It's been a while since we've checked in with Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine. Dave has been headlining another Gigantour run and gave an interview to a local Denver newspaper, where the topic of religion and God came up:
“Honestly, to boil it down, religion, it sucks. For me it’s really all about having a personal relationship with God, and people don’t want to do that because they don’t want to be held accountable. It’s kind of like when you’re in AA: You have a sponsor and the sponsor helps you get through the day without drinking. I needed that accountability to help me get off heroin.”
The thing is, though, he has cited his views "as a Christian" for certain viewpoints in the past, where here he is blasting religion and just talking about his personal relationship with God. But overall, nothing too bad. "Finding God" is what helped him sober up, as it has helped many people.
The topic of addiction led to his thoughts about Jeff Hanneman, who passed from liver failure to do overdrinking earlier this year:
“Unfortunately, Jeff and I were never really close. We toured together a lot over the years, but our two camps were pretty separate. The bands were kind of acquaintances in the beginning, though that was more so me and Kerry [King]. Jeff was always a little more aloof. It would just be kind of, “Hey man, what’s up?” when we saw each other.
Also, for the greater period of the time I knew him, I was starting to go the route of getting away from my addictions, and I was unable to hang around with people who were partying. And people know about Jeff’s drinking, and that’s unfortunately what led to his death. It was liver failure.
And you know, getting bitten by a spider, that’s just random. But I think because Jeff was kind of unaware of what was going on and wore long sleeves all the time, no one else really saw his arm, and so no one said, “Dude, you’ve got a f*cking problem going on here.”
The sad thing is, we’ve lost a good guy and a mighty guitar player. But now what we need to ask is: What can be learned from this? How can we honor Jeff’s life? And how can we use his unfortunate passing to help young people not go the same route? So the whole thing saddens me, but I also can’t act like we were best friends, because we weren’t. It was a similar thing with Dimebag Darrell, where it seemed like everybody jumped on his bandwagon after his death. I don’t want to do that.”
I can't argue with anything he said here. What's going on? I'm agreeing with Dave Mustaine?! Get remaining Gigantour dates here.
[via Metal Insider]
