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Megadeth Unsung: The Real Greatest Hits Liner Notes by Jon Reed Megadeth has had a spectacular career, one which Dave Mustaine is spectacularly bitter about. One of the big head scratchers in metal history is Dave Mustaine's inability to overcome his beef with Metallica. As documented in the film "Some Kind of Monster," Dave continues to struggle with his decades-old expulsion from Metallica. He maintains the footage in "Monster" is one-sided. However one-sided it might be, it isn't pretty. Any other hard-drinking kid dumped out of Metallica's van in New York City would have wound up on skid row. But Dave orchestrated a triumph. No, Megadeth did not have the blues-rock dexterity that allowed Metallica to jump from metal clubs to stadiums, but Megadeth still claims a big place in metal history. In the metal world, Dave's feat was the equivalent of Pete Best getting booted out of the Beatles and going on to form The Who. Yet Dave seems perpetually unsatisfied by the contrast. Dave's larger than life personality was not a good fit for Metallica, a band that had an equilibrium of egos. Dave was better off fronting his own band. Dave has had many partners in Megadeth, none more important than original bassist David Ellefson, but he's maintained creative control, and the formula works. Fronting his own band suited Dave totally. Knowing that he's not at peace with his legacy is a slap in the face to all rock geniuses toiling in obscurity. Then again, the charm of Dave Mustaine is that he doesn't hide his demons. He may have some vinegar in his throat, but so do we. What alienates Dave from himself brings him closer to us. And while he doesn't go multi-platinum any longer, his recent work has been edgy. Dave's increasing political fury indicates he is going to age more like Neil Young than Phil Collins. The parallels between Megadeth and Metallica's careers are striking. Both were thrash metal pioneers whose most influential work dates to their youth. Both tried to "cross over" into the mainstream for reasons that are more defensible than the intolerant reactions of their own fans. Dave has expressed regret about his attempts to morph into a more accessible sound. His regret is regrettable. There is no way to improve upon the thrash metal of youth. You may get smarter, but you never get faster. There is a difference between selling out and flirting with established genres. Not every song worked, exhibit A “Megadeth for fratboys” miscue “Crush ‘Em,” but the creative ambition can't be questioned. These liner notes pull together the best Megadeth songs. Originally, I made this mix when Capitol Punishment was the only hits collection. Now there are a couple more "greatest hits" packages to consider; each is flawed in different ways. It seems that Dave Mustaine has a gripe with the Cryptic Writings album - perhaps his most commercial, but also one of his best. Megadeth's recent hits collections veer away from Cryptic Writings at the expense of a well-rounded release. And to this day, "Take No Prisoners," which is not only the best Megadeth song, but a contender for greatest metal song of all time, does not appear on any Megadeth compilations - except this one. Those of you who follow this web site know that I like to devote most of my attention to bands that are unsung. Megadeth were not what you would call unsung. But for Dave Mustaine, Megadeth will always be lurking somewhere on the outside. And I have yet to see a review of Dave’s work that has spanned all the moods and eras of his career. So there you have it. Not too long ago, Dave put out an album called The World Needs a Hero. For many of us, Dave is as close to that hero as we're going to get. We can only hope he doesn't forever long for his day in the sun when he gave so many of those days to the rest of us. (1) "Almost Honest'" - Supposedly this is one of the big "sellout" Megadeth songs, but outside of purist la-la land, “Almost Honest” is Dave's essential "love gone bad" relationship song. The first few Megadeth albums had some smart lyrics, but they didn't venture anywhere near love. Putting out a relationship song is a guaranteed way to get shrapnel-minded "real metal" purists to turn on you. But like any artists worth their rock salt, Dave decided he wouldn't be limited by lyrical taboos. Trust was the record where Dave aired out bitter laundry to great effect. "Trust," the title track and bigger hit, was excellent, but "Almost Honest" was even better. It's the song's bridge that sends it into immortality..."don't ask me what's wrong, I-I-I don't know!" Not bad for a so-called sellout song from a so-called sellout album. (2) "Holy Wars - The