Max Norman who was the producer for the 1992 Megadeth classic Countdown to Extinction, hasn’t minced his words when sharing his thoughts on Dave Mustaine, labelling the vocalist “full of shit” and says that he tried to steal some of his production credit.
“I remember Dave said to me on ‘Countdown,’ when we started to do ‘Countdown,’ he said, ‘I want you to teach me how to produce,” Norman explained during an appearance on The Metal Voice.
Norman then continued to say that after the album was finished he received a call from his attorney to let him know there was a change to the production credit.
“And I said, ‘What changed?’ And he said, ‘You know, ‘produced by Dave Mustaine and Max Norman.” And I said, ‘Whoa, whoa! No, no.’ And I called Dave and I said, ‘Hey, you just fucked me by changing the credit right at the end, and they’ve already printed 400,000 copies of this! How I about I junk the fucking record right now?’
“And he started freaking out. He said, ‘Dude, dude, it’s a mistake!’ And I knew it wasn’t a mistake. It was a little bit of a backstab, and I got very, very upset about it.”
Norman said that he told Mustaine that the credits needed to be changed back otherwise he would call the recording label and tell them the record isn’t being released.
“And they already had like 450,000 out in the stores, so it was a real mess, and it took me quite a while to stop being pissed off about that. And Dave kept apologizing…
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“‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ‘It was a mistake.’ ‘I don’t know what happened.’ And I was like, ‘You’re so full of shit. You did it on purpose, I know why you did it. Don’t ever fucking try it again.’
“I don’t think that on ‘Countdown,’ that Dave was really a co-producer, but I gave him a co-producer credit anyway because, you know, I’ve been a nice guy, I guess.”
For more on this topic head to the Metal Observer.
Listen to ‘Sweating Bullets by Megadeth:
