New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ RoadRunner Records) Megadeth bassist
David Ellefson was interviewed by the Denver alt-weekly Westword, and discussed his own and the band's earliest musical days, how he came to join the band (which he describes as having "punk attitude with metal chops"), and more.
Says Ellefson, "I grew up in the Midwest, so a lot of the stuff I heard was on the radio, stuff like Kiss, Styx, Foreigner, BTO. It was kind of the arena rock of those days. I heard it on the radio station WLS out of
Chicago while I was riding the school bus as a kid, probably when I was about ten years old. By eleven, I got a bass guitar. By twelve, I put my first band together, and by thirteen, I was actually gigging professionally."
He explains his relationship with Dave Mustaine as follows: "For Dave, to have someone like me who would be his stalwart, right hand man over the years - because it's not easy starting a band. Bands gobble guys up, man. It's a hard life. It's not like we had a bunch of money. We had opportunity, but that's about it. So Dave and I, I'd say our story is really kind of an American success story even on a business level: Here's two guys that agreed that this is what we were going to go do and we started with nothing and turned it into something."
And did you know Ellefson wrote a book some years back? He did; it's called Making
Music Your Business, and as he explains it, "It was kind of a way to give something back to our fans. Especially the musicians who, like all of us...You can't really go to school to learn it. Everybody's career path is different. But there's so much in the business that you figure out on your own and I thought it would be a cool way to give something back, that was my motive behind it."
