Category: news

California‘s Palm Desert might not be a location immediately synonymous with punk rock, but, just like CBGBs in New York and The Roxy in London, this arid wasteland incubated a rebellious DIY music scene whose impact still resonates. Inspired by local skateboarders’ imaginative quests to find new spaces in which to ride, bands such as Yawning Man and Across The River sought out desolate locales in which to spark up, plug in portable power generators and rock out, out of sight of the authorities.

Fuelled by beer, weed, acid and crystal meth, these impromptu, free-for-all assemblies became the stuff of local legend. And it was here that the teenage Josh Homme served his musical apprentice, in Kyuss, a brooding, intense, psychedelic punk band completed by his high school buddy Nick Oliveri on bass, vocalist John Garcia and drummer Brant Bjork.

“We were a little young to go to see Black Flag and the Misfits and GBH and Discharge without getting killed,” Homme recalled, “so we ended up creating what we wanted to hear those bands evolve into. In the desert, it was about having to make your own thing, and being isolated enough to do it without anyone fucking with you.”

Kyuss ended up recording four studio albums, peaking with 1994’s Welcome To Sky Valley, before imploding acrimoniously.

“Business started to dictate what we were doing,” says Brant Bjork, “and the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood, all that made our band pure and organic, started to evaporate.”

It would have been all too easy for Josh Homme, the band’s most charismatic and confident character, to re-emerge from the wreckage with a vehicle which traded upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, following a summer serving as a touring guitarist in Screaming Trees, Homme purposefully took a hard left, renouncing stoner rock for something altogether more nimble, more abstract and more sensual.

With Queens Of The Stone Age, ‘The Ginger Elvis’ aspired to create “trance robot music… heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls.”

Inspired in equal measure by The Stooges, Misfits, Discharge, Can, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, the band’s self-titled 1998 debut album, with its motorik riffs, studied minimalism, louche Rat Pack swagger and obvious disdain for hard rock orthodoxy, represented both a razing of the past and a signpost to new horizons.

The wired, unhinged and stylistically promiscuous Rated R was an even bolder leap forward. Introduced by the remarkable Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, on which Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford joined Homme and his berserker sidekick Oliveri to deliver a verse resembling a junkie’s letter to Santa (“Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol”) and a single word chorus – the word “cocaine” gleefully stretched like bubblegum – it saw QOTSA anointed as “the new saviours of rock music” by broadsheet newspapers and fashionista style mags, much to Homme’s bemusement.

“Is rock’n’roll in trouble?” he asked drolly. “Is it drowning somewhere and I don’t know? I’ve been listening to good rock music since I was a kid. I mean, I love our music, and I want other people to love it as well, but I just don’t know that rock needed saving.”

Homme was right, obviously, but with Rated R racking up 100,000 UK sales. plus Album Of The Year accolades from Kerrang! and NME, his band were were now regarded as serious players in an industry which, via indie darlings The Strokes and The White Stripes, had suddenly fallen in love anew with guitar bands.

“[Our label] have suddenly realised they’ve got this cool little band on their hands, all ready to go,” Homme observed. “It’s almost like a challenge to stay ahead now. Some people may say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I say, Fuck you. Catch me if you can motherfuckers.”

Expectations for the group’s third album were duly inflated… which Homme, forever a punk at heart, naturally interpreted as a green light to make Queens’ new songs louder, darker, weirder and more fucked-up.

“There are a lot of people who like heavy music but don’t want to listen to Creed or nu-metal bands,” he reasoned. “I think we can offer something a little more esoteric.”

“It’s a three-record plan,” Homme said at the time. “The first record needed to step away from Kyuss and announce a new sound, which was repetition, trance, and simplicity. Then the second record needed to fan the music out so we could display it and play whatever we wanted. So, the third record, to get it right, should combine the first two and go even further.”

Sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age album began in October 2001, with Homme confident that he had amassed his strongest set of songs to date.

