Headbanger's Blog recently conducted an interview with
MEGADETH mainman
Dave Mustaine. An except from the chat follows:
Headbanger's Blog: When did you start seeing signs that
Glen Drover [former
MEGADETH guitarist] might not be happy with what he was doing in the band?
Mustaine: You know, out of respect for
Glen,
I'm not gonna really talk too much about that. He was having some stuff
that he was dealing with, and we're talking about someone who left for
personal matters. He didn't get into it, so why should I? I frankly
don't know what [made him want to leave] other than what he told me,
which is he wanted to leave to be with his family. Now,
Glen is the brother of our drummer [
Shawn Drover],
and out of just sheer stupidity you would talk shit about an exiting
member when he's got a sibling in your band, so I've got nothing to
say. And even if I was mad a
Glen, which I'm not, I wouldn't say anything about it.
Glen is a talented player, and he had given the thumbs up to
Chris Broderick [new
MEGADETH guitarist] coming in, and
Shawn is the one who even recommended
Chris Broderick. So, I was really excited.
Glen was influenced a lot by
Chris Poland, and we don't play a lot of
MEGADETH from the
Chris Poland era.
Chris was totally influenced by
Marty Friedman, who we play a lot of music from. It was the longest lineup, and for subsequent guitar players after
Marty left, I tried to find people who sounded a little more like him than just kind of going in whatever direction I wanted to.
There was no real rhyme or reason between the choices of a player like
Chris Poland, and then jumping to someone like a Jeff Young and then jumping to
Marty Friedman. It wasn't like I was advancing or progressing or following any kind of educational graph to get from
Chris to
Marty. The good thing now is every song is ready to go.
Chris has been down here playing the songs with me. We play them in slow-mo,
we film them on video cameras and we're going over every single note —
so much so that we even corrected things that bass and drums were doing
wrong while we were doing rehearsal here prior to leaving for the tour.
We got deep down in there and found a bunch of stuff that made it even
tighter. I loved playing with
Glen. This is a new chapter. I think we've taken it up a level. I appreciate
Glen helping me find
Chris. Now it's time to move on.
Read more at
Headbanger's Blog.