Rust in Peace

- ONE -

CASTLE DONINGTON

BEGINNINGS CAN OFTEN BE FOUND INSIDE ENDINGS. This story begins at an ending, the Megadeth performance August 20, 1988, at the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, where the band was to appear before a record crowd of 108,000, playing through a more than 100,000-watt sound system—so large it made the Guinness Book of World Records—on a bill with Iron Maiden, Kiss, David Lee Roth, and a new band from Los Angeles whose first album, Appetite for Destruction, was starting to make some noise back in the States.

DAVE MUSTAINE: Everybody was strung out and, of course, you never take enough heroin, so everybody ran out and got dope sick. Our bassist, David Ellefson—we called him Junior to avoid having a second Dave in the band—couldn’t handle it. He snapped. He told our manager that he was a junkie. Everybody had known about my bad habits, but not about David’s. They came up with this lie that he fell in the tub and sprained his wrist, but he never did.

At Castle Donington, the show went off, but what happened after was the beginning of things falling apart. We had just finished the Iron Maiden Seventh Son of a Seventh Son tour in America, and I thought that had been a great opportunity for us. After Donington, we had another seven stadium dates as support to Iron Maiden through Europe. So Far So Good… So What!, our third album, had come out in January, and we had just done the video for “In My Darkest Hour” for the Penelope Spheeris movie The Decline of Western Civilization.

CHUCK BEHLER: I was only the drummer in the band for less than two years. We went from clubs to arenas that quick. To play a show like Donington was just unimaginable to me, and we were excited. We had already done America, Europe, and Japan and took a little break. I was really looking forward to this show because I had the album Monsters of Rock from the first festival in 1980, with Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and the other bands. The cover of the record featured a live overhead shot of this massive crowd. I knew there were going to be a lot of people. I was kind of nervous, but at the same time I was really looking forward to that.

DAVID ELLEFSON: I had the same Castle Donington record as a kid growing up in Minnesota; Rainbow, Quiet Riot, Scorpions, April Wine—cool bands that I was into. It was this mythical, legendary festival that still maintained its stature as the crème de la crème of all European rock festivals. As an American metal band, the goal was always to break in Europe—that was really the end game—because once you broke in Europe, you had planted your flag, you were deemed cool, worthy. Of course, Metallica had a huge leg up on that, drummer Lars Ulrich being from Denmark. He knew how to connect with that. But Anthrax had also been there. Slayer had been over there. Megadeth had gone over only a couple of times, so this was really a huge moment for us. But Metallica had certainly broken down a lot of doors before all of us.

We played a warmup for the show at the Ritz in New York. We were going to fly to New York, play the Ritz, and from there, fly over to England, which was good because it gave us one last chance to cop and make sure we had enough drugs to get from New York to England. None of us smuggled heroin. We never brought drugs through borders or any of that stuff. By the time we got to England and were driving up to Donington, some of us were coming down off the heroin and starting to jones. I was thinking Guns N’ Roses was going to be there, and we knew they got high. We knew that they were like us; they did heroin and coke.

CHUCK BEHLER: We stayed in an old-style hotel where Guns N’ Roses was staying too. I hung out a lot with their drummer, Steven Adler, a cool guy. He told me, “This is it—this is the gig, man. It doesn’t get any better than this.” He was kind of nervous. We got on the bus to go to the gig and when we drove past the fence and saw the crowd for the first time, it was almost overwhelming. It was a sea of people. We had done a sound check the day before—there were so many bands, they held sound checks for three days before the festival; we did ours the same day as Kiss and Guns N’ Roses—but nobody was there. The day of the show, though, it was just… wow.

DAVE MUSTAINE: At the hotel the night before Castle Donington, the bar was a who’s who of hard rock. The promoter showed up in his Lamborghini Countach to check on everybody. This was his biggest show ever. We weren’t the only band jonesing for heroin. Someone said one of the Guns N’ Roses guys got mugged out in the streets that night trying to score.

DAVID ELLEFSON: Heroin is a very difficult drug to tour with. Whereas coke, pot, and beer were readily available, heroin was not. Guns N’ Roses had just come off a huge run though America with Aerosmith and they were mostly cleaned up. We were not. We stayed at a hotel at Leicester Square, and the Iron Maiden guys were there. In addition to being super jet-lagged, I was coming down hard off my heroin. I was getting dope sick big-time. My girlfriend Charlie was with me, and she had put her foot down about the drugs when we first got together, so I had been hiding my habit from her. And everybody else but Dave. But now the word was out.

I called a doctor to come to the hotel, and he wrote me a prescription for codeine, which, when you’re on heroin, is like taking baby aspirin. It doesn’t really do much. The doctor was disgusted with me and called me a “fucking American drug addict.” Our agent, Andy Somers, was there and he chastised me, telling me how disappointed in me he was. The whole fucking house of cards was crumbling down.

That night, Charlie got extravagantly drunk. The next day when we had to leave to go to Donington Park, she was still so fucked up I had to leave her in my bunk on our bus. She was a wreck. Meanwhile, I was dope sick and felt terrible. Biggest day of my life, biggest day of the band’s career, our biggest show ever, and I’m fucking not fully present because I was so strung out. All of our heroes were there—Iron Maiden, Kiss, David Lee Roth.

DAVE MUSTAINE: His girlfriend was really bad. She was very controlling. She once made him dump a gram of heroin into the carpet. Too bad he didn’t know that if you blew up a balloon and rubbed it over the carpet, all the heroin would stick to the balloon and it would come out of the carpet, but he was pretty much an amateur junkie. Ha-ha.