Many of these had actually been recorded before, at the Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, during the Homme-helmed Desert Sessions, freewheeling, spontaneous, experimental jam sessions involving the likes of PJ Harvey, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, Masters Of Reality mainman Chris Goss (producer of three Kyuss album and both previous QOTSA long-players), Goatsnake/Earthlings’ vocalist Pete Stahl and more.

Homme imagined that he could recreate the loose, organic feel of these sessions in the studio with Queens, but the vibe with new producer Eric Valentine was markedly different, regimented, meticulous and not altogether fun. To Homme’s fury, word began to filter through that “the adults”, the executives at Interscope Records, were expressing concern over the album’s direction, or, more specifically, its lack of direction.

“To other people there seemed to be a lot riding on this record,” he noted pointedly, “and they ended up standing in our way trying to help. Our main thing we had to overcome was other people that were not involved with us and sort of pushing them to the side, whether gracefully or violently.”

One man who voluntarily stepped away from the project after a mere seven days, due to other obligations, was Queens’ drummer Gene Trautmann. Fortunately, Homme had a back-up option, namely former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, a long-time friend.

“I called Dave and said, Do you want to finish this record?” Homme recalled. “He said, ‘I’m in Malibu. I’ll be there at six o’clock’.”

“I first met Josh in 1992, at a Kyuss show at the Off Ramp in Seattle because he was touring with my friend Pete Stahl‘s band, Wool, and The Obsessed,” Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. “This was the first time I’d seen Kyuss and I was blown away, they were fucking great. They seemed like us, like kids who grew up in the suburbs listening to rock ‘n’ roll records, doing petty crime and drugs, just a little vandals from the middle of nowhere.”

“Then we had QOTSA on tour with us for a really long time in 2000. Instead of putting ‘Queens Of The Stone Age’ on their dressing room door we used to put ‘Critic’s Choice’ because they were the coolest band in the world, and honestly, we thought that too. So in 2000, as we were touring with Queens, someone asked me what was my biggest regret of the year and I said that it was that I didn’t get asked to play on Rated R.

“So Josh said, ‘Dude, if you want to play on a couple of songs…’ Then, that day, I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, going to the beach, and he called and said, ‘Do you want to play on our whole record?’

“Josh and I have a connection musically that I just don’t have with anybody else: as a drummer, playing with him, we share this frequency that I haven’t shared with anyone else. It’s intangible and unspoken, almost like ESP. I made a U-turn, went straight to the studio, and we recorded the drums in like 10 days, maybe two weeks.”

“Dave came in and made these songs that I thought were good, really phenomenal,” marvelled Nick Oliveri. “It uplifted not only our spirit, but us as players, including Josh: his playing on it really made everybody come forward. Dave was a champion of all things. He helped us in so many ways we could never repay the guy.”

As the sessions finally gathered momentum, Homme hit upon a unifying concept to tie his band’s “eclectic, schizophrenic” new songs together: they would be presented as a selection of tracks aired on disparate radio stations dialled in on a night drive from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, a road trip Homme had undertaken countless times.

“When I’d do it, I didn’t have a stereo, all I had was a radio,” he recalled in 2002. “And it goes into weird religious stations and really bad, bad music on that trip through the middle of nowhere. I used to really enjoy the silence and then every once in a while the station you were at would all of a sudden let out a screech, and become a new station. I just wanted to bring that to a record somehow. It is kind of a concept record, but as if the word ‘concept’ didn’t suck.”

The idea was a masterstroke. With friends such as The Cramps’ Lux Interior, Eagles Of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes and Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White recruited to voice mock radio station idents – “KRDL… we spoil music for everyone”, “KLON… we play the songs that sound more like everyone else than anyone else” – the album was given continuity and cohesion.

Crystallising QOTSA’s ‘last-gang-in-town’ outlaw cool, Songs For The Deaf is a wild, disorientating joyride into a grotesque world of sex, drugs, violence and death, laced with subtle black humour. On a diverse and challenging album, not everything quite worked – the scorched-earth punk of Six Shooter is disposable at best, while The Sky Is Fallin’ resembles a cast-off from co-producer Chris Goss’ Masters Of Reality – but when Homme’s band hit their mark, it’s irresistible.

