Dave Mustaine ”“ Megadeth

Countdown to Extinction that you wrote all those years back is probably still relevant”¦

Ya, it is”¦ Totally is”¦

What’s your take on that?

Peace Sells But Who’s Buying is still relevant”¦

So did you set out to make music that’s timeless?

I’ve always just followed this itchy feeling inside of me that I get sometimes that I’ve got to say something. A lot of times people won’t say stuff because they are afraid to say it. I think political correctness is for pussies. Or maybe I should say political correctness is for vaginas.

You had a pretty bad nerve injury, and you temporarily disbanded the band. Did you ever think you would be coming back and delivering all these kickass records after that?

Deep down inside, I know that I am not a quitter. It’s like we had somebody leave and he sent us an email and he said ”“ and he wasn’t a musician, he was a staff guy ”“ he said, ”˜I hope you understand why I quit’ and I don’t understand why he quit. He was a quitter. I don’t have a quitter bone in my body. So why would I understand what a fucking pathetic quitter is? You know, I can’t even quit drugs.

Going forward, you look at this stretch of success we had, coming here and how long it’s been. There’s not a lot of bands that could withstand the pressures of the music business. A lot of them break up over money, a lot of them break up over women, they break up over drugs. Or they break up because the record companies have destroyed bands.

Lately, bands are being picked off left and right because their revenue streams have been narrowed due to downloading of files. I’m not a guy that would go up to Capitol Hill and demand e-mail addresses myself. But I do think that there’s a difference between downloading some samples or downloading some songs or downloading some pictures or even downloading a small movie from our fan club versus purposely downloading the entire fucking record for free. You can’t tell me that the kids are that stupid that they download an entire record for free ”“ they think that’s how the world is right now. No, they are not stupid. Kids nowadays are brilliant. That’s why they understand computers. But they realise that there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

So until they have some kind of way of regulating that, it depends on the hearts of the fans. If they really love Megadeth [enough] to look within themselves and say, “Just look at everything we do for you guys, look at everything we celebrate with you.” If you wanna download from our website, it’s totally there for you – we’re going way out of our way. But think about some of the other bands that can’t afford to have you download their whole record. Now think about all the other bands that would never be able to come to India because they can’t afford it.

A lot of artists are shifting from a record label format to, say, a Wal-Mart or a Starbucks. What do you think about that?

The Wal-Mart idea was great. The Starbucks idea was I think poor. I don’t necessarily think that Starbucks distributing music is a bad idea because they are everywhere. But I think it was a poor choice by Starbucks because Sir Paul’s record was a dud. The Eagles record going into Wal-Mart, you know the Eagles are a guarantee, you can’t lose. Now what we intend on doing when our contract’s up, we’re going to be looking at our options like that because we are with the same management as the Eagles. And [we will] consider placing records in a situation like that or making them available through digital download, something like an iTunes.

Like Radiohead’s In Rainbows?

No, that was dumb. And you know it backfired on them. I’m not gonna purposely”¦ intentionally put my record up someplace for someone to download for free. What I said was to sell the record through downloads. That’s what a lot of people are doing right now. They’re leaving the record labels because the record labels are imploding. Their greed and the corporate insanity has destroyed the music industry. You know, we talk about this all the time ”“ music business is two words right now. When we started it was one word, it was ”˜music business.’ Now it’s two words ”“ we are the music and they are the business. They don’t give a fuck about us. They don’t care about us at all. All they care about is moving units, and shifting sales and when they get to their break-even point, then they start to turn the thumb screws and reduce the marketing money and expect more out of the bands. I don’t like that. I don’t like being treated like luggage. This is a legendary band, I’m a legend. And you know what, I’ve been in this business longer than half the people I’ve met in some of the record labels we’ve been with.