording that album was great fun,” says Lee. “It’s got great energy and the vibe is what makes it.”

Like its predecessor, Carnival… received rave reviews which inevitably led to a heavy touring schedule. So heavy, in fact, that it left the band little time to prepare their next record. The pressure was so intense that, expected to come up with an album’s worth of lyrics in one week, Lee quit the band. Or tried to, at least.

“I just said, ‘Fuck this, I’m out of here!’ I was dead serious, but the rest of the band carried on, ignored me, and got ready for the studio!”

Although Lee soon changed his mind, the studio sessions for 1996’s Supernatural Birth Machine were at times far from fun.

“There isn’t a single song on the album that I rehearsed even once,” groans Lee. “Most of them are first takes and a lot of the lyrics were written 10 minutes before they were recorded. It was hideous. Because there was a two-year gap between Ethereal… and Carnival…, we felt we had a lot of time to catch up on. We’d decided that no matter what the situation, we’d do an album a year after Carnival…, which was stupid. We were nowhere near prepared to record it, which was a shame.”

Haunted by this, they were in no rush to head back to the studio which, ironically, presented them with the opposite problem when they did eventually return in 1998 to record Caravan Beyond Redemption.

“I think we actually spent too much time on Caravan…!” laughs Lee. “We tried too many different things that, on reflection, weren’t really cohesive enough.”

The album also highlighted just how far Cathedral had moved beyond their early sound, a situation Lee in particular was weary of.

“I was getting disillusioned”, he admits. “I thought we were drifting away from real heaviness. The songs were starting to sound too polished and I was starting to have bust-ups with the other guys. So I said, ‘If we don’t make this next album the heaviest we’ve ever made, I’m gonna fucking think seriously about leaving the band. Again.’ At first they didn’t agree with me, but eventually they came round to my way of thinking, and that’s what led to Endtyme. In a way, it completely destroyed everything we’d done up to that point. It was almost like staring over again.”

Released in 2001, Endtyme dragged the band back to their roots, but it didn’t last long.

“I thought Endtyme would be a turning point where we went back to being a completely heavy band,” says Lee, “but with The VIIth Coming it kinda slipped back to where it had been with the album before. But to be honest, I’d kicked up such a storm and got my way with Endtyme, I just kept my mouth shut. I didn’t wanna seem to be like I was bullying everyone into doing something they didn’t wanna do.”

The long gap between The VIIth Coming and 2005’s The Garden Of Unearthly Delights was down to a number of things, chief among which was the very question of the band’s existence.

“We were working out if we wanted to do this anymore,” explains Lee. “The signs of the band coming to an end started back then. I wasn’t tired of being in a band; I was tired of fighting to be in a band. We really believed in it but every-thing seemed to be a struggle. So we went and did a bit of soul searching.”

Souls duly searched, Cathedral finally returned in 2010 with The Guessing Game, a sprawling double album and their most adventurous yet. Although not the last Cathedral album, as some – including the band themselves – initially imagined, even the possibility seemed to take the pressure off and open the creative floodgates. Progressive and eclectic, it was a fine achievement and would have made a fitting epitaph. During the ensuing tour, however, old wounds re-opened.

“The usual problems were still there,” says Lee “The old signs were starting to show. If everyone was in it 100 per cent and for the same reasons, we’d still be here now. It just got to the point where I didn’t have the time, the energy or the fight to do this anymore. I told Gaz and he basically agreed.”

Once the decision to split had been taken, the band embarked on a series of farewell shows, including a date in London which was recorded for the 2011 live album Anniversary. Touring decks thus cleared, they then began work on the final Cathedral album, The Last Spire. Huge, crushing and heavier than hell, it’s the sound of a band with nothing left to prove.

“It’s relentless, flat-out doom!” smiles Lee. “It’s almost like we’ve recorded our second album last.”

Few bands have done as much as Cathedral to shape the development of doom. From songs you can dance to, to songs that make you want to slit your wrists, their music is colourful even when it’s pitch black, and always inventive. If there is such a thing as a perfect ending, maybe this is it.

“We really had to get this right,” Lee concludes. “The way we ended the band was almost as important as the way we started.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 244, April 2013

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine is one of metal’s most opinionated figures. But when Metal Hammer sat down with him in 2013 to talk about his band’s new album, Super Collider, we found metal’s greatest motormouth in unexpectedly approachable form.

Dave Mustaine is happy. Alarmingly happy. Today finds him warm, enthusiastic, gracious. He’s sounding wise and reasonable and being as generous as he can with his time. He’s practically demanding that Hammer and all our families and friends come and hang out with him at every single show on their UK tour. And it’s really fucking weird. Disarming, even.