Opener You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire boasts a storming route one riff and a manic Nick Oliveri screaming “Gimme some more!”, First It Giveth deals with chasing narcotic highs, Another Love Song is surf guitar-driven Motown metal and Go With The Flow is a deathless ode to squeezing every last drop of pleasure out of life.

Best of all is the kinetic No One Knows, a Josh Homme/Mark Lanegan co-write, where the thunderous interplay between guest Dave Grohl, Oliveri and Homme recalls Led Zeppelin at their most telepathically locked-in.

Like its desert setting, this is music without horizons, all heat, light and awe-inspiring elemental power.

Released on August 27, 2002, Songs For The Deaf debuted at number 4 in the UK, and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. Its release was preceded by festival dates for the band, including an appearance at England’s Glastonbury festival, with Dave Grohl on drums.

This was all the more notable because, at the time, Grohl was supposed to be in a Hollywood recording studio making the fourth Foo Fighters album, One By One, a fact that understandably alarmed his bandmates. Some wondered privately whether Grohl might ever return. For a fleeting moment or two, the thought crossed Grohl’s mind too.

“I did a one-off show with Queens at the Troubador [on March 7, 2002],” Grohl recalled, “and we walked offstage and Mark Lanegan said – and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me – ‘You know, it’d be a shame just to do that only once’. My decision was purely musical and motivational.

“Being in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life. If you can say that you were a member of Queens Of The Stone Age that’s like wearing a patch on your chest that says ‘I Am A Badass’ for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens Of The Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that’s the truth.

“Walking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, [Mark] Lanegan, [Nick] Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it’s like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show. I was now playing drums in the best band I’d ever been in and fucking loving it.”

This busman’s holiday ended for Grohl at the Fuji Rock festival in Japan in July 2002.

“I started missing my friends,” he explained. “The Foo Fighters had become a family by this point and I’d been away from home for too long.”

“I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters,” Josh Homme admitted. “I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something the other guys needed to worry about. But band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled, because many bands don’t last, and they’re such an unpredictable animal that it’s easy to get your confidence rattled.

“What was great about that time was that Dave did go back, and that said that it’s possible to have a musical mistress: it would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it had proved that having multiple personalities isn’t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that’s when you can get closer to God.”

Asked to ponder his band’s new found popularity in 2002, Homme had this to say: “Kyuss got noticed because it didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it. Bands now scratch and they claw. I don’t wanna show up and go, Please can I get into this club? I want someone to ask me. That attitude is the reason why it’s still fun. It’s like being a deliberate outsider. You invited the outsider in, and now the outsider’s gonna fuck things up.”

Songs For The Deaf ensured that Homme’s band would be outsiders no more.

Ahead of Independence Day in the US, Gene Simmons has voiced his views on patriotism, America’s place in the world, and why he believes the country has a problem with illegal immigration.

Kiss‘ vocalist/bassist shared his opinions during a set with his solo band at Summerfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 3, ahead of celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“In case you don’t know it, you are blessed,” Simmons told the crowd, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. “You are living in the greatest fucking country on the planet. And that’s called USA. Okay, I wanna tell you why I took a minute to talk about America, because if you’ve been asleep the last 250 years, tomorrow is America’s 250th birthday.

“This is the greatest country,” he continued. “That’s why we’ve had anywhere from 20 million to 30 million illegal immigrants. Why? ‘Cause they are willing to break the law and come into the greatest country on the face of the planet, right here. We have more illegal immigrants than most countries have populations on the face of the planet. That’s a fact.

“I myself am an immigrant, but a legal one. I came through the lawful way. You wait in line, you respect the country, you respect its laws, and then you become a citizen of the United States of America. And in return, you get police who risk their lives to protect you.

“And you get first responders who are here for you. And if your house is on fire, you get fire departments that risk their lives to come put that fire out for you. You get a school system that’s yours, and everything is free. Cops, fire department, school — free. All you gotta do is follow the law and do it legally, okay?

