David Ellefson Thinks Risk is ‘One of the Great Megadeth Records’
In the pantheon of Megadeth‘s rather large discography, everyone’s got their favorite and least favorite albums. For some, the former can be anything from Rust In Peace to maybe Peace Sells… But Who’s Buyin’? or maybe one of the newer offerings like The World Needs a Hero or Endgame. The same can be said of the other coin, though the list of hated albums is pretty small — Supercollider or Risk stand out.
In a recent interview with Oran O’Beirne of Overdrive.ie (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), ex-Megadeth bassist and solo game enthusiast David Ellefson came out in defense of one of his former band’s two most hated albums, suggesting that Risk deserves a spot next to the band’s all-time greats.
“I think with Risk, with Megadeth, we wrote that record mostly at rehearsal, then we went to Nashville and finished it in the studio and it didn’t have time to simmer and percolate and really kind of sink into us.
“Here’s what I found: if you’re not a fan of your music first, it’s hard to convince someone else to be. And that album just didn’t — and now I listen back to it, and it still remains one of the great Megadeth records, even though it doesn’t sound like a Megadeth record of the past, leading up to that point. But we didn’t have enough time to let it just kind of absorb into us. And then next thing you know, we’re right on the road playing these songs and it’s, like, ‘Oh, shit. These songs aren’t really connecting so much.’ To just have the time, to let the stuff, to let the material absorb…
“[Former Megadeth guitarist] Jeff Young is really big on this whole mindset of we’re analog creatures, and that’s why digital music, it doesn’t connect with us, and it doesn’t stay with us.”
Yeah, to say the songs weren’t connecting so much with fans would be an understatement. It’s commonly considered one of the worst of the band’s output despite the fact that it debuted at number 16 on the Billboard charts and reached gold certification in the U.S. for selling half a million copies.
During the same interview, Ellefson was asked if he’d change anything about Risk and his answer was an emphatic “no.”
“No, because you’d have to start all over on that. You’d have to go back to the rehearsal room.
“Here’s the long and the short of it: our manager at the time was really leaning on us to dig deeper into this radio approach, an approach that worked very well on Cryptic Writings, because we said, ‘Hey, let’s make a third of the record… We’ve gotta reinvent the band in a way that’s competitive with what’s happening around us.’ There’s a radio format here in America called Active Rock radio, and now bands like Disturbed, Shinedown, Godsmack, they own that, Halestorm, they own that format. And we had some success with it, with ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ and ‘Sweating Bullets’ and stuff like that in the early ’90s. And then with Cryptic, a third [of the songs were] radio, a third metal, a third kind of whatever, and it worked. It was the right approach.
“With Risk, there was just kind of this really heavy push, ‘If some is good, more must be better.’ And our attitude as well, ‘When we get down to Nashville [to make the album], we’ll crush out these metal tunes. That’ll be easy. No problem.’ And the truth of it is it took so much time crafting the other songs for the record that we didn’t really have the time or the mindset to make those metal songs that the record should have had to sort of balance it out. So it tended it to be a record that was skewed more as a crafted radio album. And admittedly, there’s a piece of it that we didn’t include, that we just kind of ran out of time, focus and energy for. And that’s the part that’s on us, for sure. And I think what that taught us was, and then for The World Needs A Hero, we started to re-chart the course of the ship again, was we have to like the songs.
“If we like it, there’s gonna be a bunch of other knuckleheads just like us who are gonna like it too. So let’s preach to that choir, rather than trying to go out and get a tribe that we aren’t a part of and may never get invited into, let’s just make our tribe tighter. ‘Cause, look, that’s ultimately how Megadeth and thrash, our genre, that’s how it grew.”
So there you have it. The album that caused Marty Friedman to leave the band apparently should be near the top of Megadeth fans’ favorite albums list. You can’t make that up.