“I’m totally at peace right now,” he says, with only the slightest hint of glee that comes when someone’s ‘found Christianity’. “I’m at so much peace it’s bizarre. I don’t think I’ve ever really known true peace until right now. Or certainly these past months. In the back of everyone’s minds we always live with fear – fear of losing something, or not gaining something or, in my case, fear of looking bad in front of your friends. But recently I’ve really been trying to live as I really am. And I think our new album reflects that. There’s no mythology about me now, no complicated lyrical meanings. It’s just me.”

You think you know Dave . We all do. He’s the guy who’s famous for shredding, scowling and providing provocative opinions about any subject thrown his way. Google his name and you’ll find a plethora of clips of Dave being pissed off across three decades, his bottom lip petulantly protruding, a flicker of rage in his eyes. Dave Mustaine: the man who formed Megadeth out of revenge at being jettisoned from Metallica. Dave Mustaine: metal’s biggest megalomaniac and sometime mouthpiece for Conservative America. The man who has previously carried more demons than most guitarists have plectrums. A Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. Drink, drugs, feuds. Alcoholics Anonymous. Conspiracy theories. Near-death experiences. Seventeen trips to rehab. Politically incorrect shit-stirring.

Even before he converted to Christianity in 2004 and became the poster boy for that small pool of rock musicians who reject the liberalism of the music industry in favour of that ‘God, guns and government’ ethos, as written in the American constitution that’s remained unchanged since 1787, he was ruffling feathers. In the 80s when Megadeth were enjoying their first rush of success, he was a man mythologised. But where his thrash contemporaries Metallica and Slayer achieved a kind of stately grandeur by the new millennium, Dave was ranting and raving more than ever. Most of it about how America was going to Hell in a hand-cart.

Yet here he is not saying anything remotely bat-shit crazy about how gay marriage is wrong and Barack Obama isn’t a real American and dinosaurs are silly and guns are brilliant and mankind was created by God out of sweet ’n’ sour spare rib one afternoon in 1956. And while he’s no Dalai Lama, today Dave Mustaine is a different man – different even from the Mustaine who Hammer interviewed a mere six months ago.

Today, as Megadeth prepare to release their 14th album, Super Collider, he seems to have toned down the mania. The album might easily be called ‘Best Behaviour’ or ‘Charm Offensive’. The reasons may be practical though: late in his career, the frontman has just landed his own label imprint at Universal Records – something that brings a degree of wealth and power – and also because he’s made a promise to the rest of his bandmates to keep his crackpot theories on lockdown. It is as if an intervention has been staged to prevent any further bell-endery. He’s still slightly out there, mind. Still speaks in the quote-heavy tone of someone who has been in and out of rehab – and church. And he is still, as he recently told Conservative conspiracist broadcaster Alex Jones, “writing songs about how the peasants are unhappy in the valley – me being one of them”.

There are a few surprises on Super Collider. Slide guitars, a bit of a Southern country vibe. Even a banjo. On a Megadeth album.

“Ah, but it’s not a banjo, it’s a ganjo, which is a six-string banjo with the neck of a guitar. But, yes, I think you need to surprise people now and again. It wouldn’t be a Megadeth record if we didn’t. Everything went surprisingly great making this record – Dave [Ellefson, Megadeth bassist, with whom Mustaine fell out] was back, and the other guys were playing like motherfuckers. And then this thing happened where Universal gave me my own label imprint, Tradecraft. If I didn’t know what an orgasm felt like before, then I sure did now…”

So you’re in a ‘good place’ now?

“Someone asked me recently when I first realised I had ‘made it’. I said, ‘Six months ago.’ My arm got so messed up in 2002 that it scrambled my head. I wondered if I was ever going to get my A-game back as a player. My hand went numb, I had to have an operation on my neck… I felt like a hole in a doughnut. I felt like a non-person without purpose and wasn’t sure I would ever play again. It was such a weird time.”

What type of subject do the new songs cover?

“My mother died instantly and it was really hard because so much gets left unsaid and that’s why I wrote A Tout Le Monde [from Youthanasia]. After that my mother-in-law became a surrogate mother to me. She was great. But then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it was so painful for us all. It was like watching an ice sculpture melt, and so I wrote Forget To Remember which about my love for a family member. That’s an example of one song but the point is, in the past when we were banging records out one after another it got harder and harder to find things to write about. Now we have time to live our lives between albums and reflect a little and despite the subject of some of the songs, we are in a good place and there’s some fun stuff on there, too.”

Do you still feel like ‘the peasant guy’?

