Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine blasts Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel over his book

by | Oct 24, 2017 | News | 0 comments

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine has slammed Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel via Twitter over his book For the Sake of Heaviness: The History of Metal Blade Records, which was released this past summer. Mustaine appears to heavily disagree with Slagel’s memory about how the label attempted to sign Megadeth. Slagel apologized, and Mustaine accepted his apology, but asked that the story be taken out of future printings. Here’s how it went down: 

The excerpt reads:

“The only band that I didn’t get that I wished I had was Megadeth. It was between us and a brand new label called Combat, which was part of the Important distribution firm that we’d started working out with. Late in 1984 they’d decided that the whole metal thing was starting to happen and they wanted to get on it by creating their own label.

The first band that came onto their radar (and ours at the same time) was Megadeth. In the end, it came down to just a thousand dollars. We had offered them seven thousand dollars, but Combat offered eight, so they went with Combat.

With hindsight, especially given what MEGADETH became, I’ve often thought, ‘Well, maybe I could have gotten a little more money together.’ But really, at that time, seven thousand dollars was absolutely the most we had ever offered anybody.

Most of the stuff we were doing involved spending $1,600 to maybe $3,500, at the high end, to make a full record. Seven grand was a lot of money. I remember Dave Mustaine writing me a really long, heartfelt letter saying how he really wanted to be on Metal Blade, but it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Slagel sent out a tweet just yesterday (23) to promote the book and Mustaine decided to make a disputing response stating: “If the fallacy of offering us a deal for $7,000 is any indication of the rest of this book, I hope it’s marked fiction. I’d never sign with you.”

You can purchase your copy of For the Sake of Heaviness: The History of Metal Blade Records here.