Dave Mustaine spent the first weeks of recording Rust in Peace not in a Canoga Park control room but in a Californian rehab facility, which is why the man who would later claim the album as his masterpiece is almost entirely absent from its first half of tape. Producer Mike Clink, fresh from making Appetite for Destruction with Guns N Roses, ran sessions at Rumbo Recorders without him, cutting drums with a 25-year-old debutant called Nick Menza, bass with David Ellefson, and lead guitar with a former Cacophony player called Marty Friedman who had been hired in February 1990 on the strength of a solo album sent in the post. By the time Mustaine sobered up enough to come and sing his own record, Clink had quit for the Use Your Illusion sessions, mix engineer Max Norman had been brought in to salvage the tapes, and the so-called classic Megadeth lineup had quietly recorded one of the most technically accomplished thrash metal albums ever made.
Released by Capitol Records on 24 September 1990, Rust in Peace is the album where Megadeth stopped being Metallica's noisier little brother and became something else entirely: a four-piece capable of pairing Friedman's exotic, Eastern-tinged lead work with riffs about nuclear paranoia, the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Marvel Punisher and a hangar in Ohio where alien bodies were rumoured to be kept on ice. Three and a half decades on, it remains a fixture on every credible greatest-thrash-album list ever published, and the record against which every other Megadeth album, including its own writer's later work, is silently measured.
Album facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Megadeth |
| Album | Rust in Peace |
| Release date | 24 September 1990 |
| Label | Capitol Records |
| Producers | Dave Mustaine, Mike Clink |
| Studios | Rumbo Recorders, Canoga Park, California |
| Genre / subgenre | Thrash metal, technical thrash |
| Track count | 9 (original); 13 on the 2004 remix and remaster |
| Total runtime | 40:44 |
| Billboard 200 peak | 23 |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 8 |
| Other notable chart peaks | Ireland 18, Finland 19, Germany 21, Japan 29, Switzerland 29, New Zealand 35, Sweden 34, Australia 47, Canada 70 |
| Certifications | Platinum (US RIAA, 1994; Canada Music Canada), Gold (UK BPI, Japan RIAJ, Italy FIMI, Argentina CAPIF) |
| Estimated sales | Worldwide figures rarely published; over one million shipments in the US alone |
| Key singles | Holy Wars... The Punishment Due (23 September 1990); Hangar 18 (4 February 1991) |
Cultural context: thrash at its high water mark
To understand what Rust in Peace had to compete with, look at the rest of the metal calendar for 1990. In the same twelve-month stretch, Slayer released Seasons in the Abyss, Anthrax dropped Persistence of Time, Judas Priest returned to crushing form with Painkiller, Pantera kicked open a new door with Cowboys from Hell, Alice in Chains debuted with Facelift and Queensryche released the platinum-bound Empire. Glam was wheezing on its last legs in Los Angeles, grunge was bubbling up the I-5 from Seattle, and thrash, the genre Megadeth had helped invent, was at the absolute commercial peak it would ever reach.
Within eighteen months the rules would change again. Metallica's self-titled Black Album in August 1991 made thrash radio-friendly, and Nirvana's Nevermind in September 1991 made everything before it suddenly sound like the past. Rust in Peace landed in the narrow window where speed, technicality and intricacy were still rewarded with serious airplay and gold records, and Megadeth made absolute hay of it.
- Slayer, Seasons in the Abyss (October 1990)
- Anthrax, Persistence of Time (August 1990)
- Judas Priest, Painkiller (September 1990)
- Pantera, Cowboys from Hell (July 1990)
- Queensryche, Empire (August 1990)
- Alice in Chains, Facelift (August 1990)
- Kreator, Coma of Souls (October 1990)
- Annihilator, Never, Neverland (October 1990)
The band's story up to this point
By the end of 1988 Megadeth was a chaos engine. The third album, So Far, So Good... So What!, had gone gold but to widely mixed reviews. A Monsters of Rock appearance at Donington that summer in front of more than a hundred thousand people had ended with Ellefson's heroin problems forcing the band off the subsequent European tour after a single show, and a scheduled Australian run was cancelled outright. Mustaine, equally entangled in addiction, fired both drummer Chuck Behler and lead guitarist Jeff Young and started the search for replacements that would consume most of 1989.
