DAVID ELLEFSON On MEGADETH: ‘It’s Never A Closed Chapter’

In a new interview with Sam Acevedo of El Planeta Del Rock, David Ellefson was asked if MEGADETH is “a closed chapter” for him at this point. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “No, look, it’s never a closed chapter. I mean, look, I helped start the band. I was there from the beginning. My heart and soul was in it. You’ll hear that in those songs forever. And, look, that way of life, our lifestyle, our work ethic has influenced me forever. It’s part of how I still roll now moving forward. So, you can’t just take that piece of your life and just pull it out and stick it on the shelf. It’s part of me. I’m always part of that. And, hey, look, we’re not sharing the stage together, we’re not doing that right now. But, yeah, my thing is, why ever close doors? It wasn’t my idea to not be there. So I’m, like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Maybe another time. Anyway, let’s go to Rome. Let’s play a show. Let’s go jam some tunes with OVERKILL.’ So, to me, it’s kind of, like, just keep moving, man. Just keep moving.”Ellefson continued: “Look, when I went back to [MEGADETH] in 2010, it wasn’t in my rearview mirror; it was now in the front view. And that’s kind of how I viewed it the first time around [after MEGADETH temporarily split up in 2002, only to reform a couple of years later without Ellefson]. It was, like, ‘Well, don’t sit here and focus on the little rearview mirror. Look out the big windshield in the front and see what’s coming around,’ and that was SOULFLY and all these other kind of cool things that came around. And then one day, next thing you know, hey, wow, MEGADETH’s in the front view again. All right, well, let’s do that for a little while. So, that’s my outlook on it.”Ellefson was fired from MEGADETH more than three years ago after sexually tinged messages and explicit video footage involving the bassist were posted on Twitter.In 2004, Ellefson filed an $18.5-million lawsuit against Dave Mustaine, alleging the MEGADETH frontman shortchanged him on profits and backed out of a deal to turn Megadeth Inc. over to him when the band broke up in 2002. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed and Ellefson rejoined MEGADETH in 2010.Ellefson was in MEGADETH from the band’s inception in 1983 to 2002, and again from 2010 until his latest exit.In June 2023, Ellefson told Andrew McKaysmith of the “Scars And Guitars” podcast that he was prepared for his latest exit from MEGADETH.”When my departure from MEGADETH happened, a lot of people were hitting me [up and saying], ‘Oh my God. It’s so terrible. It’s so terrible,'” he recalled. “[And I said], ‘Yeah, believe me, it’s not.’ [Laughs] It really isn’t. I was ready for it. I didn’t think it was gonna go down that way; I didn’t see that coming. But the fact that it happened, I was not sad about it. I was okay with it. Because I knew there’s another journey ahead, and that journey wasn’t gonna start until I was out of the old one.”When you’re in a group, you’re in a setting, you’ve gotta play company man and you kind of go along with the narrative that’s been set forth.”There was a lot of things, a lot of the narrative in that band that I never agreed with,” Ellefson admitted. “A lot of that band was started on a grudge and a hardship of the firing [of MEGADETH leader Dave Mustaine] from METALLICA. That was never my story. I was always a METALLICA fan and I became friends with those guys. I have nothing but gratitude for that group and those gentlemen for what they’ve done for all of us, and I think they deserve the biggest applause. So it was hard to be in a band that always had this saltiness around that whole narrative, because it was never my narrative. So I went along to get along, but now I don’t have to do that. And now I can be on my own path. These are my words; it’s my story now. And maybe the events that happened a couple of years ago, I needed to have my own story to tell. ‘Cause when you quit a band, everyone’s pissed at you; they hate you: ‘Oh, fuck you. You quit. You quit my favorite band.’ But when you get tossed out… And I’m not looking for the sympathy card. You don’t have to feel sorry for me; you don’t have to do any of that. But it’s interesting that, I guess the way it happened… it went down in a way that it was certainly visible enough and on a level that… It was sort of, like, okay, well, what’s gonna happen next? And I just tried to be faithful to just following my heart, following the path.”[embedded content]