Dave: It’s completely healed. It took a year of physical training after 4 months of physical therapy for it to come back. The doctor said I would probably have about 80% use of my arm back but that I would never play the same again and it kind of angered me and it also encouraged me to try that much harder. It’s kind of like when I left Metallica; at first I said “I quit” and people found out I got fired and it was like either way fuck them!! So, I was driven to succeed then and I’m driven to succeed now. Of course the odds were against me this time because it was a physical thing; it wasn’t about writing a song, it was about being able to play period.

Dave: On your arm on the inside under your bicep there’s a nerve called the radial ulnar nerve. The reason they call it “radial” as it goes around the ulnar bone and with this particular nerve, there’s a notch in the bone where the nerve sits on top of it. Part of it is within a crack that goes around the bone. I put my arm over the back of a chair and got the circulation cut off inside my arm (my left arm) and the nerve just got like a drinking straw when you chew on it; it just got crushed. It took 4 months, as it takes about a month per mm for a nerve to grow and then about a year of weight training so that my arms matched in size and strength. My arms are more balanced in strength than they are in size because when something affects the tissue like that on one side of the body like your arm, but not the other…to get it back, it’s never the same.

Dave: According to some people’s standards I’m a good guitar player.

Dave: Thanks…..thanks. I was really set free on this record because I just did my own thing and I called my own shots. I didn’t have other band members wanting me to play their crap. You know it’s really hard when you have other guys that you’re grateful to because they’ve helped you with your career yet you have to tell them….no. See the thing is, people think it’s just me being a bastard……I mean how stupid is that. If I’ve got 9 songs on a record and you’ve got one great one that’s going to sell a million records and I put 10 on there and we’re only going to sell half a million records, I’m going to get paid less than if I take my 9 and your 1. I understand business. I took business management in college, I’m not stupid and I also was a drug dealer when I was a kid so I know commerce!! (laughs). I completely understand business!!!! I’m also pretty good with the metric system….changing ounces into grams!! (laughs). But that was a former life…a long time ago.

Dave: Yes it was

Dave: : It was definitely a blessing although some people may look at it as something terrible. I look at it as a gift…you know when Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying came out, that was the second record by the first line-up. After that, the line-up was asked to leave because Gar and Chris were doing stuff that was unpredictable and was incongruent with my vision. They were unreliable, my stuff was getting stolen and so on and so forth. When that first line-up went away and the second line-up was made, something happened with Ellefson where he took on this thing “I’m a survivor” and believed that “hey this is my band now too”. It wasn’t……..you know when I took the bus home from New York to California after I left Metallica, I didn’t stop by fucking Minnesota to pick him up…you know….so it was my thing and going forward with all the different incarnations of the bands, it’s always been about perpetuating my vision. As far as going into the studio with this record, it was really fun to make. Unlike some of the other records where there was a lot of infighting. Again, going back to this thing about someone’s got to tell them that “hey we’re not going to use your stuff” and that was really hard.

Dave: It’s way more than that and I can’t really discuss it but I can tell you this much….the truth will come out and he’s wrong. I am grateful for what he’s done for my career over the years and I don’t want to hurt him…….I don’t. You know I wish I could tell you everything and just lay it out on the line…….It will happen and the truth needs to come out but it needs to be done in a court of law because I can’t say boo! anymore without his vultures waiting for me to say something.

Dave: It was just a session and Chris did it for the money and basically did me a favor. About half-way through the recording, he didn’t get his work done on time. The deal was for him to complete a body of work and not how long you were there. Terms changed but I still was considerate and I paid him extra even though he didn’t fulfill what he was supposed to do. Then after it was over, somebody from his camp tried suing me because I said he was a thief and you know what….he stole my guitars and sold them for heroin. What do you call somebody who steals….a stealer?? You know my attorney told me that you can judge your success by the number of people who are suing you. I can judge my attorney’s success by how many people are suing me! (laughs). But it’s just one of those things and I probably should’ve not used Chris because it put a real black mark on everything. As far as his participation with this album, every time I think of it it’s just going to remind me that I got sued because of it.

Dave: No I’m not happy about what happened and I haven’t talked to him about it. I don’t think he knew that his people even did this. Obviously somebody knew about it’s fucked up because he threw away our relationship for $9,500!!

Dave: Well you know what? I do things quite differently. I was right and I could’ve fought it but you gotta ask yourself “A guy’s going to sell out a friend for $9,500??”…..I’m not a friend……..

Dave: Thanks…..

Dave: That’s not what it’s about

Dave: It could be…..I never thought about it like that…..

Dave: Shooting was with a gun not a needle!!! (laughs) You know what it was about? It was about Tomb Raider. The people from Tomb Raider asked me to do a song for the sequel and I wrote that song and I thought wow man….this is hot! I wrote a great song for them and Angelina Jolie will be in the studio with singing you know…So I turned in the song and they liked it and they wanted me to demo it and record it for the movie but they just didn’t have the funds to do it right.

