#203 Dave Mustaine - Megadeth Co-Founder & Frontman

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Speaker 4 Dave Mustaine, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4 Man,

Speaker 4 I've been super excited about this. Huge Megadeth fan.
Grew up listening to that stuff. And just to have you here is like unreal.
So thank you for coming.

Speaker 5 Of course.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 yeah, so we're going to do a life story on you. Starting in childhood all the way to today, so it could be a long day.
You in for it?

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 remember I was there, so it should be pretty easy.

Speaker 4 Cool. Well, everybody starts with an introduction.
So

Speaker 4 here we go. Dave Mustaine.
Co-founder of Metallica, where he helped lay the groundwork for Thrash Metal before parting ways in 1983.

Speaker 4 Mastermind behind Megadeth, a band that sold over 50 million records, earned six platinum albums, and even a Grammy in 2017 for Dystopia.

Speaker 4 Working on your 17th Megadeth album to be released later this year, in June, you'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of Megadeth's debut album, Killing Is My Business and Business is Good.

Speaker 4 Thrash Metal Pioneer, whose guitar prowess has landed you among the top guitarists of all time, influencing generations of headbangers.

Speaker 4 Cancer Survivor, having beaten throat cancer in 2019 while still crafting one of Megadeth's fiercest album,

Speaker 4 The Sick, the Dying, and the Dead, which is the topic of a book you're working on called In My Darkest Hour.

Speaker 4 Now a Wittner with House of Mustain, blending your passion for music with fine winemaking, relaunching Megadeth beer in the UK and Europe with a Pilsner, IPA, and Zero beer called Rattlehead, a family man, married to Pamela since 1991 with two children, Electra and Justice, and most important out of everything, you're a Christian.

Speaker 4 Did I miss anything? Sure, I missed a lot.

Speaker 5 No, I think that was very, very honoring. Thank you for that.

Speaker 5 I did sell about 40 to 50 million records with Metallica. So

Speaker 4 it was, you know,

Speaker 5 about 100 million records.

Speaker 4 Wow. A hundred million records.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's that's

Speaker 4 that's a third of the country. That's insane.
That's insane. But

Speaker 4 so everybody gets a gift on the show.

Speaker 4 Nothing crazy.

Speaker 4 Vigilance elite gummy bears made here in the USA. Legal in all 50 states.

Speaker 5 It's horrible for you.

Speaker 5 38%.

Speaker 5 I'll be eating these during the show, man.

Speaker 4 Just candy. Yeah.
Just candy.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 4 my pleasure. And then lastly, we have a Patreon account.
It's a community and subscription service that's actually turned into a community.

Speaker 4 And they've been with me since the very beginning when I started this in my attic. And then we moved here.
And now we're moving to a new studio. And they've just supported me.

Speaker 4 And they're the reason that I get to sit here and do this. Wow.
And yeah. So one of the things that I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

Speaker 4 And so this is from Stephen Casey.

Speaker 4 I heard Dave practiced,

Speaker 4 excuse me, I heard Dave practiced Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 4 How did you get into that? Also, how does your worldview affect your music? theme and focus

Speaker 5 I'll ask the second question first

Speaker 5 How does it affect my worldview and focus? How does martial arts affect my worldview and focus?

Speaker 4 I think that's where he's going. I think he's talking more about your music.
How does your worldview affect your music theme and focus?

Speaker 5 That's what I thought. So my worldview is,

Speaker 5 you know, it's in flux.

Speaker 5 It changes over time.

Speaker 5 Something that I thought was okay when I was a teenager certainly isn't okay now. Stuff that I thought wasn't okay

Speaker 5 seems absolutely normal right now.

Speaker 5 My thinking evolves just like anybody who has an open mind.

Speaker 5 I've been around the world and I've seen so many things that it makes me really grateful for where we live, but it also makes me grateful for the way in which we live.

Speaker 5 Going to some of the other countries that are are socialist countries or other countries that maybe are third-world countries and the poverty level

Speaker 4 extreme.

Speaker 5 You know, you want to say, hey, this person is just like me, and they are physiologically, but when it comes down to

Speaker 5 anything beyond them just standing in front of you, their whole existence is completely different.

Speaker 5 You know, I can't go down to South America, for example, and expect somebody who's a fan who is living under those

Speaker 5 pressures of poverty to know what it's like to have your own house.

Speaker 5 I learned a long time ago that young people in Japan had a decision to make whether they were willing to purchase a vehicle or a house. They could not do both.

Speaker 5 And then to get back to your first question about

Speaker 5 Brazilian martial art,

Speaker 5 I'm working on my fourth black belt right now in VJJ.

Speaker 5 And it started with Benny DeJette Yukides, who is in the Black Belt Hall of Fame. And he was my first black belt that I got in Yikidokan.

Speaker 5 And that was back in the 90s. And

Speaker 5 after that, I moved to Arizona, so I was unable to train with Sensei Beni anymore. And the closest, most convenient place for me to go work out was a taekwondo school that was there.
And

Speaker 5 I got a black belt in that really fast. And I was going for the master program, and I started to notice there were holes in the program.

Speaker 5 Like I was teaching a kids' class, and I grabbed the bottom of his gi, and I pulled on it and

Speaker 5 he fell and started crying and I felt terrible. And then I thought, you know, this program doesn't teach people how to fall.
But in the meantime, I had gotten my black belt with that

Speaker 5 organization. And then we went to Korea and I got my third black belt in taekwondo.
And

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 got my fourth degree with the World Taekwondo Federation. And

Speaker 5 Mr. Chung Chung was the ambassador, he was the president at the time.
He was the one that had presented me my awards and my belts.

Speaker 5 And then the one thing that I always wanted to do was ground fighting because Yukidokan is a hybrid of nine different styles and one of those styles is jiu-jitsu and it doesn't mean that it's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or man on the moon jiu-jitsu, it's jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 5 But I found a school here.

Speaker 5 I went there and I didn't like the instructor, but I liked, or the owner, but I liked the head instructor there. And so much so that I helped him get a school on his own.

Speaker 5 We moved away from that original school. He opened up a school in Spring Hill, and he opened up a second school in Columbia.
And it's Renzo Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. So I have

Speaker 5 my brown belt right now. And if everything goes according to plan, and I stay in my training routine, I probably will have my black belt

Speaker 5 sometime the end of this year or next year.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 5 Long question, I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 No, that's, I mean,

Speaker 4 what got you interested in at the beginning?

Speaker 5 Getting beaten up.

Speaker 4 Getting beaten up?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 The one thing I did know before I knew how to fight was that I didn't like taking shit from people. I didn't know how to defend myself, but I knew I did not like taking shit from people.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 12 years old, I joined the YMCA. My brother-in-law was the chief of police in Staten, California, and he told me that the YMCA across from the police department was doing free karate classes.

Speaker 5 And I went. It was Shao Rinryu, so it was more the traditional karate style.
And I remember when I went and started

Speaker 5 taking classes there, the first thing we did, it was like within the first couple classes was a tournament. And, you know, I was still a white belt and

Speaker 5 there's no striking to the face, no striking to the groin. And

Speaker 5 the first guy that I competed against kicked me in the groin and smacked me in the face. And he was dequed, but didn't change the fact that I could not finish.
And so I just said,

Speaker 5 that's it for me. And I went a different route.
And I started training in Kung Fu San Tzu after that for a little while. So I've had

Speaker 5 various training in different styles, but I still think the best defense is to

Speaker 5 keep your eyes open and don't be a dick.

Speaker 4 Wow. Wow.

Speaker 4 Soon to be four black belts. Yeah, soon.
Holy shit, man.

Speaker 4 That's a lot of training. What's your training regimen like? Do you train often?

Speaker 5 Well, I have two privates a week, and I have a gym in my house.

Speaker 5 One of your friends

Speaker 5 knows where we're at and has been there. So it's a little bit more than a home gym.
It's kind of like a semi-professional gym.

Speaker 5 We still need some stuff there, but it has everything that you need to get a good workout in.

Speaker 4 Man, that's awesome.

Speaker 4 Well, Dave, let's get into the life story.

Speaker 4 Where did you grow up?

Speaker 5 All over the place. My mom and dad got divorced when I was four, and I was born in La Mesa.
and at that time,

Speaker 5 all I really remember was about four years old when I was baptized as a Lutheran, and then my mom and dad got a divorce, and thus started the leapfrog game with my mom and

Speaker 5 the two youngest children that she had, myself and my sister Debbie. And whenever we would move, my dad would find us, and usually we would show up drunk.
And,

Speaker 5 I loved him. I didn't understand alcoholism at the time.
I was just a kid.

Speaker 5 And I certainly didn't understand why they didn't try to get him into a program, like a 12-step program, because they were in existence at the time. But

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 four years old until 13, I was with my mom. We'd move from one sister to another sister.
to my aunt on our own, back to another sister, back to the other sister.

Speaker 5 And it was always me and my sister Debbie

Speaker 5 who would be doing this leapfrogging because my two older sisters had both been married and had families, so they had some stability. I never knew that.
My mom was a Jehovah's Witness, and when I was

Speaker 5 13, I started playing guitar. And at about 15 years old, she said she'd had enough.
And she moved out and left me alone in an apartment and no money to pay rent. So I did not know what to do.

Speaker 5 And I knew it was just a matter of time before I was going to lose the apartment. So I did what any kid would do.

Speaker 5 I became an entrepreneur and I became a distributor of sorts.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so I was able to

Speaker 5 sell some stuff and

Speaker 5 be able to pay my rent and and eventually I was making enough money where I had a car and I was able to

Speaker 5 get some musical equipment.

Speaker 5 But the meantime,

Speaker 5 we're still facing all the moves that had happened before then. And then as soon as

Speaker 5 I hooked up with Metallica, the moving continued and moved from Huntington Beach up to San Francisco, out to New York, back to California to Costa Mesa, then up to Los Angeles, where I finally started Megadeth.

Speaker 4 Whoa, let's rewind a little bit. There's a lot to unpack there.
Sure. So

Speaker 4 you're at four years old, your parents separate. How many siblings do you have? I have three.

Speaker 5 Debbie is three years older than me, and the other two were 15 and 18 years older than me, and are both deceased.

Speaker 4 Were you close with them?

Speaker 5 The oldest one, yeah, but after a while, because they were following the guidelines of their religion, and I was supposedly a worldly person, and they

Speaker 5 did what their religion calls for. I was disfellowshipped

Speaker 5 not

Speaker 5 officially, but basically I was not allowed to be around anybody.

Speaker 5 I couldn't come to meetings. I couldn't go to

Speaker 5 witnesses' houses and stuff like that. And I didn't care because I hated that religion.

Speaker 4 So were you

Speaker 4 I mean, my editor and good friend grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, and then I don't know if you would call it escaped it, but that's what I call it, escaped it, because it sounds very

Speaker 4 extremely cultish. Yeah.
And

Speaker 4 they have destroyed

Speaker 4 his relationship with his son and the rest of his family.

Speaker 4 Did you get sucked into the religion?

Speaker 5 No, I didn't like it.

Speaker 5 I'm a kid. I want to watch fucking cartoons, man.
I don't want to go to church.

Speaker 5 And when they would say, okay, not only are you going to go out to church, but on the other day on the weekend, you're going to go out and knock on strangers' doors and try and sell them shit that they don't want.

Speaker 4 Right?

Speaker 5 I mean, there's people that the houses you knock on the doors probably have the same outlook I do.

Speaker 5 I don't want to be bothered on a Sunday because I'm scratching my belly in my pajamas and I'm watching, you know, college sports. So, you know,

Speaker 5 that kind of a thing,

Speaker 5 to me, it just sucked. And then having the holidays taken away, not being able to hang out with friends.
You know, you make friends in school

Speaker 5 and then they say, hey, you want to come over? Oh, I can't.

Speaker 4 Why?

Speaker 5 Because my mom's nuts.

Speaker 4 Geez.

Speaker 4 What age did that start?

Speaker 4 What age did she start at the start?

Speaker 5 I think it was seven when she started.

Speaker 5 And it went on until she moved out because, you know, I was selling pot for a living. You know, what else does a 15-year-old have to do? Sell his ass, sell pot.

Speaker 5 Well, I wasn't going to sell my ass, so I sold pot.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I would go to rehearsal and

Speaker 5 I would say

Speaker 5 to my mom before she had moved out,

Speaker 5 I had a

Speaker 5 beginning of a

Speaker 5 relationship with marijuana. So sometimes I would have some and I would leave it and I would say, hey, somebody's coming by.
Just

Speaker 5 there's something by the door. Just tell them to leave the money.

Speaker 5 Say that. I think that happened maybe like two, three times.
And then that was it. She was gone.

Speaker 5 Wow. Older sisters,

Speaker 5 Michelle, the oldest one,

Speaker 5 she actually

Speaker 5 was not one of the witnesses for a very long time. She actually went into witchcraft.
That's what I learned my witchcraft from, was my oldest sister, Michelle.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 she

Speaker 5 somehow got, you know, re-recruited and she ended up being a witness again at the end. And she would talk to me, but it was

Speaker 5 kind of like an aunt kind of thing. And then my sister that was younger than her, the one that was 15 years older than me,

Speaker 5 she didn't want to have anything to do with me. She just died.

Speaker 5 And even though she was awful to me,

Speaker 5 I did the right thing and paid for her to go to hospice and paid for a nurse to be with them.

Speaker 5 For me, I work really hard for my money and it was,

Speaker 5 for anybody else, it would have been a difficult decision.

Speaker 5 If I would have thought about, this is the sister who's treated you like shit your entire life.

Speaker 5 Why are you going to do this? And it ain't about what she thinks. It's about what

Speaker 5 God thinks.

Speaker 5 Am I doing the right thing with what I'm getting given?

Speaker 5 My funds, my gifts.

Speaker 5 You know, it can be used for very bad stuff.

Speaker 4 Was that a

Speaker 4 tough decision for you?

Speaker 5 To help my sister try to pass into the next world. You know, I thought she, being a Jehovah's Witness, would be so eager to get into

Speaker 5 heaven. You know, I mean, I don't understand the concept of heaven, so

Speaker 5 I would have thought she would have said, you know, chuck this old body man, I'm out of here. But, you know, she fought and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought.
And

Speaker 5 finally,

Speaker 5 the government out in California put her into hospice. You know, I'd been paying for a very long time for a nurse for her.
You know, when

Speaker 5 people

Speaker 5 wonder what I spend my money on, that was a lot of it, was paying for my sister's transition into, you know, into death.

Speaker 5 And then the

Speaker 5 youngest one, who's a little bit older than me, she's

Speaker 5 got a little bit of a mental illness. So

Speaker 5 I don't know what you would call it, if it's depression or if it's

Speaker 5 what. I don't know.
But

Speaker 5 we still talk, but she kind of

Speaker 5 talks like a baby when she talks to me. So that's a little weird.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, every family has this stuff. We all do.

Speaker 5 It's either your immediate bloodline, your family of origin, you know, maybe your family of choice, your best friend.

Speaker 5 You know, I mean, I know a lot of people who I've been close with that aren't here anymore. And I'm thinking, for fuck's sake, man, I'm only 63.

Speaker 5 How is it that you've died already? I feel like I've still got a lot of life left in me.

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Speaker 4 Man,

Speaker 4 did you ever get to

Speaker 4 make amends with your sister before she passed?

Speaker 5 Oh yeah, I did that a long time ago.

Speaker 5 I did go through the 12-step program and I made my

Speaker 5 personal moral inventory of everything that I'd done and I read it to my sponsor. And then

Speaker 5 I got prepared to go out and make amends to everybody except when to do so would injure others. You know, I'm not going to say my skin is somebody else's expense.

Speaker 5 And then I just continued the last three steps, you know, keep taking moral inventory of myself

Speaker 5 and carry the message in all my affairs. And I'm not in a 12-step, but it shows you how it worked in my life.
I can recite a lot of it. And

Speaker 5 it all goes back, if you boil it down, it goes back to the Sermon on the Mount anyways. It's just the Beatitudes.
That was adopted by the Washingtonian group who got adopted by AA. And then AA

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 the groundwork for the other fellowships that came after that, like CA and NA and GA and OA.

Speaker 4 I know we're going to dive into this in a little bit, but

Speaker 4 how did your sister get involved in witchcraft?

Speaker 5 Oh, Michelle was

Speaker 5 a very determined woman. She was one of the first people who applied to join the Navy in

Speaker 5 our county. And for some reason, the Navy wasn't accepting women at the time.
And

Speaker 5 they just...

Speaker 5 I don't know if it was a moment where they weren't accepting them or if they hadn't opened up the idea of having women in the Navy, because I seem to think that there were women in the Navy that were really old and it just kind of defies logic that she wouldn't be able to do it unless there was a moment where they said we're not taking any more women.

Speaker 5 But she was really determined and she married a guy that I really just

Speaker 5 looked up to him so much.

Speaker 5 He's

Speaker 5 my brother-in-law, Stan. And I already told you about the first one who was the chief of police in

Speaker 5 Stanton, California. well this one was a motorcycle cop for the california highway patrol i don't know what's up with my sisters being drawn to leo's but you know

Speaker 5 it is what it is so that particularly sucked when my mom would move in with my sister because they were both very large men and they would have to do the unthinkable and i know they hated it but they would come home and my sister would say well david was the oldest and these guys got in trouble so he's had his nose in the corner for an hour, and you need to give him a spank.

Speaker 5 And the fuckers both had gun belts, and that's what I got spanked with, was the leather belt that they kept all of their tools on.

Speaker 4 But I thought he would.

Speaker 4 So your sisters' husbands would discipline you.

Speaker 5 Yeah, because I didn't have a dad in the picture. My mom would empower them to be my surrogate role model, surrogate father, kind of thing.
So it was really fucked up. It was psychotic.

Speaker 5 This is part of that whole witness thing. So,

Speaker 4 you know, what do you mean it's part of the witness thing?

Speaker 5 Well, when you have problems with somebody who needs to be disciplined,

Speaker 5 they help

Speaker 5 women that have kids that aren't listening by singling them out and getting people around them to talk to them in

Speaker 5 usually a less than edifying way. And, you know,

Speaker 5 I was never put in one of those situations, but my sister Debbie was.

Speaker 5 She had done something, gone out somewhere with another guy that was in the church that they went to, and some girl that liked the guy made up a story that they were

Speaker 5 and never happened. But the church believed this other girl, because her dad was one of the

Speaker 5 executives in the church. They call him overseers.
So of course you're going to believe the daughter of an overseer because they're they're a hierarchy. They're

Speaker 5 They're pious. They're without remorse,

Speaker 5 they're without any spot, no blame. They're spotless.

Speaker 5 So their kid can come up with a story like my sister banging some guy and

Speaker 5 never happened. And of course, she's this fellowship and that traumatizes her because, again, the social circles and what happens when you don't have people that you associate with on a regular basis?