Punishment Due" - Megadeth's thrash metal masterpiece, "Holy Wars" proved that thrash could bring together brutal riffs with lyrically incisive music. I remember seeing Dave play this not long after 9/11, and his spiteful introduction nailed the terrorists. But Dave’s wasn’t dumb enough to stop there. As in “Holy Wars” itself, Dave called attention to an underlying problem - religious fundamentalism, and not just on the part of our enemies. When you talk about intelligent rage, which to me is the most highly evolved mentality you can cultivate in this fucked up world, you’re talking about “Holy Wars.” You can divide “old school” Megadeth fans into those who consider “Holy Wars” the definitive Megadeth song and those who give the nod to “Hangar 18.” I’m a “Holy Wars” guy myself, but it’s a false argument. The real prize goes to Rust in Peace, the 1991 thrash classic that sports both of these songs. (3) "Trust" - Just like “Holy Wars” and “Hangar 18” are linked in Megadeth history, so are “Trust” and “Almost Honest.” To some pea-brained fans, this was when Megadeth “sold out.” Based on the music Megadeth has put out since, we know that writing off Dave because he felt like writing a hit single was idiotic. It’s one thing to hate Cryptic Writings because you just don’t like that style of music. But writing off Megadeth’s career because of it? Your loss, chumps.“Trust” had a dash of mass appeal; it’s a poppy number with some lyrical edge to it. I always thought the middle section dragged a bit, but overall, “Trust” has a grinding vibe that sounds even better live than it did on record. It’s a shame Dave dropped this song from his setlist for a long while. I only hope he did it because he genuinely didn’t feel like playing it. If he feels like it’s too commercial, well, that’s a stupid reason not to play a song. The Beatles put out plenty of commercial music and it turned out to be pretty darn good. The problem is not commercial music but soulless music. There’s a big difference, and if you want me to say more on that, fear not, I have a separate tirade in the works. “Trust” was commercial, but it sure as heck wasn’t soulless. (4) "In My Darkest Hour" - Perhaps the least known of the early Megadeth stalwarts, “In My Darkest Hour” is a wrenching tribute to Cliff Burton, Metallica’s original bassist and one of the most influential figures in the history of heavy metal. Perhaps Dave took the death of Cliff Burton hard because he knew the death of Cliff meant the end of thrash metal purity. Every musical movement has an early period where the most important figures worked, sometimes in obscurity, and smashed all the assumptions around them. When those early figures go down, you find yourself in a less innocent era. Money and egos triumph over the aesthetic of passion; music played for the love of playing it gives away to the money grab. “In My Darkest Hour” melds Dave’s anguish into a bruising song that varies in its rhythm but not in intensity. The lyrics hold for any situation where loss and betrayal leads you back to a battle with yourself. However you feel about Dave’s singing in general, this is Dave’s finest vocal performance. (5) "Hangar 18" - I already said that I’m more of a “Holy Wars” than “Hangar 18” guy, but “Hangar 18” is still one of the landmark songs of the thrash metal era. Most of the guys who sped metal up did not realize you could play fast as all hell without compromising lyrical incisiveness. Amazingly, there are more interesting things to sing about than amoral, murderous violence. “Hangar 18” mocks “military intelligence” without even trying hard - it’s just Dave playing it fast and loose the way most indispensable songs are recorded. “Hangar 18” reminds me of those times when you’re watching a great film, and you sense its utter confidence from beginning to end. It’s a pleasure to watch a movie that knows what it is at all times and exactly where it’s going (“The Usual Suspects” comes to mind). “Hangar 18” is like that. Dave was peaking, and he caught it on vinyl. (6) "Take No Prisoners"- Some remember the day that Kennedy was shot. Others remember the day the Red Sox won the World Series. I remember the day I heard “Take No Prisoners” for the first time. It was in a shitty living room on a shitty turntable at a really shitty party. The first time through, all I heard was the purity of the aggression and the exquisite “Take No Prisoners, Take No Shit!” punchline. Repeat listens yielded a better feel for the complexity of the song structure, the brilliance of writing the only three minute epic in rock history, made possible by a furious pace where no four lines in the song have the same beat. It’s one of the few metal songs that has no shared