"James says, 'Kill him!' This guy looks at the two of us and says, 'Who’s gonna kill me?' And James pointed at me." Dave Mustaine looks back on Metallica's wild early days

(Image credit: Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage)

By his own admission, in the early '80s, when he was Metallica's guitarist, Dave Mustaine was an angry young man, and wasn't afraid to deal out a little 'attitude adjustment' to those who crossed him or his friends.

"I would be destructive," Megadeth's frontman admits in a new interview with British newspaper The Telegraph. "If there’s somebody getting in your face, you know, pulling something, trying to take advantage of you, I’m the guy you want there with you."

In his 2010 autobiography, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, the 64-year-old Californian musician admitted that his personality, particularly when amplified by considerable alcohol intake, wasn't always aligned with those of his bandmates James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich.

"The more they drank, the goofier they became," he wrote. "With me it was a different story. The more I drank, the more I sought an outlet for my rage and frustration. I wanted to get out and do some cruising and bruising."

But as Mustaine points out to Telegraph writer Neil McCormick, his bandmates were often thankful for his 'feisty' demeanour in the early years of the band.

"We were at a club," he remembers, "and some guy was punching on a girl, and James says, 'Kill him!' This guy turns around and looks at the two of us and says, 'Who’s gonna kill me?' And James pointed at me. I had to fight the guy on the spot."

On another occasion, Mustaine recalls, he broke someone’s leg because they "were giving Lars a hard time."

"When Metallica first came to San Francisco I thought Lars’ guitarists were either going to get him killed or else land him in jail,” the band's old friend Ron Quintana once recalled . “Hetfield and Mustaine were just out of control. For a time it seemed like Dave would get in a fight every single night on Broadway. He wasn’t always the instigator, he didn’t always start the fights, but he usually finished them. He was a tough guy and was always drunk. I didn’t expect him to last the ‘80s."

"I think my younger self just needed to be loved," Mustaine tells The Telegraph.

Megadeth's final album, Megadeth is out now. It features Megadeth's take on Metallica's Ride The Lightning, which Mustaine co-wrote. "I wanted to do something to close the circle on my career," he says.

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

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