Speaker 5 I was talking to Darren earlier, and I told him, I said, you know, we have the people that we would associate with, and there would be, you know, two days that we'd see people on Wednesdays and on Sundays, unless you went out and service on Saturdays, and you didn't really get a chance to associate with people.

Speaker 5 So your social life was very stunted.

Speaker 5 It was,

Speaker 5 I feel like a lot of the young people in organized religion, you know,

Speaker 5 this particular one didn't think about the social hardships that it was going to be for young people growing up. You know, it's kind of like them Night Shyamalan's movie, The Village.
You know,

Speaker 5 we were in the village.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 Wow. And your sisters were okay with

Speaker 4 her. Were they husbands?

Speaker 4 They were husbands?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 They're my brother-in-laws.

Speaker 4 How bad did it get?

Speaker 4 The Spankins? Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, you know, the gun belt's like two, two, three inches wide. It's about three-eighths of an inch thick leather.
So one SWAT with that hurt like hell.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it wasn't like I was beat every day.

Speaker 5 But whenever anybody got in trouble, I got it because I was the oldest.

Speaker 5 And I had

Speaker 5 both of those sisters had kids that were just a little bit younger than me that were boys. So we would all be together.

Speaker 5 Even though I was their uncle, we would go out and do stuff as three kids because we're all we had. We didn't have anybody else.
You know, we weren't allowed to play with normal people. And

Speaker 5 you know, we would go someplace, we would shoplift something, we would light a fire in a field, we would break something, we'd throw a ball, you know, break out a streetlight, throw somebody's shoes over a wire, whatever.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they would just go nuts. So.

Speaker 4 Damn. How did she get into witchcraft?

Speaker 5 Oh, Michelle. Yeah, so she into this thing with Stan.
She married Stan. Stan was, like I said, he was a really, really

Speaker 5 trivial guy. He was a really awesome guy, good looking, and

Speaker 5 wrote a Harley. I mean, first thing in the morning, the whole fucking neighborhood vibrated.
And who wouldn't want to be married to a cop like that?

Speaker 5 And his tour that he had to do every day was Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. That doesn't suck, right?

Speaker 5 So anyways, he left her, and she was heartbroken, and she went

Speaker 5 crazy.

Speaker 5 And she started pursuing alternate means because God had not worked for her.

Speaker 5 The God of the witnesses that she'd been praying for, her husband, to come back, didn't work for her. And she,

Speaker 5 I had ran away from home, and I moved up to Idaho. And I was living with her

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 her kids in a trailer which was awful, just fucking awful.

Speaker 5 And she'd went to work one day and I started playing hookie from school because my nephew had told people at the school I was a martial artist guy and the first day I got there I got cold cocked.

Speaker 5 And I figured, I'm not going to this school because I'm not going to deal with this every day. So I started playing hookie.
I figured I would run away back to home.

Speaker 5 But one day I went back into where her bedroom was and there was a candle that was on her desk that had melted, and it had some

Speaker 5 substance in the top of it. It looked like moss.
And there was a picture that was burnt in half. And it was

Speaker 5 a hex to have him leave the girl he left my sister for, who was a

Speaker 5 big blonde bombshell from a bar. and to

Speaker 5 come back to my sister, who was not a big

Speaker 5 bombshell blonde.

Speaker 5 And I'll be damned if he didn't come back.

Speaker 4 Are you serious?

Speaker 5 He came back. He came back.
So I figured,

Speaker 5 wow, this has got to work. And I saw the book.
It was just a little piece of paper. It was like, you know, you fold it in half and that's a page.

Speaker 5 And it was like a 20-page booklet or something like that.

Speaker 5 And it had a couple hexes in there, and I tried two of them, and they both worked, too. So

Speaker 5 at that point, I had to tell my wife what I had done, and we started on the journey of trying to get the oppression,

Speaker 5 the demonic oppression that had happened to me by opening up my

Speaker 5 defenses and asking for

Speaker 5 the dark prince to help me put

Speaker 5 a hex on somebody.

Speaker 5 That really fucked my life up. And it took years for us to get out of it because

Speaker 5 we were going to San Francisco up to Filipino priests that would lay hands on you. And I had some Indian Rajas that would do cupping and acupuncture and crazy stuff like that.

Speaker 4 What were your hexes?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 one was something that had to do with the guy that actually punched me at school.

Speaker 5 What happened was we

Speaker 5 went to school that day.

Speaker 5 Excuse me.

Speaker 5 We went to school that day, and

Speaker 5 the guy walked up to me and just slugged me. And he said he was going to see me after school.

Speaker 5 Now, we rode a normal school bus to one point, and then the bus stopped, and all the kids got out for a smaller bus that would take us out into the rural area.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so we stop, we get out, and everybody circles around the two of us like we're going to fight right there. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this is going down.

Speaker 5 So everything I'd learned up to that point, you know,

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 going through my mind and the second bus shows up and we get in the bus and we take off and he's coming up to his house and he walks through the walkway in the bus and elbows me in the back of the head as he's getting out.

Speaker 5 And I was trying to fit in so I had a mouthful of red man

Speaker 5 and I was trying to get into the whole chewing tobacco thing because that's what everybody else was doing.

Speaker 5 And when he hit me, I went

Speaker 5 and I swallowed that shit. So I went back to my sister's trailer and I got really, really sick.
And I figured, that's it. I'm going to do something about this.

Speaker 5 So I looked through the book and I found something that would

Speaker 5 do what I wanted. And I did that, hex.
And then there was another one.

Speaker 4 What did you want to happen?

Speaker 5 Well, I really don't want to get into it because I don't want anybody to be misled and try and figure out what I did and go down that route because it was a terrible deviation from what was good and right in the world for me.

Speaker 5 Of course, that power's out there.

Speaker 5 Without black, there's no white. But

Speaker 5 it was just for me after that happened, I realized that I don't want to really talk about this, really don't want to

Speaker 5 get anybody interested in it.

Speaker 5 So I'll talk about it to the degree that I'm comfortable with where I know that nobody can be misled from it.

Speaker 4 And then you did another one?

Speaker 5 I did a second one and that one was

Speaker 5 something when I had moved back to California already and there was somebody that I wanted and

Speaker 5 I was

Speaker 5 just, you know, I was an ugly red-headed, freckle-faced kid with short hair and sweat rings. And

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 didn't have any chance of being with this girl, but everybody in school wanted to be with this girl. So I figured, what the hell? You know, I say that quite a lot in my life, right?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we were together and then we weren't.

Speaker 4 And it worked again.

Speaker 4 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So what is, I mean,

Speaker 4 I don't know much about witchcraft.

Speaker 5 You don't want to.

Speaker 4 What is the

Speaker 4 in a snapshot? What is it? Is it.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 there is an

Speaker 5 understanding that there are black witches and white witches, that there are witches that do good.

Speaker 5 But witchcraft is still witchcraft. It's the use of the elements and

Speaker 5 there's alchemy, there's wizardry, sorcery, electricity,

Speaker 5 magic, there's

Speaker 5 use of blood, use of spit, use of sperm, use of

Speaker 5 all of these things that are all part of

Speaker 5 what was created and being used in an unnatural way.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you know, for me,

Speaker 5 when I walked away from practicing any kind of witchcraft, because I didn't practice it, I did it two times and both of them worked. And then I went,

Speaker 5 this is bigger than I am, and I'm not going to mess around with this. And so

Speaker 5 I wrote the song, The Conjuring, and

Speaker 5 there was another song that was kind of along from that inspiration, from that experience. It was Bad Omen.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 You know, earlier you had mentioned

Speaker 4 when we were talking about your sister passing, you had mentioned that you don't understand the concept of heaven.

Speaker 4 Do you still not understand the concept of heaven?

Speaker 5 Well, no, see,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 that's probably, you know, as soon as I said that, I thought, you know, there's probably going to

Speaker 5 be some people that think I don't believe in heaven.

Speaker 5 See, the thing is, is

Speaker 5 I'm willing to believe in it, and I'm willing to be wrong. It's like Pascual's

Speaker 5 equation when he said it's better to live like there's a God and die and find out there isn't one than to live like there is no God and die and find out that there is one.

Speaker 5 So for me,

Speaker 5 I like to try and live my life as if there is a God.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I like to look forward to my life.

Speaker 5 I want to live a long time. I don't want to die and go to heaven right now because I'm in a very human way selfish.

Speaker 5 And I want to spend time with my family, with my granddaughter, with my son, with my daughter, with my wife.

Speaker 5 I love making music.

Speaker 5 My career is full stop right now. And,

Speaker 5 you know, the idea of just saying, oh, I give up, let's go. Ding, ding,

Speaker 5 that to me is not what I want to do.

Speaker 5 Do I believe in streets of gold and all that kind of stuff? Well, there's a lot of documentation about that in the Word, but

Speaker 5 I don't necessarily remember everything because of...

Speaker 5 part of the cancer treatment. The chemo brain is something that happens when you get chemotherapy and the radiation and chemo treatment that I had was really gnarly.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 do I believe when I die I'm going to go to heaven? Yeah, hope so.

Speaker 4 What do you envision heaven like?

Speaker 5 I don't know. See, that's the whole thing.
I always have this picture of clouds and the gate and you walk through it and then it's like I think, you know, do I want to go to heaven?

Speaker 5 No, I want to spend more time with my wife because if I go to heaven and I'm not with her, or if I go to heaven and we're not together as a couple anymore, that would make me sad.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I get real emotional when I think about that. So I don't want to talk about it.

Speaker 4 Rewinding just a little bit.

Speaker 4 If you don't mind, I'd like to dig a little bit more into childhood.

Speaker 4 Man, do whatever you want.

Speaker 4 It sounds like you've had a rough go as a kid, and

Speaker 4 I find that a lot more common than I'd like to, especially during these interviews.

Speaker 4 It blows my mind how many kids grow up in

Speaker 4 in a dangerous abusive

Speaker 4 uncomfortable shit environment

Speaker 4 and so i mean growing up with a with an alcoholic father i mean what

Speaker 4 and you'd mentioned that he would find where you guys live and you would have to move again i mean what kind of stuff

Speaker 4 What kind of stuff were you dealing with? And the reason I'm asking is because

Speaker 4 I know there's a lot of kids that watch this that are going through

Speaker 4 that.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I know a lot of them feel trapped in where they are, and they're looking for

Speaker 4 hope. And so I just want to, you know, kind of talk about your experience with an abusive father and the stuff that happened with you, with your sister's husband.

Speaker 5 Well, see, I loved my dad. I didn't know what was going on.
I was still really young.

Speaker 5 I remember to this day when we were living on one particular street in Costa Mesa, and my mom and my dad were still together,

Speaker 5 They must have tried another time

Speaker 5 because I don't believe I was four at the time. I believe I was a little older.
But they for sure got divorced at four.

Speaker 5 And I remember kissing him goodnight and his stubble on his face, and he always smelled like a pipe, like cherry vanilla pipe. So I grew up to love that smell.

Speaker 5 Now, the things that I was told about my dad that I never saw was that my dad

Speaker 5 had slashed on my mom's tires so she couldn't get away, that he had cut his hands and he rubbed his blood all over my mom's face, and that he'd smacked her a few times and spit in her face,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 what do I know? Do I know? Do I think that's real? Probably is. It probably is.
Do I wish I knew? Yeah.

Speaker 5 But do I know now after going through treatment so many times that a lot of times when people are

Speaker 5 in the throes of spirits or

Speaker 5 medication or street drugs, any kind of thing like that, you know, the whole reason that people do anything like that is to break the reality,

Speaker 5 just to have a momentary break in reality so that you can feel anything but what you're really feeling right now.

Speaker 5 I just want to feel something

Speaker 5 different.

Speaker 5 I don't know if I want to go up or go down or go sideways. I just want to feel something different.
I hate my life. I hate my job.
I hate my relationship.

Speaker 5 And I have nothing to live for. And I know I don't want to kill myself because I'm afraid of killing myself.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the choices

Speaker 5 sit there and you know just be miserable or someone will come around and say like hey man let's have a drink and it's usually how it starts a drink another drink another drink and if you're someone like me the thing the reason why I don't drink hard liquor is

Speaker 5 because once I get

Speaker 5 to the point where I take one and I go ah

Speaker 5 the second one I'm gonna go oh and the third one I'm gonna go whoops

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 it's just there's just no place in my life right now for that

Speaker 5 I'll see people when they're in our presence, meet and greet, sponsored stuff like that, and they'll be clearly inebriated.

Speaker 5 And we'll try and be real considerate of that and make sure that they're being handled in a proper way.

Speaker 5 Because sometimes they say stuff that makes them look like they're an aggressor, but they're just a rampunctious fan who's intoxicated.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 back to the thing with my dad.

Speaker 5 There was was those stories that I had heard, but then again, I go back to the same thing I said previously about I don't know why they didn't try and take him to a treatment facility because he was a vet.

Speaker 5 He was in the Army.

Speaker 5 I know he had a problem with the VA.

Speaker 5 And I know he had some kind of disease. He had gout.
That was one of the things he had. And he had some other kind of diseases because when he passed away, I went to his apartment and

Speaker 5 I found his Masonic ring and then I

Speaker 5 found these jars that were full of medication, and they were big jars. They were like peanut butter-sized jars, not the little ones you get from the pharmacy.

Speaker 4 They're big.

Speaker 5 So, whatever he was dealing with, he had enough medication there to

Speaker 5 last, in my estimation, a very long time, unless he was eating them like candy.

Speaker 4 When did he pass? How old were you?

Speaker 5 I was 17 when he died, and

Speaker 5 he had been working in a bar. He was working for National Cash Register at the time.

Speaker 5 He went from being the West Coast branch manager of Bank of America to being a guy that worked on cash registers because of his alcoholism. And I'm sure that that was unbearable for him.

Speaker 5 So he's in a bar. He's working on a cash register.
They said he fell off a stool. All I know is that he was in a bar and his head hit the ground.

Speaker 5 Whatever transpired between him walking through the front door and him walking out in a stretcher is, it's an enigma to me.

Speaker 5 But he had a mass cerebral hemorrhage and he was in the hospital and my sister called me up and they said, daddy's in the hospital. You need to come now.

Speaker 5 And all I had for transportation at the time was a moped because my mom had left me. And that's the, you know, I took the moped with my surfboard down to the beach every day.

Speaker 5 That's all I needed transportation for.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 I got the call and I grabbed a bottle of whiskey. It was this stuff called old granddad.
It was awful.

Speaker 5 And And I started driving down Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach to Costa Mesa to go to the hospital where my dad was. He was already dead.
He was in a coma.

Speaker 5 And he was in the fetal position. And I walked in and my sister Suzanne, the middle one, goes, you're going to end up just like daddy.
And

Speaker 5 I hated her from that moment on. Before then,

Speaker 5 I didn't hate her. I was confused why she had ostracized me.
But when she said that, I just figured, you're just rotten. And I'm not going to have anything to do with you anymore.

Speaker 5 And we stayed out of touch for a very long time.

Speaker 4 How much time had passed since between

Speaker 4 the last time you saw your father and

Speaker 4 when he died?

Speaker 5 Well, the funny thing was, when my mom moved out, I had called him up, and it was the first year. And I, like I said, I was 17.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I had,

Speaker 5 it was it was Father's Day and I called him up and I said hey dad

Speaker 5 I'm living on my own now and I'd really like to come down and see you for Father's Day and he said he'd really like that so I went down and I saw his apartment and it was it was just bare bones and and I opened up his fridge and there was a piece of meat in there on a plate like a

Speaker 5 pot roast and nothing else.

Speaker 5 And at the time, I didn't put everything together that this is not acceptable.

Speaker 5 This is not okay. This is my dad.
What's going on here? I just went down and I figured this is the first step.

Speaker 5 Because it's the first time I'd ever seen my dad in a neutral territory where my mom wasn't saying her mantra, which was, you're going to go live with your father.

Speaker 5 So I was always threatened with my father at the end of the sentence. You know, you're going to get your head shaved with your father.

Speaker 5 Anything like that stupid shit. They would just say, You're going to get this with your father.

Speaker 5 And when they would say I was going to go move with them, after a while I started to fear that. And I needed to find out for myself.
And I went and I met him. I saw him for the man that he was.

Speaker 5 He was a sick man.

Speaker 5 And he wasn't

Speaker 5 weak by any means. He was sick.

Speaker 4 What was the conversation like? I mean,

Speaker 5 it was very, very shallow. It was very strained.
I think he knew how badly he had

Speaker 5 let me down as his son.

Speaker 5 I can tell you, when I do stupid stuff like cuss around my son's daughter, I feel like I've done the unthinkable.

Speaker 5 So like when my dad had to face what he did, I'm sure it was 100 times manifest

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 5 so many times worse than all the things he had to face and think of. Because I've never done anything

Speaker 5 like rub blood on my wife or spit on her or slash her tires or anything like that.

Speaker 5 Whenever we get in an argument,

Speaker 5 I know that I love her too much to say anything that I would regret. So I usually walk away and, you know, I get hit with stuff as I'm walking away.

Speaker 5 Don't walk away. Come back here and fight.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 5 you know, it's usually better. I let her cool off.
And then,

Speaker 5 you know, every every couple has that. You know, if you really love somebody, you've got to face the fact that you're two completely different people trying to live together.

Speaker 4 Did the relationship with your dad develop more? Or was that the only time you saw him before he died?

Speaker 5 That was the one and only time I had seen him

Speaker 5 ever without any kind of conditioning by my mom. Damn.
Usually he would come over the first week of school, and my mom would let him bring over stuff like pencils and school products for the

Speaker 5 list that they give you when you start each school year. You need to get your notebooks and your this and your that.
My mom would have him provide that for us.

Speaker 5 I don't know that he ever gave her child support. That could have possibly been a problem.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 she's just like I said, it's an enigma. I just don't know.

Speaker 4 How did the so your mom left at 15.

Speaker 4 Did you continue a relationship with her?

Speaker 5 Tried.

Speaker 5 We talked.

Speaker 5 She would come over and

Speaker 5 maybe once every couple weeks and

Speaker 5 do stuff like clean my house or

Speaker 5 come over to maybe cook something. I think it was her way of making sure I didn't die.
But

Speaker 5 you know, because she still was a mom and I still was her son, no matter what religious

Speaker 5 organization had a hold of her, her mind. Her heart still belonged,

Speaker 5 to her maternal

Speaker 5 production, for lack of a better word that I was.

Speaker 4 How did you get into dealing?

Speaker 5 That was,

Speaker 5 like I said, I started off

Speaker 5 messing around with it a little bit and then I figured out

Speaker 5 I would sell it. And it wasn't like something that happened overnight.
You know, we were,

Speaker 5 I was going to Marina High School. There was a place they had that went over this moat that ran around the school.