The drum chair was the first to fill. Nick Menza, the German-born son of jazz saxophonist Don Menza, had been working as Behler's drum tech and had been pressed into service to play soundcheck when Behler was unavailable for a date at Rock City in Nottingham. Mustaine and Ellefson had heard enough. Menza was hired in 1989 and would make his recorded debut on Rust in Peace.
The guitar audition was a much longer ordeal. Mustaine offered the job to Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, who said yes on the condition that his brother Vinnie Paul also be hired as drummer. Mustaine declined. Annihilator's Jeff Waters was discussed. Original Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland was lured back to track lead parts on demos of Holy Wars, Tornado of Souls, Lucretia, Five Magics, Take No Prisoners, Rust in Peace... Polaris and Poison Was the Cure. By Poland's own account he was, in his words, "99 percent going to join" the band before his manager talked him out of it. The chair was finally filled in February 1990, when Mustaine's friend Bob Nalbandian tipped him off about an ex-Cacophony shredder called Marty Friedman who had just released a solo album called Dragon's Kiss. Mustaine listened, called Friedman in, watched him play, and hired him on the spot. The classic Megadeth lineup was now intact, and the band had six weeks before pre-production was due to start.
Pre-production and demos
The Rust in Peace songbook was not a clean-sheet write. Five Magics had been worked on for some time, drawing lyrically on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels and musically on the kind of long-form instrumental thinking Mustaine had been doing since the Killing Is My Business era. Poison Was the Cure had been sketched as far back as the Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? sessions in 1986, and was developed further during the So Far, So Good... So What! period before being properly demoed in 1990. Rust in Peace... Polaris was older still: Mustaine has said that the song, originally titled Child Saint, was one of his earliest compositions and predated his Metallica tenure entirely.
Other tracks were newer. Holy Wars was a direct response to a now-notorious 1988 show in Antrim, Northern Ireland, where Mustaine, unaware of the political weight of the phrase, dedicated a song to "The Cause" after being told that bootleg Megadeth shirts on sale outside the venue were funding it. The audience rioted; the band were escorted out in a bulletproof bus and driven back to Dublin. Hangar 18 came in via Menza, who proposed the concept of a song about UFO conspiracies and Area 51 and watched Mustaine run with it. Lucretia and Tornado of Souls were co-writes with Ellefson, and Dawn Patrol, the album's strange creeping interlude, was an Ellefson lyric set to a Mustaine bassline.
The Chris Poland demos remain among the most-traded Megadeth artefacts of all. They reveal songs already largely formed at the riff and arrangement level, with leads that bear no resemblance to the parts Friedman would eventually cut: Poland's playing is bluesier, his phrasing looser, his note choice more rooted in conventional rock vocabulary. When Friedman arrived in February 1990 he was effectively asked to relearn nothing, only to reinvent the lead guitar of an album whose rhythm tracks were almost complete.
Creating the album: Rumbo, rehab and the Clink problem
Recording moved into Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park late in 1989 and continued through the first half of 1990. Rumbo, founded by Captain and Tennille and best known by then for hosting Guns N Roses, gave Megadeth access to a high-end Los Angeles studio at a time when their budget would have struggled to book one. Mike Clink, who had produced Appetite for Destruction and UFO's Strangers in the Night, was the obvious draw: Mustaine wanted that big, modern, hard-rock sound on a thrash record, and Clink had it on tap.
The first practical problem was that Mustaine was not present for much of it. By his own admission in a 2002 interview, the band "really didn't make the record with Clink" because Mustaine spent the early stretch of the schedule in rehab. Clink ran the sessions and concentrated on the parts of the album he could capture without the singer: Ellefson's bass, Menza's drums and Friedman's lead guitar. The second problem was that Clink had a much bigger gig waiting for him. Guns N Roses were about to start Use Your Illusion I and II, and Clink left Rust in Peace before vocals and a substantial chunk of the rhythm guitars had been finished.
