Dave Mustaine beat cancer and wrote a killer album — with help from his Nashville friends
A path isn’t supposed to run from Dave Mustaine‘s hillside rural estate to a nearby rental where he and his band retreated to cut a new album.
A few hundred yards of rocky, overgrown field and untamed wooded patches separate his home from the makeshift office.
He traveled between these houses so many times that on one overcast morning in August, his ATV slipped neatly into a pair of muddy, worn tracks.
“This is how I used to get to work every day,” Mustaine said between light pushes on the gas pedal. “IV on my wrist.”
He wrestled his way to work with an IV bag shadowing him because the 60-year-old spent much of 2019 undertaking chemotherapy for a throat cancer that could’ve derailed his four-decade career indefinitely.
But Mustaine — a world-class thrash guitarist who with his band Megadeth influenced a generation of headbanging followers — built a legacy on cutting his own path. His cancer battle wouldn’t be any different.
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Now, Megadeth returns this week with “The Sick, the Dying… and the Dead!,” a blistering thrash album that finds the frontman diving headfirst into high-speed tales of mass plague, nuclear meltdown and intergalactic escapism — each throwing fuel on one of the band’s fieriest releases this century.
Nobody would’ve blamed Mustaine for pushing “pause” on album-making during chemotherapy. But he trudged on.
“America loves a comeback story,” Mustaine said. “I have just been stubborn and not willing to have anybody count me out.”
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Moving to Tennessee
How did a heavy metal torchbearer find his way to Music City, U.S.A.?
In 2014, five years before his cancer diagnosis, Mustaine and his family relocated to rural Williamson County, in part, because his daughter Electra wanted to pursue a singing career.
Her ambitions coupled with the California native and his wife, Pam Mustaine, hoping to find a rural getaway where “I could live my life and not have somebody’s nose in my underwear,” Mustaine said.
They searched for years near Austin, Texas, before digging roots on an 11-acre backroad property south of Nashville. A horse barn and rolling, fenced fields line a curving driveway leading to the hillside estate.
Inside the house, Mustaine’s office overflows with models of his signature Flying V guitar, Gold and Platinum-selling certifications and Megadeth memorabilia, including the band’s first Grammy Award, won for 2016 album “Dystopia.”
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Outside, he traded headbanging history for serene landscape. After a short downhill trek from his house, Mustaine parked his ATV near a pair of family horses grazing along a chest-high fence. He walked gingerly toward one of the horses — Gerrit — before running his hands calmly across the animal’s coat.
He wasn’t always a horse guy; a few bad run-ins as a kid left Mustaine with poor memories, he said. His wife reintroduced him to the animal, and now “I love this guy,” Mustaine said as he stood next to the Friesian steed.
“I remember when we brought him out here,” Mustaine said. “He didn’t know what to do because he’s so free. It’s so wonderful.”
‘I feel sorry for the cancer’
In 2019, Mustaine revealed that doctors found a cancerous tumor near his throat. Megadeth halted touring indefinitely as the bandleader immediately entered chemotherapy.
Around the world, many in hard rock rallied behind the ex-Metallica member and “Peace Sells” songwriter.
“A lot of people were joking around like, ‘Dave Mustaine’s got cancer. Oh my God, I feel sorry for the cancer,'” he said. “I thought that was a cute way to encourage me.”
But at home, he felt shook.
Mustaine learned about his cancer after visiting a specialist for lingering pain post-root canal. The doctor adopted an ice-cold bedside manner that still sits poorly with Mustaine. Unfiltered, the doctor hit him with the news like a gut punch: “It’s the big C.”
“I was gobsmacked,” Mustaine said. “I said, ‘Excuse me?” And he’d already walked out. I didn’t get to follow up.”
Mustaine grabbed his things and headed to the parking lot, dazed by what he heard.
“I sat in my car for [what] seems like an eternity,” he said. “I think I had gone into shock. When I realized I had been sitting there for a while, I had been crying. I didn’t realize that. I basically blacked out. … I was thinking about dying.”
He began chemotherapy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, adopting treatment that needed to balance eliminating the tumor without dealing with career-ending damage to his throat.
Anthony Cmelak, a professor of radiation oncology, treated Mustaine. The two eventually hit it off, and Mustaine enlisted Cmelak to co-write a song for the new Megadeth album.
“I just felt horrible for him because here’s this guy who has been on stage in front of 10s of thousands of people,” Cmelak said. He later added: “To see him change from being scared [not] about his career, but his life — to see him go through it day to-day — he seemed to take it in strides.
Mustaine beat cancer after 51 radiation treatments and nine chemotherapy sessions. He returned to the stage in early 2020 — weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic derailed touring for months. He maintains his health today through nutritional supplements and regular jujitsu, he said.
He credits being “really blessed” with an overflowing support system — and a little bit of “intestinal fortitude” — for helping him through the months of treatment.
“I feel like I got a higher calling …” he said. “I looked at some of the things that were important, and some of the stuff that wasn’t. I started putting things into perspective.”
‘The Sick, the Dying… and the Dead!’
On Friday, Megadeth unleashes “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!,” an album that may sound like post-COVID commentary, but isn’t. Mustaine began chewing on the idea before a global pandemic upended much of the world.
Some of the riffs began germinating in his head “many, many years ago,” like when chords from his pre-Metallica band Panic resurfaced years later on essential Megadeth album “Rust In Peace,” Mustaine said.
He often jots down one-off ideas from books or films that could be fleshed out for a song. For example, “…The Dead!” title track spiraled out of a morbid interest in nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie.”
The song opens with a British belter telling listeners to “bring out your dead,” a theatrical touch often found in Megadeth’s work.
“The plague came from rats and fleas and humans getting bitten,” Mustaine said. “So many people have said, ‘Oh, yeah. You wrote this about the pandemic.’ Fat (expletive) chance. Why don’t you listen to the lyrics and see what it is?
“I can’t get any more clearer unless I started out, ‘One, two, three! This is not about COVID. Na-na-na, na-na-na-na.'”
He enlisted a handful of unlikely Nashville friends for the album, including John Clement, a U.S. Army veteran. Clement helped Mustaine sharpen “Night Stalker,” a song about black-ops helicopters that features Ice-T.
And Cmelak co-wrote “Dogs Of Chernobyl,” a six-minute metal marathon loosely about animals left behind after the 1986 nuclear meltdown. Mustaine asked Cmelak on a Saturday morning if he would share some radiology experience for a song. He sent lyrics the following Monday and the band cut a track two days later.
“I think he wanted descriptive terminology on how your bodily functions would change after exposure to massive doses of radiation,” Cmelak said. He added: “He also wanted a flair of someone being left behind … I geared toward that and it came around very quickly.”
Today, Mustaine’s grown into a regular member of Nashville’s evolving rock community. He launched a signature guitar with local six-string powerhouse Gibson; sometimes fans can find him strumming a few chords ahead of a Nashville SC match; and he occasionally pops up to promote House of Mustaine, a boutique wine company ran by his wife and daughter.
He made some changes when Megadeth returned to the road, like down-tuning his guitar because he can’t hit high notes like he did before cancer treatment. But Mustaine said he’ll keep playing his heavy, fast-moving music as long as his body allows.
He’s not done cutting his path yet, after all.
“Some days are good, some days are great,” he said. “I feel happy about my life right now.”
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