Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
In a new “Behind The Song” video released by Megadeth, Dave Mustaine discusses his choice to include his rendition of “Ride The Lightning,” the title track of Metallica’s 1984 album for which he received a co-writing credit after leaving the band in 1983, on the band’s final album, simply named “Megadeth”, as per Blabbermouth Dave explained why he decided to record this specific Metallica song.
We chose to do a version of ‘Ride The Lightning’, partly because I wrote with the band on that song. So it just seemed like the natural thing to do — close the circle, pay my respects to the band that I got my break in, and let James and Lars know how I really feel about stuff. I believe that James is an excellent guitar player and that Lars is an amazing songwriter.
Mustaine went on in this manner, thinking back to his early days with Metallica.
We were playing one day. We had a guitar player. He says, ‘I want to be called Damien Phillips when I get up on stage.’ And I went, ‘Uh, beat it, buddy.’ So we ended up going to the venue, we’re playing and I look over and he’s got a feather earring in his ear. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be so bad.’ So, the next day I got to rehearsal, and he’d been fired, and James is playing guitar. And he’s not playing guitar like somebody in this room would. He’s playing guitar like me. And I thought, ‘No fucking way. This guy is that good, and he doesn’t wanna be known for his guitar playing?'”
So it was really fun for me to do ‘Ride The Lightning’ [with Megadeth]. One of my chords that I invented, the spider chord, where you fret with these two fingers and you fret with these two fingers at the same time and you alternate, that’s in ‘Ride The Lightning’. It’s in ‘Wake Up Dead’ also. It’s in several songs that I’ve penned. And we figured if you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it at least as good as the version that the original song is or better. So we sped it up a little bit, and at the very end, the drum fill at the very end, there’s four drum fills at the end. The last two, I told Dirk, ‘Do whatever you want.’ And in the solo section, I talked to Teemu, I said, ‘Why don’t we split it up? You take the first third, I’ll take the middle, and you can take the last part.’
And we did that, so it would have a little bit of our flair to it. It wouldn’t sound too much like Kirk trying to copy me in the beginning. ‘Cause I don’t remember what I initially did on ‘Ride The Lightning’, and I can’t find any recordings of me playing it. But I think that the version that we did was great. It honors James’s playing and singing. He’s a great singer, too. Fuck, I was trying to sing that song and some of it really pushed my vocal ability.
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