Former Metallica guitarist and Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine revealed in a new Full Metal Jackie interview that he heard Black Sabbath for the first time from a friend he would get marijuana from, and that he didn’t listen to them when he was younger.
Full Metal Jackie asked, “Megadeth are going to be touring with Ozzy Osbourne this summer. What aspects of his music that appealed to you as a kid still affects you now?”
Dave Mustaine responded, “I’ve always told the truth about things with Black Sabbath as a kid for me — I didn’t really discover them until later. A friend of mine would listen to them all the time who I used to go and get my pot from.
But that was the only place I’d ever hear Sabbath was at Alfie’s. So, when I would go to my brother-in-law’s to go play guitar and hang out and stuff like that, they always played Zeppelin and KISS and Ted Nugent.
So, that’s kind of what I grew up on. Then once I started to get into Sabbath, I was like wow Tonny Iommi is really — he has a sound and a heaviness all his own.
Then you add the I don’t know if I would say prolific is the right word or maybe poignant, but Ozzy’s lyrics, I think a lot of people think they’re really simple, but they’re really meaningful. Especially to a songwriter, like Ronnie James Dio, his songwriting, a lot of it relied on rhyme but the premise was on all medieval stuff. So that was really cool.
That was his wheelhouse and he was really great at it. Ozzy’s singing about all kinds of different stuff which I think is really cool. It kind of gave me the guts to do it.”
