Former Megadeth member guitarist Jeff Young has opened up on refusing to join David Lee Roth’s solo band.
The musician told The Metal Voice that he thinks David Lee Roth is “nuts” and doesn’t regret his decision.
“I turned it down,” he said about the position in Lee Roth’s solo band. “I thought he’d end up in Vegas. And that was all the way back then. And where did he end up? I might have ESP or something.”
He added: “I just don’t really like [Roth’s] voice, to be honest. And now I’ve since learned he’s a lunatic. I made a great choice. He’s nuts.”
Young joined Megadeth in 1987 and was fired from the band just two years later with Dave Mustaine claiming that the dismissal was due to Young’s alleged heroin use.
However, Young since dismissed Mustaine’s claims, calling him a liar.
“That’s what a pathological liar does. Are you talking about the YouTube video where he says I ran out of heroin in Japan and cancelled the Australian tour? Yeah, I’ve been owning him in the media ever since he’s done that. If Pinocchio has a brother, you know what I’m saying,” he told Misplaced Straws.
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He told the publication that he was straight edge when he joined the band, and didn’t agree with Megadeth members’ use of drugs.
“I kind of tried to hang with those guys a little bit, but [Mustaine] was the one that cancelled that tour,” he said. “That’s why I left the band because early on, being a straight edge and three nights in, the guitar tech gets arrested in East LA scoring heroin from Mustaine, and he doesn’t show up to the studio that night and the drummer tells you, you realise, ‘Okay, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.’”
He added, “I made a pact with myself, I can remember the exact sentence I said in that moment at the Music Grinder studio when I found out the news, the first thing I literally said was, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’, and the second thing was, ‘I’m gonna stay in the situation as long as it’s healthy for me’, which you see exactly how long that duration was.”
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