“Towards the end of that tour, things got really dark,” Mustaine told Rolling Stone in 2017.
#MEGADETH COUNTDOWN TO EXTINCTION MOVIE#
The title track had been inspired by environmental concerns (ultimately winning a Humane Society Genesis Award, making Megadeth the only metal band ever to have done so), while the irresistible Symphony Of Destruction, earmarked as the set’s lead-off single, had been inspired by a combination of a World War II documentary advertisement in Time magazine, tense movie thriller The Manchurian Candidate, and an incident that occurred while the band were on the road with rising grunge rock newcomers Stone Temple Pilots. Megadeth had always been one of thrash metal’s more politically astute forces, and Countdown To Extinction seemed to exemplify this more than ever. Perhaps subconsciously, the tension bled into the studio. I said, ‘You are making a huge mistake there – you get pulled over for any reason, by cops or civilians, and they find those guns in there… well, there’s nothing more wrong than being shot with your own gun.’ We would work feverishly on the record until 6pm, then it was like a school bell ringing and we had to make it home.”
“Nick Menza and David Ellefson both had handguns in the car. “I only live two blocks away from the studio so I could walk there, but the other guys in the band had to drive,” Mustaine told Hammer in 2018. Sessions started at Burbank’s Enterprise studios in January 1992 and carried through to April, a timeframe encompassing the infamous LA riots, which broke out in furious response to the exoneration of police officers who had been filmed savagely beating motorist Rodney King in March 1991. Keen to amplify their newly honed accessibility, they enlisted Ozzy Osbourne’s producer, Max Norman, to co-produce. Megadeth ended the Clash Of The Titans run with an arsenal of new songs banked, the likes of Foreclosure Of A Dream and Ashes In Your Mouth shifting away from the more technical focus of Rust In Peace, to emphasise strong melodic hooks and arrangements. We knew the record after Rust In Peace was going to be the big one, you could just feel it.” He made sure we’d have everything we needed to harness the greatness that was developing in the band at the time. “Ron Laffitte was a terrific manager for us his icon was Pat Riley of the Lakers, so he was all about the team and focusing on how you could channel all this talent. “Every single day we got to a city and into our dressing room, we were writing songs for what would become Countdown To Extinction,” Ellefson recalls. Sensing a new window of opportunity at broadcast media for music with attitude, Megadeth knuckled down. That summer, a second Clash Of The Titans tour was announced, with fellow thrash trailblazers Anthrax added to the bill as a third headliner, and a young Seattle band, Alice In Chains, booked as the opening act, to promote their debut album, Facelift, featuring emerging radio hit Man In The Box. Megadeth played a run of dates in late 1990 and early 1991 that included shows with Judas Priest and an appearance at the second Rock In Rio festival, where they played to more than 100,000 people on a bill topped by Guns N’ Roses.
We were shooting for the stars.”Īnd momentum was building. It was interesting to juxtapose where we were in ’90, kinda fresh and going out with Slayer as this new unit, to the end of the following summer where we were ready to go it alone and do things for ourselves. “ Rust… was our first record with clear minds and clear ambitions. “It was the stepping stone that took us from being a dishevelled, broken-down, drugged-out shell of a Megadeth in 1988/1989 into being the band that could fill arenas on our own. “Clash Of The Titans was very strategic for Megadeth,” Ellefson tells us. Mustaine and Ellefson were both completely hooked. With Testament and Suicidal Tendencies on the under-card, the three-week tour, billed as the Clash Of The Titans, was a triumph, offering all four bands a teasing first taste of what true success might look like. Two days before their fourth album dropped, the band kicked off an ambitious European arena tour, co-headlining with old friends Slayer.
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