The album was rescued in two stages. Engineer Micajah Ryan, with assistant Andy Udoff, picked up the recording and stayed with Mustaine through the back half of the project, capturing vocals and the bulk of Mustaine's own guitar work. Mix engineer Max Norman, then best known for producing Ozzy Osbourne's Diary of a Madman and Bark at the Moon, was then brought in to mix; mastering was completed by Greg Fulginiti. Norman gave the record the dry, separated, hyper-articulate sound that became the album's signature: every double-kick triplet audible, every Friedman bend untangled from every Mustaine palm-mute, no thrash blur, no mud. In a 2002 retelling Mustaine credited most of the actual making of the album to himself, Norman and Ryan rather than to Clink, though Clink's name remains on the producer line.
"We really didn't make the record with [Clink], as at the time he was focused on Guns N Roses."
Dave Mustaine, interview, 2002, cited on the Rust in Peace Wikipedia entry
The end result was a record that did not sound like 1990 thrash. Master of Puppets had been wet and cavernous, Reign in Blood brutal and compressed, South of Heaven gloomy. Rust in Peace was bone-dry and surgical, the instrumental separation closer to a Steely Dan record than to any of its peers, and that production aesthetic is the reason it still sounds modern thirty-five years later.
Personnel and credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals, guitars | Dave Mustaine | Also cover concept |
| Lead guitar | Marty Friedman | Recording debut with Megadeth; joined February 1990 |
| Bass, backing vocals | David Ellefson | Co-wrote Hangar 18, Lucretia, Tornado of Souls, Dawn Patrol |
| Drums, backing vocals | Nick Menza | Recording debut with Megadeth; proposed concept for Hangar 18 |
| Additional musicians | ||
| Laugh on Lucretia | Sandra Rabin | Single vocal credit |
| Lead guitar (demos only) | Chris Poland | Tracked demo leads on seven of the album's nine songs; replaced before the final cuts |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Dave Mustaine, Mike Clink | Clink left mid-project for Guns N Roses Use Your Illusion sessions |
| Recording and engineering | Micajah Ryan, Mike Clink | Ryan finished vocals and guitars after Clink's departure |
| Assistant engineer | Andy Udoff | |
| Mixing | Max Norman | Brought in after tracking; defined the album's dry, articulate sound |
| Mastering | Greg Fulginiti | |
| Guitar technician | Tom Mayhue | |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover illustration and artwork | Ed Repka | Also painted the cover for Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? (1986) and the single sleeves |
| Cover concept | Dave Mustaine | |
| Photography | Gene Kirkland | With assistant Wendi Schaeffer |
The credit that did not make the liner notes is the most interesting one. Chris Poland's demo leads are the ghost in the machine of Rust in Peace: present on every bootleg trade list for a generation, audibly the first version of the album anyone outside Megadeth's inner circle heard. Mustaine has been generous about them in retrospect, calling Poland's contributions formative, while Poland himself remains philosophical about a Megadeth career that came within a percentage point of restarting.
The songs: a track-by-track
Across forty minutes and nine tracks Mustaine wrote either alone or with Ellefson, with no producer co-writes and no outside lyricists. The album opens with arguably the most ambitious song he has ever recorded and closes on the song he wrote before he had ever heard of Metallica.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Holy Wars... The Punishment Due | Mustaine | 6:36 | Yes (Sep 1990) | Two-part suite: holy war section then a Punisher-inspired second half |
| 2 | Hangar 18 | Mustaine, Ellefson | 5:14 | Yes (Feb 1991) | Twin solos between Mustaine and Friedman; concept proposed by Menza |
| 3 | Take No Prisoners | Mustaine | 3:28 | Fastest track on the record | |
| 4 | Five Magics | Mustaine | 5:42 | Lyrics drawn from Roger Zelazny's Amber novels | |
| 5 | Poison Was the Cure | Mustaine | 2:58 | Autobiographical addiction lyric; sketched in the Peace Sells era | |
| 6 | Lucretia | Mustaine, Ellefson | 3:58 | Sandra Rabin's laugh in the intro | |
| 7 | Tornado of Souls | Mustaine, Ellefson | 5:22 | Friedman's solo routinely voted one of metal's all-time best | |
| 8 | Dawn Patrol | Ellefson lyric, Mustaine music | 1:50 | Bass-and-vocal interlude | |
| 9 | Rust in Peace... Polaris | Mustaine | 5:36 | Nuclear-war lyric; originally titled Child Saint, pre-Metallica |
Holy Wars... The Punishment Due opens with one of the most copied riffs in metal. Mustaine had to publish his own corrected transcription in 2017 because the version that had been circulating on tab sites for two decades was wrong, a detail that says something about both the song's reach and the difficulty of actually playing it. Lyrically it stitches two narratives together: a verse cycle about religious violence drawn from the Northern Ireland incident, and a closing section about Marvel's Punisher, the Frank Castle vigilante character Mustaine had been reading. The song is a deliberate dare. Five and a half minutes in there is a tempo shift and a half-time outro that arrives like a slap, and even Megadeth themselves rarely play the song convincingly live without rehearsing it back into shape.
