Ex-Overkill Guitarist Reveals Why He Wasn’t Hired by Megadeth and Metallica, Recalls What Metallica Members Told Him at Audition

“I think that wasn’t the greatest time of their career at that point.”

26,610 views · 6 comments

Share

After the classic “Peace Sells” lineup of Megadeth fell apart back in 1987 — with guitarist Chris Poland and drummer Gar Samuelson both having left or been fired, depending on who you talk to — mastermind Dave Mustaine asked then-Overkill guitarist Bobby Gustafson if he would be interested in joining the band that Dave had started right after his dismissal from Metallica in 1983. Bobby ultimately turned down the offer as he wanted to stay with Overkill, who, at the time, were enjoying considerable popularity.When asked in a new interview with The Meista – Brews & Tunes if the accounts were true, Gustafson recalled (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):

“Yeah, it was right after Rat [Skates, then-Overkill drummer] had quit, we were on tour with Megadeth. We did two months in Europe, we had a couple days home and then we had another six weeks with Megadeth and by the end of that tour Rat had quit. We were in San Jose and he quit, and Dave wanted me to stay out there. Halfway through the tour, he had asked me…he was like fed up with his band and he wanted me to play guitar.”

Referring to the members of Megadeth’s drug addictions, which were also contributing factors to a few lineup changes they had between “Peace Sells” and 1990’s “Rust In Peace”, Bobby continued:

“They were just kind of a little to messed up for me at that point, you know on [the ‘Peace Sells’ tour], so we had just taken overcome out and I’m thinking ‘No, I think I’m gonna stick with my band.’ I probably woukld have did that one album, which is the third album [1988’s ‘So Far, So Good…So What!’]…yeah I don’t see it having gone past that, so I at least made the right choice with Overkill for another two albums I was able to do. But you know, it could have been cool. We knew each other before that and [Mustaine] just needed like a heavy rhythm guitar player.”

He also revealed that the late Nick Menza — who would later become Megadeth’s drummer from 1989 to 1998 and again briefly in 2004 — was offered to join Overkill around the same time that Rat Skates left the band before Sid Falck was hired as the latter’s replacement:

“[On ‘So Far, So Good…So What!’], they got Jeff [Young] on guitar and then Chuck [Behler], who was Gar’s roadie became the drummer, and then Nick, who was Chuck’s roadie, we asked him to join our band, and he would up going with Megadeth, which is better, and they just kept trading places. Yeah, I think that wasn’t the greatest time of their career at that point, probably a bit of a low.”

Gustafson then went on to offer his recollection of his audition for Metallica as a temporary fill-in for James Hetfield back in 1992, when the latter was burned onstage in the middle of their tour with Guns N’ Roses:

“Yeah I was doing…I forgot, I was doing [the short-lived Bay Area thrash metal project featuring Exodus drummer Tom Hunting] I4NI in New York after the Cycle Sluts [From Hell]. I had put an original band together, when we were playing out and we had a show the next night at L’Amours in Brooklyn and I got a call at about 11:30 at night from Tony Smith and they said that, ‘You know James got hurt, he burned, and they said that you were the first one they thought of to call’. So he gave me the entire set list which was like eighteen songs. So I had, like, a day and a half to learn the songs, plus I didn’t cancel my show [with I4NI] that night so I played that show with the songs on cassette trying to learn them backstage. I was supposed to fly to Denver, they went to Denver, and they set up int he arena like in a back room and they were doing the auditions there. And I was leaving the airport in New Jersey and it rained for ten minutes, just a downpour, 10 minutes. It screwed my flight up for four hours. So James was in pain, but he was waiting there because he wanted to sing while I went out and played and I assumed he would be there and I kind of tried to work off the vocals because I really never learned their songs, I guess maybe they thought I did but I was trying to cram all that in and then they just auditioned me on like five songs and I’m like, ‘Shit, why didn’t you just tell me the five? It would’ve been a lot easier to learn.’ So I really didn’t have everything down and as I was playing I kind of knew…I did ‘Creeping Death’ and I nailed it and they were like, ‘Holy shit, your right hand’s really good’, and I said ‘Yeah thank you’, and the rest just didn’t go, like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, I didn’t learn that yet. I was doing my own stuff…but yeah, that could have been pretty cool too. It would have been fun.”

The Hetfield fill-in gig eventually went to then-Metal Church guitarist John Marshall, who had filled in for James once before. Marshall — a guitar tech for Metallica at the time — first filled in for him on guitar during the “Master Of Puppets” tour in 1986, when Hetfield had broken his wrist due to a skateboarding accident.

Gustafson — who recently left Vio-Lence after a two-year stint — was the guitar player for Overkill from 1982 to 1990, performing on their first four albums, up to and including “The Years Of Decay” (1989), which includes one of the band’s live staples, and most famous songs, “Elimination”.