There have been many memorable instances of people getting kicked out of bands. Pete Best was The Beatles’ first drummer before being replaced by Ringo Starr, and Paul Di’Anno sang lead vocals on the first two Iron Maiden albums before giving way to Bruce Dickinson. With that said, few band member expulsions are as memorable, or have as much of a place in rock n’ roll lore as Dave Mustaine’s removal from Metallica.
As the story goes, the band was concerned with how much Mustaine was drinking (how you drink too much booze to be in early Metallica is beyond me), and one day they decided enough was enough. They told him he was out of the band, drove him to the bus station, and that was that. Naturally, Mustaine was devastated by this; he thought he’d be part of one of the greatest metal bands of all-time. Now, he’d have to start over on his own.
To say he made a quick recovery would be an understatement. While Mustaine was still struggling with his addictions (he would do that for a long time), it didn’t take him long to put together a new band, Megadeth. In 1985, they released their debut album, Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!, which featured a revved up version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” as well “Mechanix,” the original version of what became Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen.”
In 1986, Megadeth released their second album, Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?!, which is generally considered to be one of the best thrash records of all-time. At this point, the power of Megadeth was undeniable. This album came out the same year as Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood. The following year, Anthrax would release their masterpiece, Among the Living, and the Big Four of thrash bands was created. When Rust in Peace came out in 1990, it solidified Megadeth’s status as one of the most important metal bands in the world. And yet, Dave Mustaine still wasn’t happy.
Mustaine’s biggest problem was that no matter how popular Megadeth got, he couldn’t stop comparing their success to that of Metallica, and he could never quite measure up, at least in terms of album sales. This became all too evident when Megadeth had their greatest commercial hit, 1992’s Countdown to Extinction. In addition to producing enduring radio hits like “Symphony of Destruction,” and “Sweating Bullets,” the album made it to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, which is no small feat for a metal band. Still, it wasn’t enough for Dave, not when Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album” had reached No. 1 a year earlier. The fact that he couldn’t match his former band at the top of the charts struck him as a failure, even though most musicians would have considered getting to No. 2 to be a career highlight. In the liner notes of 2004’s Countdown to Extinction re-issue, Mustaine revealed that not getting to No. 1 really bothered him, and in fact was the inspiration for “A Tout Le Monde,” off 1994’s Youthanasia, a dreary ballad in which the narrator contemplates suicide. Even though Dave Mustaine created a critically acclaimed, commercially successful band with millions of fans, he still felt that he was in Metallica’s shadow.
This feeling didn’t change over the next decade, as we all saw in the excellent documentary Some Kind of Monster, which looks at Metallica’s experience making the St. Anger album. In the film, the band goes into therapy, and Mustaine joins them for a session. There, he completely spills his guts out, letting his former bandmates know that being kicked out of the band still hurt, 20 years later. It’s easy to mock this scene, particularly the bit about how he misses his “little Danish friend” Lars Ulrich, but it’s pretty raw. After having those feelings stew inside him, he finally has his moment of catharsis.
Eventually, in a move that stunned many metal fans, Metallica and Mustaine buried the hatchet. They would join forces on the Big Four tour, along with Slayer and Anthrax, and after all this time, the water appears to be under the bridge. Still, the schism between Dave Mustaine and Metallica is an immutable part of Megadeth’s legacy. The anger and frustration Mustaine felt after being kicked out of the band he thought he would conquer the world with stuck with him for a very long time, not only inspiring the creation of Megadeth, but also some of their best songs. Dave Mustaine seems to finally realize that he’s had an incredible career, regardless of how it looks next to Metallica’s, but the raging inferiority complex that he struggled with for so many years can never totally be erased. And when we considered how much great music it inspired, that’s probably a good thing.
