![]() ![]() We were rehearsing at Mars Studio, in Los Angeles, and Gar laid out some lines on the counter - a line of white and a line of brown. I’ll never forget the first time I tried heroin. He brought in Gar Samuelson in 1984 and then Chris Poland. We called it “heroin and hamburgers from Jay Jones.” He fed us and kept us strung out. That was how he ingratiated himself with us. And that is exactly what happened.ĭAVID ELLEFSON: Our first manager, Jay Jones, was our supplier. We needed a drum tech anyway, but we hired Chuck because, after that, I knew that if Gar ever messed up, Chuck could play. ![]() He had shown up at the club for the sound check and convinced me he knew the songs from the records well enough to play. When he didn’t come back, Chuck saw his opportunity. We were in Detroit and Gar Samuelson went off to go find drugs. That’s how Chuck Behler landed the drum job. Sometimes he would come back late, but he always managed to score. He would head over to the unsavory side of town to find heroin. ![]() Often when we would go into a new city, Gar would disappear. I used to joke about seeing them passed out with their pants off. ![]() Dave and I had already certainly been dancing with the cocaine thing because the white lady was popular at the time in LA.ĭAVE MUSTAINE: Gar had told me how some friends of the New Yorkers broke into a pharmacy and stole a bunch of opium suppositories. The two of them were well funded for their heroin and cocaine habit, which came with them when they joined the band. They built a modest following, selling out the Troubadour and like that, but narrowly missed the window and never got a record deal. They were fusion jazz musicians from the Dunkirk/Buffalo, New York, area who moved to Los Angeles, where they had a band called the New Yorkers that played around the scene. And it was off to the races again.ĭAVID ELLEFSON: Megadeth had first started getting deeper into drugs when Gar Samuelson and Chris Poland were in the band. I got loaded in treatment and checked out. He came back, smuggled heroin into the treatment center in a guitar pedal. This was the first time either one of us had tried treatment. But as the excerpt shows, before they could write Rust in Peace ‘s headbanging classics “Hangar 18,” “Holy Wars … the Punishment Due,” and “Tornado of Souls,” they first had to kick their bad habits.ĭAVE MUSTAINE: We were supposed to go into this rehab facility called ASAP in the Valley. Throughout the book, the musicians and their friends often offer clashing, yet compelling, recollections of the events that marked the album’s genesis. In this exclusive excerpt, Mustaine and Ellefson are both strung out while on tour supporting their 1988 album, So Far, So Good … So What! The rest of the book explains how they courted Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell for the lead guitarist position and settled on the lineup that would propel them to commercial success a few years later on 1992’s Countdown to Extinction. Rust in Peace: The Inside Story of the Megadeth Masterpiece, a new oral-history book by Mustaine and co-author Joel Selvin, chronicles the withdrawals and growing pains that fueled the group’s watershed record, which Rolling Stone dubbed one of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. Drug abuse and in-fighting led to the departure of half its original lineup, and by the mid-Eighties, those same forces were about to expel those musicians’ replacements from the band. Frontman Dave Mustaine and bassist David Ellefson had formed the group in 1983, after Mustaine’s ejection from Metallica, and even though they had already released three underground hit records, the band was far from stable. In the years leading up to the creation of one of the defining albums of thrash metal, Megadeth’s 1990 LP Rust in Peace, the band members were going through hell. ![]()
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