Dave: No….it was Laura Croft I was talking about (laughs)

Dave: I’ll be Forty-three in a couple of days

Dave: Yeah Saxon and all those guys….Accept and U.D.O……(starts singing hi di hi do hi da, the German polka intro to Restless and Wild)…

Dave: : See…that’s the thing that sets me apart from other people. I give credit where credit’s due. I give recognition to the people who have influenced me. I am not cheap with thanking people or putting credits on my records for the people who have contributed to furthering my career. The same thing when the band was disbanded, Megadeth owed some people money so I sold off the gear that was there to pay these people and when there wasn’t enough gear left to sell to pay these people, I sold my personal guitar collection. I don’t see any of those other guys selling their stuff to pay the bill off

Dave: It was tough……

Dave: I like them but they really didn’t influence me too much. Certainly there was an influence though. My influences were more along the lines of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Diamond Head. I liked Budgie and Judas Priest was obviously a big influence. A lot of people ask me if I was influenced by Sabbath….no….I smoked a lot of pot listening to them but I wasn’t influenced by them (laughs) There a great heavy band but their music’s too slow for my tastes.

Dave: Yes

Dave: You like that huh!!

Dave: You know who it is….why don’t you take a guess…

Dave: Yup

Dave: Oh I saw it…and I didn’t approve it. I told them I didn’t want it used and then went ahead anyway. Then Lars says that they didn’t know whether it was me or my management….well it’s not true because I talked to the director and told him flat out…don’t use it! My management told the director…..don’t use it! We told their management…don’t use it! Then after that Lars does his little spin….and says (in an impressive Lars Ulrich impression) “I can’t believe ya know the last 20 years all he thinks about is ya know Metallica in the rear view mirror” It’s like Lars….that’s not what I said….I said “You don’t know what it’s been like for me”

Dave: I haven’t seen it either

Dave: You know the funny thing about this whole movie is that they’ve tried to make me invisible for 20 years. They said I was unimportant, I wasn’t a good guitar player and that I was only temporary…..well why as an unimportant, invisible, temporary, shitty guitar player am I so vital to your movie! Were you lyin’ then or are you lyin’ now. The best about it is the acronym of the movie SKOM!!! (laughs). Sounds like Scum…..you didn’t think about that did ya!!

Dave: One was from Last Action Hero and the other was Beavis and Butthead….you know I think that if you really enjoy what you do, you never really put too much importance on any of your work. You approach everything the same and when it’s done it’s done. Art is supposed to be art. It’s not supposed to be an investment. Now people who buy paintings that are already done as an investment are the public. Now the painter making a painting in order to make money off of it is not an artist….he’s a painter. So for me when I did 99 Ways To Die, it’s basically because Beavis and Butthead was huge at the time and it was an awesome opportunity to do something with them. The song was actually fashioned after Paul Simon…..

Dave: Yeah 99 Ways To Die!! You know I was on my way to see a psychiatrist because everyone said I was insane so now I’m seeing a fuckin’ psychiatrist!!! I’m looking at the billboard on the way there and it’s a cemetery add saying “We’re not ready to meet you….drive safely” and I went hmmm…they’re not ready to meet me yet…not ready to meet you yet (sings)….well “meet” doesn’t sound that great so I went “Not ready to see you yet” and that’s when I started writing 99 Ways To Die. Same thing for Angry Again, it was a song that was for The Last Action Hero with Arnold and he was huge at the time. Now granted the movie was a stinker but he had just done Terminator and how could you possibly go bad after that and Commando too and we were thinkin’ that the association would be great and this would be wonderful. I had written that song because we were in Paris and Nick said that some people grabbed him in front of McDonald’s and maced him and said ‘Fuck you Americans” and the truth was that he went out with 2 crew guys to the red light district and they got there asses kicked and they got maced. They lied to me about it and the truth came out the next day and I was mad because they lied to me about it and on stage I said “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a hand to Nick as he got maced by some mean people yesterday boo hoo hoo you know. Then I find out the truth and I go you twat! I just misused my authority on the stage to just play part of your lie. I was mad…Then I fell asleep and MTV Europe is in the background and I’m hearing da da dada da da da (hums)..you know the Clash song Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now….The More of You That I Expect. That’s how I wrote the lyrics…..I’m having this nightmare and it’s Nick and he’s lying to me and his face is just melting off and at the very end, I’m driving down this road from Megadeth and all of these bastards and I look to the side of the road and there’s all these kids just out there skateboarding swinging these rubber hoses in the air and all this stuff and it was like, this is really symbolic so I just grabbed a pen and just wrote the whole song down and that’s how Angry Again came about.

