Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Dave Mustaine 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 final Megadeth album, simply titled “Megadeth,” during an appearance on the December 5 episode of SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk.” This is what Dave said regarding the creation of the new recording, as reported by blabbermouth.net.
We’re managed by three men — Danny Nozell, Steve Ross and Justis Mustaine. And we were talking with management, and we were just kind of yacking about what the cover song was gonna be on the record, ’cause we always did cover songs on our records. But this wasn’t a cover song, because I wrote it with James. And it just became clear that I should do this, because if I’m going to ride off into the sunset, I wanna pay tribute to the band that I started in, and I wanted to make mention about what I think about James.
I think [James is] an exceptional guitar player. I remember the day that I saw him play guitar for the first time. We were playing at the Whisky [A Go Go in West Hollywood, California]. And we had a guitar player with us, and his name was Brad Parker. And the night of the show he changed it to Damian Phillips. And he showed up at the Whisky in mid-1980s Rudy Sarzo garb. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s not gonna go down.’ And I looked at him and he had a giant feather earring. And I thought to myself, ‘This guy’s not gonna be here very long.’ So I go to rehearsal, after the show, the next rehearsal I go and there’s no Brad, there’s no Damian, nobody. It was just James playing guitar — like a motherfucker. And I thought, ‘How did this happen? How did this guy go from singer to a great guitar player like this?’ And I was excited for me. I was excited for the band. And we started playing then.
This is how the choice ended on “Ride The Lightning“.
With the track, choosing that, I figured it should be something that I had something to do with, but I didn’t know it was going to turn out like that. Something off of ‘Kill ‘Em All’ would’ve been obvious, and we already did that [with ‘Mechanix’]. And so I was thinking about ‘Ride The Lightning’, and there’s only a couple songs on there that I wrote. And I didn’t think that ‘The Call Of Ktulu’ would be the right move, ’cause that’s not even how the song was when I was in the band; they changed it so much, so it’s not the way that I remember it. So we started doing ‘Ride’, and it just felt so great, listening to the tracks, listening to James’s singing, listening to how the song structure was. It was just great. I loved it. And I’ve always believed when you do a song from somebody, you’ve gotta do it as good or better — you’ve got to. So we sped it up a little bit and we beefed up a couple parts, just to make them a little bit more modern. And there you have it.
