Last month, Megadeth frontman/guitarist Dave Mustaine appeared on the Shawn Ryan Show and discussed how Metallica used several of his riffs after he was dismissed from the band. Mustaine said he got credit for some of his work but not everything.
“I told them when I left, ‘Do not use my music,’” Mustaine said. “And of course they used it. ‘Ride The Lightning’ I wrote. ‘The Call Of Ktulu’ I wrote. Let’s see, what else? There’s ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Jump In The Fire’, ‘The Four Horsemen’. And I wrote a bunch of ‘Leper Messiah’ too. They didn’t give me credit on that. You listen to the riffs, you know they’re my riffs. It’s, like, you think I’m gonna all of a sudden hear my riff and say, ‘That’s not me.’ So, yeah, I wrote a lot of their music that made them, and all the solos on that first record were mine — the best Kirk could try and copy them.”
Former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson weighed in on the situation during an appearance on The Delz Show. “When you work for a company, like, for instance, when I worked for Peavey, we did a David Ellefson signature bass,” Ellefson explained. “But when I left, they took my name off of it and they kept the bass. It’s Hartley Peavey’s company, and I worked for him. I think in Metallica it’s the same way. It’s Lars’s and James’s band. And so if you’re there and you write some songs, what you did there stays there.”
Ellefson continued: “I mean, look, again, this was all before I met Dave. I met Dave six weeks after he was out of Metallica. And for me, ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ was my first introduction to them, and I loved what I heard. And it wasn’t my argument to have with that, but I just looked at it and went, man, the fact that this band kicked you out – okay, bummer – but they used your songs, they put your name on the credit, and you got paid. It’s, like, f*ck, that’s like a triple win, man.”
Ellefson’s full interview can be viewed below.