“Maybe I’m delusional but I feel like a normal guy. I think I’m more like our fans than they realise. My Mom was a maid and I grew up poor so I’m fairly in touch with reality – and with most people who listen to hard rock and metal. And metal fans are still stigmatised, too. So I try and write lyrics with meaning, rather than standard metal lyrics. Bless the hearts of other songwriters for trying, but they don’t always help our cause. All you can do is write what you feel at the time. I’ve been revisiting my own lyrics recently as we just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Countdown To Extinction and it got me looking further back. Like, would I use the word ‘sleaze’ as I did back on Loved To Deth in 1985 if I knew the future me would read it? Maybe. Maybe not. What I do know is rock’n’roll could have claimed me a long time ago if I hadn’t changed my ways. I did die once, but for some crazy reason the big guy kept me around for another concert.”

Did nearly dying have any bearing on your becoming a born again Christian years later?

“No. [long pause] I mean, I’d say it might have something to do with it but that’s kind of a personal thing for me. I try not to push it on anybody. It’s like the old saying ‘There is nothing worse than a newly sober drunk’ because all they want to do is tell you not to drink and, actually, not everybody has a drink problem. When my faith changed I wanted to say to people, well you know, look back 25 years to the song Peace Sells and tell me what the first line is: ‘What do you mean I don’t believe in God? / I talk to him every day.’. Because we all kind of believe in God to a certain degree.”

Well, not necessarily…

“Yeah, I know agnostics and atheists would question that but I think we all somehow fundamentally believe in the existence of good and evil. When I was 15, living on my own, trying to hustle money for rent, it was hard. But I somehow pulled it off. Are you familiar with the saying ‘There’s no atheist in a fox-hole’? Basically when you’re all alone you trend to reach out for any help you can get. Even at 15 I was asking questions. There were a lot of weird coincidences.”

What type of coincidences?

“Well, I just realised that maybe it wasn’t ‘God’ as such, but someone was watching out for me – like a kind of guardian angel-type trip? You don’t lead the life I’ve had and survive it without someone out there helping you.”

Your willingness to discuss these things – religion, politics – is possibly why people always want to read a Dave Mustaine interview.

“Yeah, and that’s probably one of my major problems, too. I have a big mouth. But when you love somebody you want to share stuff, and I feel like a have this great ongoing relationships with Megadeth’s fanbase. Whatever’s been going on with me and my life I’ve shared it and people possibly respect that because with me what you see is what you get. I can’t dress myself up as something I’m not. I’m not going to show up painted blue. I’m not going to put on, you know, a rubber suit with tits on it.”

Perish the thought. Is there a tiny part of you that enjoys provocation, though?

“No, I don’t say things to get a reaction. The stuff that I write about is important to me. Some of the subjects on Peace Sells… are still relevant, particularly environmental issues. And the personal stuff is relevant. I’ve written songs about loss and pain – everyone goes through that so, no, I’m not being provocative. We actually have fun songs too. If you’re pissed-off, the title track on Super Collider or Symphony Of Destruction might make you feel better.”

Your mischievous sense of humour and interview rhetoric seems like it has always bordered on the self-destructive.

“Yeah, and it doesn’t translate well does it? Probably the biggest thing that has harmed my career is being misunderstood but is it better to be understood or to understand? I understand much more now so I’m less inclined to be preaching or complaining about being misquoted now. There’s another rock star guy in our genre who I won’t name, who used to make journalists sign all sorts of documents and he’d have to clear the interview before it went out – come on, is that an interview or a 12-step statement? It’s paranoia about how you’re going to appear in print. I’m not like that. There are people who love me and people who don’t, but everyone’s entitled. I have love in my heart for both. I don’t get mad about the people who dislike me. You can get obsessed with that. It used to be that if I was in a room after a show and nine out of 10 people liked me, I’d spend the entire night drinking and trying to convince the one other guy to like me too. Now I think: why? Who cares? Someone doesn’t like? Tough shit for me.”

The internet is like a worldwide manifestation of that scenario. Do you Google yourself much?

“No, I don’t… well, I did back in the beginning when it was like, ‘Wow, my name has brought up 60million websites!’ There’s a lot of propaganda out there; there are people whose sole purpose in life is to make others miserable. I don’t mean just me, but politicians or whoever. It’s not necessary and it’s not kind. Journalism has changed, too. When we were younger, me and the Metallica guys would buy the British metal press and it was like manna from heaven to us. But in the 90s something changed, I withdrew from reading the press a bit because it seemed like writers started to take the piss out of existing bands for no reason. Things got harsh.”

But that’s surely part of the nature of how we respond to art – to praise but also to criticise?

