Marty Friedman on Megadeth: “I Don’t Think We Cared as Much About Metallica as People Put in the Press”
I feel like, at one point, if you asked anyone who Megadeth was you’d get back “Oh, that’s that band from the guy who got kicked out of Metallica because he was a mean drunk and all the rest of the band were party drunks.” Eventually they had to form their own identity and become “Oh yeah, Megadeth, that’s Dave Mustaine’s band.” And, according to Marty Friedman, the culture of Megadeth didn’t entirely revolve around hating Metallica, as much as the media tried to depict Megadeth as the great anti-Metallica.
In a recent interview with Vanyaland, Friedman was asked about a section in his book when he referred to the rivalry between Metallica and Megadeth as “fabricated hype,” and Friedman talked about how much he and his bandmates respected Metallica:
“I don’t think we cared as much about Metallica as people put in the press. We were definitely our own band, our own entity as far as I’m concerned. We admired Metallica for the great work that they did, and they’re playing a similar genre of music to what we were doing. So, there is no question that we were watching their every move, what they were doing, what we could learn from it, what we could adapt to our situation from their success. I mean, we’re both heavy metal bands, and Mustaine pioneered this heavy metal rhythm guitar style. Hetfield pioneered this heavy metal guitar style. They both were very, very important in the formation of thrash metal.
“I think we could both learn from each other and we could certainly learn from Metallica’s great success. And so there was no question that we watched that. However, it wasn’t like any kind of, ‘Look, we hate Metallica’ and ‘We want to beat them.’ There was absolutely no — not that I saw — any kind of feud type of thinking, but I have no idea what Dave’s personal relationships are with those guys. I just remember the journalists, it’s a juicy headline, and so they go with it, and that stuff goes on to this day. But that part was probably fabricated a lot in the media from our side. We were just way, way too busy with our own music, our own careers, to really follow them that much. However, we did respect them a lot. I respected them a lot. I continue to respect them, and I think they’re an awesome band and [there’s still] lots to learn from them.”
The whole narrative of Mustaine being a bitter little bitch about Metallica to this day always seemed to be exaggerated. By much of what we were led to believe, Mustaine’s personality was supposedly based primarily around his hatred of his former bandmates. People are obviously way more complex than that and I’m sure his feelings towards Metallica have to be way more complicated than that.
