If anyone knows about being gracelessly kicked out of a band, it’s Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine. The guitarist and vocalist was fired from Metallica in 1983, for being a violent, angry drunk, and due to finances was forced to take a bus home to California from New York. To this day, Dave feels the band expelled him unfairly, because, well, because he talks about it a lot; it’d be fair to say that Megadeth’s entire existence is based off of being poorly dismissed from his band. And yet according to former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson, who was recently let go due to a sex scandal, Mustaine and Co. fired him with no greater amount of compassion or honesty.
While appearing on The Jeremy White Podcast, Ellefson was asked whether or not he felt Megadeth’s formal statement on his firing fanned the flames of the public’s anger at him. Ellefson said that it did — and that it was part of what led to his unceremonious departure.
“A hundred percent,” said the bassist. “It was all based on fear. It wasn’t based on reality. They said all sides would be heard, and, quite honestly, no sides were heard. Because within two weeks, I went through the process that I told them I was gonna go through, to just walk through it and say, ‘Hey, this is a bunch of bullshit,’ and I did — I did my part. And I confessed my… [Laughs] Look, I was caught on ‘Candid Camera’; there was no hiding from it. So you just address it. You take the sword. You deal with it. It was embarrassing. Sorry about that. Move on. And that’s it.
“I pushed back against [the accusations],” he continued. “[I said] ‘This is bullshit.’ And that’s when I said [to the Megadeth camp], ‘Look, they threw a Molotov cocktail — proverbial — at my house and burned my house down. Would you please help me? Would you please support me? I could use some help right now.’ And quite honestly, I was just kicked to the side of the road to just deal with it on my own. So it’s, like, all right. Well, then now we know where the loyalties lie. And now we move on.”
You can watch the full interview below:
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Words by Chris Krovatin
