Mustaine: A Life in Metal

Did it work?

I can’t say for sure, but I do know that a short time later Wilbur was involved in a car accident; his leg was broken. Given the nature of life in that part of the world—the way people drank heavily and drove without regard to consequence—and given that Wilbur was an imbecilic jerk, I suppose some sort of crippling episode was inevitable.

Then again…

Kind of creepy, huh?

AFTER MY HIATUS in Idaho, I returned to Orange County and loosely resumed the pursuit of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Since I liked cars and knew a little bit about how they worked, I got a part-time job working at a garage; this helped tide me over until I could cultivate enough clients to resurrect my business selling pot. I took classes at night in the hope of getting a high school diploma and found companionship in the arms of a girl named Moira, who became my first serious love interest.

Musically, I was a sponge, listening to anything I could get my hands on, trying to learn my favorite licks and mimic my favorite guitar players. During the day I hung out at the beach with my best buddy, Mike Jordan, and some other pasty-skinned friends of Northern European descent, drinking and trying not to fry. At night we wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood, from kegger to kegger, sometimes fighting, but usually just drinking, smoking pot, and laughing at the amateurish bands that passed for “entertainment.”

Even the worst of them, though, managed to tap into something primal and to achieve a minor level of celebrity, with all the attendant perks. I remember hearing about a guy named Pat Knowles, the one guitar player in our neighborhood universally viewed as a badass musician. Then I met him for the first time. What a disappointment! The guy was a skinny little vanillapudding, Peter Pan–looking motherfucker. Just a really soft kid. But Jesus…could he play! And then there was John Tull, who was almost the antithesis of Pat Knowles. John was a big lumberjack kind of guy, with thick arms and a cinder block of a skull. You know how they say the typical adult male has a forehead equal to the width of four fingers? Well, John was definitely a five. Maybe even a six. He had a black Les Paul with three pickups, and he was playing songs like no one I’d ever seen. Not locally, anyway. Good songs, too—songs I listened to on the radio and on my eight track, and as I watched him play, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

Man…this guy is good.

That was only half of it. When the band went on break and John put down his guitar, the chicks were all over him. And bear in mind, Mr. Five-Finger Forehead was not exactly the most handsome guy in the room. But it didn’t matter—it was the guitar and the magic of the music that made John attractive to the opposite sex. I wanted to be like him, and to be like Pat Knowles.

Only better than them.

IT BEGAN AT the age of seventeen, with a kid named Dave Harmon, a drummer from Huntington Beach whose home life seemed to be the exact opposite of mine. Dave came from a stable family, with a mother and father who supported everything he wanted to do, including becoming a musician. They understood that I was basically on my own, and so they took pity on me, opened their home to me, and treated me with kindness and understanding. For me, it was like winning the lottery. I was living on my own, drinking generic beer, eating ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese like they were going out of style. Then I meet this kid with cool parents and a fridge full of food.

Dave and I started talking about playing together and maybe putting together a real band, one that would kick the shit out of anything we’d seen at the neighborhood parties. To play guitar, Dave recruited a friend of his named Rick Solis, who had a beautiful Gibson Flying V. Like me, Rick studied martial arts, so we hit it off right away. Rick was also the first aspiring rocker I’d met who actually looked the part—he was like a cross between Vinnie Vincent and Paul Stanley. This was no accident. Rick was one of those guys with an innate understanding of image—he favored sleeveless shirts, long hair, and a weird assemblage of rock star jewelry. He also had an enormous nose and dark skin, which gave him a really exotic Mediterranean appearance, and was one of the most hirsute guys I’d ever met. He took the good with the bad—the bearskin rug on his chest (hey, in the seventies this was considered the height of virility) and the monobrow that stretched from one side of his head to the other.

Rick was the first guy I met who seemed committed to playing well and to becoming a rock star. We taught each other a bunch of songs, from “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix to most of the Judas Priest catalog to almost anything else that sounded interesting. Like me, Rick was still developing his taste for music. Before long he was behaving in a manner that was profoundly weird and unacceptable, which led not only to his expulsion from the band but, I can only presume, to a premature demise (Rick often drove while fucked-up, and died in a motorcycle accident just a few years later).

With Rick gone, Dave and I went about the business of building a new band. First to join was a guitar player named Tom Quecke, a friend of mine from night school. Tom came from a family with three brothers. The oldest worked for the government in national security; a terrific, great upstanding guy. The middle brother I didn’t hear much about—he was the black sheep of the family. And then there was Tom, who was like a black sheep gone good. Or trying, anyway. Truth be told, he was kind of a mediocre guitar player, but that’s all we really needed, because he only played rhythm; I handled lead.

Next on board was Bob Evans, a bass player who reminded me of that character Junior from the hillbilly TV show Hee Haw. He was heavyset, with short hair and bangs, and he wore overalls all the time. Bobby looked…well, kind of like a simpleton. But he was actually a pretty sharp kid. As was his father, who was an accomplished sound engineer who had built some incredible sound cabinets for his home. These things weren’t just bass cabinets; they were like bass enclosures from Royal Albert Hall or something. We’d go to play with this dude, and I’d have my little cabinets, and Bobby would be firing up these enormous cabinets, stacked eight feet high, and would hit that first bass note—BWOWWWWWW!—and sterilize the neighborhood. Bobby had money and a car, so naturally we were happy to have him in the band.

At that point all we needed was a singer—I hadn’t yet considered the possibility that I might handle the microphone myself—and we found one in Pat Voelkes. Pat was lean and muscular, with long straight hair—he looked like a singer. He was also a couple years older than the rest of us, a little bit more mature, a little smarter about the practical side of putting together a band. We built a rehearsal studio in Pat’s garage and got together as often as possible to practice. But we all had lives on the side. Mine revolved around the trafficking of illicit substances. By this time I’d gravitated from selling pot to selling anything I could get my hands on: hash, LSD, Quaaludes, cocaine. When it came to making money, I was indiscriminate.

I don’t say that with pride. It’s just the way it was. I needed cash, and this was the easiest, most efficient way to raise it. Moreover, you have to consider the cultural and political climate of the times. Chemically speaking, the late 1970s was a pretty liberal time. I didn’t see anything particularly dangerous or immoral about ingesting or distributing drugs. It seemed absolutely normal to me. Given my background and family history, this isn’t exactly a surprise.

We called the band Panic. I don’t even remember why—probably just because it sounded kind of cool, wild and anarchic. Our first performance was in Dana Point, at a party hosted by my cousin John. It was something of a makeshift affair. Dave Harmon was unable to play that night, so we recruited a substitute drummer named Mike Leftwich. We played pretty well, and the crowd loved us. The set list was a random collection of songs I’d heard at various keg parties—Def Leppard, the Scorpions, Judas Priest—along with some more obscure stuff that I liked, such as Budgie and Sammy Hagar (as a solo artist). Everyone had a blast, and by the end of the night the apartment had taken on the atmosphere of an orgy, with drunken girls removing their clothes and having sex with guys in the band.

I couldn’t have been happier.

The next day, though, brought horrific news. The band members had all gone their separate ways after the party. Mike had left with a friend named Joe, a big-hearted, unassuming kid who had doubled as our sound guy for the concert. On the drive home, on Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Huntington Beach Pier, Mike and Joe had been involved in a terrible accident. I got the news from Tom Quecke, delivered through the haze of an earlymorning hangover.

“Joe fell asleep at the wheel,” he said, his voice catching. “They’re both gone.”

AT SEVENTEEN YOU don’t instantly make the cause-and-effect connection between drinking and death, but I was beginning to understand that the lifestyle I was leading—and at times loving—had its consequences. For one thing, when I drank, I tended to get really violent. Pot had a soothing, almost soporific effect. Alcohol, though, provoked anger. I was probably sixteen the first time I drank to the point of blacking out. It wouldn’t be the last. Invariably, my mood turned dark on these occasions. My intent was never to hurt anyone. It wasn’t like I popped open the first beer with the goal of finding a fight by the end of the evening. My motivation was much simpler: to feel good and find somebody who wanted to commiserate naked with me. Typically, though, the plans went awry. Let’s put it this way: I did not get in trouble every time I drank, but every time I got in trouble, I’d been drinking. That’s for sure. Smoking pot was an entirely different experience. I’d get up in the morning, wake and bake, watch MTV, sing along with the Buggles, play some guitar, take a nap, and get on with the day. No harm, no foul.

