Biography Megadeth - Showbiza.com/us

When guitarist Dave Mustaine was booted out of Metallica early in its career, he formed Megadeth, which continued his former group's thrash-metal style with even more speed and intensity.

Mustaine was seven when his parents divorced, and his family wound up living in poverty in the Southern California suburbs. During his teens, Mustaine's mother was often away, leaving him with his sisters; he told a journalist that a brother-in-law once punched him in the face for listening to Judas Priest. Mustaine's revenge was to join a heavy-metal band, and in 1981 he became a founding member of Metallica [see entry], from which he was fired two years later in a power struggle over leadership and allegations of his drug use. Mustaine, whose reputation for outspokenness and mood swings is notorious, formed Megadeth that same year with Minnesota native Dave Ellefson.

Mustaine and Ellefson hoped to create a jazz-oriented progressive strain of heavy metal based on chops as much as emotional aggression. Megadeth's first album, Killing Is My Business…and Business Is Good, succeeded in that regard and garnered mainly positive reviews, even from critics normally hostile to heavy metal. Mustaine's drug use, meanwhile, deepened with his discovery of heroin. Still, the band's subsequent albums, Peace Sells…But Who's Buying? (#76, 1986) and So Far, So Good…So What? (#28, 1988), continued in its celebrated lightening-speed chops-heavy style.

In 1990 Mustaine was arrested for impaired driving and went into a 12-step program for his drug and alcohol problems. The same year, Megadeth released Rust in Peace, which reached #23. Mustaine's former band, meanwhile, paved the way for thrash metal when its self-titled album of 1991 skyrocketed to the top of the charts; Megadeth followed in Metallica's footsteps the next year with Countdown to Extinction, which went to #2.

Offstage, Mustaine continued getting into trouble: In 1993, Megadeth was dumped from its opening spot on Aerosmith's tour when that group tired of Mustaine's misbehavior. Megadeth returned in 1994 with Youthanasia (the album's press release was written by novelist Dean Koontz), which debuted at #4. That same year, Mustaine slipped back into drug use briefly during a tour, but has since returned to sobriety, claiming even to refuse nitrous oxide while in the dentist's chair.

Before recording 1997's Cryptic Writings (#10), Mustaine started work on a degree in business management at the University of Phoenix and began mastering Web design. He put those new skills to work when his company designed the Web site for Alice Cooper's theme restaurant, Alice Cooper'stown.

Megadeth's lineup changes continued, as former Suicidal Tendencies drummer Jimmy DeGrasso joined in time for 1999's Risk. That album's title and revamped sound were inspired by published comments from Metallica's Lars Ulrich suggesting that Megadeth take more musical risks. The subsequent album incorporated surprising industrial and Middle Eastern flavors along the edges.

Super Collider (2012–present)

In September 2012, it was announced that the band would re-release Countdown to Extinction in honor of the album's 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Megadeth launched a 2012 fall tour in which the band performed the album live in its entirety. One such performance, filmed at the Pomona Fox Theater, was released as a live album called Countdown to Extinction: Live the following year. Additionally, in December 2012, another track from Thirteen, "Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)", was nominated for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance at the 55th Grammy Awards, but ultimately lost to Halestorm's "Love Bites (So Do I)".

In August 2012, the band stated that they would be returning to the studio with producer Johnny K to record their fourteenth album. In December 2012, Dave Mustaine revealed that the new album was under way and that three new songs were "tracked and almost done". At the start of 2013, Megadeth left Roadrunner Records for Mustaine's label, Tradecraft, distributed through Universal Music Group. The album, Super Collider, was released on June 4 and debuted at number six on the Billboard 200, the band's highest chart position since 1994's Youthanasia. Critical reaction to the album, however, was largely negative.

Shortly after the release of Super Collider, Mustaine stated that he had already started thinking about a fifteenth Megadeth album. According to Mustaine, this was spurred by the then-recent death of Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman, which gave him a sense of mortality. Mustaine elaborated, "We're planning our next time to go into the studio to start demoing up our next record," and "You know, time is short. Nobody knows how long they're gonna live. You see what happened with Jeff Hanneman, so I wanna write as much as I can while I can." In 2014, Megadeth were slated to play the Soundwave festival in Australia, but were pulled from the lineup after troubles arose concerning the band playing sideshows with Newsted and Mustaine's interactions with the tour promoter, A.J. Maddah.