“I’m honoured to say I’ve gotta get up at 3:30 this morning to catch a 5:00 a.m. flight because I’ve been asked by the White House to narrate the World War II Veterans honors in America’s 250th birthday tomorrow in Washington, D.C. And unless you guys think Fourth of July is just fireworks and all that, without our veterans, there would be nothing. There would be no America. There would be nothing.

“Politicians talk the talk but veterans put their lives out there. All gave some, some gave all. Don’t forget. So the next time you’re going to a Starbucks and you see somebody in uniform, step aside and make way for a real hero. That’s the least you can do.

“And if you don’t like America, please go back to where you fucking came from.”

Simmons regularly shares his view that musicians and celebrities should refrain from speaking about politics or current affairs.Unless the musician/celebrity in question is Gene Simmons.

It has become one of the most surprising and iconic images to have emerged from the Grammys in recent years: James Hetfield, barrel-chested and iron-lunged Metallica frontman, screaming into a microphone he’s sharing with generational pop superstar, Lady Gaga.

The duo, backed by the rest of Metallica, pillars of pyro and a gaggle of backing dancers as they rip through Moth Into Flame, have had to improvise after an almighty technical hiccup threatened to throw the entire performance into parody. Luckily, it all only serves to make an historic collaboration both more intimate and, somehow, more epic. Disaster averted, basically.

The unlikely team-up took place at the 59th edition of the music industry’s most prestigious awards show, which was held on February 12, 2017 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

On a night also marked by appearances by pop heavyweights such as Adele, Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Daft Punk, Bruno Mars and Katy Perry, Metallica’s one-song set promised to inject the evening with some much needed energy and heaviness, not to mention the fact that it’d involve one of the wildest partnerships in Grammys history.

Amazingly, the whole thing came together over just a matter of weeks, following a chance meeting between Metallica’s drummer and honorary motormouth, Lars Ulrich, and Gaga herself. “We were asked whether we would come and join the Grammys again,” Ulrich explained to Access Hollywood ahead of the performance.

“They encourage you to consider, ‘Is there some collaboration that you think would be cool?’ We said, ‘Let’s think about it.’ And so, I was at a dinner party [with Gaga], and we were sitting next to each other, and we were just basically talking, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this would be cool.’ So I said, ‘We’re doing the Grammys in a couple of months, do you wanna join us?’ and she was just, ‘Yeah, that would be great!'”

The dinner party in question was held at the residence of none other than Hollywood A-lister Bradley Cooper, who was in pre-production with Gaga for the film they were both starring in (and that Cooper was directing), A Star Is Born. “I was at Bradley’s house with Lars and we were just hanging out,” Gaga confirmed to Apple Music‘s Zane Lowe later that year.

The singer was also full of superlatives for Ulrich and his band, adding: “He’s amazing! I went to see them live, I’ve seen them a couple times live, but I saw them recently… and we were watching the show and I’ll tell you something, those guys play better than they’ve played in their whole lives.”

And so, a rehearsal studio in LA was booked for the weekend leading up to the big event, and Gaga and Metallica set about reimagining Moth Into Flame in a way that’d both suit its heavy roots while making the most of Gaga’s powerful, unique vocals and flamboyant sense of creativity.

“She was in there for two hours before we even got there, working on her moves and thinking stuff up,” James Hetfield told Howard Stern in 2020. “She’s extremely creative, and she’s a fearless artist.”

“She was telling me that Metal Militia, which is this deep cut on our first album Kill ‘Em All, was her favourite song back in the day,” added Ulrich. “She loves metal, has been very vocal about her love for metal all the time and would show up at Iron Maiden shows and Anthrax shows.”

Following a successful on-set dress rehearsal before the show began, the stage was officially set and the 59th annual Grammys were underway. And here, sadly, is where things started to go pear-shaped. On the same night that Megadeth were inexplicably played to the stage pick up their Best Metal Performance award to the sound of the house band playing Metallica’s Master Of Puppets, it seemed that Metallica themselves were also destined to be undermined at the Grammys – and not for the first time.

