MEGADETH frontman / founder Dave Mustaine recently discussed his new autobiography, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, with Roadrunner Records. An excerpt from the interview is available below.

Q: With so much sordid history and life experiences, how did you manage to narrow down what you covered for your autobiography?

Mustaine: "Well the legal process kind of vetted the book out. Going through some of the stories and knowing that a lot of the people I told the story about would be in jail, probably next to me, we left some of the stories out. Like, if you have drugs in your pocket and you drive, you’re a felon. If you have somebody underage and you cross the state line, you’re a kidnapper. All kinds of crazy stuff happened over the course of our career. As much as people think that I’m the bad guy, I was like the big brother that would say 'What are you thinking?' all the time. When we were in England and we had to cancel the Monsters of Rock Festival because of David Ellefson -- everybody knew I had a drug problem, but they didn’t know he had one, so it was really surprising to them. I think it kind of left room for some more storytelling, and I think the success of this, being a best seller now, there’s more to the story. This is like up until now, and in fact it’s not even until now it’s until a year ago, and so much great stuff has happened in the last year that it’s mind-boggling. Getting back together with The Big Four and all that stuff, having my old bass player come back, it’s been really, really great."

Q: You have been crucified for being vocal about your thoughts and feelings in the past, so have you experienced any blowback from what you’ve written?

Mustaine: "No. I don’t have a lot of stuff that intimidates me in this world because I’ve died once, I’ve been through all kinds of stuff with line-up changes, changing management and labels, ups and downs with marriage, with my kids, all that kind of stuff, and I’ve been really open about it so that the public’s aware of it and there’s nothing really in the book I think that’s going to get me into any trouble. There’s one or two people in there I would have liked to have barbequed because of the way I feel about them, and it would have been real easy to have told a couple stories that would have destroyed them because of what kind of people they really are and the way that they’ve got the public fooled, but I’m not a caped crusader going around telling people who the phonies are in the music industry. Water has a way of finding its own level, and these guys will be exposed. The bummer was the legal process because we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars going over this book -- over and over and over -- with all the legal stuff that was involved in it. It’s crazy when you think about making a book; you’re not going to make a mountain of money off of it, you think you’re doing it as a labor of love and then you watch all of your proceeds go away because of the litigiousness of our country. It’s a bummer. Even the UK book is more vetted because of the legal process. I guess in England if you have a book and you put it out, there are attorney’s that survive just on book releases. They go through the books and they look for somebody saying something about somebody and they contact them and say “let’s sue.” So that kind of sucked the fun out of the process of the book being released in the UK, but like I said I’m pretty straight about stuff like that. If I did something that was wrong I copped to it, and if somebody else did something, I pretty much left it alone because I’m not going to save my skin at someone else’s expense. That’s not very cool."

Go to this location for more.

As previously reported Mustaine’s Autobiography recently landed at position #2 on Canada's The Globe and Mail Hardcover Nonfiction bestsellers list. The book, co-written by award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Joe Layden, was released in the US on August 3 via HarperCollins' It Books imprint. The UK edition, Mustaine: A Life In Metal, will hit book stores in the UK on September 30. Dave Mustaine has scheduled 21-book-signing sessions across the US to promote the book.

For more information and to order the book online, click here.