MEGADETH Mainman: 'I Used To Be Kind Of A Wiseguy, Liked To Shoot Zingers And Stuff'

Jeff Treppel recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine for RoadrunnerRecords.com. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On the Internet:

"Even the guys who come to our web site and act like tough guys, I know that that's just part of the culture now, acting like a tough guy on the Internet. I don't do that that much anymore. I used to be kind of a wiseguy, liked to shoot zingers and stuff, but maybe in my old age I've just changed a little bit. I think that for us, with our site, we've got one of the coolest web sites, because fans can actually come there and say, 'Hey, we don't like this song,' and they can actually say they don't like that song and were not going to ban them. And I think that's cool, because it helps us to be able to find out what's on the pulse of our fans, which I think helped us make the right decisions on this new record and choose the right songs."

On the music industry:

"You know, records have, with the peer-to-peer transferring and everything, unfortunately the music business has become so changed that records don't even matter anymore. They're like business cards. I remember when I first got my first record contract, being able to pick which four songs were going to be on which side of the record. 'Never put more than four songs on there, the grooves are too close together. Can't have that much material, it'll sound terrible. Yes, that's why contracts are like that.' 'Really? Oh, wow, great.' And then the last time we went to the studio, we had a conversation where somebody had said that they wanted to have almost twice that many songs on the record, and I just laughed at how much things have changed, where a man can put almost his entire life's work into a record, and a few years later it doesn't mean anything. And you have to do 100 percent more to make it equivalent. Take for example the first VAN HALEN record. Now, they say, 'We don't want these eight songs. We want 15 of these songs.' There probably would have been no VAN HALEN. I don't know that those guys would have had all those guitar pyrotechnics on the record, if it would have just been too much for the fans to digest. I remember listening to records like early TED NUGENT and KISS and stuff like that you had 'Kiss Alive', right? You had to have had 'Kiss Alive'. Maybe not, maybe you're too young. I remember listening to those live records God dang it, if it had too many songs on it, you were like [makes snoring noise]. And now it's like, you have to have songs, and videos, and give away T-shirts, and you can win dinner at my house, and it's like, when did we try so hard? When did music get so crappy that you had to give somebody a back rub with it?"

Read the entire interview at RoadrunnerRecords.com.