Suicide Girls correspondent Ryan Stewart recently caught up with MEGADETH frontman / founder Dave Mustaine to discuss the new book, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. An excerpt from the interview is available below.

Q: I thought maybe we could start with something fun, instead of the dark stuff. Can you talk a little about Megadeth groupies, back in the day? What they were like in terms of quality and supply?

Mustaine: "Well, I'm not really sure that I want to go too deep into that question. We all had relationships with people when Megadeth started. You can't really speak for what's in the audience, and as far as what was backstage, I didn't really keep track of what was going on with the other guys. I had a girlfriend named Diana for a long time and I've been married to Pam for twenty years. I'm sure that there was a lot to choose from, but my whole thing was really playing music and being loud and obnoxious and I wasn't really the big romantic type."

Q: It's hard for me to even keep track of the lineup, so many changes over the years. Do you feel like you've missed out on anything by not keeping a consistent lineup, even if it's just the camaraderie of long-time collaborators?

Mustaine: "Nope. Go ask any athlete if they liked having somebody who didn't give 100 percent to the game on their team. If they have a different vision than you, then they obviously can't give 100 percent because their vision is going to be looking elsewhere. And I'm not saying anything about the band members that have been with us in the past; if they've had a change in their vision where they don't want to go where we want to go, then obviously we're going in two different directions and it's not going to work. It's my band, I'm the leader, and that's what this whole thing is based off of. It wasn't based on 'Let's all get together and see what the common thread is that we all have.' It was something I wanted to do and these guys joined me. And I've been really fortunate to have some really talented people playing with us. And when Marty [Friedman] got in the band he wanted us to become a pop band and we turned ourselves inside out to make that little dude happy, but in the long run, even after Cryptic Writings, even after Risk, as melodic as Risk was, he wanted it to still be more alternative. And I said 'I can't do this.' It's not inside of me, Ryan, to write a record that's more melodic than Risk. That one was as deep-reaching as I could go. Believe it or not, it's easier to write songs that are less melodic than songs that are more melodic. When you're writing something that's melodic, you've got to have something that resonates with a lot of people and it's a lot harder to find that simpler melody that's gonna make people say 'Oh yeah, I like that melody.' So, there were people in the past that would have different visions, and we just went different ways. It doesn't mean we don't care about each other. Some of us are still friends, some of us ain't. That's the way the cookie crumbles."

Go to this location for the complete interview.