During a recent interview with That Fuzzing Rock Show, Megadeth bassist David Ellefson took a look back at the band’s 1986 track “Peace Sells” and revealed how the song and its iconic bass intro came to be.
During their discussion, Ellefson revealed that frontman Dave Mustaine is actually the one who wrote the riff, and that he penned it on the guitar before instructing Ellefson to play it on his bass.
“It started as a guitar riff. Dave was writing a riff…” Ellefson said, adding that they wrote the track before Megadeth had reached any level of commercial success and while they were still struggling musicians. “Me and Dave were essentially homeless. This was after the ‘Killing Is My Business’. We were living with the guy that engineered and co-produced ‘Killing Is My Business’. His name is Karat Faye, and we were basically squatting in his house up in Laurel Canyon.”
He continued: “I had this bass; it was a B.C. Rich. I’d ripped the frets out of it, so it was fretless and stained, like a natural color. Dave picked it up and was playing it. He goes, ‘Hey, Junior. Come here. Play this riff.’ So we were working this riff out. And we went to rehearsal. And he’s, like, ‘Play that riff.’ So he started playing it, and Gar [Samuelson, drummer] jumps in, and then Dave and Chris [Poland, guitarist] started playing the riff, the verse.”
Ellefson also noted that “Peace Sells” wasn’t the only song they wrote in such a spontaneous manner.
“That was a song that really wrote itself in the band room within a couple hours. And it’s funny, the songs that did that — ‘Symphony Of Destruction’, ’99 Ways To Die’, ‘Sweating Bullets’. I guess ‘Angry Again’ was kind of put together in an afternoon in the studio here in Phoenix. So it’s funny that a lot of the biggest Megadeth songs that became hits, like the singles and the hits, were the ones that just sort of fell out right in front of us in the band room. And, of course, time went into kind of detailing them up a little more, but the basic core of the song was there.”
