Dave Mustaine Wants You To Know He's Not As Much Of An Asshole As You Think He Is

Megadeth tent pole Dave Mustaine was recently interviewed by Elliot In The Morning, with the notoriously fiery frontman speaking out against the perception that he’s hard to work with.

Discussing how Mustaine and new Megadeth drummer Chris Adler (ex Lamb Of God) gelled during the early songwriting process for the band’s new album Dystopia, Mustaine had nothing but kind things to say about Adler. However when asked if he thought Adler was cautious working with him at first, he was candid about his reputation as an asshole.

“Unfortunately, there’s a terrible lie out there about me and my reputation, how difficult I am to work with,” he said.

Citing his collaboration with Adler as proof against such claims, he was resolute in denouncing them. “Chris will attest now, after working together, that it’s B.S.”

Discussing whether on not the perception he’s difficult to work with bothers him, he said “no, I don’t care about it,” before going on to explain that it actually kind of does.

“I think it’s kind of a bummer, though,” he admitted. “Sometimes when people, for the first time, come up to you. It’s such a pregnant pause when people will go… they’ll meet you and go, ‘God, you know, I heard you were such an a-hole,’ and you just kind of look at them, like, ‘Uh-huh.'”

Going on with an analogy about getting turned down by a girl at his first school dance as an explanation about how getting rejected can lead to lashing out, he said this was the case with him and Metallica.

“That’s kind of what we do when we get any kind of rejection; we make the other person out to be really horrible. Evidence of that was when I parted ways with Metallica,” he said.

“Neither one of us really wanted to tell the absolute truth about what happened; we wanted to make the other party the bad guys. And I think that’s what took so long for us to come to the truth that, ‘Hey, we still really love each other a lot. And it was never meant to be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.'”

Gallery: Megadeth, Children of Bodom – Hordern Pavilion, Sydney 2015 / Photos By Ashley Mar