mustaine

Over the last few weeks I've been reading "Mustaine," which, rather predictably, is the autobiography of one David Mustaine, lead singer of my favourite band, Megadeth.

The book was pretty good. It's certainly very readable and you get a good insight into Mustaine's life. What I would say, though, is that it feels very trimmed down. Of course, this is true of all biographies, because you have to hack stuff away simply in order to avoid a multi-volume overload.

The problem is more that because Dave has had such an eventful life, this means quite a bit of stuff that's skimmed over is still pretty interesting. I mean, for a lot of people that warrant biographies you can skip past big chunks of their life where they didn't do the bit that was interesting about them.

However, Dave had a fairly unique - and not particularly fun - childhood that informs quite a lot of what came after, so you can't skip that. Then he was a homeless drug dealer, which is not something you can skip. Then he broke into the music world when he was becoming an adult and you can't skip that. And then you have Megadeth, with its constantly changing line-ups and massive success, the rivalry with Metallica, his drug use and abuse, his wife and kids, his finding God, the trouble his big mouth has gotten him into, the injury of his arm...

And it's not like he's now retired, or even like his career has hit the skids, so something has to give. In this case the 'give' takes the form of a skimming past stuff once you get out of the first years of Megadeth. So the earlier years have the most detail and then there are choice highlights from the later years.

It works quite well, and everything in there is entertaining and interesting, but you do sometimes feel a bit like you want to know more. In particular, touring and his process of writing songs are given very short shrift. Which is okay as I'm sure those things would only be of interest to fans, rather than the ordinary public, but if you're looking for details on what all the songs are about, you'll find meagre pickings (as I understand it, there was actually talk of doing a separate book on the songs, so this might be part of why they're not really covered).

What also feels a little short-changed is some of the well known feuds. In particular, Kerry King and Pantera are both mentioned, but almost more in passing than "here's what happened" detail. I can kinda understand that as most of these have been healed or fizzled out, so they may not seem important now and it wouldn't be fair if the book was entirely Dave banging on about old grudges.

But what about the big one? The Metallica thing.

Well, it's clear from the book what Dave's perspective on the whole thing was and is. He's certainly not changed his tune in that he feels hard done by, although he acknowledges several times that he was "a handful."

The main impression I got was that it's difficult to see how it could have worked any other way. I mean, a lot of the book is about how he was a chronic drug abuser and alcoholic and when he did drink he was an angry and dangerous drunk. And it took him several decades before he even came close to sorting all that out.

I mean, if Megadeth wasn't entirely his band and instead he'd been in other collaborative bands (which is what Metallica in the early days was) then you get the distinct impression he'd have been kicked out of those bands too. But since Megadeth was his, you get the situation where he's constantly firing people in a similar fashion to how he was kicked out.

Now to be fair there is a distinct difference - most of the people he fired were more like 'hired guns' than people who'd really been an integral part of Megadeth's song writing. And they all went for pretty reasonable reasons, although it's interesting he admits he's not very good at firing people.

But the point is more that okay, he was hard done by, they didn't fire him in a good way, and in his eyes he should have been the guitar player in the biggest band in the world, and yet that was a hell of a long time ago and Metallica have written an awful lot of albums that got them much more success than those early songs did.