Dave Mustaine has called out “bitter ex-members” of Megadeth for telling lies about him.
During an interview for Guitar.com, the frontman was asked his thoughts on how he feels about the general image he has as a “control freak” in regards to deciding what makes the final cuts in songs for Megadeth. Mustaine replied that this portrayal largely came about from lies told by ex-band members.
“All you have to do is look at the last record and how much Kiko [Loureiro] wrote on it. It completely dispels the lies from the past about me not letting certain band members in the past write music. Same thing with Dirk [Verbeuren] too. So that was just a bunch of bitter ex-members complaining about ‘quality control’ over riffs that weren’t that good. If they were good, they would have been on the record.”
In the past, Mustaine has taken credit for bringing “things into Megadeth that the other guys wouldn’t do.”
“Everybody has strengths, everybody has weaknesses, and I think if you sort of tap everybody’s strengths, you hear the best of the best, and that’s always what you wanna try to get in any team setting, and certainly in a band,” he continued.
“Quite honestly, with Megadeth, Dave [Mustaine, guitar/vocals] writes amazing riffs. We don’t need three riff writers. Dave writes some of the best riffs in the world. I write good riffs too, but if they sound like Dave… Dave and I always had a saying: If we both agree on everything, then one of us is unnecessary,” he laughed.
“Sometimes you need the conflict because it presents a different way to look at something.”
Ellefson was dismissed from Megadeth on May 24th, 2021 – days after sexually explicit messages involving him were posted on Twitter. The longtime Megadeth bassist, who joined the fold during its formative years, admitted to police that he had been sexting with a Dutch teenager who had captured video of their communication without his consent and shared them with friends.
