Marty Friedman Says He’s Never Held a Grudge Against Dave Mustaine, Unlike Some Ex-Members
Back in February, ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman joined his former band on stage at the Budokan in Tokyo, Japan. It was a massive moment that reunited the Cap’n Crunch aficionado with Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine for the first time since Friedman quit the band in 1999.
During a recent interview on Jamey Jasta’s podcast “The Jasta Show” (transcribed by Blabbermouth), Friedman was asked whether there had been any bad blood between him and Mustaine prior to the reunion on stage. Friedman said any reports of animosity between the two couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The funny thing is there was really nothing between us ever in the time that we weren’t playing together. And if there was, it was kind of like things that media kind of like… You know how they do these days — they’ll take something that could possibly look negative out of, like, a two-hour interview, and that’ll be the headline. There was never anything between us in the first place. If either of us e-mailed each other, it would be totally casual. So it wasn’t unusual to hear from Dave and say, ‘Dude, we’re playing Budokan. You wanna jam?’ It was just completely casual. So there really never was anything — definitely nothing that I know of that was of any kind of juicy, newsworthy arguments between us in the first place. It’s boring. But it is what it is.”
Angry and jilted ex-Megadeth members is nothing new to the band. Recent months have seen former Megadeth members like Jeff Young and David Ellefson have been engaged in a one-sided feud with Mustaine for months now. They’ve even gone on to record what we think is an apparent diss track of sorts.
Still, in Friedman’s case, getting together and choosing the songs they’d play live on stage went seamlessly, he said.
“It was so organic. It was like two buds in high school talking about, ‘Let’s go jam.’ It was so incredibly casual. And I think that’s the way it should be, really. And we just talked about a couple of songs. I wanted to do two songs, and then Dave [Mustaine] says, ‘Why don’t we do another song?’ And I’m, like, ‘Okay. That’s great.’ Yeah, so we did the songs that we did, and there was no real rhyme and reason to which songs we did. But it turned out just fine and we enjoyed the hell out of it.”
Who knows if we’ll ever see Friedman and Mustaine team up again for another Megadeth gig? It would certainly be cool to hear them play some more classic tunes.