All of it was of an ever-expanding piece: the music, the lifestyle, the drinking, the drugs, the sex. For the longest time I was incapable of acknowledging even the slightest possibility that I might have a problem with substance abuse. I looked in the mirror and saw a prototypical rock star. A party animal. It wasn’t until many years later that I took another look and saw something else:

Oh, my God. I’m not Keith Richards. I’m Otis from Mayberry! A fucking drunk!

But that took time. Pot was for the most part a socially acceptable drug in the seventies; to a lesser extent, so was cocaine, although I shunned it initially because it was linked in my view to the disco movement and then to house music and techno. Cocaine was for the Village People and Donna Summer crowds, or the pussies you’d see at a Flock of Seagulls concert. For metal fans, especially for metal musicians, there was booze and drugs. The hard stuff.

A FEW DAYS after the accident, Dave Harmon and I went over to Mike’s house and tried to speak with his family. We awkwardly offered our condolences, and they graciously accepted, but it was a painful encounter. I suppose on some level they blamed us for what happened to Mike, if for no other reason than because of his association with the band. Someone had to be at fault, right? Isn’t that the way tragedy works?

We tried to resuscitate the band, even played a bunch of shows in Dana Point, Huntington Beach, and the surrounding areas over the next couple months. But the spirit was lacking; there was too much baggage, too many reminders of what had happened. Too much guilt, maybe. I can only speak for myself, and for me, it just didn’t feel right. The kinship that drives a band during the formative years was lacking. We didn’t like each other enough, and we didn’t want it badly enough.

Drug use around Panic was common. I was doing drugs with the band members, fronting people stuff, getting high on my own supply…spiraling down the path of drugs and alcoholism. Even the greatest of all fringe benefits—random, indiscriminate sex—began to lose its luster. I told Moira one day that I’d had a dream about engaging in a threesome with her and one of her best friends (this was true, incidentally); that afternoon, when I came home from rehearsal, Moira and Patty were standing on the front porch, naked and smiling, awaiting my arrival. One might reasonably assert that such a greeting would boost the spirits of any red-blooded American male. And it did…for a while. But something was missing. I just didn’t know what it was.

I’d gotten into rock ’n’ roll for the lifestyle, not because I aspired to great musicianship. I didn’t sit around waiting for people to come up and say, “Gosh, Dave, you arpeggiate so beautifully!” No, it wasn’t that at all. I was a rock ’n’ roll rebel. I had my guitar strung across my back, I had a knife in my belt, and I had a sneer on my face. And that was it. That was enough.

Or so I thought.

AROUND THE SAME time, I briefly reconnected with my father. It was June of 1978; I was seventeen years old, and for some reason I got the urge to track him down. Mom and Dad had been divorced for so long, and he’d been such a shadowy figure in my life, that I just had to see for myself whether everything I’d heard was true. So distant were the memories that they couldn’t be trusted, any more than I could trust the lurid stories of abuse spewed by my sisters and my mother.

It didn’t take long to track him down, and when I called him up and suggested we get together, he seemed genuinely moved.

“I’d like that, yeah. When?”

“How about this weekend?”

We met at his apartment, a dark, sparsely furnished little place with bad wallpaper and rented furniture. It was Father’s Day, but that was almost beside the point. I didn’t feel like his son, and I don’t know that he felt like my father. We were just two people—strangers really—trying to connect. Whatever emotion I expected—anger, joy, pride—was overwhelmed by the sadness of his pathetic little life. My father did not look like the bogeyman of my nightmares; nor did he look like the successful banker he’d once been. He just looked…old. At one point I opened up the refrigerator looking for something to drink and was stunned by its emptiness. There, in the door, was a little jar of mayonnaise, crusty at the rim. On the center shelf was a loaf of bread, open and spilling out of its bag. A few random bottles of beer were scattered about the fridge.

