After releasing what is likely their final studio album, thrash metal titans Megadeth are crisscrossing the world on their farewell tour. But a few years ago, Dave Mustaine—the band’s co-founder and creative force—almost experienced another goodbye. To his life.
In the summer 2019, the singer/guitarist was diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue. The Big C. But through treatment, radiation, chemotherapy, a little Brazilian jujitsu, and the sheer dogged determination that has marked his music career, he beat it.
Mustaine relives it all, while discussing what he’s learned from it and how it affects his life today, in In My Darkest Hour: A Memoir (240 pp., $30, Da Capo). This book could not have a more perfect title, taken from the 1988 Megadeth track that’s one of his earliest, deepest songs. It was the only choice.
“There were no others. Because that’s the real deal. Though I wasn’t alone, it was a lonely, dark time for me. This was very much a bad situation, and the regiment was just brutal,” Mustaine says via Zoom from his Nashville home.
“I’ve always been very open with my fans and thought it was important because so many were supportive of me through this experience. I want people to get some hope out of it.”
Mustaine mentions it’s now a regular occurrence for people to approach him with their own cancer journey stories. “I feel so sorry for them. For me, my outlook was really powerful. I’ve always joked around my family about being sick. I tell them when a bug gets inside of me, it dies. And some of my friends said they felt sorry for cancer in this! I just had to follow the doctor’s direction and pray. I prayed a lot.”
Among Mustaine’s biggest supporters—and the most affected—were (and are) his wife Pam, daughter Electra, and son Justis. Among the most moving sections of the book are when he talks about them and fearing more for their sake than his own should he not make it.
Early in his diagnosis, he and Pam flew to Houston in a neighbor’s private aircraft for some consultations at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Ultimately, it was the distance between the family home and Houston that made him decide against inpatient care.
“It was just too far away, and that was the whole reason. I wanted to see my wife and kids every day. We have a very tight family,” he offers.
In My Darkest Hour was written with journalist Joe Layden, who also collaborated with him on his 2010 memoir, Mustaine. “He and I have a very interesting relationship,” Mustaine says. “He’s an amazing writer and his spirit is one of an educated uncle or big brother. He helped me get my story out, because a lot of it needed coaxing. Pulling it out of me because it was all in a dark place I blocked out. He was able to get stuff out of me that I probably wouldn’t have said on my own.”
In one of the book’s most harrowing passages, Mustaine’s head is fitted for his “cancer mask” he must wear during radiation, formed tightly to the confines of his face and neck (illustrated on the book’s cover). Feeling claustrophobic and full of anxiety, he panics and rips off the first one. Only to have to endure the whole process all over again.
Still, Mustaine found the strength to channel his pain into creativity. He alternated between hospital rooms and recording studios (with the band) to lay down tracks for 2022’s The Sick, The Dying…and The Dead! That all this happened during the time of COVID only added to the album’s themes.
This year has been a great year for Megadeth. Their self-titled and purpotedly final studio release gave them their first No. 1 album on the Billboard chart in their entire 40+ year career. And Mustaine certainly seems to wave a goodbye in the heartfelt song “The Last Note.”
He says he got the chart news at home via a phone call at from Justis, who had just heard it from the Orchard, a distribution division of Sony. And while elated, he also knew there was an aspect of timing in the triumph, and what the competition was during that particular seven-day period.
“Here’s the perfect example! If our record was to come out during Christmas week, we would never have charted because Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift are going to be fighting for that spot with their fucking Christmas albums!” he laughs. “And thank God Michael Jackson didn’t do a Christmas album!”
But Megadeth, I remind him, did put their spin on some holiday classics when they appeared on a 2013 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote their fake album Thrashing Through the Snow: a Very Megadeth Christmas. For the duet “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Mustaine is joined by winsome singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis, identifying with the woman in the song who wants to leave, saying “”No, seriously, I have to go away, I’m scared.”
The current lineup of Megadeth also includes Teemu Mäntysaari (guitar), James LoMenzo (bass), and Dirk Verbeuren (drums). When asked what makes the current band lineup stand out in his mind from the others, Mustaine says that he “promised himself” he’s stop comparing them, noting that they’ve shifted for any number of reasons including death, drugs, and musical differences.
But he then goes on to tell the tale of one guitarist who “sat in for a couple of months” on tour but a “legend” has grown to note he was an official member. While another guitarist they were interested in didn’t seem capable of learning the solos for a record himself, telling Mustaine that his guitar teacher would do that, then show the new recruit how to play them.
“I thought to myself ‘Are you fucking mad?’ And you know what I did?” Mustaine asks. “I hired his teacher!”
Megadeth’s only Texas stop on the farewell tour will be in San Antonio at the Alamodome on September 29, where they’ll be sandwiched between Anthrax and headliner Iron Maiden. As he writes in In My Darkest Hour, Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson—who went through his own cancer battle—gave encouraging words and advice to Mustaine during his own.
But it was on Iron Maiden’s 1981 album Killers (with pre-Dickinson vocalist Paul Di’anno) that he first became familiar with the band, soon to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“I was a teenager living in Huntington Beach on my own, my mom had moved out, and I had gone to the Westminster Mall, and they had a record store there,” Mustaine recalls. “There was a girl there who used to hang out with us, and I traded her some stuff for new records. I saw AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock and it changed my life. On my second or third time I came across Killers. And when it went into ‘Wrathchild,’ I thought ‘this is some pretty dangerous music there!’”
Mustaine then launches into his impression of Di’Anno’s power vocals, though he was not aware of the singer’s 2024 death until the Houston Press informed him.
The cancer he details in In My Darkest Hour wasn’t the first health crisis that Dave Mustaine has faced: there was drug and alcohol addiction, and permanent damage to his neck and spine from years of ferocious headbanging.
And it wasn’t his last. He’s currently suffering from Dupuytren’s contracture, a hand condition where tissue in the palm thickens and causes fingers to bend inward. Not the greatest thing for a guitar player.
“You see that?” Mustaine says, pushing his left hand into his computer’s camera. “Right there on my hand? Looks like a V? The hard part of my hand? It’s like a lump when I push it, and it’s pulling my finger down. And eventually, my hand’s going to be all [gnarled] if I don’t get treatment of some sort,” he says.
“And I was not going to have treatment that I don’t know the outcome of and have them say ‘Oh shit, you can’t use your hand anymore!’ Not that ‘You can’t play,’ but ‘You can’t use your hand anymore.’ It’s kind of a small area of meat to be chopping around on!”
Finally, Dave Mustaine has been very up front about his belief in God since a 2002 personal enlightenment. So, we ask, how did that Christian faith carry him through the entirety of his cancer days in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?
“A lot of people make a mistake when they hear about my faith. I don’t belong to any religion, and when you say ‘Christianity’ to me, that’s organized religion. That’s not me. It’s just me and God and Jesus and that’s it. You have a much purer relationship. And if I didn’t believe in God, how could I write songs about the dark?” he says.
“I pray at every meal, just because I was homeless for so long and I went hungry so many times. And before we go on stage, the four of us circle up every night and we pray that we have fun. That’s as simple as it’s supposed to be. And my family does when we’re together,” he sums up. “But I still say ‘fuck’ and I still see people who I want to punch in the face every once in a while!”
For more on Megadeth, visit Megadeth.com
