“For Dave, having that Metallica history gave Megadeth a huge advantage to starting.”

In case you might have missed this interesting piece of trivia, Megadeth frontman and leader Dave Mustaine was once a member of Metallica. However, according to David Ellefson, now former member of the band who was fired from Megadeth in 2021 (over that one particular thing), seemingly leaving the band for good, Mustaine could have been just a little bit more appreciative of his chance to play in Metallica and use this as leverage for Megadeth back in their early days.

Speaking to Riff Crew, Ellefson was asked about Mustaine’s feud with Metallica and ultimately his firing from the legendary metal band, which also led James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich to hire Kirk Hammett. Ellefson replied (via Blabbermouth):

 

 

“The Megadeth-Metallica feud… Look, it was not my feud, because I was a huge Metallica fan.”

 

He then added:

“Look, I’m in the band with Dave, so I’ve gotta toe the company line. It’s one of these, ‘Hey, man, if you’re my friend, you have to love my friends and you’ve gotta hate my enemies with me.’ You know how that is. ‘We like that guy. That chick, fuck her. That sucks.’ We know how this goes.”

 

As Dave also added, he loves Metallica and hearing the “No Life ‘Til Leather” was “frickin’ awesome.” He also shares the same feelings about Metallica’s debut record “Kill ‘Em All.” With that said, Ellefson recalled what it was like to sit down and listen to this record with Mustaine in the room:

“So, here I am. And, look, I love Metallica. I hear the ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ demo and it’s frickin’ awesome. And I still love their demo. And then ‘Kill ‘Em All’ comes out. I remember the day we sat there in stone cold silence for, like, an hour while we listened to the ‘Kill ‘Em All’ album.

“And God bless Dave for just sort of biting the bullet and just going, ‘Okay, I need to listen to this. What did they do to my songs?’ Obviously the first thing he sees is the writing credits. Stuff that he had written by himself, like ‘Mechanix’, now had the writing credits of James [Hetfield] and Lars [Ulrich].

 

“And to their credit, they did rewrite the lyrics; ‘The Four Horsemen’ is an entirely different lyrical thing. I wasn’t in the room as this stuff was going down.”

But according to Ellefson, things weren’t as bad for Dave as he made it to be:

 

“I always looked at it like, ‘Hey, Dave. They gave you the greatest gift ever. Not only did they use your songs and pay you for them, they, just as importantly, put your name on it.’ That gave Megadeth such an incredible advantage to starting out. We were just talking about [my current projects] Dieth and Kings of Thrash. It’s, like, here’s the Megadeth records. Yeah, that’s definitely me — my name, my credits. These things always help.

“There’s a saying in jazz, ‘You’re only as good as your last gig, ’cause every gig you do leads you to the next opportunity.’ So for Dave, having that Metallica history gave Megadeth a huge advantage to starting. I often wish that he would have been a little more appreciative of how well we did and the gift we had, how many fans came to his side despite the departure. And I’ve learned from that myself now that I’m not in Megadeth, going, ‘Be appreciative.’ A lot of people came to my side. You don’t have to hate Megadeth to like David Ellefson.”

Going more into it, Ellefson also added that he never had any issues with Metallica’s James and Lars:

“I’ve listened to Metallica on the radio. Living in L.A., they had KNAC and things, and they would always do ‘Mandatory Metallica’ and all this stuff. That band broke down so many doors for all of us. And then, when I met the guys — I met James and Lars [early on] — they were totally cool. I don’t know — it seemed like it would be pretty fun to be in a band with those guys. So I always liked them. I watched them grow and develop and basically take over the world. I got a front-row seat for that, and I thought that was really, really awesome.”