Chad Bowar: Megadeth recently played in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. How was that?
Dave Mustaine: It was very interesting. It was nothing like we were led to believe in the media. It was the third annual festival there. We got to do some desert stuff. They called it a safari, but it was riding around in the sand dunes on 4 wheelers. The guys in Reel Big Fish went sandboarding. We went out to a dinner that night where they had belly dancers and all kinds of crazy stuff.
That was the first show with new bassist James Lomenzo. How did he fit in?
He was wonderful.
Give us a recap of what is on your new DVD Arsenal Of Megadeth.
It's a lot of stuff. It's a compilation of live and studio video footage. There's footage of us doing interviews and recording. There's backstage stuff and things like Rock The Vote. There are also parts of ad campaigns from the record company that people may have never seen. People can bitch about everything and there are always going to be somebody who's going to complain about something, but the only thing (on the DVD) that I thought that was probably in need of a description was the footage from Risk, why it was the way it was, why there wasn't any performance of the band. That was a period where we were leaving the label, so there wasn't really much interaction between us and the label. That's why that video showed up with nobody in it.
How long did it take to compile everything for the DVD?
It's been about two years. It wasn't all my doing, even though I picked a lot of the stuff. There was a gentleman named Kevin Flaherty that was involved in it, too. It was a labor of love because there was so much stuff to go over. Sadly there were a lot of setbacks with licensing problems with other people who had material we wanted on the DVD. There was either too much bureaucracy and red tape or they wanted a ridiculous amount of money for a very insignificant amount of footage. There was one instance where somebody wanted 50 grand for a 30 second spot.
The DVD got off to a strong start, debuting at number 6 on the DVD charts.
Yeah, that's great. I'm hoping that it will hold or even continue to rise.
Will there be a Gigantour 2 this summer?
Yes. We've already started confirming some of our acts and working out what the routing is for the festival, like the dates and times and how many groups we're going to have. We actually started discussing this two days after Gigantour 1 ended. The announcements will come within the next month or so. The festival will probably be the end of August through the beginning of October.
After the first festival did you decide to make any major changes for this year?
I don't know how to say this without sounding pompous, but there really wasn't that much to learn going from a place of being the facilitator for a festival and being an organizer. There's so much stuff to do, but it's stuff I knew how to do because I used to do all that stuff back in my other band. In the beginning I would handle a lot of that stuff. It was like going back to school a little bit, but I knew how to do it. I think the talent is going to be something that's going to step up a notch, because it's proven now. We can reach out to some more bands that are higher up in their accomplishments. Some of the bands we took out were young and unknown. It was great to have them out and they helped Gigantour get some credibility. I think this time we can go out and present it to some other people.
The band has been doing some songwriting. Do you have a timetable for the next Megadeth studio album?
We start tracking on April 19th in England. Jeff Balding is going to work with me in producing. We're going to take a different approach to this record. I'm not going to say any more than that. I know what we're capable of doing. The System Has Failed was a great comeback record, and I think this is going to continue claiming new fans and reintroducing ourselves to some old fans who may have gone to listening to other music.
