The Grammys played Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as Gojira accepted their Best Metal Performance Grammy, as seen in a video, despite Gojira beating Metallica to win.
The #GRAMMYs house band plays Metallica's "Enter Sandman" as Gojira beats Metallica for Best Metal Performance pic.twitter.com/rZTs1mexoA
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Before he was the mastermind behind Megadeth, Dave Mustaine was Metallica’s fiery, virtuosic guitarist. But his tenure with the band was short-lived. In 1983, Mustaine was infamously fired from Metallica due to his volatile behavior and struggles with substance abuse. The dismissal left him with a chip on his shoulder and an unrelenting drive to prove his worth. Mustaine began planning his next move.
He vowed to form a band that would be faster, heavier, and more technically precise than anything Metallica could produce. That band would become Megadeth. But the road to success wasn’t easy. In the mid-1980s, Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson found themselves living on the edge, both financially and emotionally. Following the release of Megadeth’s debut album, Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!, money was tight, and the two musicians were essentially homeless.
David Ellefson spoke on That Fuzzing Rock Show about him and Dave Mustaine being homeless at the time.
“It started as a guitar riff. Dave was writing a riff… 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.”
“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.”
Noting how “Peace Sells” wasn’t the only Megadeth hit that happened so spontaneously, Ellefson said:
“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.”