Around halfway through the evening, Orange Is The New Black actress Laverne Cox arrived on stage to introduce Metallica and Lady Gaga’s performance…only to forget to mention Metallica at all. Whoops! “I am so sorry to Metallica and all their fans,” Cox later stated on Twitter. “I am told I didn’t say their names during the intro. Love you Metallica. You Rock.”

The facepalms did by no means end there. As lashings of pyro burst out across the stage and the band kicked into Moth Into Flame, a metalled-up and go-go-dancing Gaga in tow, it soon became obvious that something was wrong.

Namely, James Hetfield’s microphone wasn’t working. While the band were clearly on top form, as the track’s first verse kicked into gear, the frontman’s voice was nowhere to be heard as he bellowed into the mic, a quick, confused glance to his side emphasising that he could tell something was up.

Gaga soldiered on, sounding great as she sung her parts, but by the time it came to Moth Into Flames‘ chorus, it was clear the issue was not getting fixed – almost ninety seconds into the song, and Papa Het was still singing his heart out to absolutely no avail.

“In the heat of the battle, you’re out there, you’re playing,” Lars Ulrich told James Corden on The Late Late Show a few weeks later. “When it’s a technical issue, you don’t really know. Is it going to the house? Are the vocals going to the truck? Maybe it’s just the monitor – so you just gotta keep playing.”

Thankfully, quick minds prevailed. Gaga, ever the professional, subtly beckoned Hetfield over, and the two sung the track’s chorus together on her mic, sharing it for the remainder of the performance. What could have been a total catastrophe ended up being saved at the last minute, and the rest of the song went by without a hitch – and, of course, gave us that iconic shot of the two vocalists side by side.

Sadly, the technical snafu had already done its damage as far as Hetfield’s mood was concerned; as soon as the performance finished, Metallica’s usually PMA powerhouse could be seen angrily throwing his guitar off stage. He was still fuming by the time the band got back to their dressing room.

“We get off stage, we get back there and I haven’t seen him like that in 20 years,” Ulrich revealed on The Late Late Show. “He was livid. He’s aged really well and is a pretty chilled guy – but the first five or 10 minutes in that dressing room was not a lot of fun.”

“I felt embarrassed,” Hetfield told the New York Post. “I haven’t been that angry in a long time. When something out of my control goes wrong, I still get wound up. I’m sure it taps into other stuff from my past, but I felt helpless.”

TMZ would report that the unfortunate screw-up was down to a stagehand accidentally unplugging a wire under the stage moments before the performance took place. A brutal mistake, but a mistake nonetheless – and one that Metallica, to their credit, were quickly able to put a positive spin on.

“Like they say, the show must go on,” said Lars on The Late Late Show. “We fought through it and a lot of people said that it at least made for great television.” “It ended up being a blessing because I ended up singing in a microphone with Lady Gaga – maybe even more than she wanted,” Hetfield told the New York Post. “It felt more like a real collaboration because of that.”

In hindsight, Metallica’s collab with Gaga is far from the biggest disaster the Four Horsemen have put their name to. A victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, it served as an imperfect if riotously entertaining awards performance unlike any other. Like just about everything else Metallica do, it was certainly unforgettable – and at least we have the flawless rehearsal footage to remind exactly how it all should have gone.

Megadeth‘s 1990 album Rust in Peace is one of the best thrash albums ever made, but it was recorded in absolutely chaotic circumstances.

Dave Mustaine had fired most of his band in 1988: guitarist Jeff Young and drummer Chuck Behler were out. After auditioning many musicians, former Cacophony guitarist Marty Friedman joined the band while Behler’s tech Nick Menza took over on drums.

“By just about every conceivable standard, Rust in Peace was a watershed event for Megadeth,” Mustaine recalled in his 2010 autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. “Funny thing was, it didn’t start out that well. We recorded at a place called Rumbo Recorders, which was owned by the Captain and Tennille, of all people. I was skeptical about Rumbo offering the right atmosphere, a feeling that was exacerbated one day when I walked in and saw our producer, Dave Jerden, eating a chili dog and smoking a cigarette at the controls. The place just reeked.”