Dave: It started off as a labor of love but then it turned into hell. When I started to see some of the tapes of the records and the condition that they were in when they came to us to fix. You know there was a lot of stuff that needed to be sorted out. Some of the stuff had been erased or recorded over by people that weren’t in Megadeth you know the producer that had done Cryptic Writings and Risk. Some of my stuff was gone. Some other situations were that there was a keyboard part on a guitar track now how do you EQ that track….to guitar or to keyboards? Because when it goes from guitar to keyboard, the EQ will be wrong..how do you do it? I’m thinkin’ how the fuck could anybody do that!!! That’s why I was frustrated when Risk came out because I said that if you don’t like this record then fuck you!! The truth of the matter is that the record that I made when I left Nashville was a good record. The record that I got which was what was released, was different. That’s why I wanted to get back in there and remix Risk. It’s still a record that’s got brilliant songs on it that I believe if it didn’t say Megadeth on it, it would be very, very successful. Because it says Megadeth on it, fans were a little disillusioned because they expected metal and that is a great classic record but it’s not like Megadeth metal, it’s more like really great heavy metal almost like hard rock/heavy metal. Wonderlust is one of my favorite songs ever period.

Dave: With Risk? I’m happy with how it is now. Some of the stuff I took out like some of the weird stuff that Dan put in there like dance track drums and crap behind songs like Ecstasy. You know Ecstasy was about somebody earlier in my life that I was seeing and she was in a relationship with somebody else. My whole thing was to bring pleasure to a woman who was very unhappy in a relationship and very rarely do men find themselves in that situation. Usually it’s the other way around where a woman will bring pleasure to a man who is in an unhappy in his situation. You know that’s the kind of thing that a guy you know when he gets older and your beard starts to go grey like ours is (laughs) we look back and think…god…remember that back then when I was a boy toy and I was actually was something…you know I had it going on and now you see your ears are growing hair and your kids are just about ready to start driving and it’s like FUCK!!

Dave: Two…a 12 year old son and a six year old daughter.

Dave: So you understand?

Dave: Yes…some of the stuff was missing. For example, the lead vocal track for Take No Prisoners was gone. The background vocals for Five Magics were gone. A bass guitar part in Take No Prisoners was gone. Some of the guitar parts in Set The World Afire were destroyed. A lot of the bass drum tracks on the entire So Far So Good, So What record were destroyed. This is because I’d always used Ampex tape. I used a guy named Paul Lanney and he says “Let’s use Agfa tape”. I said O.K. whatever we’ll use Agfa. It comes out of the locker in New Jersey (Capitol Records) and the guy says “Dave there’s white powder all over the top of the tapes”. Naturally I’m trying to be funny and say “Is it cocaine?” (laughs). It turned out to be digital artifacts and stuff like that and the tapes were disintegrating. They had to bake the tapes and it didn’t help. I said what’s going on here. I was told that Agfa in 1988 had a bad batch of tapes and naturally….I got ‘em!! Lucky Dave…………..

Dave: No

Dave: No…..Our relationship is well….I have respect for him but just think that his period in Megadeth is complete and again I respect him for the contributions that he made. I just think that the task of what he was supposed to do was fulfilled. He got married to a nice girl and you know he’s got a certain lifestyle that to me is very different from the way I like to do business. I would rather that he follow his heart that follow a disingenuous life. You know if you want to be a Navy Seal, you have to be able to like hold your breath for 5 minutes under water or something like that. You can’t like pull a sandwich bag out and grab a couple of breaths of air every once in a while. You need to be able to do it. So if somebody comes and works with me or for me and their not capable of doing it….don’t fake it…you’re just going to disappoint both of us. You’re gonna be unhappy and eventually I’m going to be unhappy too.

Dave: Well, when the towers got hit I was in Seattle and we had to cancel the show there that night. The next night we played in Edmonton and the next night after that, I’m filming Some Kind Of Monster.

Dave: O.K. picture this….September 13th, 2001; 2 days after we got hit and my 40th birthday, I’m spending it with Lars…..and I can only think of one thing worse than that and that’s dying!!! He said it was going to be about “Hey man we’re gonna go over some things and work some things out and it’s been real helpful for us to have this therapist and everything” and I was like “O.K. I’ve had therapy before (because of you…) and I’ll be able to do this. So, I went and talked to the guy and there you have it.

Dave: There was one show we didn’t do down in Buenos Aries because the crew didn’t want to go down there. The guitar tech for Al Petrelli was some guy named Sal and he was afraid to go down there so….he says “I’m not going!!” Now Al doesn’t have a guitar tech, what do I do. O.K. we have no guitar tech. Then another guy gets wind of Sal not wanting to go and says “If Sal doesn’t want to go then I’m not going either” I’m like “Good because you know what? Al doesn’t want to be in Megadeth; he wants to be married cool….you’re his guitar tech and you don’t want to go…cool….Any of you guys who don’t want to go, speak up now” There were a few people that had concerns because of their families. So I had to make a press statement saying “We’re concerned because of the political climate right now”. Now what I wanted to say was that “Sal’s a pussy and he doesn’t want to go down there and Al wants to go home and fuck his new wife!!” The thing is that I respect Al…..Sal on the other hand, his claim was groundless and baseless because we were going to Argentina and we’re gods down there. The three biggest bands in the entire nation are The Ramones, The Stones and Megadeth. How can you not want to go down there? I mean we’ve played soccer stadiums there.

Dave: Your welcome…..

Dave: I believe in November sometime.