Megadeth ended the Clash Of The Titans run with an arsenal of new songs banked, the likes of Foreclosure Of A Dream and Ashes In Your Mouth shifting away from the more technical focus of Rust In Peace, to emphasise strong melodic hooks and arrangements. We knew the record after Rust In Peace was going to be the big one, you could just feel it.” He made sure we’d have everything we needed to harness the greatness that was developing in the band at the time. “Ron Laffitte was a terrific manager for us his icon was Pat Riley of the Lakers, so he was all about the team and focusing on how you could channel all this talent. “Every single day we got to a city and into our dressing room, we were writing songs for what would become Countdown To Extinction,” Ellefson recalls. Sensing a new window of opportunity at broadcast media for music with attitude, Megadeth knuckled down. That summer, a second Clash Of The Titans tour was announced, with fellow thrash trailblazers Anthrax added to the bill as a third headliner, and a young Seattle band, Alice In Chains, booked as the opening act, to promote their debut album, Facelift, featuring emerging radio hit Man In The Box. Megadeth played a run of dates in late 1990 and early 1991 that included shows with Judas Priest and an appearance at the second Rock In Rio festival, where they played to more than 100,000 people on a bill topped by Guns N’ Roses.

We were shooting for the stars.”Īnd momentum was building. It was interesting to juxtapose where we were in ’90, kinda fresh and going out with Slayer as this new unit, to the end of the following summer where we were ready to go it alone and do things for ourselves. “ Rust… was our first record with clear minds and clear ambitions. “It was the stepping stone that took us from being a dishevelled, broken-down, drugged-out shell of a Megadeth in 1988/1989 into being the band that could fill arenas on our own. “Clash Of The Titans was very strategic for Megadeth,” Ellefson tells us. Mustaine and Ellefson were both completely hooked. With Testament and Suicidal Tendencies on the under-card, the three-week tour, billed as the Clash Of The Titans, was a triumph, offering all four bands a teasing first taste of what true success might look like.

Two days before their fourth album dropped, the band kicked off an ambitious European arena tour, co-headlining with old friends Slayer.

Dave mustaine 90s