Edmonton's VUE Weekly has issued the following report from Eden Munro:

"I’ve been on the road for the last year and it’s going great,” Dave Mustaine, vocalist, guitarist and leader of MEGADETH, says over the phone. “There’s a lot of people out here, and with people come relationships and relationships are hard to maintain, unless you’re a complete phony and then you can pretend you like somebody and really hate their guts. But I’m the kind of person, if I don’t like you, it’s hard for me not to say something.”

It’s not hard to believe that Mustaine is more than willing to speak his mind when he has something to say - during our conversation, he riffs more in 15 minutes than many people do in 45, covering plenty of topics along the way. Still, as pointed as his statement might sound, he hasn’t kept Megadeth alive for the last 25 years by firing off random attacks on people. Mustaine’s attitude is quite the opposite, in fact: it’s only the people who have burned him in the past who are on the receiving end of his cutting jabs - mostly old band members who have lied or stolen from him over the years.

“We’ve always tried to be classy, because the relationship we’ve always had with you - the press - and them - the audience - we’ve always really recognized that without the three of us we would not exist,” he says of the interconnections between the different groups that make up the music community that Megadeth is a part of. “I know that there’s a lot of [journalists] that like me and a lot that don’t. I know that there’s a lot that like me but they don’t necessarily like my music. I’m cool with all of that - I know that it’s a job and I know that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a good or a bad person because of what you do.

“I also know that we’ve got some fans that are great people and we’ve got some fans that aren’t such nice guys,” he adds, his voice taking on a more serious tone. “There are some people who are fans of ours that love our music and they use it to do bad stuff with.”

The bad stuff that Mustaine is referring to is the 2006 shooting that took place at Dawson College in Montréal, where the shooter had claimed to have been inspired by Megadeth’s 'À Tout Le Monde', a 1994 song that Mustaine re-recorded for the band’s most recent album, United Abominations.

“What happened here before up at Dawson, it was terrible,” he says. “But I made absolutely sure to say when that happened, that song belongs to the beautiful people of Montréal and it wasn’t meant for anybody to do anything like that and I refuse to allow that song to be stolen by him... I think that you have to take ownership of stuff like that and if you let the bad guys win, you’re letting the bad guys win.”

Read the full story at VUE Weekly.