That was it.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just shut the door and took a seat at the kitchen table. I don’t remember exactly how long the visit lasted. I do recall apologizing for being such a terrible son, an acknowledgment that brought tears to his eyes and a dismissive wave of the hand. When I left, we hugged and agreed to make an effort to get together more often.

That didn’t happen. The next time I saw my father, about one week later, he was in a hospital bed, on life support. His job at the time was hardly glamorous—servicing cash registers for NCR. Apparently, as I understand it (although there is some dispute regarding the events leading up to his death), Dad was in a bar when he slipped off a stool and hit his head. I’d like to think that he was working on a cash register at the time, that his death was in some minor way noble. But the likelihood of that is small. It’s like the guy who gets caught in the whorehouse and says, “Uh…I was just looking.” My father was an alcoholic, and he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in a bar. Hard to imagine he was sober when it happened. The tragedy is that he might have been saved, but by the time the doctors tracked down anyone who could give them permission to crack his skull and relieve the pressure, he’d already lapsed into a coma. Imagine that. You have an ex-wife and four children all living in the area. You have several brothers and sisters. Grandchildren. But on the day that you suffer a terrible accident, there’s no one to call, no one who cares.

When I got the call from my sister Suzanne, I kind of freaked out.

“Dad’s in the hospital,” she said. “You’d better get down here right away.”

“What happened?”

“Just hurry.”

The first thing I did—the very first fucking thing—was grab a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey. I tucked it into my shirt pocket, then ran outside, hopped on my moped, and drove off down Goldenwest Street toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Funny thing is, I hated whiskey; it wasn’t even my bottle, just some shit left behind after a party, no doubt. But I saw it and knew I wanted to hurt someone, and I figured whiskey would help get the job done.

The trip to the hospital in Costa Mesa was one I could have made in my sleep, even though I’d never been there before. I knew my way around the whole region because I’d been like a flea, jumping from dog to dog through Orange County, Riverside County, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I raced down the highway, drinking with one hand, opening the throttle with the other. When I got to the hospital room, my father was in the fetal position, wires snaking from his body to various monitors and life-support equipment. My sisters were already there, lined up at the foot of the bed like the Three Wise Monkeys. Nobody said a word, until finally Suzanne drew close, smelled the liquor on my breath, saw my bloodshot eyes and the near-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad poking out of my shirt pocket.

“You know what?” she said, her voice dripping with disdain.

“What?”

“You’re going to end up just like him.”

She put the emphasis on the last word—“him”—in such a way that I wasn’t sure which one of us—me or my father—was the true object of her contempt. I knew only that I was furious. I was angry that my father was dying just as I was getting to know him. I was angry that my sister saw in me the same character flaws that had led my father to such a miserable end. Most of all, though, I was angry at myself. I feared in my heart that she might be right. Maybe I would end up just like my father, curled up in a hospital bed, my brain drowning in its own juices, surrounded by blank-faced people who didn’t seem to give a shit whether I lived or died.

3 LARS AND ME,OR WHAT AM I GETTING MYSELF INTO?

“You got the job.”

PANIC DIDN’T SO MUCH BREAK UP AS DISSOLVE, THE RESULT OF A LACK OF COMMITMENT AND CHEMISTRY.* ONE OF OUR LAST SHOWS, IN LATE 1981, WAS ALSO ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE. IT WAS A BENEFIT CONCERT FOR A BIKER WHO HAD PASSED AWAY. NOW, COMPILING A SET LIST FOR A GROUP OF BIKERS-AND I’M TALKING ABOUT SERIOUS BIKERS, NOT THE GUYS WHO TRADE THEIR BEEMERS FOR HARLEYS ON THE WEEKEND-CAN BE A CHALLENGE. MY OWN TASTES WERE KIND OF ECLECTIC. I REALLY LIKED A LOT OF STUFF BY INDIVIDUAL BANDS I’D DISCOVERED JUST BY KEEPING MY EARS OPEN.

