NEWS – Dave Mustaine Says the Record Company Told Him to “Change Your Logo, Cut Your Hair”

Megadeth frontman has already released his long-awaited autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir in the United States (The UK version, Mustaine: A Life in Metal, will be released next month) and is currently promoting both the book and the upcoming Rust in Peace Blu-ray. In a new interview with alternative adult site Suicide Girls Mustaine has commented on his group’s numerous line-ups over the last three decades: “Go ask any athlete if they liked having somebody who didn’t give 100 percent to the game on their team. If they have a different vision than you, then they obviously can’t give 100 percent because their vision is going to be looking elsewhere… And I’ve been really fortunate to have some really talented people playing with us. And when Marty [Friedman] got in the band he wanted us to become a pop band and we turned ourselves inside out to make that little dude happy, but in the long run, even after Cryptic Writings, even after Risk, as melodic as Risk was, he wanted it to still be more alternative.”

Mustaine continues: “Everybody knows who the quarterback is, and I’m not like that. Unfortunately, a lot of people have this perception of who I am that’s the same as who I think you think you’re talking to. But that’s not how I do business. The point about the musical direction is that if you’re going in two different directions, you’re gonna rip in the middle. We’ve tried to the best of our ability to accommodate everybody. The biggest culprit out of everything has been me needing to say no when I should’ve, and I didn’t. We even had the record company telling us “Change your logo, cut your hair, wear flannel, and grow facial hair.” And we’re like “Whaaaat?” You wouldn’t really know all those things unless you were there.”