MEGADETH Mainman Talks About GIGANTOUR and Upcoming 'Greatest Hits' Collection

MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine recently spoke to Jerry Ewing of Total Rock about the group's upcoming tour, Gigantour, and the "Greatest Hits: Back to the Start" collection, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

On Gigantour:

"I tried to be really considerate of the acts that I wanted to choose. A lot of festivals over in the U.K. and Europe are, to me, I think, very tasteful with the diversity of the bill. And unfortunately, in the United States, a lot of the festivals over here, they're boring — they're very mundane. You've got 10 of the same types of bands here. All you need to do is just change the backdrop and you can leave all the players up there and no one would notice. 'Cause they all sound the same and they look the same.

"For me, one of the key criteria was… I wanted to have a positive and encouraging environment for people to come to. There are some festivals out there that are fun to be at and some that aren't, and I wanted the musicianship to be vital also. There are some people that I've chosen that some of the MEGADETH fans really love and some of them they don't like, and it's OK because when they book their own festival, they can pick whoever they want."

On Gigantour's co-headliner, DREAM THEATER:

"I think because of the musical ability of that group, it transcends the stigmatism of, you know, 'You've gotta have wings of skull-heads in your logo.' I certainly don't know much about them, other than what I have heard of them is very, very top-level musicianship, and I have been friends with the drummer for quite a while. It's odd that I would know this dude for so long and I don't know nothing about his music. But what I've heard since we've talked about playing together, I'm pleased that we chose them. Again, it just adds diversity to what's going on and it makes it a little harder for you to walk away from the stage, because there's always gonna be something for somebody.

"In America, with a lot of the tours that are going around, there's something called double selling where you get a band that's gonna buy the same ticket whether you are the headliner or they would buy the same ticket for the band that's opening for you. And that doesn't make much sense, because do you want to attract other people, do you want to get an opportunity to play in front of new fans? That's why you have an opener. I mean, it's not like a stand-up comic before a television show where you get an audience primed to laugh at any stupid one-liner from the script to the TV show. You wanna have diversity. It all comes back down to what I said earlier about European and U.K. festivals. I did a festival one time in Finland, or Scandinavia, and it was R.E.M., OASIS, FAITH NO MORE, SHERYL CROW, BOB DIDDLEY and MEGADETH. Now that is a diversified bill."

On why NEVERMORE was chosen for the tour:

"It had to do with who they were as people and how their music was. Their guitarist, Jeff Loomis, is really, really an exceptional guitar player and their music is really exciting, they've got a new record out, they've got a lot of support coming from the record company. The guys in my group, the Drover brothers, who are playing with me, really are close friends with them, as a lot of the guys in my staff are with my crew, and so on. And they're pretty excited about a lot of the bands.

"For the most part, I don't have time to keep my ear to the ground to check all these new bands that are out there, so a lot of the groups that I've chosen have been something that I've recently discovered, or someone else will say, 'What do you think of these guys?' And I'll go listen to them and I'll sleep on it and a couple of days later check it out again and see what happens. There were a couple of groups that we wanted to get — one, in fact, that I thought was gonna be good for the tour [presumably referring to CHILDREN OF BODOM — Ed.], and it turns out there's a rift between them and another band on here [presumably referring to CHILDREN OF BODOM guitarist Alexi Laiho's comment in the April 2005 issue of Guitar World magazine: 'There are lots of guitar players out there who play super fast and super well — but they're also super lame. Like DREAM THEATER.' — Ed.], so unfortunately it didn't work out, because I just don't want any politics on what we're doing, I want it to be really fun for everybody."

On MEGADETH's upcoming "Greatest Hits: Back to the Start" collection:

"The selection of the songs… We basically conducted a poll at the MEGADETH forums, the web site for all of our fans, and they chose their favorite songs off each record. There were records that were not part of Capitol and EMI's catalog, so obviously they're not gonna show up on there. And there were other songs that fans had chosen that were great songs but some of the ones that were skipped, I had to put my executive decree down on, because a greatest-hits record needs to be, you know, greatest hits, and there were a couple of songs that were just ignored — not because I think they weren't any good, I think that it just wasn't thought of. For example, the song 'Kill the King' was on 'Capitol Punishment', and 'Capitol Punishment' was a record that was made to appease the record company for us to settle and to be released from our contract to go forward, which… It belongs to Capitol and EMI, and it's rightly to be on this record because when they took 'Capitol Punishment' out of print, that song went away forever. So I don't feel that it's right for that song to go away 'cause it was only ever on that record. That greatest-hits record, by the way, the song selection on it was a direct setlist we were playing on tour at that moment. It wasn't too varied from what we're doing now — I mean, from the greatest-hits selection now — but it certainly wasn't 100 percent what the fans wanted."

On the possibility of another MEGADETH album:

"I don't know. The whole thing is I haven't made my decision yet. I'm really leaning towards pursuing my solo career and just letting the MEGADETH legacy end on a high note like this, although what before was 100 percent ending it now is a question mark. It would be bad business for anybody to say, 'Hey, things are going great, let's stop.' But I've gotta think about a lot of other things, like what would it be like to start brand new with great players and this new excitement that everybody seems to be having and looking for versus continuing to carry on with something that a lot of people worked at over the years and maybe it's better to just kind of leave it like it is. So I've got a moral dilemma here — what do I do? At this point, right now, I'm gonna make up my mind at the end of the tour and I'll make an announcement."