Megadeth’s ‘Endgame’ Fueled by Pain

Oscar Wilde once wrote that "life imitates art far more than art imitates life." For Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine however, the making of the band's new album 'Endgame' had far more to do with art imitating life. It isn't just the title of the album -- a reference to an Orwellian U.S. government doctrine that calls for the removal of all illegal aliens by 2012 -- that makes the album so vicious and angry. No, the brutality of the disc has far more to do with the physical and emotional pain Mustaine experienced during the creation of the album.

For years, Mustaine has suffered from neck and back problems from decades of headbanging, but lately those injuries reached a new level of agony. X-rays revealed that the metal legend had not only damaged himself, he had actually disfigured and mutated his neck and back.

"The top part of your neck has some weird-shaped vertebrae, and each vertebrae has a longer tip on the back of it than your normal vertebrae going from your shoulders down," he explains to Noisecreep. "Well, in my neck I have so much inflammation from headbanging that it's producing this fluid. And that stuff is hardening, so my neck is starting to fuse together. In the morning when I get up, if I don't crack my neck, my range of motion is about 25 percent. And during the course of the day, I probably crack my neck 100 times. It's terrible for me, I know that, but the alternative is what?"

On July 30, Mustaine's pain management doctor gave him a cortisone steroidal injection to alleviate the pain. It was the first in a series of procedures he will undergo in the foreseeable future. "It was kind of like an epidural, and it worked really well," Mustaine says. "We're having things done that will be the least invasive to my back and we're going to try everything before we go to [full-blown surgery]. I don't want to get fixed, I just want to stop hurting. I know I'm going to be uncomfortable for the rest of my life, and I'm OK with that. I just want to stop the pain."

Mustaine is especially frustrated by his back problems, because, for years, he has lived a healthy lifestyle that he had hoped would help him avoid his current predicament.

"I still do everything I can," he says. "I work out seven days a week, I do yoga, I do martial arts, I do all kinds of exercises for my back. I take nutrients. I've gone to a life extension clinic to get my back healed. You name it. This is just stuff that happens when you get a little older and you experience nerve damage. It has a lasting effect. Now granted, I don't understand for the life of me how I healed when they said I wasn't going to be able to play guitar again, and I've actually healed and play better now than before I got hurt. So if that's the case I would recommend that everybody go out and fall asleep on their arm. But it's not supposed to be like that."

In addition to his back problems, Mustaine experiencing some painful relationship woes during the making of 'Endgame' that resulted in him filing for divorce from his wife of 18 years, Pam.

"The process during the record with all the marital problems and parental problems that I was going through were really challenging," Mustaine admits. "And I guess that was one of the things that led me in this direction. There were parenting problems. Teenagers are very difficult, and my teenager is no different from anybody else's, except that he knows stuff and he's seen stuff that other kids aren't privy to, so he seems a little more mature than he is.

"And when you're talking to him, you forget that he's only 17, and at 17, it's not who he's gonna be when he grows up. But when we're in the heat of battle, we see these things and we're thinking, 'S---, if we don't send him to military school he's gonna end up being just like us.' But that's not the solution. That's the solution our parents used."