For example, there was a little-known band called Gamma, which was Ronny Montrose’s follow-up to his solo project. I loved Montrose, loved how they sounded and what they stood for. They were just a really solid rock band. Most of the bands you saw at backyard parties in this era were all playing the same stuff: Robin Trower, Rush, Ted Nugent, Pat Travers, Led Zeppelin, KISS. Some of it I liked more than others, but I digested all of it and figured out what it was people wanted to hear. In that way I could formulate a reasonably satisfying set list. But figuring out what kids from the suburbs want to hear is a little easier than meeting the expectations of a gang of drunken bikers. So one of the songs we learned specifically for this show was “Bad Motor Scooter” by Sammy Hagar. If nothing else, at least we’d done our homework.

The show took place out in the boondocks, at a big campground in a nature preserve. And I have to say, it was exciting—probably the most intense night Panic had known, or ever would know, as it turned out. These were hard-core bikers. Gang members. Now, I had seen Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary about the Rolling Stones’ infamous and tragic performance at Altamont, during which security provided by the Hells Angels resulted in murder and mayhem. So I had some idea what to expect. Was I scared?

Hell, no!

I thought I had arrived.

But the night was both more and less than I had anticipated. There were two distinct odors filling the air throughout the evening: pot…and chili. That’s right—chili. Vats of it, the result of a chili cook-off; these, unbeknownst to me, were fairly common at this sort of event. There were thirteen kegs of beer at the center of the compound—I specifically remember the number because of its symbolism (good luck, bad luck, as the case may be). We didn’t do a sound check or anything like that. We just hung out, smoking dope, eating chili, drinking beer with these guys, until one of them yelled, “Start playing!” And that’s what we did.

We roped off an area at the front of the compound and set up our gear. This was a time when cordless gear was still relatively rare (and often prohibitively expensive). But I rigged a cordless setup using a Radio Shack stereo, an amp, and a device known as a Nady wireless system. I was one of the first guys I knew who had a wireless setup, and I could tell it freaked out the bikers who watched us play that night. You could almost see them thinking, How the fuck is he playing that thing without any wires?

Anyway, we ripped through our set, playing fast and flawlessly. Tons of energy, no mistakes (none that were noticeable, anyway). We finished with a scorching version of “Bad Motor Scooter,” thanked the crowd for their support, and began to pack up.

That’s when things got ugly. The guy in charge approached the “stage.”

“The fuck are you doing?”

At first I said nothing, which was clearly the smartest approach. I thought about getting right in his face. I mean, I was a drug dealer, right? I understood the rules of marketing and fair trade. They had paid us to play. We played. How dare they not honor our contract?

Well, they were bikers, of course. They did what they wanted to do. And what they wanted, at that moment, was more music. Fortunately, we had a diplomat in our midst: Pat Voelkes, who, as I’ve mentioned, was the oldest member of the band and easily the most mature when it came to dealing with other people. Pat negotiated with them for a few minutes, then returned with a new contract. Here were the terms: we’d play another set; they wouldn’t pay us another dime. They did, however, agree to give us a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Deal!

So we did one more set, and everybody ate the magic mushrooms and tripped out spectacularly, resulting in one of worst experiences of our professional lives. We all said things we didn’t mean, divulged secrets that should have been left unspoken. By the time we got home, the brotherhood had been destroyed. And getting home was no small task. Our primary means of transportation, Tom’s Volkswagen Rabbit, had blown a clutch on the way out. At first, we tried to push the thing home, and what a sight that must have been: a bunch of scrawny, anemic teenagers leaning into a couple thousand pounds of unwilling steel. It was hopeless, so we ended up sleeping overnight in the back of a flatbed truck that we had used to transport our equipment. With us that night were two buddies who had been helping with my drug trade—basically just keeping an eye on my house while I was traveling with the band or working at the garage. These guys were Dumb and Dumber but likeable enough under most circumstances. Unfortunately, their minimal brain power was diminished even further by the mushrooms, and at some point they thought it would be a good idea to steal a keg from the bikers.

It all went bad very quickly, of course. The keg got away from them and started rolling down a hill, clanging and clattering, banging against rocks, and waking up everyone at the campground. It finally came to rest in a stream.