Speaker 5 It was called the bridge and all the kids that were the bad kids would go out on the bridge. So I would go out there and people would sell joints.
And

Speaker 5 stuff that you hear on Cheech and Chong records, acapulco gold and Columbian and Sensamia and stuff like that. That's what the pot was called back then.

Speaker 5 And I remember

Speaker 5 we would go out there during lunch and everybody'd smoked joint. You know, you'd get one puff off of it and then you'd go back to go eat lunch and then go to class.

Speaker 5 Unfortunately for me, algebra was after lunch and I got an F in algebra. But

Speaker 5 all the other classes I had that were philosophical in a sense, like English, stuff like that, social studies, those were things that were enjoyable for me when

Speaker 5 I was in high school.

Speaker 4 Did you deal with any other types of abuse, any sexual abuse, anything like that?

Speaker 5 Me, myself? Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 it depends on what people say abuse is, because if you see stuff that you shouldn't see, that's abusive. And I saw stuff I shouldn't see.

Speaker 5 And for me, I think that,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it's one of those things that

Speaker 5 you have to break the chains. You have to.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 maybe it wasn't my dad, maybe it was in his dad,

Speaker 5 but doing something like that, I believe, is a spiritual

Speaker 5 trespass on somebody.

Speaker 4 You're talking about generational trauma.

Speaker 5 Yeah, any kind of bloodshed or any kind of sexual abuse, stuff like that, because

Speaker 5 the sins of the father are revisited onto generations.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I was having a hard time with stuff, and we did a bunch of ancestral research and found out that there was a lot of war in my family and a lot of warriors and a lot of bloodshed consequently.

Speaker 5 So we

Speaker 5 had to really face a lot of that stuff. And, you know, I'm not a violent person by nature.

Speaker 5 Like I said, one of the best things I've ever learned about fighting is not to.

Speaker 4 If you don't mind me asking, we don't have to go there. What kind of stuff did you see?

Speaker 5 Oh, sexual stuff?

Speaker 5 Well, I saw stuff with

Speaker 5 some cousins that I had that were kind of fooling around with other people, and it was something that they thought it was kind of fun to show us kids. And

Speaker 5 to me, I think that's sexual abuse. At nine years old, you don't need to witness somebody having intercourse with somebody else.

Speaker 5 you know as far as like anybody trying to sexually abuse me that that hasn't happened

Speaker 5 fortunately for me.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 as far as my family is concerned, we're golden.

Speaker 5 Ever since our children were born, they've been treated like gold.

Speaker 5 And there was never anything that, you know, we would make sure that they didn't watch any inappropriate movies for their age. You know,

Speaker 5 even at this time, with Elector being in her mid-20s, when she's in the front room watching movies with her mom and there's too much cussing, I'll go, you guys, you know.

Speaker 4 Here I am.

Speaker 5 You know, I can't get through a sentence without saying fuck. And,

Speaker 5 you know, it's like that guru that's on the internet that says all the great ways you can use fuck in a sentence.

Speaker 5 But when I hear it and I hear my family saying it, I'm like, come on, man, don't do that.

Speaker 5 You're a lady. Stop it.
You know,

Speaker 4 goofy, right?

Speaker 4 I get it. I get it.

Speaker 4 Well, I want to ask you,

Speaker 4 we'll take a break here in a minute, but before we do,

Speaker 4 like I had mentioned earlier, there's a lot of kids that are in broken homes right now and

Speaker 4 facing the unthinkable.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 what advice would you have for a kid that's in that kind of a situation?

Speaker 5 The first thing is to say something about it, as embarrassing as it is, to let it continue to happen is

Speaker 5 in a very twisted way,

Speaker 5 kind of allowing it to happen. And

Speaker 5 know, you don't want to be a co-conspirator in your own sexual abuse. You know,

Speaker 5 there are certain circumstances I'm sure of. I have a vivid imagination where people are in circumstances where they cannot get out of a circumstance where they're being sexually abused.

Speaker 5 And that's where I think you need to say something. To who? To anybody.
The first person you fucking see. Say something.

Speaker 5 You know, because

Speaker 5 if you're being sexually abused and you're a child, that person is

Speaker 5 doing the unthinkable.

Speaker 5 If you're an adult and you're being sexually abused, there are laws for that, equally the same ones with children.

Speaker 5 And stuff that's taken by force,

Speaker 5 there are laws for that.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, I don't know if we should go back to the death penalty for for rapists.

Speaker 5 Part of me says yes, and part of me says no. But

Speaker 5 I think when you do that, because you're taking a piece of somebody's life away

Speaker 5 forever.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you're

Speaker 4 destroying their innocence.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And they're going to think about that moment for the rest of their life.
Something's wrong with me.

Speaker 4 Do you, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious. I bet, you know, some of your family downstairs, your wife and your son,

Speaker 4 seems like you've broken the generational curse.

Speaker 5 Yes, we have.

Speaker 4 Did your siblings,

Speaker 4 did your siblings, were they able to break that?

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 5 Let's go down the chain. Michelle, she passed away recently from leukemia and a bunch of blood diseases.

Speaker 5 And I think that could be because of what she did.

Speaker 5 I talk talked to my uncle, her husband, Stan, every once in a while because he's still kind of like my childhood hero.

Speaker 5 My next sister Suzanne, she passed away from Parkinson's disease just this year and her husband died a long time ago and he was the police chief and I made amends with him before he passed away, which was good.

Speaker 5 And the amends with him was really weird because I I told him, I said,

Speaker 5 I needed to make amends for you and I'll never get over my drinking unless I

Speaker 5 clean up the records of my past. And I've seen I've done the following harm to you.
I made you have to discipline me and I know you didn't want to do that.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I need to

Speaker 5 say that I need to know what I can do to make it right. Not sorry, because I said sorry so much it became a fucking character reference.
But when

Speaker 5 I would say, I need to make amends to you, and I see I've done the following harms,

Speaker 5 you know, and what can I do to make this right?

Speaker 5 Some people would say, I don't ever want to see you again. Some people will say, you know what, I'm looking forward to seeing you in heaven, but not down on earth.
And

Speaker 5 other people would say, you know what,

Speaker 5 just stay sober. Or one guy said, I want a guitar.
And I went,

Speaker 5 inside I was rolling my eyes. But on the outside, I went, okay, that's what you want, and that's what I'll do.
That's the price, the dummy tax that I spent.

Speaker 4 Right on, right on. Well, Dave, let's take a quick break.
Sure.

Speaker 4 All right, Dave, we're back from the break.

Speaker 4 Let's get into how you got into heavy metal.

Speaker 5 Well, that was,

Speaker 5 again,

Speaker 5 not having

Speaker 5 a social network of people that were my age that I hung out with, I had to

Speaker 5 hang out with my sister's boyfriend's little brother.

Speaker 5 So my sister got married when she was 17.

Speaker 4 Oh, wow. Yeah.

Speaker 5 To this guy who they're divorced now

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 he's not anybody I ever want to see again in this world.

Speaker 5 And he had a guitar but his little brother had a bass. And I remember going to

Speaker 5 the little brother, his name was Mark, to his house and he was listening to some records with his friends and we just smoked a joint and we thought that we were the coolest kids in the world and we had some there were some girls that were in the neighborhood mark had a girlfriend and her girlfriend had a friend so i hooked up with her and we had everything to be in a rock band except talent and instruments right

Speaker 5 so my brother-in-law mike the older one had this

Speaker 5 guitar. It was a piece of junk called a supra.

Speaker 5 And he was playing guitar. He was playing some Deep Purple at the time, which is not a band that I'm really fond of.
I respect the players tremendously, but it's not really my type of music.

Speaker 5 But I did understand the playing was very cyclical. It was something that did not

Speaker 5 reminisce in any way American music, because American music was a lot of rock and roll stuff. So there was a chord

Speaker 5 followed by another chord, followed by another chord, which would go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, little bit of a

Speaker 5 middle eighth section, like a refrain, and then a chorus, and the song's over. Maybe two minutes, three minutes.
Then it started getting a little longer.

Speaker 5 So I had my first introduction to playing the guitar through

Speaker 5 Mark and Mike Bally.

Speaker 5 First time I ever actually played the guitar was my cousin John

Speaker 5 Odell and he he had Gibson Les Paul back then. God, what I would give to have that guitar from him.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 he showed me how to do a bar chord and I knew how to do that. And one of the first songs I ever learned was a song called Panicking Detroit that was done by David Bowie.

Speaker 5 And the next one was All the Young Dudes by Mata Hoopel. And I can't remember which one was first.
It was one or the other of those two, but those were basically the two songs I started playing.

Speaker 5 And then I heard Led Zeppelin, and I thought, God, this is just amazing, but it's so difficult. And I started to learn how to play and started to get drawn more to the guitar.

Speaker 5 Right after Led Zeppelin, it was Ted Nugent and Kiss.

Speaker 5 Those were really influential bands.

Speaker 5 And so now I'm starting to see the visual. I'm starting to hear the

Speaker 5 mystical with Led Zeppelin. And and I'm hearing

Speaker 5 the blue-collar stuff with Deep Purple and so on. Ted Nugent being

Speaker 5 back in the day, the Motor City Madman,

Speaker 5 he had some really

Speaker 5 amazing songs for the time.

Speaker 5 I still think he's an amazing guitar player. I know that a lot of people

Speaker 5 don't like

Speaker 5 Ted, but

Speaker 5 I think that my guitar playing has a lot of influence from Ted Nugent,

Speaker 5 as well as

Speaker 5 once I started to get into

Speaker 5 the new wave of British heavy metal, because the first time I got involved in music was

Speaker 5 the British Invasion. So for my songwriting, learning how to songwrite, it was primarily bands like the Stones, The Hoop, The Beatles, so on and so forth.

Speaker 5 And then when I started to pick up guitar, I started to learn the new wave of British heavy metal, which was bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Diamond Head, Motorhead, so on and so forth.

Speaker 5 And there was a total difference because

Speaker 5 how I write a song is not

Speaker 5 based off of what I can play on guitar.

Speaker 5 Because I can play guitar to the level that I can, I can write songs that are a little bit more explorative.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 4 you learned how to write before you learned how to play.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 no, that's not exactly right. What I learned about songwriting was from the British invasion.

Speaker 5 So from listening to the Beatles. Also, my sisters were very much into Motown.
So Megadeth has its swing and its grew from the Motown influence that I had.

Speaker 5 Sam and Dave, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder,

Speaker 5 Sly and the Family Stone,

Speaker 5 Shaka Khan. There's so many bands from back then that R ⁇ B stuff would be played at my house.
Plus, it was sometimes the only thing you could hear on the radio.

Speaker 5 There's a radio station in Los Angeles called K-Earth, K-Earth 101, and it plays oldies, and I love the oldies.

Speaker 4 So you picked that up. It sounds like you picked it up relatively quick.

Speaker 5 Picking it up,

Speaker 5 it happened at a really good time in my life.

Speaker 5 where I was looking for something because I was playing Little League and I was really, really good at it but I also knew the reality was that I was never going to be a professional baseball player because

Speaker 5 you know I'm not stupid so

Speaker 5 that's what you know about stupid so I became a rock star instead well that's not hilarious not it's not a dichotomy it's it's more along the lines of me knowing the the odds for being able to become a professional baseball player.

Speaker 5 I was not huge in stature. I was not a big person.

Speaker 5 The position I played was a catcher, and most catchers in professional baseball are solid guys.

Speaker 5 They're much more

Speaker 5 taller and heavier than I was. So I was thinking, you know, part of the reason that I liked playing that position was because I got to almost sit down the whole game.

Speaker 4 Excuse me. It's just funny that, you know, what are the odds of becoming a professional baseball player? I don't know.
What are the odds of becoming a rock star?

Speaker 5 Well, see,

Speaker 5 that was,

Speaker 5 I made up my mind I was going to do that. That's different.

Speaker 4 You made up your mind that you were going to become who you are today all the way back then, or it just happened.

Speaker 5 When I was a child?

Speaker 5 After I stopped playing Little League, I knew that I needed to make a decision in my life, obviously. I'm living on my my own.
I'm selling marijuana. And

Speaker 5 I'm not happy.

Speaker 5 I'm alone.

Speaker 5 And as bad as things were, this was worse. Being alone was worse.

Speaker 5 I knew that I needed to do something.

Speaker 4 How old were you when you started?

Speaker 5 Playing guitar? I was 13. My mom had gotten me an acoustic guitar when I had graduated from some grade.

Speaker 5 I don't know what it was, but she got me an acoustic guitar from Pier 1 Imports and it was a piece of shit, but I started plunking around on it.

Speaker 5 My sister was playing piano and my mom had got her a piano and me a piece of shit acoustic guitar. So again, here I am, the last kid, getting the

Speaker 5 tough kids' blue jeans that are somebody else's already for a few years.

Speaker 5 So I started playing guitar to

Speaker 5 play along with her and then it became clear to me that she wasn't getting any better so I stopped playing with her and I started playing by myself and and once I met her boyfriend and her boyfriend's little brother that's when I started really focusing and I just I the thought of me not being that person not being a rock star it just didn't cross my mind because I had nothing else to

Speaker 5 you know it's like an officer and a gentleman where the guy says I don't have anywhere else to go I didn't

Speaker 4 damn

Speaker 4 and And so

Speaker 4 when was Panic born?

Speaker 5 About when I was 18.

Speaker 4 18 years old? Yeah. Had you done any live performances before then?

Speaker 5 Little weird stuff. Like

Speaker 5 I went with the little three-piece group that

Speaker 5 I was in for like a day for

Speaker 5 it was for a dance.

Speaker 5 And they were having a battle of the bands and we only knew one song and they said we were too loud. So we

Speaker 5 we missed out on that one and then

Speaker 5 I started playing at my cousin's house down in Dana Point

Speaker 5 and we did several concerts down there and that's basically where Megadeth was born was out of my cousin John's front room in Dana Point. Wow.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 You mean Panic?

Speaker 5 No, Megadeth was born there because the songs that are in Megadeth were being played in panic at that time. So Megadeth was born at that time, although I didn't know it.

Speaker 5 I was in the guise of panic, but really Megadeth had just broken the surface of the terra firma. And

Speaker 5 now I'm going to watch this whole thing unfold before my eyes.

Speaker 5 Am I going to be able to handle the pressure? I think so. I've had a lot of pressure in my life.
Am I going to be able to stay relevant?

Speaker 5 I think so, because I've had to almost teach myself because of dropping out of school and having to figure everything out for myself.

Speaker 5 Right now I'm writing a song on the art of war because I've got a song that just sounds like a fucking samurai song. And I thought it'd be really great because I've read the art of war so many times

Speaker 5 to maybe put that book as a muse to help me write a story about something related with the samurai culture or the way of life.

Speaker 4 How did you get into the art of war?

Speaker 5 I've read a lot of really good books to help me.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I started very early reading all the self-help books you could get, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Way of Peaceful Warrior, all those books.

Speaker 5 How to win, friends, and influence people.

Speaker 5 I read a bunch of C.S. Lewis books,

Speaker 5 read tons of books, and just stuff that gives you a different perspective on stuff. It may not be be real.
It may not be appropriate. It may not fit.

Speaker 5 But it helps me to maybe understand somebody else a little bit more.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 how did you guys come up with the name Panic?

Speaker 5 Panic?

Speaker 5 Man, I was a teenager. That was the best thing I could come up with.

Speaker 4 Pretty good name.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was pretty good at the time.

Speaker 5 I remember there was another band that was called Panic at the Disco,

Speaker 5 and I always wondered who had it first because I never really did the research and see when those guys actually started, started.

Speaker 5 But I think there was another band that was called Panic 2 at some point.

Speaker 4 What was, I mean, so let's just talk about your first time doing something live.

Speaker 4 How many people showed up?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 was that a rush to you? to see

Speaker 5 well we were the first time that we played we were in my cousin's apartment and you know apartments they're they're

Speaker 5 not generally gigantic places to live in so um i think the room probably was his front room was probably about two-thirds the size of this room and we had our gear set up and my cousin was very uh well-known in dana point

Speaker 5 and uh

Speaker 5 he had let all his friends know, hey, my cousin David's coming. I hate when he calls me David.
My cousin David's coming down from Huntington Beach to do a jam with his band.

Speaker 5 People there, it's a block party.

Speaker 4 Oh, shit. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so I'm hiding in the bathroom and getting ready to play. And

Speaker 5 we go out and we start playing the song set we'd learned. And we played a couple originals I had.
We played what ended up being Hanger 18 there because it was called N2RHQ at the time.

Speaker 5 It was a tail number on a plane that I had seen one time and I thought, what does that say?

Speaker 5 And I wrote down N2RHQ. It's probably not what the Finn had on it anyways or the tail hat on it.

Speaker 5 And I thought about what it would be like to have a place in outer space that was a new existence, like, for example, Skylab.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so that was how that song started. And it morphed as it went into Megadeth.
We changed the name and changed the lyrics just a little bit.

Speaker 4 How did it, I mean,

Speaker 4 just like five minutes ago, you're talking about how alone you felt as a kid and

Speaker 4 that got you into, kind of got you into music and stuff. And so,

Speaker 4 what's it like to go?

Speaker 4 I mean, how did it feel for you to go from completely alone to an entire block party wanting to see you play?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 it felt wonderful, obviously, but it was

Speaker 5 very foreign.

Speaker 5 So I'd never experienced anything like that. I mean, the games at the Little League Park, that was great.
You hit a home run.

Speaker 5 I was tied for first place for our home runs that were hit in

Speaker 5 one of the last seasons I played down there.

Speaker 5 And I wasn't by any means a ringer, but it was two kids. He hit four, I hit four, but kids weren't hitting home runs.

Speaker 5 And that was cool. I don't know why I keep going off on this baseball stuff, but you know, the people that were in the bleachers cheering and stuff like that,

Speaker 5 that felt good. That felt good.
But it wasn't a routine occurrence.

Speaker 4 How routine did it become?

Speaker 5 It was a weekend thing with Little League. Sometimes you would have an after-school game, but usually it was weekends.
And not always did we win, or not always did I have

Speaker 5 VIP performance.

Speaker 4 I mean

Speaker 4 the concerts.

Speaker 5 The concerts. Okay, so that would happen about maybe

Speaker 5 once a month, maybe.

Speaker 4 Once a month?

Speaker 5 It only happened, I think, four or five times down there. And then we did a couple

Speaker 5 parties up in

Speaker 5 Huntington Beach, Orange County area. And then

Speaker 5 I left because it was just getting the drugs that were going around.

Speaker 5 There was a whole nother scene that I never knew about until we started playing. As soon as we started playing, we were at a friend's house.
There was a party and

Speaker 5 some

Speaker 5 people from

Speaker 5 another neighborhood came to this party and they dumped a bunch of things that were called reds.

Speaker 5 I think it's barbatuits. And they dumped that into the fruit punch that they made.

Speaker 5 So they had fruit punch and vodka, and somebody came there and dumped a bunch of these other drugs in there, and everybody was falling out in the place, and they ended up getting robbed.

