Dave Mustaine has long traced some of his earliest and most volatile songwriting to what he describes as “religious abuse” during his upbringing, shaped by his mother’s strict devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith until her death in 1990.
The Megadeth frontman has said the rules of that childhood — no birthday parties, no Christmas presents and not even participation in the Pledge of Allegiance — left him feeling isolated, robbing him of a normal youth and setting him apart from other children.
By his teenage years, Mustaine pushed back hard. He has spoken about turning toward black magic and the occult before eventually breaking into the music world as the lead guitarist for Metallica.
After being dismissed from the future Grammy-winning metal giants amid struggles with drugs and alcohol, Mustaine launched Megadeth, the band that would make him a thrash metal icon with tracks such as “Symphony of Destruction” and “Holy Wars.”
Now 64, the veteran rocker has suggested that the religion at the center of his childhood played a role in an even deeper family wound — a painful chapter he says has followed him for decades and, heartbreakingly, can never be fully repaired.
In his upcoming memoir, In My Darkest Hour, Mustaine, who also battled throat cancer in 2019, writes about growing up in a ‘weird and dysfunctional household (I wouldn’t even call it a home).’
The Megadeth front man has said growing up with a devout Jehovah’s Witness as a mother ruined his childhood and alienated him from his peers
Mustaine with his daughter Electra, and his wife of 35 years, Pam
He says he always suspected that the woman who raised him, Emily Marie Mustaine, was not his mother at all, but that one of his sisters had committed the cardinal sin of getting pregnant as an unwed teenager.
‘Maybe,’ he writes in the memoir, ‘out of embarrassment and religious and social pressure, they had “gone away” for a while (as people sometimes did in those days), and then turned the baby over to grandma to raise as her own. Grandma, in this case, being the woman I knew as my mother.’
He adds: ‘Maybe the tumult had contributed to my father disappearing.’
His mother and violent alcoholic father got divorced when Mustaine was just four. Mustaine has talked in the past about how he lived in fear of his father’s unpredictable and violent mood swings.
‘Maybe,’ he adds, ‘it had led my mother into the insane vortex of religious zealotry.
‘I can’t fully explain why I felt this way, but I did. Sometimes I’d even dream about it.’
In those dreams, his mother and father were both absent, and in their place was his oldest sister, Michelle.
‘She was always looking out for me, in a doting, caring kind of way, like she was worried something terrible would happen.
‘We looked alike, too, which I realize is not much of a shock, given that we were siblings, but I always wondered why I bore more of a resemblance to my sister – well, to all three of my sisters, actually – than to my own mother.’
Of course, he admits this could all have simply been a case of wishful thinking – a childish desire to make sense of his chaotic, traumatic childhood.
But just as he was finishing his memoir, he received a mysterious call from his middle sister, Suzanne, who is in hospice with Parkinson’s, ‘suffering from all the horrific stuff that comes with that disease, including dementia.’
He writes: ‘She drifts in and out of lucidity, telling stories that are dead accurate and others that make no sense whatsoever.’
Together with his sister’s assistant, he attempted to piece together coherent sentences from this ‘admittedly fuzzy conversation.’
Mustaine always wondered why he looked more like his sisters than his mother
The rocker rebelled as a teenager, exploring black magic and the occult before finding fame with Megadeth (the band photographed in 1987)
Daughter Electra and son Justis – Mustaine’s ‘tight family’
They heard the name ‘David.’
‘What did you say?’ the assistant asked.
Suzanne mumbled some more.
‘He’s your baby?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You mean David?’
After a long pause, Suzanne replied: ‘Yes.’
Mustaine admits his sister could have been using the word ‘baby’ in the colloquial sense – ‘as a big sister might do when referring to a little brother.
‘Or,’ he adds, ‘does one read something more gothic into it, something more sinister?’
What, he muses, if it wasn’t Michelle who was his mother at all. She’d been the eldest – 18 years older than Mustaine – so it made most sense. She was also very protective and loving around her baby brother.
Suzanne, on the other hand, had been just 15 when Mustaine was born.
‘Her giving birth to an illegitimate child would have been more scandalous. And maybe that would explain the bitterness and the resentment she so often exhibited toward me,’ he writes.
‘Maybe I had ruined her life. Maybe the mere fact of my existence provoked sadness and anger.
‘Or maybe my imagination was working overtime, as it sometimes does.’
Whatever the truth, he will likely never find the answer he seeks.
Both his mother and Michelle are now dead. His youngest sister, Debbie, meanwhile, is just three years older than he is, so has no memory of his birth.
‘And Suzanne is here, but not really here,’ he writes. ‘So it will remain an enigma for the rest of my life.
Mustaine’s family – daughter Electra, wife Pam and son Justis
The guitarist, who converted to Christianity around 2002, refused to play some of the band’s most controversial hits for years
The Megadeth star and his wife celebrate being grandparents to adorable little Georgette Monroe Mustaine
‘What is the importance of any of this?’ he asks. ‘Why not leave it all behind, with the other detritus of my Dickensian childhood? Why burrow into rabbit holes best left unexplored?
‘I guess the answer to that would be: I don’t want to leave it behind. I don’t want to forget. The memories drive me. The hunger, physical and metaphorical, motivates me to live a better life, to make the most of my time on the planet. I’ve always felt that way, but cancer has a way of turning up the volume on the ticking clock.’
The guitarist, who converted to Christianity around 2002 and, for years, refused to play some of the band’s most controversial hits, admits that he’d spent a lot of time praying during cancer treatment.
Those prayers, he says, were largely focused on keeping his family, wife of 35 years Pam and their children Electra, 28, and Justis, 34, together.
Now seven years cancer free, he writes: ‘Here we are, the same tight family we’ve always been. I can’t help but feel blessed, and it isn’t so much cancer that drives that point home, but the persistent, ceaseless memory of where I came from and the fractured family from which I escaped.’
In My Darkest Hour by David Mustaine is published September 8 by Da Capo, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