CHUCK BEHLER: I was standing on the side of the stage watching Guns N’ Roses with Lars Ulrich, who was there hanging out. We had no idea what was happening, but the band suddenly stopped playing. At first, I just thought it was some weirdness because Guns N’ Roses back then was known for doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Stopping playing in the middle of a show was just the kind of crap they would pull. Steven got off his drums and pointed into the audience. I thought maybe vocalist Axl Rose was mad at somebody and had jumped into the crowd. He would do stuff like that. But when the band went silent and walked off the stage, it was obvious something else went wrong. It turned out that the massive crowd, slipping around on a muddy, soggy field, had crushed two people down in front. The kids died, but we didn’t know that until much later. We did know they were hurt because we saw the ambulance come. I don’t know how the heck they got them out of there, but they did. Dave and I gave an interview between sets to a local radio station and we didn’t mention anything, even though it was on our minds.

DAVE MUSTAINE: I was not watching Guns N’ Roses when the people got crushed to death, but we were all aware what had happened. There were a lot of people pulled out of the crowd who were getting crushed. It was a terrible setup. The hill sloped down to the stage from the far end of the raceway. The field was sloppy and muddy from rain. With a hundred thousand people at the top of the hill, they simply slid down and couldn’t help themselves. Many people were taken out of the front and, to tell the truth, the promoters were lucky that only two died. Behind the stage was an embankment where they laid out all these kids along the wall. There were a lot of kids. I walked by them on my way to the stage—“You guys okay? You okay? You okay? You okay?” That was fucked up, seeing all the people that had been squashed.

DAVID ELLEFSON: They sold these two-liter bottles of ale and these fans would drink the ale, piss in the bottle, and throw the bottle at the stage. When they’d throw it, piss would come flying out in a big ten-foot wheel of urine. People were throwing mud, not because they hated us, but as a kind of weird salute, the way they gobbed the punk bands. I was strung out. I used my bass as a Viking shield to try to stave off the mud and the piss wheels. Somehow we got through the show.

DAVE MUSTAINE: Some of the things that were coming up on the stage were pieces of the ground, either chunks of grassy clay or soaking mud. Some were hunks of sod. Ellefson got hit a couple of times. My guitar got splattered, but I’m fairly agile onstage and can move around pretty good if I see stuff coming, but I was covered in mud before long.

CHUCK BEHLER: David Ellefson had been doing a lot of smack and he was in withdrawal. You would have never known it, watching him play that day, but he was in pretty bad shape.

DAVE MUSTAINE: We went up onstage to watch David Lee Roth. Lars was there. There are photos of Lars, Slash, and Axl from Guns N’ Roses and me sucking on a Jack Daniels bottle backstage after we played. We were all sitting in a circle waiting for one of the other bands to play. Lars was wearing Slash’s hat. It was one of the first times I’d run into him at anything significant we were doing, and here we were with this whole thing unraveling around us. That’s also where I met British rock photographer Ross Halfin. He was standing in my way and I went to give him a little pinch on his arm to get him out of the way, but I accidentally pinched him too hard. He pulled his arm back and looked up like, Who the fuck did that? Lars and I were both there, so I’m not even sure he knew it was me. I hope he didn’t.

CHUCK BEHLER: We went back to the hotel. Junior was sick, really sick. I didn’t see him acting that way or feeling that way at all during the show. They held some meetings, evidently, with our manager, Keith Rawls, and agent, Andy Somers, with the two of them in their hotel room later on that night. I didn’t really have much to say about it. They made that decision and that’s what happened. I wasn’t in the hotel room with them. I found out later that night. It wasn’t like we had a band meeting. But, to tell you the truth, I really wasn’t aware that David had gotten that bad. I really wasn’t.

DAVE MUSTAINE: Ellefson was coming out of his skin because he was going into withdrawal really bad. Whenever I went into withdrawal, I just toughed it out. I shook. I sweated. I puked. I shit. I would use alcohol and pot to power my way through it. And they do have stuff you can get over the counter in England to help you get through it, but he didn’t want to have any part of that. He wanted to go back home.

This had happened before, earlier in the year. We went to Japan and one of us ran out of heroin. We were supposed to go to Australia after that, but we canceled and came home. That cost us getting banned in Australia for quite a while.

DAVID ELLEFSON: I was so sick all I could do was crawl back to the bus after our set. Kiss, my favorite band growing up, was taking the stage, but I couldn’t even lift my head. I sank back in my bunk on the bus and covered my head. I could barely hear them play as the bus pulled out and we left Donington Park for London to catch our flight home. It had been agreed that Dave and I would go into rehab in Van Nuys at a program called ASAP as soon as we got back. It was pathetic.

It was further agreed upon that because I was the one forced to cancel the rest of the dates by my girlfriend that the excuse would be that I fell in the shower, broke my arm. That was the official reason announced as to why Megadeth would be off the remaining shows. They got Testament to fill in for us. And that was it.

DAVE MUSTAINE: But that wasn’t it. David Ellefson initially blamed Charlie for us having to cancel those dates. I’m sure today he would admit it was his disease of addiction that caused those cancelation disasters.

ANDY SOMERS: Junior came to me. I was shocked at how strung out and addicted he was. Did I always know Megadeth drank? Yeah. Did I always know there had been drug use, especially with the original lineup? Yeah. They were supposed to continue in Europe, but we pulled those dates down and came home.

DAVE MUSTAINE: I felt shitty. I understood what Ellefson was going through because obviously I’d been through it myself, the withdrawal and everything, but I didn’t want to cancel the dates. That was terrible, but it was bittersweet. We were going home and all I was thinking was, go home, get high, and then go check into rehab to see what that will be like.

THE BAND RETURNED to the United States and this lineup of Megadeth—Dave Mustaine, David Ellefson, Chuck Behler, and Jeff Young—never played together again.