Dave Mustaine looked back on a period of Megadeth history in which he said too many mistakes were made – leaving him feeling “queazy“ about the album they’d made.
Risk, released in 1999, was their eighth record, but it was recorded during a difficult time. Drummer Nick Menza had left and Marty Friedman was ready to go too. On top of that, Mustaine felt his position as band leader was being questioned. But he suggested there was a relatively easy way to repair the record – record a faster version.
“The band was about as fragmented as we could be,” he told Ultimate Guitar. “Marty didn’t want to be in the band anymore, we had a manager named Bud Prager…and the drummer we had at the time was Jimmy DeGrasso.”
He added: “The music on that record would have been great if it was a Dave Mustaine solo record. But I think because it said ‘Megadeth,’ people expected something a little bit faster.”
He explained why the songs had been produced at a slower pace: “The beats per minute thing popped up again. That happened during Youthanasia. Max Norman produced that record; he’d said that the secret to singles is 120 beats per minute. And after I worked with Max, I hadn’t heard that again until when we did Risk. If it didn’t say ‘Megadeth’ and said ‘Dave Mustaine,’ it would be fine as a solo record… It makes me queasy when I think about that period.”
He cited another element of the album he didn’t like: the song Crush ‘Em. “I had said that I didn’t want to do that. And Bud Prager kept insisting. He did have the credentials when he said, ‘Look, we had a number one single with Trust on the last record. You had five radio singles.’ And when someone says that, and they can back it up with the proof, you kind of want to listen to them. Because they did make things happen for us.”
But he’d come to realise that thinking had been wrong. “The other thing that was not taken into account was – we’re not a singles band. We’re a band that makes thrash metal. And like, with the [current] album, the reason it was number one is because it was approached as a thrash metal band.”
With Megadeth approaching the end of their career, it’s unlikely Risk will be revisited. And maybe Mustaine doesn’t mind. “There were just, I think, too many mistakes going on in that period,” he reflected, “because there was so much fragmentation. It was being pulled in different directions. My leadership was being questioned all the time.”
![Megadeth - Trust (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/FDbG-Vt1PYs/maxresdefault.jpg "The Megadeth album that makes Dave Mustaine feel queazy 19")
