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may have misfired in their decision to dump Mustaine – musically, at least: ‘With Cliff and Dave, that band was monstrous! I would have put that line-up against Black Sabbath of ’72 or Deep Purple [in the same era]. They were a monster band, and everybody knew, whatever it was, Metallica had it.’ It was deeply unfair, he says, that after Mustaine got kicked out ‘everybody ganged up on Dave – Dave’s an alcoholic or whatever. But we all have to remember, Dave wrote most of the first [Metallica] album plus the second album, Dave [had] the ideas.’ Compared to his successor, ‘Dave is a much more of an aggressive player, a cutting-edge player.’ That he subsequently formed his own multi-platinum-selling band, Megadeth, speaks volumes, while Hammett remains just ‘a lead guitar player in a band. So you know…’ Hale concedes, however, that career-wise, replacing the combustible Mustaine with the rock-steady Hammett was ‘why Metallica went far. All of a sudden there’s just two leaders in the band.’ Had Mustaine stayed, ‘I can only imagine how tumultuous the whole process would have been.’

If there was a positive aspect to Mustaine’s sense of betrayal, it was that it fired him up to prove the others wrong. Within months he had moved back to LA and formed his own innovative new metal band, Megadeth, in which he would not only play lead guitar but also sing. Second-in-command in the new outfit would be bassist David Ellefson, an eighteen-year-old from Minnesota who had moved out to LA with three buddies a week after graduating high school in 1983. One morning Ellefson was in his apartment chugging away on the bass intro from Van Halen’s ‘Running with the Devil’ when he heard a voice from the apartment above scream, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ followed by the crash of a flowerpot hitting his window-side air-conditioner. ‘I was like, jeez, these people in California aren’t friendly like they are in Minnesota.’ The same day one of his roommates reported seeing ‘some cool-looking guy with long blond hair’ walking around outside the building, barefoot. Deciding they needed ‘to meet some people’, one night they went upstairs to Mustaine’s apartment and knocked on his door and asked where to buy some cigarettes. ‘He slammed the door in our faces.’ So they knocked again and asked if he knew where to buy any beer and this time ‘he opens the door and lets us in’. Ellefson goes on: ‘This was early June ’83. He’s talking about this band Metallica that he was in and which I hadn’t heard of. I knew about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but he seemed to know all about it.’ Mustaine played Ellefson the No Life demo. ‘I thought it was awesome. It had this very haunting heaviness to it that intrigued me, almost kind of scary. It had kind of a darkness to it.’ Mustaine gave Ellefson the full story. ‘San Francisco, New York…playing gigs at Staten Island, Jonny Z, and then the inevitable resentment about it because he wasn’t in the band any more.’ Explaining why he’d been fired, ‘The main thing was: “It [was about] attitude, not ability.” That was his kind of tagline.’

Mustaine’s new band Megadeth, he told Ellefson, would be his revenge on Metallica. ‘Sure, without a doubt. It was a vengeful, spiteful return from Dave,’ says Ellefson. Mustaine’s ousting from Metallica ‘totally explains the pressure, the angst [and] frustration’ he continues to exhibit about Metallica to this very day. ‘Maybe even to some degree the broken heart that Dave had about being fired. Because, you know, Dave is kind of a gentle spirit underneath all of the ferociousness and the anger. Underneath of that is a real genuine, actually real sweet guy at times. I think for him a lot of it was, yeah, obviously their success. But I never got the feeling Dave ever played guitar for money anyway. That never fuelled him.’ For Dave Mustaine, ‘it was more just the broken heart of losing his friendship and his buddies’. As James Hetfield later conceded, ‘It’s obvious [Mustaine] had the same drive as us – he went on to do great things in Megadeth.’ Had he been allowed to stay, ‘There would have been