verses, no shared choruses. Every section is different, with its own purpose and rhythm, yet part of a seamless whole. Then you print out a lyric sheet and see the compact certainty of each line, and it’s now possible to rock your roommates on a whole different level, since you now know the words Dave is spitting and snarling as his band riffs in perfect anarchic symmetry behind him. The only problem with “Take No Prisoners”? Because of its speed on the one hand and its complexity on the other, it’s almost impossible to play live, even for a band with as much fretboard dexterity as Megadeth. That would explain how ten years of Megadeth shows brought zero “Take No Prisoners” sightings into my life. But that all changed last summer at the Mohegan Sun Casino, where Megadeth did its usual “blowtorch the headliner off the stage” routine, this time the charred victims being the Heaven and Hell (Dio and Black Sabbath) guys, who have to be applauded for having the guts to put Megadeth on their bill, and then a song I have been waiting more than a decade to hear, actually gave up on hearing, is casually inserted at the #2 spot in the set list. A hundred feet in front of me, I have just heard the best metal song of all time. (7) "Train of Consequences"- Dave has always had a knack for writing a riff that could run through a wall. “Train of Consequence” is one of those super spiffy Megadeth rhythms, a song that can chug or stop on a dime, and does a bit of both. This one’s not about the message, it’s about the groove. Maybe the only Megadeth song you could dance to. (8) "A Tout Le Monde"- I don’t know if Dave struggled with suicide; based on his tortured attitude towards his Metallica years and his mythic battles with drugs, you would assume that Dave stared down the dark side of his psyche more than once. In another career parallel with Metallica, both bands have their “suicide songs.” Metallica’s, of course, is the colossal “Fade to Black,” arguably the greatest song about suicide ever recorded, metal or not. “A Tout Le Monde” is not in that discussion, but it’s a song with merit, and for someone like Dave who wasn’t prone to power ballads, this is one of the few changes of pace you’ll get in the Megadeth back catalog. (9) "Sweating Bullets"- “Hello me...meet the real me!” So begins the psycho-lyrical worldplay of one of Megadeth’s most beloved songs. “Sweating Bullets” is one of the few Megadeth tracks that seems to reach across the lines of those who are usually indifferent to the band. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s got something to do with the hip-hop flirtation and the effortless vocal delivery. (10) "Use the Man"- One of Dave’s most autobiographical songs, and note that I didn’t say, “one of Dave’s most personal songs.” The distinction matters. There are times when Dave adopts a somewhat distant approach to the vocal delivery of his material. Whether this is an attempt at macho posturing, a coping mechanism for experiences too raw to relive, or some combination of factors, the fact is that some of Dave’s most “personal” songs just don’t feel all that personal. That doesn’t mean they are not effective. In the last verse, when Dave moves from “I’ve seen the man use the needle/seen the needle use the man” to “I’ve seen the man use the needle/seen the needle in my hand.” the image resonates. Another keeper from the overly-maligned Cryptic Writings album, I wouldn’t elevate “Use the Man” to the Megadeth short list, but it’s still a worthy song that speaks for an important aspect of Dave’s own story. (11) "Kill the King"- “Kill the King” was the oddest of tracks - a song added to a greatest hits collection that truly felt like it belonged. “Kill the King” was just as good, if not better, than a lot of the songs on the greatest hits. In the Megadeth pantheon, there’s a small collection of all-time greats that include “Holy Wars,” “Hangar 18,” “Take No Prisoners,” “Peace Sells,” and “Symphony of Destruction.” Below that tier is a broader group of classics that are not on that same transcendent level, but remain strong material. “Almost Honest,” “Trust,” and “In My Darkest Hour” are at the top of that second tier, and from there, you can argue about which songs make the cut in that second grouping. Somewhere in that batch is “Kill the King,” the new greatest hits song that instantly belonged. Sidenote: when I finished burning this mix to CD, I found that I needed to cut off about four minutes. I took “Kill the King” off at that point, favoring it to lead off my next Megadeth collection, but I kept it on this written version since it definitely fits. (12) "Washington is Next” - Dave has had an odd evolution, becoming more outspoken about