Former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson was a recent guest on the “100 Songs That Define Heavy Metal” podcast with Metal Blade Records CEO Brian Slagel. Ellefson, who recently joined genre stalwarts Metal Church, talked about the grunge/alternative era and how it affected Megadeth and the metal genre as a whole.
In 1999, Megadeth tried branching into a more commercial sound with their album “Risk,” to mixed results. “Look, we played the game. Because it’s a game,” Ellefson explained. “When you’re in showbiz, it’s a game. And so you play the game. And, look, part of it is your self-interest. Do you wanna survive or not? You wanna be back out on the road again, paying your mortgage next year? Well, then we gotta play the game. Sometimes you do get a little beholden to the golden handcuffs of the paycheck. Just like in any business — it’s like anybody going to work. Do what the boss says. Well, sometimes the boss in music isn’t anyone in the band; the boss is the public. In fact, they’re always the boss, quite honestly. They pretty much dictate the course of your career.”
Ellefson continued: “(Grunge) was the turning point. By the time we got to the ‘Risk’ album, we had different management at that point and we lost the plot — we did. And we took it as far as we could go as far as being sort of a melodic radio rock band. I think (1997’s) Cryptic Writings’, we completely hit the mark. That was a very successful record. And, yeah, musically you can hear there’s a great spirit in it, you can hear it’s authentic, you can hear it’s really still us, just kind of moving the goalposts a little bit so we could explore some stuff. ‘Risk’, as our friend (and former manager) Larry Mazer said, we zigged and the rest of the world zagged. I think that was the best way to look at it. We went lighter and the rest of sort of the modern rock, modern metal regime went harder and heavier. And it took a few years to correct the ship and right the course from that one.”
Check out Ellefson’s full appearance below.
