“Unscrewed the lid off something evil”: the 1977 album that made Dave Mustaine want to be rock star
In the biopic of your life, however cheesy it might be, there will be one moment when the world halts to a standstill as some new idea blooms with the power of a thousand suns in your head, and for Dave Mustaine, that moment came in 1977.
The air in Huntington Beach, California, is known to be sweet, with very little variation in the weather, meaning it is not too hot, not too cold, perfect for lounging around, flunking out, and smoking weed. Though he’d go on to be one of the biggest metal stars in the circuit, at one point, Mustaine was just a kid who sold weed.
“There was a girl called Cindy who worked at a record store. I used to sell pot, but I would trade her pot for records,” the star once shared with Louder Sound.
Cue the glorious ring of heavenly angels announcing the freeze-frame of his life. In 1977, during one of these dubious trades, Mustaine’s world changed forever as he discovered AC/DC.
“The first time I put the record on, I was looking at the back cover and wondering: ‘What the hell’s up with that dude’s lip?’ But hearing the music, my life totally changed,” he reminisced about the hard rock classic album Let There Be Rock. Mustaine, who spent most of his teenage years sitting in that blissful, if slightly discombobulating, numbing feeling of a weed high, realised that there were other ways to feel. The sprawling record sharpened its paws directly on his face.
“To me, it sounded like something was wrong, like it was too close to my face,” he added, “Most records are all around you, but this one was right there [spreads his hand in front of his nose]. It was…unsettling. I remember everything, from that first millisecond, that little crackle before ‘ga-dun-gar!’ in ‘Go Down’, to the last guitar noise at the end of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’.”
Something awoke within Mustaine, and kicked him out of the weed stupor. Soon enough, he was in a band that performed plenty of AC/DC covers, where he learned the importance of a good riff and the euphoric feeling of a wall of sound knocking you right on your ass. Later, much later, Mustaine would even open for his heroes on tour.
Back to 1977, Mustaine slipped the disc out of its sleeve, completely unaware that years down the road the music journalism panopticon would settle on this very moment as one of the defining acts in metal history. Mustaine was instantly hooked, recalling, “I just started to really love this band. I started collecting everything I could get my hands on”.
It took six years from this point for Mustaine to form Megadeth, shortly after he was fired from Metallica. It was no water off his back, anyway, the musician has since insisted. He wanted faster, heavier riffs, that feeling of music snapping the bridge of your nose in two.
Though, unfortunately, the female employee who offered Mustaine the AC/DC record didn’t stick around in the biopic of his life, he’s forever grateful to her, saying, “God bless her for that. It was like someone had unscrewed the lid off something evil. The guitars sounded so demonic. It was something I’d never heard before.”
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