his politics and his Christianity at the same time. This has led to some pretty strange lyrical intersections; there are a couple of strange fuck-the-government-but-remember-family-values moments in “Washington is Next.” But despite a few ideological twists and turns, the tune is a keeper. A blistering entry from the United Abominations album, “Washington is Next” is ominous enough that you can’t help but wonder if Dave didn’t get his name on a watch list or two for his trouble. When Dave plays this song live, it sounds just as intense as the thrash metal of his youth, and if you don’t think that’s a compliment, you haven’t been to very many “old school” metal shows lately, where half the goal is finding a way to keep the cotton balls from falling out of your ears until the “new material segment” is over. (13) "Of Mice and Men"- It's rare for me to include a recent song in a greatest hits writeup. Most new metal records from the old guard are filler (or even blander forms of regurgitated crapola). But not long ago, Dave came out with a blistering album called The System Has Failed, and he did two things right on that album - two things I always preach to artists when you have a historic youth to live up to: one, expand your range and move your lyrics into broader issues, and two, show your maturity by exposing yourself in new ways. Dave accomplished both on The System Has Failed, and never more powerfully than on "Of Mice and Men," as wise a retrospective of his own (brilliantly) misspent youth as he’s given us. "Of Mice and Men" tells a story I won't spoil for those who haven't discovered this gem. The best Megadeth song that few people have heard. (14) "Dread and the Fugitive Mind"- “Dread and the Fugitive Mind” “ and “Kill the King” are two songs with a unique distinction: taken together, they are the two best “greatest hits toss in tracks” of all time. You know the score - these days, a band can’t release a greatest hits CD without the obligatory “previously unreleased” single from purgatory to help drive sales for the album. This practice has resulted in some truly embarrassing tracks that have really diminished the greatest hits albums that have come out in the last decade or so. When Megadeth put out their first greatest hits album, Capitol Punishment, both “Dread and the Fugitive Mind” and “Kill the King” were the new tracks on the album. To my incredulity, neither were tossers. It remains the strongest pair of new tracks on a “best of” package that I’ve seen. “Dread and the Fugitive Mind” has some excellent lyrics - it’s another one of those “inside my twisted mind” Megadeth songs. This song is too obvious a return to the “Sweating Bullets” well to be eligible for the Megadeth short list. But a song can be derivative of an even better song and still be worthwhile, and that’s the case here. (15) “Go To Hell” - I did not intent to include either “Go to Hell” or “99 Ways to Die” in this collection. Songs that didn’t make the cut, like “Foreclosure of a Dream” or “Countdown to Extinction,” offer a lot more lyrically. But you run the risk of being too heavy-handed if you always obsess about lyrical importance. A good collection of songs should have flow from the beginning to the end. And “Go To Hell,” despite its somewhat transparent ripoff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” is one of Dave’s best adolescent rockers (at press time, I was unable to determine which of the two songs actually came out first…so maybe Metallica took Dave’s idea once again?). Of course, Dave wasn’t a teenager when he wrote this song, but he might as well have been, and I mean that in both a good and bad way. The good aspect of teenage rock and roll is that it tends to pack more intensity than anything you can pull off when you’re older. The downside is that most teens lack the life experience (or Dylan musical genius) to move beyond the pimpled themes they know about. In the case of heavy metal, anything to do with hell or Satan is always a boon for record sales. It’s been that way since Black Sabbath and it will probably be that way forever. Mostly, Dave has avoided such themes, especially so in recent years. It’s an act of hero worship to overly praise him for moving out of this generic territory, so I’ll hold off on that, as long we also acknowledge that many metal bands never had the guts to sing about anything besides Middle Earth, poontang, and the fire down below, even when they were old enough that such themes seemed either nostalgic (Def Leppard), wishful thinking (Motley Crue), or downright idiotic (AC/DC). Megadeth has had one of the superior “getting older” metal careers, primarily because they have not tried to cash in their clichés. But as