Speaker 5 It was just a bad scene. So that, and everybody seemed to start showing up with somebody who did, or somebody who knew somebody who did or had cocaine.
And it was just, that was the time of the

Speaker 5 in my life where cocaine was prevalent everywhere. It was in the 80s, and

Speaker 4 How old were you at this point?

Speaker 5 Well, it depends what part of the ages I'm talking about. If it was when Megadeth started, that started later.
Panic didn't

Speaker 5 go from

Speaker 5 being functional to being Megadeth overnight.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 When I was in Panic, obviously, I went to Metallica and then... got back in Megadeth.
And

Speaker 5 the stuff that I learned in Panic, I took with me to Metallica.

Speaker 5 And I think that's part of the reason why Lars was letting me help settle shows and being the spokesperson for the band until we got management.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm talking about the very beginning of Panic. How old were you when that started?

Speaker 5 That probably is, like I said, it was probably around

Speaker 5 18, maybe?

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think so. Maybe about 18.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 And you mentioned this other scene.

Speaker 4 What else was going on in the other scene that you did not like? It sounds like Panic was kind of a dark,

Speaker 4 not kind of, a dark period in your life. I know you lost some friends.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people died.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it just kind of seemed like

Speaker 5 there was bad stuff that was supposed to happen to just test me.

Speaker 4 What did happen?

Speaker 5 Oh,

Speaker 4 well,

Speaker 5 that first band, Panic,

Speaker 5 was a lot of death.

Speaker 5 The guitar player,

Speaker 5 myself,

Speaker 5 the drummer, the bass player, and the singer, we were down in Dana Point, and

Speaker 5 it was our first show.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was time for everybody to go to bed.

Speaker 5 So my cousin says, you can sack out here, you can sack out here, you can do this. And the drummer and the sound guy, guy's name was Joe, and the drummer's name was Mike.

Speaker 5 They say, no, we want to drive home. And I said, it's Dana Point, it's nighttime, you guys are buzzed, and you're going to drive all the way back up to Huntington Beach.
Bad idea. Don't do it.

Speaker 5 And they did it. And the driver, Joe, fell asleep while he was driving on Pacific Coast Highway right south of the Huntington Beach Pier.

Speaker 5 He hit a control box for the traffic signals and the car flipped on its side and burst into flames. The driver, Joe, was impaled by the steering column and

Speaker 5 he broke his neck and

Speaker 5 he died.

Speaker 5 at the scene and Mike never woke up in the back seat. He was burnt to death.
And then shortly after that, Tom, the guitar player,

Speaker 5 driven off of the freeway where there was a huge embankment like roads up here, you know, when they had those things that are down the side, and you can look down, there's a parking lot down there.

Speaker 5 Well, he went off the freeway and he hit the parking lot and his Jeep somehow pinned him underneath it and slid for a long distance and just ground him into nothingness.

Speaker 5 So that was really sad. And I know that our singer had some issues,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 he's doing great now from what I hear.

Speaker 5 It was just the whole scene, the drug scene. We did a concert out in the woods

Speaker 5 for these bikers one time. It was down in Fallbrook area, and we...
We specifically learned songs like Bad Motor Scooter by Montrose.

Speaker 5 And we were out there, and we play our set and we're done we're getting ready to go and the guys come up and they go you're not done you're gonna play again and I said no we already played our set you go well you ain't leaving until you play another set and I thought this is bad we're out here with a bunch of bikers and they're pissed and drunk right now so one of the guys that was with us

Speaker 5 two of the guys that were with us decided it was a novel idea to go try and steal a keg from the bikers They had taken it and rolled it up a hill and lost grip on it and it rolled down the hill and went bung, bung, bung, bung, push into the water.

Speaker 5 So you know the sound a keg makes. It was like the ringing of bells in Notre Dame and

Speaker 5 all of a sudden these guys are

Speaker 5 wanted men and the bikers are on the hunt. So I hear one of the guys, he's up in a tree like a moron going, cool, cool, trying to talk to us.
And

Speaker 5 I thought, this is not going to end well. So they said, you can play again.
We'll pay you to play again. and we'll give you this big giant bag of magic mushrooms.

Speaker 5 So everybody passed them out, everybody ate them, and then the singer, I remember him walking around with the trash bag full of beer with a hole punched in the bottom, and he was just drinking like a giant boda bag.

Speaker 5 It had gotten so out of control. And the next morning we woke up, and it was time for us to get out of there.

Speaker 5 You can imagine what else could go wrong. The car that we drove down then in there

Speaker 5 burns out its clutch. So now we have to hitchhike from the woods out in the forest of Fallbrook back up to the freeway and try and hitchhike home to Huntington Beach.

Speaker 5 It was probably one of the worst days of my life playing music.

Speaker 4 Shit.

Speaker 4 How did you, I mean, were you guys close within the band?

Speaker 5 In panic.

Speaker 5 We were kind of. Pat, the singer, was much older than we were, so he kind of had a fatherly,

Speaker 5 you know, I'm not going to say condescension, but just a little bit of a,

Speaker 5 he just seemed like he was older than us. And

Speaker 5 it just felt like that was being made clear. You know, he's the guy that's responsible.
He's the guy with the wife. He's the guy with the kid.
He's the guy with the house.

Speaker 5 We're all derelicts that do drugs and live in apartments.

Speaker 5 How did you get over the death?

Speaker 5 All three of them?

Speaker 5 Well, Mike's was really hard to deal with because he was the drummer in the band that I was in. Tom hadn't passed away yet.
And Joe I barely knew. So Mike was hard for me to lose.

Speaker 5 And he was a good guy. He was a left-handed drummer, too, which is very rare.
And

Speaker 5 he, yeah, that was hard to get over.

Speaker 5 Starting the process of looking for a drummer again seemed very

Speaker 5 artificial.

Speaker 5 because deep down inside I didn't want another drummer. I wanted Mike to be alive.

Speaker 4 And so for panic, you move into Metallica, correct?

Speaker 4 How did that come about?

Speaker 5 I was done with panic and I said I'm going to find something else to do. So I got a newspaper called The Recycler.
And it's just a rag from

Speaker 5 Los Angeles, Orange County. It's like a county classified ad magazine.
And I'm looking in the classified ad magazine. Go figure the biggest band in the world would advertise in this newspaper.
So

Speaker 5 I look at it and it says, wanted lead guitar player

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 mentioned a couple bands. So I called up and I got Lars on the phone and I said,

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, I like Motorhead. I like Budgie.
And he goes, you like fucking Budgie, man?

Speaker 5 And I went, yeah, I do. And

Speaker 5 that was the icebreaker because Budgie is a Welsh band. It's a three-piece.
It's very obscure.

Speaker 5 And by me listening to them, showed that I had credibility in the new wave of British heavy metal world because of the bands I was listening to.

Speaker 5 They were not a band like a white metal band or a progressive metal band. They were a three-piece from Wales that kicked ass.
They didn't have to have all those silly names in front of it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 how did that develop?

Speaker 5 What part of the...

Speaker 4 Joining Mataca.

Speaker 5 Joining Mataka. Yeah, so we were on the phone, and

Speaker 5 he made that comment that I know them, and I said, yeah. So we talked about

Speaker 5 meeting face to face. I drove down from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach, where he lived, in a place called,

Speaker 5 I think it was called Park Newport. And the funny thing was, my mom was a maid, and she had actually worked an event for catering in his

Speaker 5 complex he was in. And I'm thinking, go figure.
My mom was a maid here, and your mom has a place here.

Speaker 5 What a story that is. The two sides of a different coin, you know, or two different sides of the same coin.
And

Speaker 5 so I went into

Speaker 5 his place.

Speaker 5 and started talking to him.

Speaker 5 And he played this song called Hit the the Lights that was written by a guy named Lloyd Grant. So

Speaker 5 Metallica didn't write that song. Lloyd Grant wrote it and then he was friends with Lars and then Lars introduced him to James and then they started playing Hit the Lights.

Speaker 5 That's the song that I heard from them first and I said, wow, this song needs way more lead solos in it.

Speaker 5 It was just me being cocky, being me. Needs more lead solos in it.

Speaker 5 And he was trying to figure out if I was for real.

Speaker 5 And so we went to rehearsal. He said, we're going to try you out.

Speaker 5 I said, okay.

Speaker 5 So, I mean, I knew how good I played.

Speaker 5 I've been gifted, and I know it's not by my own doing, so I don't try to take any credit for it. So I don't care how good I am or not, or what people say, or anything like that.
So I just

Speaker 5 knew what I knew, what I knew. And I went to Ron LeGovney's parents' foreplex.
They had this place that James was living with Ron.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I went up there with Lars and I sat at my aunt's. I plugged my guitar in

Speaker 5 and I just started warming up.

Speaker 5 That's it.

Speaker 4 And they were impressed?

Speaker 5 They wouldn't come in.

Speaker 4 What do you mean they wouldn't come in?

Speaker 5 They wouldn't come into the rehearsal room. So I put my guitar down and I thought, this is really strange.

Speaker 5 And I walked out and I said,

Speaker 5 guys, are we going to do the audition? They said, you got the gig.

Speaker 4 No, shit. Yeah.

Speaker 4 How did that feel?

Speaker 5 Good, good. I knew I was going to get it.

Speaker 4 You knew it.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Because I could play that stuff.

Speaker 5 I mean, there weren't very many guitar players like me around at the time. You know, who were they? Randy Rhodes, there were people like that.
Guy from Rat with Warren D.

Speaker 5 Martini was really great, you know, but

Speaker 5 real shredders,

Speaker 5 there wasn't a lot of us around at the time.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 4 What was the

Speaker 4 what was the experience like joining that band and

Speaker 4 becoming the spokesman and the lead guitarist? And I mean, was that surreal for you at all?

Speaker 5 Well, I guess it's kind of like I said

Speaker 5 it seemed like this was what my destiny was. And when it came time for us to

Speaker 5 do our first concert, we played at a high school, or maybe it was a junior high school Lars might have gone to.

Speaker 5 I know he went to it, but I can't remember if it was elementary or junior or high school, whatever.

Speaker 5 And from that point on, it was just clear that whenever there was any kind of altercation that was going down, I would be the one that would take care of it.

Speaker 5 You know, James was very peaceful and Lars,

Speaker 5 you know, he was a little bit of a devil. You know, he liked to have fun.
But,

Speaker 5 yeah, if there was ever any stuff going down, I had to take care of it.

Speaker 5 When we went up to San Francisco and did our first couple shows up there at a place called the Stone, I was the one who had to go and collect the money. And,

Speaker 5 you know, there's a million ways

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 5 embezzle or to be corrupt when it comes down to running a club or bar. When it involves a ban getting paid, they can say all kinds of stuff.
And if you don't know, you don't know.

Speaker 5 And most kids my age at that time don't know.

Speaker 5 And they try and get money and they'll say, well, you sold 200 tickets and you have a bar tab here. And so we're going to give you $150.

Speaker 5 You know, and you know that they made a killing on their booze. You know that they made money on the food and snacks that they have there and the ticket prices.

Speaker 5 You know, plus they take a giant whack of your merchandise.

Speaker 5 And that was my gig. I would go do that.

Speaker 5 When we decided we were going to move out to New York, that was because Lars had found somebody who wanted to manage us, this guy, Johnny Zazula, who had Megaforce Records.

Speaker 5 And he heard our demo tape, the No Life Till Leather demo tape, and he lost his mind, just like everybody else in the world. And

Speaker 5 they wanted to get the band to come out and

Speaker 5 record a record. And while we were on the way out there, we got in a car crash.

Speaker 5 We were driving through the snow. None of us knew how to drive through snow except for Lars because he's from Denmark.
And I'm driving this rider truck.

Speaker 5 It's a 24-foot truck, and it had a tow bar, and it had James pickup on the back so when we were driving we hit black ice and the whole thing spun around while I was driving and I managed to keep it upright in the middle of the freeway but the truck stopped and oncoming traffic was coming towards us and and

Speaker 5 the events that happened at that location

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 5 guy that had produced, I think he produced the first record. His name is Mark Whitaker.
He was the guy that was doing our sound and stuff. He almost got died.

Speaker 5 I had to push him out of the way and a truck goes

Speaker 5 to the right or right where he was standing. So if I wouldn't have seen that truck come in and saved his life, he'd be dead right now.

Speaker 5 And when we went to the U-Haul place to get our truck replaced and move all of our gear into the new truck, James and Lars had made a decision to replace me because they tried to pin that driving thing on me as the last straw.

Speaker 5 We all drank. That's why they called it alcoholica.
I mean, they didn't call it Dave alcoholica. We all drank.
And they continued to drink like that even after I was gone. But that was the,

Speaker 5 I think, the beginning of the end. And when we got out to New York, I had a reel of tape.
It was a quarter-inch tape.

Speaker 5 It had probably two days worth of guitar riffs on it, just me playing and playing and playing.

Speaker 5 And we took that tape player and the reel of tape with us out to New York. And when we did two shows out there, and after those two shows,

Speaker 5 they woke me up one morning and said, Look, you're out of the band. And I said, What are you talking about? You're out of the band.
I said, No warning.

Speaker 5 No second chance. You're not going to give me a warning.
You're just going to kick me out. And I thought that was unfair.
And it showed

Speaker 5 a grotesque amount of

Speaker 5 a grotesque lack of character.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so that

Speaker 5 it pissed me off and was a huge part of the fuel. But,

Speaker 5 you know, at the time, I was really mad and

Speaker 5 I didn't want to forgive them for what they did. And I told them when I left, do not use my music.
And of course they used it.

Speaker 5 Ride the Lightning, I wrote. Call a Cthulhu, I wrote.

Speaker 5 Let's see what else.

Speaker 5 There's There's Phantom Lord, Metal Militia, Jump in the Fire, The Four Horsemen.

Speaker 5 Jeez. And I wrote a bunch of Leopard Messiah, too.
They didn't give me credit on that. You listen to the riffs, you know they're my riffs.
It's like, boeing.

Speaker 5 You think I'm going to all of a sudden hear my riff and say that's not me?

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 yeah, I wrote a lot of their music that made them. And all the solos on that first record were mine.
The best Kirk could try and copy them.

Speaker 4 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And so,

Speaker 4 I mean, why do you,

Speaker 4 if everybody was drinking that much, were there drugs involved too?

Speaker 5 I like to smoke pot, but there were no drugs.

Speaker 4 Why do you think they singled you out of the bunch?

Speaker 5 Because when I got drunk, I got violent. James and I had gone out to a club one time, and

Speaker 5 it was the old Mabuhe. It was across the street from the stone.

Speaker 5 We were out front, and some guy came out of the alleyway, and he said, there's a guy beating some girl up in the alleyway.

Speaker 5 And of course, I, being the champion for justice, did not want to hear that and not do anything. So I went down the alleyway with James.

Speaker 5 And of course, James, not being a fighter,

Speaker 5 started yelling out, kill him, kill him, kill him.

Speaker 5 And the guy comes out from behind a van and he was much bigger than James. And he said, who's going to kill me?

Speaker 5 And James goes,

Speaker 5 points to me.

Speaker 5 So I immediately grabbed a guy and put him down in a submission and started rabbit punching him until he stopped moving.

Speaker 5 And then we ran out of the alleyway and we stood out front until the paramedics came. And that was it.

Speaker 5 So I imagine he saw that and he figured, you know,

Speaker 5 I don't want to be part of this. Dave's already beat me up back down in Los Angeles and he's just too violent.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 5 Because James did get

Speaker 5 a punch in the mouth from me. He kicked my puppy.

Speaker 4 He kicked your puppy?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I was selling pot for a living, as you know. So one time I did a concert and people knew I was on stage, so they just

Speaker 5 jimmied the window. There's nobody there.
They took all my pot, and I was pissed. So

Speaker 5 I got two dogs.

Speaker 5 Nephew took one and I took the other one. And I had taken her up with me to rehearsal and she was playing and she's looking up at me.
I'm standing over here.

Speaker 5 Ron McGovney's got this really nice GTL and she leans up against the car and puts her paws on the front quarter panel and he goes, bang, and kick the dog. And I went, what did you just do?

Speaker 5 What did you just do? And it went from the front yard into the house and there's still stuff being said.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I said, you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the the mouth. And then

Speaker 5 Ron McGovney says, if you hit him, you're going to have to hit me first.

Speaker 5 And I said, you stay out of it. And then James said the same thing.
If you hit him, you're going to have to hit me first. And I said, okay, you win.
And bang, I hit James in the mouth.

Speaker 5 And then I hip-tossed Ron into his

Speaker 5 intellivation setup. And

Speaker 4 that was it.

Speaker 5 Two strikes, and it was over. And

Speaker 5 Lars was pulling his hair going, I don't want it to end this way. And I thought, you know what? I've already told you it's either me or James.

Speaker 5 And we did that a bunch of times because James was doing stupid stuff. And I told James the same thing.
I said, man, it's either me or Lars because Lars sucks.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 5 And I got the axe in the end. So it's good.
It's fine.

Speaker 4 What did you do after you got axed?

Speaker 5 I went home and

Speaker 5 I contacted a friend of mine and I said I quit. And she said, no, you didn't.
You got fired. And I said, yeah, I got fired.
So I quit. I got fired.
Whatever. You know, I'm back home.

Speaker 4 Wrong word.

Speaker 5 Not changing the outcome, you know.

Speaker 5 And I made sure not to ever say that I quit

Speaker 5 because I wanted people to know that I was unfairly dismissed and that I didn't give a shit.

Speaker 5 Because we may not be as big as they are. Hell, their biggest song, Enter Sandman.

Speaker 5 Go look up the band Excel right now.

Speaker 5 Look up their song.

Speaker 5 I think it's something into the unknown.

Speaker 5 Pretty similar.

Speaker 4 How long was it before you

Speaker 4 got back in the saddle?

Speaker 5 It wasn't very long.

Speaker 5 I moved up to Hollywood. I knew I needed to go up into L.A.,

Speaker 5 and I was really disappointed that I'd moved to Hollywood because everything about Hollywood was what I despised, what we despised in Metallica. You know, we didn't like the short hair.

Speaker 5 We didn't like the eyeliner. We didn't like the glammy clothes.
We didn't like the ballads.

Speaker 5 And those are all the things that we stood against. And

Speaker 5 I don't know where I was going with that.

Speaker 4 You moved up to Hollywood

Speaker 4 back in the saddle.

Speaker 5 I'm trying to figure out what I was going to say about that because when I first came out there, I had been friends with a bunch of people that were in PenPal

Speaker 5 kind of a position. This guy named Brian Liu was a guy who had a metal magazine called Metal Militia.
Or no. What was it called? Was it Metal Militia?

Speaker 5 I think that might have been the name of his magazine. But anyways, Brian Liu is still a friend of mine to this day.
And

Speaker 5 I told him that I was planning on getting together and I had met this guy

Speaker 5 and this other guy and I was thinking about the name Fallen Angels. Blah, blah, blah.
Okay.