“Yeah, I guess that’s human nature. People get into bands but then when they get big it’s all like, ‘Ah, those guys sold out, man…’ I’m not one of those people. I remember when I first discovered AC/DC I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Looking back, how many get to have that experience today – where you put the music on, your pupils dilate and you just know nothing is going to be the same again? The magic may have faded slightly, not because of the bands but the way it’s delivered. Man, the music business has changed so much. I remember one time a few years back in Europe I heard this label girl saying, ‘We’ve got some plastic in.’ And I said, ‘What’s plastic?’ and she said, ‘Oh, that’s what we call bands.’ I was like, really, we’ve been relegated to being called ‘plastic’ now. What happened to the days of the press and label guys jumping on the tourbus with us and getting the real story? I cherish those early days of my career but it’s never going to be that way again. Culturally there’s been a big shift but you’ll just have to trust me on this one.”

I’m actually of the age where I have experienced the music business pre-internet, too.

“Oh, so you know what I’m talking about, bro. But don’t you agree that things were so cool when you could get a great picture disc or trade tapes at swap meets? And journalists would go on tour and hang out to get the legitimate biopic – to tell the fan what a band is really like. Because people don’t always want to hear a musician selling themselves in interviews all the time. They want to know what it’s like being you. Ha ha ha! What’s it like when a girl throws a bra and it hooks on your guitar while you’re trying to solo She Wolf, y’know? That’s the stuff I like talking to bands about. Back then you could go to a listening party and drink beer and hear a band’s new album. Now it’s: here’s an email link, listen to the record, now piss off.”

The old way certainly was more fun.

“Yeah, we had a listening party at Universal yesterday and people had fun. I want to do things the old-fashioned way: sitting down with journalists, having a beer. Let’s go back to what made metal cool in the first place. I’m at the point in my career where things feel fun again. This is definitely the most enjoyable time to be in Megadeth. Ever.”

The last time you spoke to Hammer it was the week of the US election and you said the US government was behind a recent spate of shootings, and that America was becoming “a Nazi country”. You’ve also spoken about your dislike of Obama. How has America changed for you since Obama won a second term?

“Well, the American people have spoken and they’ve chosen a new president and whatever happens now, they asked for it. This is part of the beauty of the democratic process. But I’ve promised my band guys that I wouldn’t go out on tangents posturing about my possible future as the President of the United States. Ha ha ha! So I’m going to sidestep all that for a bit…”

Your lyrics are often overtly political…

“The lyrics on Super Collider tell the story of what I’ve believed since I was a teenager. I don’t think things have changed much – not in just America, but the whole planet. We need help in learning how to treat people how we want to be treated ourselves. The cool thing about metal is that, for some strange reason, when I’m with a group of metal fans I feel safer than when I’m with a bunch of people who are ‘normal’ out on the street. I’m more comfortable outside a metal show than in a crowd outside a supermarket because I’m with my own kind. You share a common ground and you know someone’s not going to go wacko on you because you’re wearing the wrong jersey – or because, politically, you’re for or against something.”

That’s true. You rarely see trouble at a metal or punk show. But I have received a few kickings for walking down the wrong street…

“Thank you for proving my point.”

What do you do when you’re not touring or recording?

“I have a beautiful Aston Martin Vanquish that I love to drive. I drive my daughter to school while listening to music, then I correspond with fans and prepare for the next tour.”

What is your biggest vice these days?

“Hot Tamales. They’re these cinnamon-flavoured jelly candies. I’m addicted to them.”

Times really have changed. Who is your favourite band of all time?

“A toss-up between Acca Dacca and Zeppelin.”

The old Dave Mustaine would have said Megadeth.

“Oh, well, my favourite band to be in? Megadeth. Definitely.”

Do you have any pets?

“My wife and daughter have Chihuahuas. We’ve got a miniature horse and two massive horses, too. I also have tarantulas that were named after me. A scientist discovered a new breed in the Arizona desert and named it after me.”

‘Dave The Spider’?

“No, man. I think it’s Aphonopelma Davemustainei or something. It’s insane!”

What’s the biggest misnomer about you?

“That I’m unapproachable.”

You seem fairly approachable today. This interview came with a warning, though: be careful, he might walk out.

“I am approachable! But I have a terrible reputation. There was a guy who used to manage me, and when we had a falling out I think he started rumours about me being difficult. But we became friends again, and reconciled. And that was all part of a process or reconciliation, including with Metallica and Ellefson, too. And do you know what? When that happened my injured arm and injured thumb started working again. Crazy, huh?”

And you think these events are linked in some way?

“Well, let’s just say that being open-minded enough to reconcile with those guys has brought new happiness and that might be a part of it. It’s about mentally letting go. Hell, we all hold grudges, but the question is, in life, how long do you keep holding on to all that old anger for?”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 244, April 2013