According to engineer Micajah Ryan, the Megadeth frontman was swift in relieving Jerden of his post after a few days: “The quote was, ‘I think there’s too many guys named Dave around here, we’re gonna get rid of one of them.’ And Dave Jerden got fired.”

Producer Mike Clink also “got off on the wrong foot” with Mustaine when he revealed that he may have to leave the studio at a moment’s notice to work with Guns N’ Roses on their follow-up to Appetite for Destruction. It was another dog – this time an actual puppy – that ended this particular producer’s tenure.

“The damn dog ate a hole in the wall and then knocked over my guitar, and we just had to let him go,” remembered Mustaine. “But I want to be fair here. Mike Clink has always gotten credit for producing Rust in Peace, and I certainly wouldn’t deny his contributions. It’s a terrific record, start to finish.”

He’s not wrong. Rust in Peace is packed with highlights and spawned two Top 30 hit singles. The first was Holy Wars… The Punishment Due, inspired by the frontman’s unwise comments about the IRA during their show at the Antrim Forum in Northern Ireland.

The second single was political, too, but this time tapped into a popular UFO conspiracy theory that the US government allegedly hid alien lifeforms in an Ohio building belonging to the USAF.

“It was an idea that Nick came up with,” said Mustaine. “The idea’s based on a place in the Four Corners state region of the United States; it’s a place where the military intelligence is housing alien aircraft and alien life-forms. Not that I subscribe to this point of view or any of that kind of BS, but Nick is way into it. I mean, the guy thinks that Jesus was a Martian.

“But, I guess those of you who know Nick probably know that the possibility, the way he explains it, it could be real,” he conceded. “So we tried to bring it to you guys in a song form, and it’s up to your imaginations to see whether or not you believe it.”

Mustaine – a Christian – later told Rock Radio that Menza’s religious comments marked his card for a future dismissal.

“Menza is the guy who believes in UFOs,” he explained. “If you look at his website or if you listen to his solo music, it shows you where he’s at in his life. Nick said something that I found really juvenile and offensive. He told me that Jesus was an alien and he could levitate. That was the end of me taking Nick seriously – I believed in God ever since I was a kid.”

Mustaine had the song’s riff lying around unused for around a decade or so, back when he was lead guitarist for his first band, Panic.

“It was called N2RHQ and it was about an environment that was up on another planet,” he told Rolling Stone. “As it morphed through going into Metallica and us deciding whether we were gonna do that song, I just waited to revisit it in Megadeth, just like in Panic, I had the song Rust in Peace … Polaris completely done; it was called Child Saint back at that time. And I’m sure that if I would’ve shown it to the guys, Metallica probably would’ve recorded that one also.”

Hangar 18 is one of the album’s most ambitious songs. Tempo-wise, it’s all over the shop and changes four times before Mustaine opens his mouth and the climax of the song quickens the pace further.

“In the middle of the break when we go to the first extended solo section, it’s a very Spanish ‘jazzy’ kind of part,” Mustaine told Total Guitar. “Then the end solo, when the guitar duel takes over, it’s no holds barred get the fuck out of the way.”

Indeed, Friedman and Mustaine trade a staggering 11 solos during the song. In a post on his website, Friedman recalls that it was producer Clink that offered words of inspiration before committing his part to tape.

“He said: ‘Check out the lyrics of this song. It’s about aliens and Martians, so play something that sounds like you are coming from outer space.’

“That was good advice and from then on, I really paid a lot more attention to the lyrics in a song than I had before,” he added.

Hangar 18 was released as a single in February 1991 and was nominated in the ‘Best Metal Performance’ category at the Grammys held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City the following year.

During the ceremony, singer Johnny Mathis gave the band a shout-out during a pre-written bit with Dionne Warwick: “I just love the GRAMMYs. On what other list would I find my name between Madonna and Megadeth?”

Another band, whose name begins with M, were named as winners of their category for their self-titled album: Metallica. As the band accepted their gong, residents in Brooklyn could have probably heard Mustaine loudly complaining about this snub on his efforts despite writing a thrash classic for the ages.