While metal masters Megadeth arrive in Houston tonight as part of the tour to promote their most recent record, Super Collider, this year the band also released the CD/DVD Countdown to Extinction Live.
The sonic souvenir of last year's tour celebrated the 20th anniversary of the popular release in which they performed the entire record start to finish, along with other Megadeth classics. It's the band's second such thematic jaunt, having given Rust in Peace similar treatment.
"Countdown was a fun record, and it came at a fun time," Megadeth founder/singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine says today. "Everyone thought the economy was great. And while it was weird times, people were happy."
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However, he also notes that in 1992 things "went to hell" for heavy-metal music - and not just because Countdown debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, thwarted from reaching the top spot by Billy Ray Cyrus' Some Gave All.
"After that, you were either Def Leppard or Nirvana," Mustaine says with no shortage of disgust. Still, it remains the band's biggest commercial success, and Mustaine enjoyed playing some of its deeper cuts on tour. Some had never been played live before by any of the band's many lineups.
"Those songs were fun because we hadn't done them, and it was interesting to see if they were going to be a train wreck or not," he says. "Some of them had multiple guitar parts, and we had to combine them to [play live]. It was almost algebraic at times."
In addition to Mustaine, the only other member in the current lineup that was also there for Countdown is bassist David Ellefson, which came as a surprise to many fans.
The two Davids had protracted personal and legal battles over when Mustaine disbanded the group in 2002 after suffering a debilitating arm injury, then released The System Has Failed two years later under the band's name, but without Ellefson's participation.
It was purportedly a Mustaine solo effort that took the more familiar Megadeth moniker for contractual reasons. Mustaine's version of the feud appeared in his very candid, page-turning autobiography, Mustaine.
Ellefson -- who, like Mustaine, has also since embraced devout Christianity -- returned to the group in 2010, and this year released an autobiography, My Life with Deth.
"The key thing is that our ups and downs are in the past tense. We've resolved our differences, and part of that happened when I turned my life around," Mustaine says. "And even though I was disagreeing with him on a lot of stuff, I still loved the guy."
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