Taste The Difference
By Tom Lanham
N
ot too long ago, Dave Mustaine
brought his pile driving thrash-
metal outfit Megadeth on tour –
backing its recent Grammy-winning return
to form, Dystopia -- to Jakarta, the bustling
capital of Indonesia on the island of Java
that boasts a population of over ten million
people. And he has a heartwarming when-
in-Rome philosophy that guides him
whenever he finds himself traveling
abroad – a little kindness in foreign coun-
tries can go a long, long way, since
American stars often have the reputation
of being snooty, standoffish, almost
untouchable. “And whenever anybody
says, ‘Say the one thing that people would-
n’t believe the most about you,’ I usually
say that it’s just that I’m approachable, that
I want to talk to people, that I’m not
untouchable. Which is,” he sighs resigned-
ly, “kind of a bummer sometimes.”
In Jakarta, for instance, Mustaine – a
trim, workout-buff 55 – was lunching in a
local restaurant, doing his best to savor the
flavors a truly exotic meal. But he looked
up to find that over two dozen fans had
tracked him to the place, and were seated
sporadically at surrounding tables like
ominous crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s
frightfest “The Birds,” waiting. Waiting for
him to finish. “And they’re all sitting
around, staring at you and watching you
eat, until they can take a picture with you
and have you sign stuff,” he recalls. “And
they’re only waiting because they’ve
walked up to you while you’re eating, and
your bodyguards have had to say, ‘Please.
Please wait until he’s done.’ So now
they’re all watching every bite you take,
and you’re thinking, ‘Oh boy – it’s kind of
hard to be cool while I’m eating.’”
Back at his hotel, the singer ran into
more snafus. Acolytes really love their
Megadeth in Jakarta, and they’d not only
followed him back to his hotel, but rough-
ly a hundred or so were waiting by the
22 illinoisentertainer.com july 2017
facility’s pool to head him off before he left
the building again. “So I was going down
to the gym – because I don’t want to be
some fat slob – and I had to sneak past all
these people who were waiting, and who
weren’t even staying in the hotel at all,” he
says. But the gym, unfortunately, wasn’t
very private – it had giant plate-glass win-
dows that everyone could stare through,
longingly, as he did his best to ignore them
and stay focused on riding the stationary
bike. He almost lost his cool. “People were
taking pictures of me on the bike through
the windows, and I was like, ‘Fuck me!
Now I know what Princess Di felt like!’ She
would go to the gym and people were tak-
ing pictures of her there. And nowadays,
everybody has a camera on their cell-
phone, so everybody’s a photographer.
And they all expect to take your picture.”
Far from being jaded, however,
Mustaine is remarkably savvy, insightful,
even prescient about the cutthroat enter-
tainment industry, the feral beast he’s been
trying to tame – with varying degrees of
success – since his formative days with the
SoCal combo Panic, then a fledgling
Metallica, which he joined as lead guitarist
in 1981. And – not that he likes to brag, he
chuckles – but that supergroup’s followers
might not know that its frontman James
Hetfield didn’t play an instrument in the
beginning – he only sang. “So I was
Metallica’s only guitar player, and there
would be no thrash metal, I believe, if I
hadn’t pushed my guitar playing to the
extremes that I d