Jeff Young calls Dave Mustaine a “pathological liar”, says 80s tour was not cancelled because he “ran out of heroin”
“If Pinocchio has a brother, you know what I’m saying.”
Image: Medios y Media / Getty Images
Ex-Megadeth guitarist Jeff Young has declared Dave Mustaine a “pathological liar” for allegedly spreading falsehoods about why the Australian leg of their 1989 “So Far, So Good… So What!” tour was cancelled.
Recruited for Megadeth in 1987, Young was fired from the band just two years later in 1989. Among differing accounts about Young’s dismissal was Mustaine’s claim in 2009 that the guitarist had “run out ” of heroin in Japan, and that “he wanted to go home,” forcing the band to cancel their Australian shows.
Disputing Mustaine’s account in a new interview with Misplaced Straws, Young said, “That’s what a pathological liar does. Are you talking about the YouTube video where he says I ran out of heroin in Japan and cancelled the Australian tour? Yeah, I’ve been owning him in the media ever since he’s done that. If Pinocchio has a brother, you know what I’m saying.”
Young then explained that he’d been “straight edge” when he joined the band, and that he never drank nor smoked pot to fit in.
“I kind of tried to hang with those guys a little bit, but [Mustaine] was the one that cancelled that tour,” Young said. “That’s why I left the band because early on, being a straight edge and three nights in, the guitar tech gets arrested in East LA scoring heroin from Mustaine, and he doesn’t show up to the studio that night and the drummer tells you, you realise, ‘Okay, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.’”
“I made a pact with myself, I can remember the exact sentence I said in that moment at the Music Grinder studio when I found out the news, the first thing I literally said was, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’, and the second thing was, ‘I’m gonna stay in the situation as long as it’s healthy for me’, which you see exactly how long that duration was.”
Check out the full interview below.