Speaker 5 Okay. Okay.
Bye.

Speaker 5 Next thing I know, it's a story that I have a band with three people.

Speaker 5 And it's called Fallen Angels. And there never was that band.
There never was. But the guitar player that I met, Robbie McKinney, was the guy I first played with when I came to Los Angeles.

Speaker 5 And he actually introduced me to the people I ended up playing with. Because

Speaker 5 when

Speaker 5 we started trying to get people, one of the first drummers we had was this kid named Lee Rausch. And we'd done a couple shows up in Palo Alto with Carrie King sitting in on guitar for us.

Speaker 5 That was really neat, but it ended in a very weird way because

Speaker 5 we'd been playing together.

Speaker 5 I'll backtrack to David Ellison being in the band, but we were playing together with this guy named Lee Rausch and

Speaker 5 this first show up in Palo Alto. It was New Year's Eve and we were at the rehearsal place we were at and something happened.
So we were all running out of the building as fast as we can.

Speaker 5 The power went off or something weird. So we're running down the stairs.
He falls, breaks his leg. And we've got a show in a couple of days.
And I said, Lee, you're an idiot. What did you do? And

Speaker 5 he goes, man, I'll just break the cast off. And

Speaker 5 he gets a pair of pliers, gets the cast wet, rips the cast off, and does the concert. His foot is black and green.
Looks like he's got gangrene on it and it should have been cut off, but he played.

Speaker 5 On the way back to Los Angeles, he goes, man, I'm going to go take some acid and find myself. And I never saw him again.
No shit. Yeah.

Speaker 5 The next dreamer we got after that was somebody who was introduced to us by

Speaker 5 a manager named Jay Jones, but I've skipped the part about David Ellison. So do you want me to talk about that? Yes.

Speaker 5 When we first got the drummer we were going through, before that happened,

Speaker 5 when I moved to the apartment I was living in in Hollywood, right underneath me there was two kids from Minnesota.

Speaker 5 They were living in Jackson, Minnesota, which is a podem town out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 5 And their parents both saved up and sent them out to California to make it big. They would go to Guitar Institute of Technology and then they'd be discovered and everybody'd live happily ever after.

Speaker 5 Well, I was there in my apartment. They were there in their apartment underneath me playing Running with the Devil.

Speaker 4 Boom, boom, boom, boom, right?

Speaker 5 Real difficult bass riff. Gene Simmons actually played that.
Did you know that?

Speaker 4 No. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so I'm hearing this, and I'm mildly hungover. Nah, I was really hungover.
So

Speaker 5 I opened up the window and I said, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 5 Slammed the window.

Speaker 5 It seems to have worked.

Speaker 5 I go lay back down.

Speaker 4 Boom, boom, boom.

Speaker 5 And I opened up the window and I grabbed this potted plant that was on the windowsill and I went

Speaker 5 and I threw it down and it burst on his air conditioner and I'm waiting.

Speaker 5 So I open up the door. What?

Speaker 5 They're both stunned. You know, they've got these long fucking ridiculous looking leather jackets on that have a belt around them.
It's like a smoking jacket.

Speaker 5 And they had canvas high tops and bell bottoms on. Like they were really styling.

Speaker 5 And I look at him. And I look at him.

Speaker 5 And they go, do you know where to get some cigarettes

Speaker 5 and I thought oh my god I said at the corner wham and I shut the door

Speaker 5 what

Speaker 5 can you buy beer and I went now we're talking so we became friends I found out Dave was the bass player Greg Handovid was the guitar player of this Twosome that came out.

Speaker 5 They were both in the band for a little while. Greg married a bong bong, and we fired him.
And it was just me and Junior for a little while.

Speaker 5 And then I found this drummer that was brought to us by a manager we had named Jay Jones.

Speaker 5 Jay Jones is dead. His brother knifed him with a butter knife over a bologna sandwich.
So it shows you the kind of people we had managing us, too.

Speaker 4 Holy shit.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Killed him over a bologna sandwich? Right.

Speaker 5 His dad was in the war, and he got hit with some shrapnel, so he'd sit out in the front yard each night and stare at the moon like

Speaker 5 a dog, right? And his brother got in a fight with him. They both lived at home still and they were both way old adults.
And the guy stabbed him.

Speaker 4 Jeez. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So Ellison came into the band, Handovit exited. We got

Speaker 5 meeting with this guy named Carr Samuelson. Me and Ellison are working at the studio at the time and

Speaker 5 Jay brings this guy, Garr. His name's Gary.

Speaker 5 So Garr sits down and he's smoking a cigarette and he nods because he's a heroin addict and he had just gotten well before he came to see us because Jay was his dealer who became our dealer.

Speaker 5 So Garr's sitting there on the couch with a cigarette and it goes

Speaker 5 right through his fingers and I thought, fuck, this guy's a masochist, man. This is going to be great.
So we go in there and we go to audition him and he was amazing, just amazing.

Speaker 5 So we created Megadeth. It was a metal jazz band that had classical and punk influences.
And we were a three-piece for a little while. And then we met Chris Poland.

Speaker 4 How did you come up with the name Megadeth?

Speaker 5 It was on a handbill from Senator Alan Cranston on the way back from New York to California.

Speaker 5 There was a handbar on the bottom of the floorboard of the greyhound I was riding in, and I picked it up because I needed something to write on.

Speaker 5 You know, I figured I was going to start writing lyrics. The first lyric I wrote was on the back of a hostess snow cones.
You know, those cups,

Speaker 5 the pink chopped-up mutant stuff, whatever it is. Yeah.
So I had written on the back of that, and I needed more paper. And there was this thing on the floor to seat in front of me.

Speaker 5 So I kind of reached my foot and grabbed it. And I flipped it over and I read it.
And it said, The Arsenal of Megadeth can't be read. This is Senator Alan Cranston saying this.

Speaker 5 And there was much more stuff there about why he should be retained as a senator. And I thought, Megadeth, that's a great song title.
So I wrote it down as a song title.

Speaker 5 And I wasn't thinking of a band name yet. But we got to LA, we got a band together, we played, we were driving around in the van.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 by now, we had hired Jay, I mean a car,

Speaker 5 David Ellison, myself.

Speaker 5 Greg Handovid was still with us, and there was a singer we tried hiring named Lawrence, but he went by lore

Speaker 5 and he was the one that was talking to us and he goes you know me that's a great band name because I was thinking something like a foreign word like like fire

Speaker 5 you know something bomb or something in a foreign language but then you know you can't really say it when you go into the foreign language speaking territories on stage bomb

Speaker 5 everybody runs for the doors right

Speaker 5 so yeah we we gave a lot of thought to Megadeth. And the funny thing is, as soon as I chose that name, this little douche from the Circle Jerks that was a drummer,

Speaker 5 his name was Keith somebody,

Speaker 5 went out and registered the name Megadeth, so I had to pay him off to get it.

Speaker 5 He knew because he was friends with Jay Jones, our manager at the time. Jay told him we're called Megadeth, and he ran right out.
It cost me $10,000.

Speaker 4 Damn. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Damn. So this is the stuff I see that I don't like.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And how fast was it? How fast did the Megadeth develop into what it is?

Speaker 5 Well, we had, I had been writing songs, and I had several songs that I had in Metallica, several songs that I had before Metallica. And

Speaker 5 I was just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And

Speaker 5 I think the first time we went into the studio was in 83,

Speaker 5 and we started doing a demo. It was a three-song demo.
I might be wrong on the date, but it was somewhere around there. And that started to circulate.

Speaker 5 And people, I remember Scott Ian from Anthrax had been doing a show at the Reseda Country Club in Reseda, California. And

Speaker 5 I went to go see them because we were friends. And I said, I want you to hear this song.
And I played him Love to Death. And he lost his mind.
He'd never heard anything like that before. And

Speaker 5 that was the beginning of our friendship. and it's lasted a long time

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 when it came time for the album we had gone down to a record company it was called uh what was it called prodigy or something like that it was like an uh

Speaker 5 like a like a new wave uh alternative kind of a uh Enigma was the name as much as I say Enigma that's the name of the

Speaker 5 record company so we went to Enigma and we talked to them and they were not interested because we weren't the kind of music that they know what to do with. So I thought that was

Speaker 5 respectable because they didn't say, oh yeah, we want to sign you, but we don't know what to do with you.

Speaker 5 So then we went to Combat. Combat was owned by Important Records and

Speaker 5 I went and talked to this guy named Cliff Coltrari. And Cliff was the vice president at the

Speaker 5 California side of Important Records. And we went in and we played the record for him and he goes, okay, let me make a call.
And so he calls up

Speaker 5 his boss out in New York. And meanwhile, we left.

Speaker 5 We were walking to the car and we hear this

Speaker 5 coming down the road and this fat guy is running after us. And all of a sudden, we recognize it's the guy we just met.
And he goes, wait, wait, wait, come back in, come back in.

Speaker 5 We want to talk to you. So we signed our first record deal, The Combat.
and

Speaker 5 that was my introduction into the music industry.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 what is the life of a rock star like? I mean, now you're in it, you've got a record deal, you're doing concerts,

Speaker 4 tons of people are showing up. What does a day in the life look like?

Speaker 5 Back then or now?

Speaker 4 Back then?

Speaker 5 Well, it was just a constant party. I had a significant other at the time, so I wasn't really catting around.
But

Speaker 5 there were loads of people partying all the time, and

Speaker 5 you know how that ends.

Speaker 5 Constant partying, money going out the window,

Speaker 5 people getting arrested or

Speaker 5 getting in accidents or stuff like that. Never ends well.

Speaker 4 Was it a good time?

Speaker 5 For me,

Speaker 5 it was not really a good time.

Speaker 5 I got off on it, but it wasn't a good time. It was a bad time, but I enjoyed a bad time because I was dangerous and people knew it.
The headlines used to say we were the most dangerous band.

Speaker 5 And I saw that headline once before from Molly Cruz, and I thought,

Speaker 5 what a fucking mistake you made there. Those guys aren't dangerous.
And

Speaker 5 because, you know, you talk about the real deal. Do they practice what they preach? Are they willing to go live live in a van to go get their music out to the masses?

Speaker 5 We traveled around the nation for years

Speaker 5 from a station wagon to a van to a camper.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we got a motorhome and we thought, shit, we've arrived. You know, and then when we got our first bus, that was a big deal.
That was a big deal. It's kind of like the bus from Almost Famous.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 But it probably was a bus from Almost Famous.

Speaker 4 But,

Speaker 5 you know, now we travel. We travel well.

Speaker 5 We don't

Speaker 5 do a lot of the crazy stuff we used to do.

Speaker 5 We don't outlaw that. You know, if people want to be around us and drink and celebrate, you know, the only thing I'm not really cool about is,

Speaker 5 you know, illicit stuff like, you know, powders and stuff like that. That to me,

Speaker 5 people that are in that circle,

Speaker 5 they're dangerous people to be around because if ever there was a momentary flip in their mentality, they could become very dangerous.

Speaker 4 How old are you in 1983 when Megadeth was? 22.

Speaker 4 22 years old?

Speaker 5 When Megadeth started, yeah.

Speaker 4 Were you ever into the...

Speaker 4 We'll save that for later. I want to get into some addiction stuff, but we'll save that for later.
But, I mean,

Speaker 4 what is the first...

Speaker 4 When's the first concert when you show up and there's just thousands and thousands and thousands of people there?

Speaker 5 That was a long time coming because the scene was so small in the beginning. We were doing it when a big concert was sold out

Speaker 5 Stone or sold out Mabuhe Gardens or stuff like that. That's what the scene was like.
You could always have fair weather fans when Symphony came out and the County Act Extinction album came out.

Speaker 5 That was a record that got huge commercial success

Speaker 5 because the time was right, and

Speaker 5 there was a lot of fair weather fans that bought the album just because Megadeth is the cool band right now.

Speaker 5 I don't know if that answered your question or not.

Speaker 4 Well, kind of what I'm getting at is the adrenaline that I'm,

Speaker 4 but I've never done anything like that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, don't.

Speaker 4 I think I've passed my time, even if that was on the cards for me. But,

Speaker 4 but I mean,

Speaker 4 you you know,

Speaker 4 but I'm no stranger to adrenaline. I mean, going out on operations and

Speaker 4 hitting targets and stuff like that, there's a major adrenaline rush, and you get addicted to it. And

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 I'm kind of

Speaker 4 in a weird way, maybe trying to relate to you a little bit with the rush that maybe you felt.

Speaker 5 Well, I got a rush when we were back down at Dana Point.

Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 5 Yeah, sure. People listening to something, you know, you've been an outcast.
You've been

Speaker 5 a child that your family has made to feel less than and everything he does. And now all of a sudden you do one thing right.

Speaker 5 Maybe

Speaker 5 this is meant for me.

Speaker 5 And that was kind of my way out.

Speaker 5 You know, I didn't see the I don't think I would have ever done anything harmful to myself, but I just did not see any kind of an existence with the way I was going before I started playing music.

Speaker 5 It just, God, what would I have been? A cash register repair person like my dad?

Speaker 4 Was it like a light switch? Did it go from 100, couple hundred people to

Speaker 4 tens of thousands?

Speaker 5 Well, I'll tell you what you're asking, and I'll save you the incremental questions.

Speaker 5 The one concert that really blew me away was in 1988 at Castle Donington when we played with Iron Maiden and Kiss and David Lee Roth and Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses played before us at that time.

Speaker 5 Two people died there, but

Speaker 5 excluding the unfortunate deaths, that concert was 140,000 people.

Speaker 4 Holy shit.

Speaker 5 And the Guinness Book of World Records has the sound system used for that concert as the biggest, most powerful public address system ever assembled for a concert.

Speaker 4 Wow. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And of course we did Rock and Rio, which had, you know, it was another concert over 100,000. And then we started doing the sonospheres.
You know, one of those got up, I think it was around 200,000.

Speaker 5 But for me, those really, really, really big concerts,

Speaker 5 they don't feel

Speaker 5 They don't feel like I'm making a connection with people in the back.

Speaker 5 You know, the people up front, I can see them, I can see them cheering, I can see their signs, their shirts, you know, who they're with, how they're acting, they're moshing, if they're just throwing their hands up in the air, if they're singing.

Speaker 5 You know, those are some of the greatest

Speaker 5 shots we've ever gotten is the fans when they're just loving the music.

Speaker 5 Because you look at the cross-section of our audience, there are a lot of different types of people, not just all middle-aged white males or young white males.

Speaker 5 It's people of color, it's people that are young, they're people that are old, they tend to stay in the back. And there's

Speaker 5 a lot of girls there.

Speaker 5 And you just don't see that with metal, you know,

Speaker 5 very few metal bands.

Speaker 4 Why were you called the most dangerous band?

Speaker 5 Because we were.

Speaker 5 What does that mean? Well, we went to our release party for Peace Sales, but who's buying?

Speaker 5 We took two limousines there, and we we were inside the bar getting drunk and they called it the Firefly Bar because they would pour alcohol down the bar and light it on fire every set amount of minutes.

Speaker 5 I guess maybe it was hourly or something.

Speaker 5 And I was getting entertained in there.

Speaker 5 And of course it came time to go get more drugs and we went outside and one of the limousines were gone.

Speaker 5 And I was pissed. And I said, where's the limo?

Speaker 5 And Chris tells me that his girlfriend and and the rest of the girls got in the car and took off.

Speaker 5 We got into the limousine and Chris started saying stuff to me

Speaker 5 so I started beating him up in the limo and then

Speaker 5 I can't remember if

Speaker 5 Garr was sitting next to me and then Chris came toward me and I kicked him in the face.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's what happened. So I mean, you know, people know that kind of stuff and and it gets around.
People were talking. We were,

Speaker 5 you know, there was a set of acts that each label had that were their dangerous people. You know, Capital had Megadeth.
They had Poison, who was a different walk of life than we were.

Speaker 5 But to some people, they were dangerous just as well.

Speaker 4 You know.

Speaker 5 But for us, I think it had to do with how we were living, how we were, you know,

Speaker 5 flopping at people's houses. We squatted on a couple people.

Speaker 5 I remember we went to one kid's house named Billy Cordero, who was a really great guy, and he let us spend the night there for, I think it was six months.

Speaker 5 Supposed to just spend one night.

Speaker 5 Yeah, thank you, Billy.

Speaker 4 I mean, what was the first album that went platinum?

Speaker 5 Countdown. Countdown went double platinum.
And then Peace. And then

Speaker 5 Euthanasia was certified platinum when it came out because it had sold a million records before we even saw the record company that campaign. And

Speaker 4 hmm.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Countdown was, I think, the first one.

Speaker 4 I think so. Yeah.
I mean

Speaker 4 sorry to keep asking age, but how old are you? Mid-20s when first one goes platinum?

Speaker 4 Yes. I mean, how were you intaking,

Speaker 4 at that young age, all the fame and all the notoriety and albums going platinum? And I mean,

Speaker 4 was that, was that... How do you navigate that?

Speaker 5 I didn't understand the question. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 How do you navigate

Speaker 4 the rise to fame and all the exposure that you're getting, and

Speaker 4 the fans, and all of that. I mean, that's a lot to take in for somebody that age.

Speaker 5 I wasn't doing very good with it.

Speaker 5 I was 30 when Countdown came out. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 fortunately for me,

Speaker 5 I'd already met Pam and

Speaker 5 we'd gotten married and

Speaker 5 Justice was born. So

Speaker 5 let me get my my dates right.

Speaker 5 Countdown came out in,

Speaker 5 I think,

Speaker 5 92. And we got married in 91, May 3rd, March 3rd, 91.
Justice was born February 11th, 92.

Speaker 5 Trying to think, I can't remember the date, but it was pretty,

Speaker 5 Euthanasia got certified way faster than Countdown did. And retroactively, a lot of the albums prior prior to Countdown has been certified gold and or platinum.

Speaker 4 How did you meet Pam?

Speaker 5 That was funny.

Speaker 5 This guy that was a personal assistant for Stephen Adler from Guns N' Roses, his name was Ronnie some but Ronnie Schneider. And Ronnie

Speaker 5 was helping Stephen and ended up getting addicted to heroin while in that circle. And he went to treatment and he got out and he called me and he said, I have to go do a show tonight.

Speaker 5 Please come with me and help me stay sober. And I said, okay,

Speaker 5 you got,

Speaker 5 I'm your man. I got your back.

Speaker 4 You were sober at the time. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I went with him and

Speaker 5 I'm in this club and I'm there with Nick. and this friend of Nick named Juan.
Juan's really dark complexed and he's got these gigantic white teeth.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 4 runny.

Speaker 5 So Runny goes and does this thing. And I'm sitting in here bored.
It's not a lot of fun things to do in a bar if you're not drinking. I don't know if you've ever sat in a bar and you're not drinking.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 It's a shitty place to be in. So I'm looking around and I see this woman.

