Ex-Megadeth guitarist Jeff Young called Dave Mustaine a “pathological liar” for previously alleging that the Australian part of the Megadeth 1989 “So Far, So Good… So What!” tour was canceled because of Young running out of his heroin.
He told Mispaced Straws, “That’s what a pathological liar does. Are you talking about the YouTube video where he says I ran out of heroin in Japan and canceled the Australian tour? Yeah, I’ve been owning him in the media ever since he’s done that. If Pinocchio has a brother, you know what I’m saying.”
Young was “straight edge” when he joined Megadeth.
“I was a straight edge when I went in that band and I never drank, I didn’t smoke pot, to fit in, I kind of tried to hang with those guys a little bit, but he was the one that canceled that tour.
“That’s why I left the band because early on, being a straight edge and three nights in the guitar tech gets arrested in East LA score and heroin from Mustaine, and he doesn’t show up to the studio that night and the drummer tells you, you realize, ‘Okay, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
“I made a pact with myself, I can remember the exact sentence I said in that moment at the Music Grinder studio when I found out the news, I said, the first thing I literally said was, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’, and the second thing was, ‘I’m gonna stay in the situation as long as it’s healthy for me’, which you see exactly how long that duration was.”
Dave Mustaine has not been the sole songwriter of Megadeth for years. However, he takes up the control when it comes down to materializing the songs.
In a recent interview for Guitar.com, Dave addressed this particular issue. When reminded that people are “always led to believe, rightly or wrongly, that you are a control freak,” he replied:
“All you have to do is look at the last record and how much Kiko [Loureiro] wrote on it. It completely dispels the lies from the past about me not letting certain band members in the past write music. Same thing with Dirk [Verbeuren] too. So that was just a bunch of bitter ex-members complaining about ‘quality control’ over riffs that weren’t that good. If they were good, they would have been on the record.”
When asked where he gets the inspiration from, Mustaine said:
“You know, I could listen to a record of something that I’d heard before and hadn’t listened to for a while, and listen to it again and I’ll hear something in it; it’ll inspire me.”
During the same interview, he was also asked about the injury he suffered back in 2002 and how he recovered from it. Back then, he was told by a doctor that he won’t be able to use his left arm to the full extent that he did.
However, Mustaine recovered and, over two decades later, he’s still recording albums and playing live shows. He was then questioned regarding his motivation through the rehabilitation process. Mustaine said:
“The doctor didn’t have permission to talk to me like that. I’m not going to allow someone like that to speak into the universe words that aren’t true about me. In my reality, when he said those things, they were untrue to me and I was not going to accept that. It might have been his reality; it might have been reality for some other people; but for me not being able to play guitar again was just not going to happen.”
