Dave Mustaine addresses Metallica’s lack of feedback on Megadeth’s ‘Ride The Lightning’ recording

Dave Mustaine, the leader of Megadeth, discussed his decision to include his rendition of “Ride The Lightning,” the title track of Metallica’s 1984 album for which he received co-writing credit after leaving the band in 1983, on the band’s final album, simply titled “Megadeth,” in a recent interview with California Post, as per Blabbermouth. Dave explained why he decided to record this specific Metallica song.

Well, it was kind of closing the circle, I guess, knowing that this is gonna be the end. When we made the decision to add that song, we were about two-thirds of the way done with the record, and we’ve always tried to add a cool cover song to our records. And this wasn’t a cover — it was a version of a song that I wrote done by one of the other writers. So it was interesting to do that. And I wanted to make it as good or better than the Metallica version. So how do you do that? You gotta play it as good. You gotta sing it as good. You gotta make it as exciting or better. So we sped it up. We spiced up the solo. We spiced up the drums, and I think the song has gotten really good response from the fans.

We haven’t heard from anybody from [the Metallica] camp, whether they like it or not, and that’s not why I did it. I did it to close the circle with us. We’ve done a lot of great things together, the three of us [James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Dave], and if this is the narrowing of the aperture on my career, I wanna go out on top.

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