Speaker 5 She was very young at the time and I just thought, wow, she's really pretty. And

Speaker 5 I'm looking and I'm thinking and I'm looking. And I finally say, hey, Juan, go over and tell that girl I want to meet her.

Speaker 5 Because that's how I roll, right? And

Speaker 4 rolled.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 he goes over there, and it's kind of dark, and I see his face. And then all of a sudden, his giant white teeth are flashing.
And I'm thinking,

Speaker 5 what's so funny?

Speaker 5 So he comes back and I said, what's so funny? He goes, she said, you want to meet her, you need to go over there yourself. And I went,

Speaker 4 spice, I like that.

Speaker 5 So I walked over to her and I said, hi, I'm Dave. She goes, I know who you are.

Speaker 4 And I thought, well, this is going to be great.

Speaker 5 So I said, listen, I just am here helping my friend stay sober. And I'm sober myself.
And I want to get out of here. I'd like to see you again.
Can I take you out to lunch?

Speaker 5 And she didn't know what was going on. So I got her number and I left.
And that was it.

Speaker 5 and then a couple days later maybe I don't even think it was that long I called her back and and we went out for a little while and and I was falling for her and I knew that I was falling for her so I broke up with her and I needed to make sure so

Speaker 5 I broke up with her it was really painful I went to Hawaii with my bodyguard and he

Speaker 5 He was talking to me while I was out there, philosophical kind of stuff, not Aristotle or anything but that, but just

Speaker 5 life, you know.

Speaker 5 And I said, you know, Tony, I think I love this chick. I think I want to marry her.

Speaker 5 So we had a concert in Hawaii, and I had invited her to come out, and her mom, and her stepfather, who I didn't like, and her grandma, who I loved, and her brother, and I think he brought his girlfriend,

Speaker 5 and my three sisters, and my sponsor, and

Speaker 5 the guy who

Speaker 5 was going to be the best man at my wedding, a bank robber who had murdered two people.

Speaker 5 I thought that was a pretty street cred kind of guy to be your best man.

Speaker 5 Just kidding. So,

Speaker 5 Pam's in the hotel, and I knock on the door because we just got to Hawaii, and

Speaker 5 she was there ahead of me, and I said, Hey, what are you doing on Tuesday? And she got mad because she didn't know what I was doing. I said, Do you want to get married? And she flipped out.

Speaker 5 So, we now are on on the hunt for a wedding dress for my

Speaker 5 skinny, real thin wife in Hawaii. And we're trying to find a nice suit for me.
So Pam got lucky and found like some eight-year-old wedding dress from some playhouse or something.

Speaker 5 And I had a suit that looks like it was made out of wriggly chewing gum wrappers. And it was, actually, I looked like the tin man from Wizard of Oz, but it had a little bit of some fashion to it.

Speaker 5 It's this bright, shiny, aluminum-looking suit, and it's all I could get. It's all I could find.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I remember we were standing at the base of Punch Bowl, you know, in Waikiki, Time and Head, the volcano. And that's where we got married, right under the volcano.

Speaker 4 Wow. Yeah, it was really neat.
Wow.

Speaker 4 How long have you been married?

Speaker 5 34 years, almost.

Speaker 4 What's the secret to a successful marriage?

Speaker 5 You have to say this, honey,

Speaker 5 I've been thinking, and you're probably right,

Speaker 5 and I'm going to try harder next time.

Speaker 5 And mean it, you know, if you really mean it, because if you tell them, you know, I've been thinking, first off, that confuses them because they don't think we know how to think.

Speaker 5 And then when you say, you're probably right, Inside they have piñatas being burst and all kinds of sky streamers and stuff.

Speaker 5 And then when you say you're going to try harder, they go, it's good, game over.

Speaker 5 So I'm just playing, but you need to have to look at things as

Speaker 5 two different, completely different

Speaker 5 organisms that are trying to coexist in the same body. And you have to make

Speaker 5 sacrifices and you have to make...

Speaker 5 I don't want to say consolation because that's not the right word I want to say, but you do have to make some...

Speaker 5 and sacrifice is the wrong word because it's too much, but you do have to make some adjustments, you know.

Speaker 5 And I think the better that the opposite spouse is of being aware of the other spouse's needs and wants, the better the relationship's going to be. Because sometimes you just got to walk away.

Speaker 5 When Pam fights with me, I just walk away.

Speaker 5 She'll throw shit, she'll scream, she'll call me names, but you know what? At least my side stopped. And sometimes cooler heads prevail.

Speaker 5 Sometimes I walk away and then she'll say something, and I got to do a U-turn and go back and jump right in the fight. But

Speaker 5 most oftentimes, you know,

Speaker 5 we try and be really respectful of one another. And

Speaker 5 I really try and help Pam with support from the kids, too. Because they're adults now, and they don't want to be looked at like kids.
They want to be looked at as adults.

Speaker 4 How long after you guys got married was Justice born?

Speaker 4 He was born

Speaker 5 in Wedlock.

Speaker 5 We'd been married 11 months, I think. We got pregnant about second or third month, I think.

Speaker 4 Wow, you guys are messing around.

Speaker 5 No, um,

Speaker 5 no, I think I think I think it was just meant to be, you know, because we weren't really getting a lot of time to spend together. I was touring a lot.
So it was meant to be. I love my son.

Speaker 4 How did you manage

Speaker 4 being a husband, being a father to your two kids, touring,

Speaker 4 all the exposure? I'm sure women are throwing themselves at you left and right. I mean, how do you manage all that?

Speaker 5 No, they walked.

Speaker 5 The women walked. They didn't throw themselves.

Speaker 5 It was a joke.

Speaker 4 I love.

Speaker 5 How was it? Well, you know, it's

Speaker 5 like anything if you know what your priorities are. You know, some people can walk into a candy store and want one of everything, you know, and then you end up sick at the end.
You know,

Speaker 5 I got to a point in my life where I knew I was ready to find the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And,

Speaker 5 you know, I came really close. I was engaged to somebody for six years one time.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 she was the muse for a lot of the early songs because our relationship was so toxic. But

Speaker 5 if I would have stayed engaged to her

Speaker 5 just a few more months, it would have been a common law marriage in California because that's seven years you're married. So

Speaker 5 I don't know if I took that into consideration or it just happened that way, but it happened that way.

Speaker 4 And you got sober before you guys met?

Speaker 5 Me and Pam?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 How bad did your addictions get?

Speaker 5 Well, I mean, it never got bad. I had money.

Speaker 5 You mean

Speaker 5 how much did I do?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I used a lot, but I had a high tolerance. And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 as far as doing my job, when it was time to go out on the road and it was time to get on stage, we got on stage. And then when everybody got off stage, that was when the party started up again.

Speaker 5 You know, it was just a way of life at the time in Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 I'm three years, three years off booze,

Speaker 4 a little over three years. And

Speaker 4 I mean, I can

Speaker 4 totally relate with addictions. I mean, I was addicted to

Speaker 4 pain pills, benzos, valium, Xanax, hydrocodine, tramadol, oxy,

Speaker 4 ambient,

Speaker 4 putting down damn near two-fifths a day of vodka.

Speaker 5 That's the only thing I haven't done that you said. Which one? The two-fifths of vodka.

Speaker 4 You've done all those? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Was it a regular

Speaker 5 it was whatever anybody had that was partiables and you know you go to a party and hey I got some ambien. You want some? Sure, what does it do? What's going to make you fall asleep in your food?

Speaker 5 Well, that sounds like a really fun drug. You know,

Speaker 5 consequently, I don't really like ambien.

Speaker 5 The other stuff you said, valium, valium, I need to go get

Speaker 5 x-rays, CAT scans stuck.

Speaker 5 I can't do it. When I have valary scopology now that I've had ear, nose, throat cancer, head and neck cancer, they have to look down my nose with that camera.
I can't do that.

Speaker 5 I have to take a volume for that. But am I addicted to it? No.

Speaker 4 What is it that got you sober?

Speaker 5 I mean, why did you...

Speaker 5 I was in Texas and I'd hurt my arm really bad.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I was talking to this pastor and he goes, man, you need the Lord, Dave. And I went,

Speaker 5 no, I don't.

Speaker 5 I've had enough, God.

Speaker 5 So he goes, why don't you go up onto the hill?

Speaker 5 Up on the hill hill was a firing, and there's two

Speaker 5 sections of building that went together like this, and it had a cross hanging down in the middle of it. Of course, I was brought up a Jehovah's Witness.
The cross was a torture device, and

Speaker 5 Jesus wasn't hung on a cross, he was hung on a tree, blah, blah, blah. All this stuff that they believe that I don't.

Speaker 5 So I'm looking at the cross, and I'm just thinking to myself, man,

Speaker 5 what have I got to lose?

Speaker 5 And those six simple words set me on my road to a new lifestyle and new existence because I went down the hill and I told the little pastor, I said, yeah, man,

Speaker 5 I think I want to try this.

Speaker 5 I just was up there and I said, what have I got to lose? And he goes, okay, well, let's do the sinner's prayer. And he goes, get down on your knees.
And I said, nope.

Speaker 5 We need to get on your knees to do the sinner's prayer. Nope, not doing it.
Not praying on my knees. I'll say the prayer, but I'm not getting on my knees.
And I did the prayer.

Speaker 5 I didn't get down on my knees.

Speaker 5 And I just couldn't bring myself to

Speaker 5 that place yet. I was not at that place yet.
I mean, I prayed. I prayed all the time because I thought that was what you're supposed to do.
But

Speaker 5 a sinner's prayer?

Speaker 5 What is that? I don't know if I like the sound of that. So we did it.
And

Speaker 5 I told my wife, and she started laughing and said her friends knew that was going to happen and

Speaker 5 from that point on it was

Speaker 5 just a series of learning stuff, learning how to coexist with other people that may or may not be enlightened.

Speaker 5 So many sayings that I learned growing up, like walking a mile in another man's shoes,

Speaker 5 you think, what the hell does that mean? And then something like that happens where

Speaker 5 your life changes something that's been a part of your existence every day every day I remember I was telling somebody the other day that when we lived in Silver Lake California David Ellison would come into my bedroom every morning well not every morning he would come into my bedroom and he would have a mirror

Speaker 5 and he would

Speaker 5 give it to me And

Speaker 5 we were off to the races.

Speaker 5 So it's kind of how we lived. It was just, I didn't know any better.

Speaker 4 What brought you to the pastor specifically?

Speaker 5 My arm injury.

Speaker 4 Your arm injury. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Is this about the same time that you stopped doing...

Speaker 4 I mean, I read that you stopped doing witchcraft around 30.

Speaker 4 Sounds like it went on for about 15 years.

Speaker 5 It ended way before that. Okay.
I'm pretty sure. You know, I think about it all the time.
Whenever somebody pisses me off, I think, man, I'll just...

Speaker 4 No, I won't.

Speaker 5 I've actually, when my sister was alive, I called her up a few times and talked to her, and she talked me out of it a few times because I was at the end of my rope, and I knew it worked,

Speaker 5 but didn't do it.

Speaker 4 Sounds like you were in some.

Speaker 4 I think you described it as a satanic depression.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 oppression.

Speaker 5 It was like

Speaker 5 a possession, not depression, like having a spirit on you.

Speaker 4 How so?

Speaker 5 Well, when you open up the doors

Speaker 5 to the dark, they're not going to wait to be invited in. They're coming, right?

Speaker 5 And if I believe in God, then I have to believe in the devil, right? And I believe in God. I believe in Christ.
I believe in the devil. I believe they're demons.
I believe they're angels.

Speaker 5 Still don't know what the real state looks like up in the heavens, but

Speaker 5 I've got a pretty good understanding of a lot of that stuff. And

Speaker 5 I don't know, the

Speaker 5 stuff that happens when you get really drugged out, a lot of times you

Speaker 5 start to

Speaker 5 do

Speaker 5 really unnatural things, you know, because you're on drugs. Well, why wouldn't you? You're not yourself.
You either have liquor in you, which is called spirits for a reason,

Speaker 5 or you're on stuff that's like an opiate, which makes you

Speaker 5 think everybody's your friend. And,

Speaker 5 you know, or you smoke pot and you're paranoid of everybody. Or you take sedatives, which for some people, they need them.
They need them to be able to not wear the people out around them.

Speaker 5 And other people need stimulants, like children who have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD.

Speaker 5 But when somebody starts grinding pharmaceutical speed because they like it, you know, it's kind of what meth is.

Speaker 4 So do you think you were possessed?

Speaker 5 Oh, I know I was because we tried to

Speaker 5 get my life in order and stuff just kept happening. And we would go see people who were spiritual in nature and they would say that

Speaker 5 they see something. The priest that was in.

Speaker 5 We went to go see a

Speaker 5 I forgot I told Darren all this stuff too.

Speaker 5 We had

Speaker 5 been talking about what had happened, Pam and I, and I said that I wanted to get rid of this. So we went to this person, her name was, I think it was Caroline somebody.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 her husband was a Green Bay Packer football player, so I thought it was legit. And she was a doctor, so she would do these kind of clearing things.
And she had this India...

Speaker 5 Indian guy that was a Rajah come over. He was like a preach that did laying on hands, cupping, acupuncture.
And

Speaker 5 so he came over and he said when he was doing the acupuncture on me, he was meditating behind me and he fell over.

Speaker 5 And he said that there was a man with a silver turban that came out and said, I release him. And that's when he fell over.

Speaker 5 When we went to San Francisco to go see the Filipino priest, he said that he laid hands on me and the bull

Speaker 5 The head of a bull came out of my chest, out of my stomach. He said that's

Speaker 4 yeah.

Speaker 5 And I didn't see it, I didn't feel it. I don't know what the fuck happened.
But you know, in the spirit world, you know,

Speaker 5 I don't know if I would see it because I don't know if I have that gifting to see the demons.

Speaker 5 But, you know, he had said the same thing. So there were several people that had nothing in common that knew that there was something going on with me.

Speaker 5 And finally, it broke. And,

Speaker 5 you know, I remember getting baptized at some place in Northridge, California, and

Speaker 5 somebody, and this is Ricky, this is Sriki, somebody had said that there was a lot of weird stuff going on in that room at the time, like chairs were moving around, because there was a bunch of people in there that were getting baptized, and there was a lot of tongues being spoken and stuff.

Speaker 5 I didn't see any of that stuff, so

Speaker 5 I got to see it myself to believe it. But, you know,

Speaker 5 that's what I heard was going on in there, and I was thinking, man, that's pretty cool, because if this whole God thing's real, and I live my life like there is a God, then I'm not going to regret it.

Speaker 4 Have you ever seen anything?

Speaker 4 Demon? Supernatural?

Speaker 5 Like a demon?

Speaker 4 Anything.

Speaker 5 Not in the physical. Visions, yeah, but not in the physical.

Speaker 5 But, you know, you do too. You see, I have dreams.

Speaker 4 Oh, I've had several occurrences where I've experienced things, not necessarily seen, but heard or

Speaker 5 feel. Walk into a room that's really cold all of a sudden.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 There's a lot of stuff like that. We have a song we wrote about some young girl named Mary Jane Twilliger who was a witch and her dad found out and he buried her alive.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 this was in the city right north of where Elifson lived. And we went out there

Speaker 5 to go visit that place and it was creepy. It was really creepy.
But

Speaker 5 that was it. It was just creepy.

Speaker 5 I didn't hear any owls. The wind didn't blow.

Speaker 5 I did hear, and this could be another bit of folklore, but somebody pushed her headstone over and

Speaker 5 they, when they went back to their car, they found their car keys on the hood.

Speaker 4 That's wild, man.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 4 It's wild.

Speaker 4 I've had a bunch of these experiences. One of them I was interviewing this, a friend of mine, priest, Sab's father, Dan Rehill.
He's an exorcist.

Speaker 4 And I remember when he came in here, he was like, look, he's like, weird shit happens when I start talking about this stuff. He's like, the cameras might go out.
Who knows what?

Speaker 4 And he was talking about exorcisms.

Speaker 4 And then he brought up Christ and the AC unit right there just went on full blast like immediately. It just started whooshing.
I mean, I've had a bunch of these experiences, but

Speaker 4 it's made me realize how real the spiritual realm is.

Speaker 5 It's real.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, just to move on a little further, I mean, after,

Speaker 4 at some point, after you found Christ again,

Speaker 4 you quit singing.

Speaker 4 You quit performing certain songs.

Speaker 4 What songs were those?

Speaker 5 It was only because I

Speaker 5 didn't really know

Speaker 5 what, I mean, I knew what I was singing about, but from a spiritual point of view, I didn't really know if I wanted to sing it anymore because one of the songs had

Speaker 5 almost all of the hex in it

Speaker 5 that I used, and I didn't want to sing that anymore because,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 what happens if somebody figures out the rest of the stuff that's missing.

Speaker 5 You know?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I haven't seen anything, but I know stuff happens to me. I know people have put

Speaker 5 curses on me. I know that they've cursed our dogs.

Speaker 5 We had a dog who died, and I prayed over her, and she came back to life long enough for us to get her to the

Speaker 5 veterinarian where she said goodbye to us all. And she passed away there.
But she was... She was dead.
Dead, dead, dead. Pam was hysterical, and I said, let me pray over

Speaker 4 Who put curses on you?

Speaker 5 People that don't like what I sing about, people that don't like Megadeth that

Speaker 5 may

Speaker 5 like other bands. There was a guy in

Speaker 5 the past, there was a band called Diocese, and

Speaker 5 we were playing in Israel, and I was really excited about playing in Israel, and I wanted to see what Megadeth looked like in Israeli font, right?

Speaker 5 So I look at the website for the festival, and it says the name of the thing and it says our name and then it says this band Diocese.

Speaker 5 And I went,

Speaker 5 what is that?

Speaker 5 So I looked it up and the guy said that he's a Satanist and that

Speaker 5 I was his mortal enemy.

Speaker 4 Are you serious? Yes.

Speaker 5 And he'd already killed two people.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 I figured, man, I walk in the light and I'm covered in the blood. And motherfucker, you're going to try anything with me.
You're going to know.

Speaker 5 And so I went there. I went to go do the concert.
I wasn't backing down. And

Speaker 5 my manager had got there before me.

Speaker 5 And he said he walked next to the kid and he bumped into him. And the guy goes, oh, sorry, sir.
Sorry, sir. And I said, well, where is he?

Speaker 4 And he goes, he left.

Speaker 5 Wait, the guy that wants to kick my ass,

Speaker 5 we're in the same spot for the first time in who knows how long or ever will be, and he leaves. So much for wanting to have a confrontation with me.

Speaker 5 And he's dead now.

Speaker 4 He's dead now.

Speaker 5 Commits suicide.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 5 So what I think happened is the guy

Speaker 5 was probably a good musician.

