MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine was interviewed yesterday (Tuesday, August 9) by Cindy Scull of the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas radio station 97.1 The Eagle Rocks. You can now listen to the 10-minute chat at this location. A couple of excerpts follow below.

On why guitarist Marty Friedman won’t return to MEGADETH:

Mustaine: “Well, first off, he’s not welcome. I mean, it’s not that he’s not welcome, it’s just that there’s no position for him. And Marty’s not as good as Chris [Broderick, current MEGADETH guitarist] is, second off. And Marty wanted to be a pop guitar player. He left to join a girl in a band in Japan. . . [The MEGADETH lineup featuring Friedman and drummer Nick Menza] wasn’t the most important lineup anyways. The lineup that we have right now has achieved more than those guys ever did. If you think about it, the groundwork, the building the band back up from nothing… Marty and Nick got in the band when the band was already huge.”

On his rekindled friendship with his former bandmates, METALLICA’s Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield:

Mustaine: “I’ve talked to Lars and James about me and David [Ellefson, MEGADETH bassist] doing a supergroup record with Lars and James. Well, James said ‘no,’ but it’s still kind of out there in the air. I’m gonna keep hammering on him. It’s on my bucket list.”

In a 2009 interview with U.K.’s Classic Rock magazine, Hetfield was asked if he was glad to see Mustaine out of METALLICA prior to the recording of the band’s debut album, 1983’s “Kill ‘Em All”. “I don’t know if ‘glad’ is the right word, but it was necessary,” he replied. “There would have been myself, Lars and [Dave] all trying to drive and it would have been this triangulated mess. It’s obvious that he had the same drive as us — he went on to do great things in MEGADETH. The way things are now, the character dynamics, Lars and I are one half of the scale with Rob [Trujillo, METALLICA bassist] and Kirk [Hammett, METALLICA guitarist] on the other. They’re great idea people but very good at being okay with someone else driving. It does take that, I think. They’re very un-ego-driven and Lars and I are the other way, it seems. That’s what I’ve been told. [Laughs] So back then Dave had to go.”

Source: www.blabbermouth.net