ELLEFSON On His Return To MEGADETH: 'I Mentally Tried To Not Go Back To Where The Baggage Was'

Mike Bax of Lithium Magazine recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Lithium Magazine: Your departure and return to MEGADETH must carry a bit of baggage with it. Was it weird coming back to the band, or was it business as usual for everyone involved from day one.

Ellefson: You know what?! I think on my side of it, I mentally tried to not go back to where the baggage was. I mean, you can't change anything from the past. All you can do is hopefully learn from it and you move forward. I think that to not have learned from your past is probably the worst mistake you could ever make in your life (laughs),because none of us are perfect. And certainly in rock and roll bands you are all very close to each other because of the creative aspect of making music. Then there is the business side of it. The time you spend in the yellow submarine and the iron lung the airplanes and tour buses and backstages (laughs),it's those close confines where you seem to sacrifice a little bit of your personal space for the betterment of the group. And I think that one of the things that was nice in my time away from MEGADETH was getting to develop other sides of my life. When I came back I felt like I'd got to spread my wings a bit, and then come back to the band willing to make some personal sacrifices again. In a group setting, the individual thrives only if the group thrives. Getting that team mentality going again has been something that I have quite honestly really enjoyed over the past year.

Lithium Magazine: Do you find that you approach your playing differently in any way now that you are back with the band in earnest?

Ellefson: Absolutely, very much so. You know, in my time away I did so many different music-related projects bands that I formed and bands that I was asked to join a ton of session work, along with a lot of my own writing. So one of the things I realized in 2002 was I was kind of dated stylistically in my playing and my songwriting, and by hooking up with some younger guys in some different settings and writing for younger bands and being a part of that, it really opened my eyes to some things how guys tune their guitars, for instance. These guys weren't tuning their guitars in standard A4 tuning anymore, and to a large degree that really was a game-changer. It was like someone threw a whole bunch of new paint into my easel for me to paint some new pictures with.

Lithium Magazine: One of the things I think MEGADETH has always been able to boast is a technical proficiency few other bands can touch. I'm sure most musicians would trip over some of the bars of music in MEGADETH material. It must be challenging to reproduce some MEGADETH material live on stage.

Ellefson: Yeah, it is. It's interesting because I grew up playing like that. I met Dave [Mustaine] as he was first composing, and some of that stuff at first was some really slow and heavy riffs. Then the material got sped up very quickly and we seemed to start writing more and more progressively from there. I had a moment early on there where I was really glad I'd learned to play bass the way that I did, you know? Even in our original line-up with Gar Samuelson [drums] and Chris Poland [guitar], they originally came from a jazz-fusion-rock background kind of a MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA meets THE WHO sound they were a little bit older than me and Dave, and they had some different life experiences behind them coming into the band. But when you fused me and Dave, the metal guys, with those two guys we had a completely unique sound. It was interesting because everyone around us had this much heavier (pauses) "metal" sound like an Eighties metal sound. Sometimes I would be kind of envious of it, too. I would hear ANTHRAX records and they would have these great drum tones and these thick guitars, and obviously METALLICA records METALLICA records would always have great drum tone with a lot of bottom end and slick guitar tones. It took us several records to completely haul our tone in. We played our stuff differently than the other guys, you know? Out of the "Big Four," every one of us has a very unique sound, and I think that's so cool about what we are doing as the "Big Four" on tour now we have such a unique individuality each one of our styles, the way we write music and the way we play. These things are likely all elements we struggled with in the early days, trying to hone our sound, and it really became the basis of our individuality.

Lithium Magazine: You penned a book called "Making Music Your Business: A Guide for Young Musicians" in the late 1990s. How relevant do you think that book is now? Would you ever consider updating it for this generation of musicians, even if it was something done electronically?

Ellefson: You know, it's interesting that you say that because I have been asked to write something updated, maybe like a "volume two" or something, and there is some stuff in it (volume one) for sure that might be considered outdated now. The music industry has changed so much now. If anything, what I could do is develop more about the last 15 years. One of the last chapters that I wrote was on the Internet. (Note: Ellefson's book was published in 1997) It's funny that that is now one of the main ways for a band to reach their audience. It's funny that I ended with that in the book, because that would essentially be the beginning of the next volume. The Internet ultimately changed all of the rules in that book. That's why I started to do a lot of stuff just on YouTube. It's so time consuming to actually sit down and write a book and get it published. And as fast are things are changing, the information in the book might just be irrelevant by the time it's published. I started "Dave Ellefson's Rock Shop" on YouTube as a way to just sit in front of the camera and very quickly get some ideas and concepts out there which essentially represents a revision of the book in a lot of ways.

Read the entire interview from Lithium Magazine.