we revisit this particular collection of songs, we see the need for a bit of the “Beavis and Butthead” Megadeth that gave kids an air guitar and a reason to rock. Sometimes that’s all music is supposed to be, and in the end, giving kids a taste of the rock and roll version of the American dream may be rock’s most beautiful purpose. And from that group of Megadeth rockers, “Go to Hell” fares well with age. “Angry Again” would have been the more popular song to include here, but that song, while more conventional in structure, doesn’t have the energy or riff power of the overlooked “Go to Hell.” (16) ”99 Ways to Die” - Speaking of Beavis and Butthead, this songs comes right from the movie soundtrack of the same. The most inspired of the Megadeth soundtrack songs, this one was a perfect match with whatever Beavis and Butthead had in mind.... “99 Ways to Die...uhhh......cool!!!!!” There’s not a lot more to say about this song, except that I once cranked it over and over again at my office until the therapist working next to me left in desperation. Umm, Beavis, that kicks ass! (17) ”Peace Sells” - “Peace Sells” is one of those songs you play so much when you first hear it that it starts to lose a bit of its bite. Then you hear it live, usually at the end of the set list: lyrics and music together, this is probably a top ten metal song...period. Since it usually comes at the end of the concert, it should also come near the end of the mix, when nothing else can really follow. “What do you mean I don’t believe in God?” remains one of the most riveting opening lines in metal history, and the “Peace Sells” song structure, while not pure thrash, has a bassline so kickass that MTV had to borrow it for a few years to carry MTV News. (18) "Symphony of Destruction"- Megadeth was never much of a radio band. That explains why "Symphony of Destruction" stands as the only overplayed Megadeth song. Without the overplay factor, "Symphony of Destruction" is easily a top five Megadeth song. It certainly stands as the most effective "metal crossover" song Megadeth ever put out, a staccato riff that drove record sales without dumbing down like Dave did on "Crush 'Em." I put it at the end of this mix as it’s one of the few songs you can follow “Peace Sells” with, and in this position, I can ration the song out for special occasions. Honorable Mention- When a career spans decades, one CD isn’t enough. I ended up kicking some worthy songs to the curb, or in this case, for “Megadeth Best of Volume II,” which is actually a collection of classics and rarities. But since I don’t see myself writing up the liner notes for that anytime soon, let me do the rundown of the songs that just missed the cut for the first CD: “Wake up Dead” - One of the most important Megadeth songs, hit MTV single and all that. A heavy tune to be sure, but a little disjointed. Important but not quite there. “Foreclosure of a Dream” - Lyrically one of Dave’s finest, and a good rocker from the underrated Countdown to Extinction album. Didn’t make the cut only because I felt the need to lighten up the mood towards the end of the mix, but I wouldn’t protest if you felt differently. “Countdown to Extinction”- Maybe my favorite Megadeth “message song,” but a little stodgy musically. Fine for volume II, not quite there for volume I. “Angry Again”- If this mix was a popularity contest, I would have had to slip this one on there, but it’s never been my fave. Not a bad tune, a Megadeth “attitude song” that was derivative of a better one. One of the few overrated Mustaine tunes. “Tornado of Souls” - The best thrash song not on volume 1, almost made the cut, but Rust in Peace is already well represented here, and this one is one small step down from the big three. Dave still plays this one live, and it’s still a standout. “Prince of Darkness” - Dave goes to that “songs about the devil” well he typically avoids on this one, and comes out with an appealing late-era rocker that is a bit too much of an empty vessel to get the highest marks. A great addition to the volume II CD though. “Die Dead Enough”- A strong single from the recent System Has Failed album. A vigorous return to form for one of Dave’s best albums in years. “Gears of War”- Another keeper from United Abominations that shows how political indignation can breathe new life into a middle-aged rock and roller (the Neil Young formula). “Tears in a Vial”- Nearly a classic breakup song from the System Has Failed record. Something about it doesn’t quite hit, call it a near miss, but still plenty worthy of inclusion on the second CD. One of Dave’s best lines: “I saved my tears in a vial for you, and moved on.” ----- |
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