Speaker 5 He probably had some kind of abuse happen in his life where he turned away from, you know, love and kindness and what's good in the world and started drawing towards other people who had the same kind of hardships that he did because misery loves company, right?

Speaker 5 You get a guy that has the same things happening to him, or he says he understands,

Speaker 5 and then they start drawing you in.

Speaker 5 And pretty soon, you know, what you're saying, I hate my parents. Pretty soon, you're stealing stuff from them,

Speaker 5 you know, and then you're asked to leave, like I was

Speaker 4 after you

Speaker 4 got sober, I mean, are you still still clean today?

Speaker 5 I'll drink wine. And I take my cancer medication.
That's it.

Speaker 4 That's it.

Speaker 4 Did you was it hard for you to get sober?

Speaker 5 Yeah, of course. It was harder to quit cigarettes than it was to

Speaker 5 quit anything else.

Speaker 4 No shit, so you just quit everything cold turkey.

Speaker 5 No, I had to go to a clinic to stop smoking cigarettes, and they gave me a shot in my neck.

Speaker 5 And I had to wear these little transcopolamine patches for a couple days and then I had to go wash all my clothes and clean my whole house out all ashtrays and smoking paraphernalia

Speaker 4 man took it took

Speaker 4 psychedelics for me to do I went micro dosing no I went down uh to a facility in Mexico called Ambio Life Sciences and

Speaker 4 now the guy that runs it's a good friend of mine his name's Trevor.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I actually went down there when this show started

Speaker 4 really getting big because

Speaker 4 I could not be in the moment with my kid. And my son was just born.
And so I was trying to manage it all,

Speaker 4 be a good husband,

Speaker 4 try to figure out how to be a good new father. And I just, I couldn't be in the moment.
And I was still addicted to pills. And I was still addicted to,

Speaker 4 still an alcoholic. and uh although I toned it down quite a bit

Speaker 4 but really what I went down there for was

Speaker 4 anxiety of of the rise of the show and being in the moment and I went down there and I did this stuff called have you ever heard of Ibogaine

Speaker 4 Ibogaine it's Ibogaine comes from a root in Africa. I think the only place you can find it is Gabon.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I'd had former colleague after former colleague come on the show and talk to me about about psychedelic therapy for ptsd traumatic brain injury uh curing addiction addiction especially opiates

Speaker 4 and because it's that's just something that the the the veteran community really struggles with you go

Speaker 4 you go to the va you get a doctor they put you on pills or any doctor and then rather than weaning you off the pills they just feed you more more and more and more.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then if they do cut you off, a lot of guys wind up on the streets looking for heroin. That's how we were talking about my best friend earlier.
That's

Speaker 4 how he died. And I went down there, like I said, just to be in the moment with

Speaker 4 my new family. And I came out of that, experienced like a 12-hour experience to take a capsule.
And

Speaker 4 it was like everything that was poison that was that I was putting into my body

Speaker 4 I had like this intuitive sense and it it took away all my cravings to get back on pills or to keep drinking

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 I kicked it that day that was

Speaker 4 Valentine's Day whatever three 2022

Speaker 4 and um

Speaker 4 and so I've done a bunch of interviews on psychedelics and and

Speaker 4 what I found was the science behind it is

Speaker 4 it replenishes all the receptors in your brain that have been beat to shit from

Speaker 4 opiates, from Adderall, from cocaine, from all of them

Speaker 4 booze.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 when it replenishes the receptors, it takes the cravings away. And so it's literally like a light switch.
It was just like, I had no cravings.

Speaker 4 I didn't want it. I haven't had a drop.
Quit smoking weed

Speaker 4 for a long time. And then that kind of came back.

Speaker 5 I'll smoke pot every once in a while, too. Yeah.
But just rarely.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And but all that shit went away. Even sugar and caffeine went away for a long time.
I still haven't drank coffee.

Speaker 5 I got off coffee too. I'm drinking tea now.

Speaker 4 Yeah, same here.

Speaker 5 Go back a bunch of grannies.

Speaker 4 I know, right

Speaker 5 but megades and sean ryan

Speaker 4 but it really like it helped me and um

Speaker 4 it's helped

Speaker 4 i have no idea how many people it's helped but it's

Speaker 4 just about everybody that i served with

Speaker 4 with the exception of a few have because it's like the same story man everybody's story is different but it all is very similar going down the addictions and and and and and on top of that it it it man it's just like it cures the mind and so another thing that it does is

Speaker 4 like with with uh

Speaker 4 post-traumatic stress and and tbi and

Speaker 4 post-traumatic stress which

Speaker 4 it puts a blocker there's like the neurons in your brain

Speaker 4 move through a thing called the default mode network And that's basically from the front of your brain to the back. Or, yeah.
And that's how they do.

Speaker 4 But when we were born and you're younger, the neurons communicate through these neural pathways in your brain.

Speaker 4 And as we get older and you start seeing people get set in their ways and addictions and all that kind of shit, it's because the neurons get lazy and they use the

Speaker 4 default mode network,

Speaker 4 which is like a highway.

Speaker 4 And so what these psychedelics will do is they'll basically put a damn roadblock into the default mode network, and it forces the neurons

Speaker 4 to reopen all these neural pathways that have not been used in decades. Yeah, and

Speaker 4 you're able to look at a lot of things that have happened in your life from a different perspective,

Speaker 4 kind of like an unemotional perspective. And it makes certain events.

Speaker 4 How do I say this?

Speaker 4 It makes certain

Speaker 4 traumatic experiences in your life,

Speaker 4 it spins it from another perspective and kind of makes, it puts you at peace with whatever happened to you.

Speaker 4 And then after it was like a week-long

Speaker 4 thing where they like get you ready for it and teach you breathing techniques and all these other things. And then you do it on a Wednesday.
You do the Ibogaine on a Wednesday.

Speaker 4 It's like a 12-hour experience. Then you have what they call gray day,

Speaker 4 which is like the worst fucking hangover you could ever imagine.

Speaker 4 And then and then on the Friday, you smoke. Have you heard of 5-MeO DMT? No.
Oh, man.

Speaker 5 Man, you got some good...

Speaker 4 It's a toad venom. It comes from a toad.

Speaker 5 Oh, it's a poisonous toad?

Speaker 4 Yeah. And you smoke it, and you have a full-on death experience.

Speaker 5 Oh, that sounds fun.

Speaker 4 Well, it's not.

Speaker 4 But the death experience lasts maybe 30 seconds, 30, 45 seconds.

Speaker 5 Is it constriction in your chest? Because they did something like that when I had a heart test. No,

Speaker 4 it's in your mind. So you smoke it, and then you do a count backwards from 10.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's like the most anxiety, most fear I've ever felt of

Speaker 4 all my time in combat, everything that I did. Holy cow.
This was like

Speaker 4 in your brain. So, but so what happens is, is apparently, and I might be a little off on this, but when you die, your penal gland in your brain empties.

Speaker 4 And whatever's in there, I can't remember the chemical.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's serotonin or I don't know what it is, but

Speaker 4 but it dumps and it gives you like this euphoric experience but before that you're in in your mind

Speaker 4 and that's what happens with 5 meo is you get a penal gland dump but before

Speaker 4 before you kind of cross over in your mind you are a hundred percent certain that you are going to die and all the like you start

Speaker 4 You start

Speaker 4 separating from everything that you're attached to. And it kind of starts with like all the bullshit, maybe like I don't know, fucking possessions or money or what, whatever it is.

Speaker 4 And, and, and, like, things just start offloading. Like, you're like, okay, I can let go of that.
I can let go of that. But it's a very,

Speaker 4 it's a very,

Speaker 4 like I said, it's the most fear, most, most anxiety I've ever felt. And the last thing for me that I, I could not let go of, that I was hanging on to, is my wife and my son.

Speaker 4 and I remember thinking I cannot depart this fucked up world and leave my wife and my son behind I have to be here for them and then

Speaker 4 I let them go and once I let them go it felt like there was this tar

Speaker 4 like

Speaker 4 it was like

Speaker 4 I didn't see anything it was like a

Speaker 4 It was like an intuitive experience. And I felt like all this tar was like wrapped around my heart, like covering my heart.
And I couldn't see it, but I could

Speaker 4 it was like it was coming off my heart, and then my heart was pure again. And then, and then once you die and you let everything go,

Speaker 4 you cross over into this other realm,

Speaker 4 and then in the other realm that you cross over into is

Speaker 4 like pure bliss, very euphoric.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I swear, I think it's like a

Speaker 4 spiritual realm that we don't have access to. Or maybe we had access to it like way early on before

Speaker 4 language and electronics and all that, these kind of distractions and shit.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I think you tap into the spiritual realm. And like I'd always heard about energy and

Speaker 4 shit like that.

Speaker 5 Tesla stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, not that kind of stuff.
Like, you know, know, like hippies talk about it. Well, good energy, bad energy.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And

Speaker 4 I never bought into that. And I always despised hippies being a SEAL and a CA contractor.

Speaker 4 But after that, like, I opened my eyes and

Speaker 4 we were at this little beach house down in Mexico and I could see,

Speaker 4 I swear, man, I could see energy flowing from the islands into the water, up the beach, into the trees.

Speaker 4 And I could, it was like the first time I had realized that the hippies say this shit too: everything is one, everything's connected. And I was like,

Speaker 4 I could just intuitively see it. And if there's.

Speaker 5 Do you see energy fields around people?

Speaker 4 I wouldn't say I've seen that, but

Speaker 2 can you?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Who do you see energy fields around?

Speaker 5 I see it on you right now.

Speaker 4 What does it look like?

Speaker 5 It's just a

Speaker 5 black shadow.

Speaker 5 It's mostly on this side.

Speaker 4 Do you see that on a lot of people?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 5 It's there.

Speaker 5 Um, no, I don't.

Speaker 4 Is it freaking you out?

Speaker 5 No, I was just looking at it.

Speaker 5 Just looking at making sure it wasn't the building, but it's not. Shadows in here.
Yeah, there's it's like an energy field on you.

Speaker 4 Interesting.

Speaker 4 Well, when I crossed over,

Speaker 4 I could feel the presence of

Speaker 4 people that I love.

Speaker 4 Gabe was there. I didn't talk to him.
I didn't see him. I could just, just Gabe, yep, I could just feel him.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 man, it was

Speaker 4 amazing. And that lasts for about 15 minutes, and then you come out of it.

Speaker 4 And that's actually, I guess, what maybe sparked my journey back to Christ because I never really thought about it when I left home and joined the SEAL teams. It just,

Speaker 4 I wouldn't say it doesn't have a place in the SEAL teams, but it's just not really discussed, at least in my experience. And it's all

Speaker 4 mission-oriented

Speaker 4 and women, and bar fights, and booze, and drugs, and all of that shit, at least when I was in.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it all went away, man.

Speaker 4 It made me realize, okay,

Speaker 4 there's definitely something bigger than us

Speaker 4 in this universe. And that sent me down, like, I don't know, man.
I started looking into energy and I started looking at, I would, I probably, I still watch them, but

Speaker 4 more documentaries than I can count on

Speaker 4 the universe and shit like that.

Speaker 4 And then, and then I had an experience in Sedona that brought me to Christ where I we were kind of talking about this earlier, like weird coincidences and shit like that that happens.

Speaker 5 The vortex.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, that's why I went to Sedona because I was like, oh man, I want to feel this energy fields.
Because there's all these supposed energy fields out there. I went up there.
I did feel shit.

Speaker 4 And at the time, like, there was a lot of things going on at the world, in the world,

Speaker 4 that I just thought were really fucked up and I felt like I was the only voice out there that was that was fighting this shit

Speaker 4 stuff like you know

Speaker 4 just all kinds of stuff man

Speaker 4 China

Speaker 4 stuff going on in China which I'm really spun up on China and and and I started diving into the pedophilia networks and and exposing that and my best friend here in Franklin died the day before we went there and um the trans stuff with kids like

Speaker 5 connected with your best friend with with with best friend dying was that connected to what you guys are talking about no no my best friend died from from heroin oh right right right you said that

Speaker 4 i so basically i'm like talking to myself and i'm like man

Speaker 4 In my head, I told my wife because

Speaker 4 I'd

Speaker 4 opened Instagram and and saw something that triggered me again. And I was like, so I smoked a joint and I was like, we got to head up to this fucking vortex.

Speaker 4 And I was looking at crystals and all kinds of wazoo shit. And

Speaker 4 went up there, didn't feel a damn thing. I was like, this energy stuff's bullshit.
And

Speaker 4 walked down

Speaker 4 and walked through the security gate.

Speaker 4 We were staying at this resort called Enchantment. They got security, whatever.

Speaker 4 But because of my background and because of the show, like people in the security business, law enforcement, military, it's just really big in those circles.

Speaker 4 So all those guys knew who I was and I would stop and say hi and talk with them.

Speaker 4 And I'd been there for a week. This was the last night.
I walked through and this old man blocks out of the guard shack who I'd never seen the whole week I'd been there. We'd been in and out all week.

Speaker 4 And he fucking read my mind from front to back. And he starts talking to me

Speaker 4 as I'm walking through. And I'm in a horrible place.
I felt like I had just surrendered my soul to the devil because I was like, well, you know, why do you care about all this shit, Sean? Like,

Speaker 4 really, it doesn't even affect you.

Speaker 4 It's you'd probably be able to shelter your kids from it. And I was like, just like, quit.

Speaker 4 Just surrender. Maybe I'm the fucked up one.
Maybe we should be doing all these things. I don't know.
Nobody else seems to give a shit and um

Speaker 4 and so i'd had this experience where i felt like i'd no shit this is a conversation i'm having in my head where i'm just like i shouldn't care about this i should just surrender and give it up and

Speaker 4 felt like i had surrendered my soul to the devil walk through this gate this old man comes out he's trying to talk to me i'm not in the mood i'm like hey like i'm not being rude but i'm i look and give him body language like i'm looking to him look talking to him over my shoulder like i don't want to be bothered right now so he engages my wife of course my wife is like a social butterfly turns around starts talking to him and i'm like

Speaker 4 so i turn around and i look at him

Speaker 4 and he looks at me and he just started reading my mind from front to back and i hadn't i hadn't even told my wife this shit and

Speaker 4 He goes, he goes, all the stuff that's going on with these kids, he's like, that's not your battle. And all the stuff that's going going on in China right now between U.S.

Speaker 4 and China relations, that's not your fight either. And I was just like looking at this guy.

Speaker 5 How do you know?

Speaker 4 He said a bunch more stuff, but my mind went blank because he scared the shit out of me. I was like, how is this guy in my head right now? I haven't vocalized any of this.

Speaker 4 It's impossible for him to know.

Speaker 4 And, you know, as weird as this sounds, I think that, like I said, I'd never seen him there before. We'd been there for a week.
I pay attention to security because of my background. And

Speaker 4 I was like, holy shit. I told Katie at the end of it when we were walking back to our bungalow.
I was like, hey,

Speaker 4 I think that was God talking to me.

Speaker 5 That's an angel, yeah.

Speaker 4 And she goes, yeah, Sean. She goes, God's always talking to you.
You just don't make any room for him.

Speaker 5 You're not paying attention. Oh, touche.

Speaker 4 And then we had gotten up to

Speaker 4 the bungalow

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 my friend Gabe, when we first got there, there was this guy that looked identical to Gabe. And Gabe was always known as a protector.

Speaker 4 He was a pro hockey player. He was an enforcer on the hockey team.
Then he became, he went pro, like semi-pro.

Speaker 4 Wasn't going to make it to the

Speaker 4 game. He was on the Tampa Bay farm team.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then

Speaker 4 he became a SEAL. He was always the guy that took care of everybody else.
Everybody knew they were fine if Gabe was around. Then moved into the agency contracting for them.
And that's where we met.

Speaker 4 And he was known for the same thing there. And then we had gotten out.
And

Speaker 4 like I told you, he had died of a heroin overdose.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I saw this guy everywhere we were at. We were on a hike, this guy that was identical to Gabe was coming back.
If we were out in town eating dinner,

Speaker 4 That guy was out there. If we were at the pool, he was at the pool.
And it was just like, Katie, the whole trip, she's like, Gabe's watching over you. Because she knew as I was in a vulnerable spot.

Speaker 4 We walked from the guard shack to the bungalow, and there's Gabe.

Speaker 4 The guy that had been everywhere we were at the whole fucking week. Winds up, these were like duplexes.
He's staying across.

Speaker 4 He's on the other side of the bungalow. And I saw that.
This was like maybe a five-minute walk, and I'm like, holy shit. Like, did you see that?

Speaker 4 This dude that looks identical to Gabe has been here the whole fucking time.

Speaker 4 And then, so then I have a breakdown. We go in and I told you my best friend in Franklin, who was also a SEAL, just died on a hunt trip with his son.
He had a heart attack.

Speaker 4 And his daughter, I'd never, who I'd never met, texts me. So she must have went through her dad's phone.
This is all within 10 minutes.

Speaker 4 And I'm breaking down and I'm talking to my wife. And I'm like, I can't believe this is happening.
And she's like,

Speaker 4 don't say you can't believe. Like, she's like, it's here.
And he's slapping you in the face right now. We have this discussion.
And my phone,

Speaker 4 I got a text. I got the ding, but I didn't look at it.
After the conversation, when I kind of cleaned myself up, I look at the phone and it's his daughter.

Speaker 4 And she says, hey, I just want you to know I walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he passed. He had this amazing gun room.

Speaker 4 And she goes, he spoke to me, and I can't remember her exact words, but she said that I had recently become his best friend

Speaker 4 and that he just wants you to know that he loves you for who you are, and that I should contact you because you had a relationship with him that nobody else had.

Speaker 4 And I was like, whoa, that's very touching. Three things in 10 minutes.
And that's what brought me to.

Speaker 4 But it was, anyways, circling way back. No, that's good.

Speaker 4 It was the psychedelics that kind of put me on the journey to figure out what this is all about.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that's where I landed, and I've really leaned into it since.

Speaker 4 But anyways.

Speaker 4 I can't remember how we got off on that tangent.

Speaker 5 Talking about Sedona, you have to match your mushrooms and everything. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Have you ever done any psychedelics?

Speaker 5 The motorcycle concert we did for the bikers up in the hills, they paid us off with magic mushrooms.

Speaker 5 You know, back in the early 80s, late 70s,

Speaker 5 people were, they were taking magic mushrooms a lot and

Speaker 5 also taking LSD, which was very popular at the time. I did that a couple times.
They didn't like it because they couldn't turn it off.

Speaker 5 I found out recently that if you just just take an opiate pill when you're frying, that you can come down from it immediately. And I thought, I'm sure glad I didn't know that.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 it is still unknown anymore.

Speaker 4 You've never done them in like a therapeutic setting with a specific intention?

Speaker 5 Not yet.

Speaker 5 But your story sure made me think.

Speaker 5 And by the way, that's not black. It's like dark purple.

Speaker 4 The aura.

Speaker 4 It's still there? Still there. But what do you think that is? Energy.

Speaker 5 I'd have to probably know you a little better, but

Speaker 5 yeah, it's only on that side.

Speaker 5 Kind of shows up a little bit on that side, but it's... That's why I play this area.

Speaker 5 Do you have anything going on in your mouth over here?

Speaker 5 You sure?

Speaker 4 Not that I know of. I just got a cancer screening.

Speaker 5 Did they check your lymph nuts over here?

Speaker 4 They checked the whole body. Okay.

Speaker 4 Now you're worried.

Speaker 5 Well, I'd love to say just kidding, but I'm not. I wouldn't have brought it up.

Speaker 4 Let's take a break.

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Speaker 4 Let's get back to the show.

Speaker 4 All right, Dave, we're back from the break.

Speaker 4 That was a good conversation we just had. Thanks.

Speaker 5 Glad you liked it.

Speaker 4 You know, I've heard a lot about

Speaker 4 satanic stuff going on in Hollywood, in music, and

Speaker 4 a lot of kids are aspiring to be a rock star. And actually, we have a mutual friend whose daughter is really into it.
And I know he is

Speaker 4 very concerned about

Speaker 4 the satanic stuff, the frequencies, and all that kind of stuff. Can you talk a little bit about

Speaker 4 what that is?

Speaker 5 I don't know exactly what you're talking about with the frequency stuff

Speaker 5 and the Satan stuff you're talking about. Can you be a little bit more

Speaker 4 I think what I'm getting at is more like satanic cults and kind of like the

Speaker 4 band that you were just talking about in Israel that you had an, well, were going to have an encounter with.

Speaker 4 And some of the stuff that you used to be into.

Speaker 4 Is that pretty,

Speaker 4 is that running rampant in those circles?

Speaker 5 See, that's the whole thing that I have to go back to. I don't think anybody that is practicing witchcraft,

Speaker 5 that that would have been their natural first choice

Speaker 5 unless they had some kind of fractured paradigm for a functional, healthy family. You know, I'm not saying that it has to be a two-parent family.
Mine wasn't, and I turned out pretty good.

Speaker 5 My kids are great. Pam and I have

Speaker 5 always taken the approach that both of us have a very significant role and that is to do what we do 100% and be able to do what the other one does 100%

Speaker 5 in times of necessity.

Speaker 5 So.

Speaker 4 Is any of that stuff pushed on you?

Speaker 5 Satanic music? No. I think the Geraldos of the world are

Speaker 5 in

Speaker 5 dire need of a severe censoring. You know, they've got a microphone and

Speaker 5 they're just blathering

Speaker 5 holes, for lack of a better word. They say stuff that they think will get listeners, viewers, readers.

Speaker 5 I did something with, I think it was one of the network stations. They were trying to do an expose on satanic music and all that stuff.

Speaker 5 Same thing, basically what you're asking, but a different environment.

Speaker 5 And I was just saying, you know, I believe that if somebody is trying something and it doesn't work, they're going to try something else, no matter what it is. Even if it's, you know,

Speaker 5 making toothpicks out of logs, if it doesn't work, they'll find another way. They have to.
That's the way we are by human nature.

Speaker 5 If we don't like something, we're going to say, screw it, and try and find something new.

Speaker 5 And I think that if you've got a young person that's very impressionable, it's like beautiful, clean, fresh clay, and we're supposed to be responsible for helping

Speaker 5 form that person, you know, not control them, but help keep them in the middle of the roof.

Speaker 5 And there's not a lot of people that really care about that anymore because of society and the environment and the economy because most families need to have a two-income family anymore.

Speaker 5 And what happens when there's a two-income family?

Speaker 5 Well, there has to be childcare, and that's usually at the hands of somebody in the school, in an after-school project or program, or having somebody that comes to your home. And either one of those,

Speaker 5 any of those choices are very expensive, and

Speaker 5 it produces diminishing returns because you've got to unprogram the nanny or teacher or substitute or whatever.

Speaker 5 I remember when I was younger, Justice was just a baby and I'd hired a nanny for him while we were on tour. We were in France.

Speaker 5 And I got off stage and he was crying because he was just a little kid and the nanny had not changed him. And I went, fucking ballistic.

Speaker 5 You know, my kid, don't ever, ever think that you're going to work for us again. And that was it.
She was gone and

Speaker 5 you know, I changed the diapers. And

Speaker 5 I don't know. Going back to the thing about the satanic stuff though uh i think that usually occurs when people are desperate and they have nowhere else to go

Speaker 4 do you think there's anything that kids that want to get into this type of industry need to watch out for

Speaker 5 in the music industry yeah you have to be very careful from the pedophilia you have to be very careful from the uh the uh

Speaker 5 rape for lack of a better word because if you're not a child and that same thing happens to you what is it called?

Speaker 5 You know, there's a lot of stuff that's in the TV right now with Sean Puff, Daddy Combs, with Jeffrey Epstein, with all these people that are coming out now, getting busted for these crazy orgies and sex parties and everything.

Speaker 5 That breaks my heart to think that somebody that was an adult with a functioning mind, no matter how depraved it is, but

Speaker 5 that they would

Speaker 5 assault an innocent child and rape them,

Speaker 5 that to me is

Speaker 5 reprehensible. And I don't know why there isn't stricter punishment for that.
I think a lot of it is because people just don't know what's happening.

Speaker 4 Is that that common in these circles?

Speaker 5 Well, there are a lot of people that are very famous musicians that the rumor has that they were executed because they were getting ready to expose pedophilia.

Speaker 4 Executed, as in killed?

Speaker 5 Well, the rumors going around about

Speaker 5 Chester from Lincoln Park and about Chris from Soundgarden was that they were making a movie on

Speaker 5 child abuse and child trafficking, I think it was. And they're both gone, and it's very suspicious.

Speaker 4 Jeez.

Speaker 5 Because they don't want this stuff to come out.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 it's out.

Speaker 5 It is.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 5 yeah, it's

Speaker 5 pretty sad stuff to talk about.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You got any happy questions?

Speaker 4 Why'd you move to Middle Tennessee?

Speaker 5 Well, I love my daughter, and we moved out here because we couldn't find

Speaker 5 the first place we went looking was Austin, Texas, and I'm glad we didn't move there, not because of the people of Austin, but because of the interlopers that have started to invade Austin, that have

Speaker 5 done the exodus from California.

Speaker 5 We were looking for homes out there and had gone every Easter out there to look for three years. And I finally was out here playing and a friend of mine,

Speaker 5 I didn't know who he was. I had met him and we'd gone our separate ways and I saw him again.
And I went, oh yeah, I remember you. So we started talking.

Speaker 5 And I told him, well, my daughter wants to be a singer. And

Speaker 5 he goes, why are you looking in Austin? You should move to Nashville. And I said, really? And he goes, yeah, man, it's so much better here.

Speaker 5 And I was in a really good place because we just played the show with Iron Maiden there. And

Speaker 5 all of our friends and neighbors and all of our

Speaker 5 associates that we had here in town finally get to see me do my job and get to know a little bit about me in a professional capacity instead of me just standing in front of them and yapping. So

Speaker 5 we moved out here and she started pursuing her country career and then she decided she didn't want to do country and I thought, well, that's great. And she started trying to sing pop again and

Speaker 5 she didn't like that either. And we had started our wine business when I'd played with the San Diego Symphony in San Diego.

Speaker 5 I had this opportunity to play with them and I wanted to make something unique for them to drink. I didn't think that the symphony would have

Speaker 5 a lot of beer on tap or a lot of hardcore alcohol, that they would probably just have champagne or wine or something. So I said,

Speaker 5 I think I want to make a wine. So we made a wine, and that took off really well.
And then

Speaker 5 moved fast forward a few more years, Electra is now a Somalier. It's one of the youngest Somaliers that was a female.
And she's a what? Somalie. What is that? That's a wine taster.

Speaker 5 They can take a little spoon and take a sip of wine and tell you where it's from. Wow.
Yeah, they're very, very, very

Speaker 5 sought after people because they can taste the

Speaker 5 soil. They can taste the

Speaker 5 group, the grouping of the grape like a red grape will have numerous red fruit tastes to it. That's the idiosyncrasy of the grape.

Speaker 5 It could taste like a cherry, it could taste like a raspberry, it could taste like a currant, it could taste like

Speaker 5 a strawberry, for example, you know, a plum. Those are all the red colors.
And

Speaker 5 so when you're tasting the wines, to have an educated palette like that is very desirable for a restaurant and certainly desirable for a wine company. We want somebody who knows their stuff.

Speaker 5 Now, Elektra and Pam are running House of Mustaine. And if you're getting your wine graded, when you make it into the 90 percentile,

Speaker 5 you are very, very desirable.

Speaker 4 Nice.

Speaker 4 Is your daughter still here?

Speaker 5 Yeah, she's still living here. She has her own place that I bought.
And

Speaker 5 she's doing the wine, and Justice and I are doing the beer.

Speaker 5 And we just, we're an entrepreneurial family.

Speaker 5 I thank God that my kids turned out the way that they did. But it wasn't for lack of trying.

Speaker 5 They certainly had a rambunctious spirit, and we had to, you know, we had Electra was like a little horse, and she did not want to be ridden, she did not want to be on a harness, she didn't want to be on a halter, she didn't want nothing.

Speaker 5 She was going to just live life her way. And Justice was kind of like that, too.
He actually wanted to move out when he was young, so we let him move.

Speaker 5 He moved in a house we had in Oceanside, and I went down there one time, and he had just had a little get-together.

Speaker 5 And I was looking in the house, and I opened up one of the closets, and I saw a smoking device that was about as big as your oar over there, made out of glass that, I don't know, I guess the guy puffs on it for a little while, and another guy comes along, and when it fills up, it's the biggest bong I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's the way the

Speaker 5 things were going back then in Cali, because everybody was getting their medical cards. And

Speaker 5 as soon as that happened, everybody was smoking pot 24-7.

Speaker 4 Do you like it here?

Speaker 5 I love it here. I think one of the things that happened when we first got here was

Speaker 5 the culture shock.

Speaker 5 My blood pressure went down. I started to really enjoy

Speaker 5 driving in traffic. I realized that people don't stick their finger up in the air as much here.
They don't honk.

Speaker 5 I can tell when people are here that aren't from Tennessee when they drive out out into the middle of the intersection when they're going to turn. And I used to make that mistake all the time.

Speaker 5 I don't now. But I can tell.
Sometimes when I'm just beyond the point of any

Speaker 5 coming back to Earth, I'll honk. You know, of course, I've said like eight cuss words while I'm honking.
But

Speaker 5 yeah, it's been really good for me. The cost of living, the people are wonderful.

Speaker 5 I love the fact that there's hardly any graffiti anywhere. And our particular neighborhood where we're at has a very, very thorough police presence and sheriff presence.
So we feel safe. Good.

Speaker 5 You know, there were some people in the property behind us. It looked like there were about 12 people walking with backpacks.
And I thought, well, that doesn't look right to me.

Speaker 5 If they were working over there, they'd probably have something. thing resembling a tool,

Speaker 5 something, but they're just a group of people walking one direction with backpacks on. So I called the sheriff and I asked, I said,

Speaker 5 are you guys aware of any migrant traffic up here?

Speaker 5 Because there's some people in my backyard.

Speaker 5 And they came out and they said, no, it was the guy behind you. He was doing something and he neglected to tell anybody.
And you know what I did?

Speaker 5 Nothing.

Speaker 5 If I was back in California, I would have made a way to let him know that I didn't appreciate him having people tromping through my backyard and make him very aware that I'm upset.

Speaker 5 You know, like what you were talking about with the tripping, you know, stuff, it's just like taking off a tight pair of shoes. You just go,

Speaker 5 you know, life just kind of settles back. And I remember one of the times when

Speaker 5 I was staying down at my mom's house, David Ellison and I had just gotten sober and we were

Speaker 5 down in Elsinore trying to get away from Los Angeles. And

Speaker 5 I remember there was one day I woke up and I heard the birds chirping. And I thought, I haven't heard the birds for so long,

Speaker 5 I just don't listen for them anymore. And now every morning I hear the birds.
I listen to nature. I listen.
I can tell when there's aircraft in the area. I can tell when the wind's blowing.

Speaker 5 I can tell when the horses are out. You know, I drove past our one pasture yesterday,

Speaker 5 the day before,

Speaker 5 and I got a mare for my wife.

Speaker 5 We have a couple, we have three horses actually, so I got her a mare because her

Speaker 5 gelding just passed away. And she put her head up and just went,

Speaker 5 just this huge winnie. And I thought, man, talk about the life these guys have it made here in Tennessee.
The weather's beautiful. The grass is probably so delicious to them.

Speaker 5 And our neighbor is growing alfalfa in his grass for his

Speaker 5 livestock. So we have that too.

Speaker 5 And our field and our forest is full of lavender.

Speaker 5 Nice. How could you complain about stuff like that?

Speaker 5 You can't. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, what's new? What's coming new with you guys? With the winery, with the beer, with the music?

Speaker 5 There's a lot of stuff. We have a book coming out.

Speaker 5 In My Darkest Hours, a book about my cancer diagnosis.

Speaker 5 I went to go see a dentist. I was out on the road for the Jimi Hendrix experience.
My mouth hurt.

Speaker 5 And I thought that the guy that had just done my work had maybe had a little debris in my mouth, some glue, maybe an instrument broke off and it was hurting.

Speaker 5 So I went there and he goes, I can't see anything. You need to go see an oral surgeon.
I go and see the oral surgeon. The guy looks at my mouth.

Speaker 5 leaves for 45 minutes and I'm thinking, you cock.

Speaker 5 I'm just thinking, man, what kind of a doctor are you? This is horrible bedside manner.

Speaker 5 And I should have been prepared from what he did. I walked into the

Speaker 5 reception area and I said, where's the doctor? And the girl goes, he'll be right in. So I go in and he walks and he stands in front of me and he goes, you got the big C.

Speaker 5 And I looked at him and I went,

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I asked him, What did you say?

Speaker 5 Because I went into shock immediately.

Speaker 5 You got the big C.

Speaker 5 And I don't remember anything after that leaving his office. I just know I got up and I walked out and I got in my car.
And then I called my wife and I said, Honey, I have cancer.

Speaker 5 And I didn't notice it, but I'd been sitting in my car for a little while and I had tears coming down my eyes because I was in shock. I didn't know.
I just thought for the absolute worse.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 is the beginning of the book and how we made our best album to date, The Sick, the Dying, and the Dead, while I was going through cancer treatment.

Speaker 5 I think it was something like

Speaker 5 eight chemo treatments and 30 radiation,

Speaker 5 some ridiculous amount of treatments. Maybe it was 51, I don't know.

Speaker 5 But it was a lot. And they said they wanted to be really, really, really aggressive with it because I was a singer.
And

Speaker 5 I love my doctors. They did great work keeping me alive and keeping my voice.
So,

Speaker 5 yeah, that's one thing we're doing. We also are resurrecting our big festival, Tour Gigantor.

Speaker 5 We have a couple one-offs. We're playing Vonaru soon.
And we've got two big festivals over in Europe that we're going to be doing.

Speaker 5 We've got the record that's going to be coming out this year.

Speaker 5 We've been in the studio recording. I'm actually supposed to be there right now.
And

Speaker 5 there's somebody we've been talking to about documenting the whole thing.

Speaker 5 So we've recorded the making of the record.

Speaker 5 We've done this several times with several records we've made, but it never really gets out the door because as soon as we're done making the record, it's too much stuff to do.

Speaker 5 And of course it's there. You know, we have the making of dystopia.
We have the making of the sick, the dying, and the dead.

Speaker 5 We We have the making of this record already, and at some point, I'm sure they'll be worthy to put out. But, you know, we're just staying busy, busy, busy.

Speaker 5 I know that Pam and Electra are doing really great with the wine. They just released a new wine.
I think it's called a Vernaccio.

Speaker 5 I don't know which one that is.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but

Speaker 5 all the wines we have have

Speaker 5 song titles to kind of give them a little bit of some connection to me for the House of Mustain stuff.

Speaker 5 Let's see what else is there.

Speaker 5 We've been working on our vineyard over in Italy. We've got a piece of property over there we've been planting and building a house over there.
And that's been really exciting because

Speaker 4 we

Speaker 5 figured out with the wines from California, a lot of them have sulfites in it. And that gives you a headache.
The wines from Italy do not and they don't give you a headache.

Speaker 5 So that's been really neat and we've been really successful with that. The kids have been moving around a lot.
Justice just got a new house so we helped him move and

Speaker 5 just getting ready for a tour.

Speaker 4 You got what kind of cancer was it?

Speaker 5 Throat cancer.

Speaker 4 Throat cancer?

Speaker 4 What stage?

Speaker 5 Oh, I don't know what stage it was. We just, we discovered it and we went to work on it right away.

Speaker 5 I know how big it was. I know it was a couple millimeters.
It was a non-basal squeamish, squammish, whatever, I think. You know, I

Speaker 5 tried to not dig into it too much because I didn't want to give it power over me.

Speaker 5 So that's why I don't really know the amount of chemo or radiation numbers I have because I frankly don't want those numbers to be the definition of me. It doesn't define me.

Speaker 4 How did your family react when you told them?

Speaker 5 I think Pam was scared.

Speaker 5 I know the kids were scared.

Speaker 5 I think Justice knew that I was a fighter and that I was going to fight this.

Speaker 5 I'm not sure that Electra knew that. And

Speaker 5 Pam knows that God's in control so that whatever happens is his way anyway, right?

Speaker 4 And you recorded an album? while going through that? Yeah.

Speaker 5 Our best one yet.

Speaker 4 Holy shit.

Speaker 5 It was hard. It was hard.
And I I fell asleep a few days in recording. And,

Speaker 5 you know, for people that don't understand that, they think you're just getting drugged out and you're enjoying it. I wasn't enjoying it.

Speaker 5 I was getting drugged out, yeah, but that was because they were trying to kill me, to kill the cancer in my body.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 5 Hard to sing. It was hard to sing.
My voice changed. I could imagine.
Plus I had my neck broken by a chiropractor back in 2012 and I had to have my neck fused together.

Speaker 5 So I've got a plate in my neck and that's changed my voice too.

Speaker 4 Holy shit, man. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 It's been a lot of stuff. So

Speaker 5 I,

Speaker 5 you know, looking out the window, appreciating the ride from you right now, yeah, I do that. I do that.
Because there's a lot of stuff that tried to take me out.

Speaker 4 Well, Dave.

Speaker 4 What an interview, man.

Speaker 5 Hey, Sean.

Speaker 4 Thank you for coming.

Speaker 5 It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 4 It was an honor to have you.

Speaker 5 It's good to meet you, too, sir.

Speaker 5 Yeah, thank you. Bye.