Hangar 18 is the band's other live anchor and the one Menza brought to the table. The reference is to a real piece of UFO folklore: the alleged Wright-Patterson Air Force Base storage facility for the bodies recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash, supposed to have been later moved to Area 51 for study. Musically the song is built around the most famous twin solo passage in thrash, with Mustaine and Friedman trading short, melodic, often atonal phrases over the same backing for what feels like much longer than it actually is. The song's sequel, Return to Hangar, would close the band's 2001 album The World Needs a Hero.
"I had complete control over what I played. That's all I ever wanted."
Marty Friedman on his Rust in Peace leads, Blabbermouth, 2016
Take No Prisoners is the album's fastest moment, a straight thrash workout. Five Magics is the album's prog showpiece, a five-and-a-half minute piece structured in distinct movements with a long instrumental introduction and lyrics borrowed from Roger Zelazny's Amber fantasy series. Poison Was the Cure is the autobiographical centrepiece: Mustaine writing in plain language about the heroin addiction that had nearly cost him this record before it was made, set to a riff that had been in his back pocket since the mid-eighties.
Lucretia, an Ellefson co-write opening with the disembodied laugh of guest Sandra Rabin, sits between the Mexican folklore figure of La Llorona and an entirely invented Mustaine ghost story; it is the album's most underrated track and the one that aged into a setlist staple long after the singles. Tornado of Souls is the songwriter's piece on the record, a tightly constructed five-minute thrash song whose middle section contains the Friedman solo that almost every guitar magazine in print has at some point named one of the greatest in metal history. Friedman's choice of notes there, full of Japanese pentatonic and Eastern modal inflections, is the moment Megadeth's lead vocabulary stopped sounding like Megadeth and started sounding like the future.
Dawn Patrol is the album's shortest piece, a one-minute-fifty Ellefson lyric set to a creeping fretless-sounding bassline, structurally there to give the listener a beat before the closing track. Rust in Peace... Polaris closes the record with a song about the Lockheed UGM-27 Polaris Cold War ballistic missile, its title pulled from the bumper sticker that gave the album its name: "May all your nuclear weapons rust in peace." Mustaine spotted the sticker on a car while driving home from Lake Elsinore, California, and decided on the spot to use the line.
B-sides, outtakes and lost songs
The original 1990 LP runs nine tracks and no formal B-sides were issued at the time beyond the album versions themselves. The bonus material lives on the 2004 remix and remaster, which added a Mustaine-Ellefson-Menza-written song called Breakpoint and three demo recordings: Rust in Peace... Polaris (demo, 5:25), Holy Wars... The Punishment Due (demo, 6:16) and Take No Prisoners (demo, 3:23). The remaster also includes My Creation, a short Mustaine-Menza instrumental sketch that did not appear on the original record.
The genuinely lost recordings are the Chris Poland demos. Tape exists of Poland's lead parts on seven of the nine songs: Holy Wars, Tornado of Souls, Lucretia, Five Magics, Take No Prisoners, Rust in Peace... Polaris and Poison Was the Cure. None has ever had an official release, but most have leaked over the years and circulate freely on collector forums. They are the closest thing to an alternate-universe version of Rust in Peace that will ever exist.
Album artwork and packaging
Ed Repka, who had already given Megadeth one of the most recognisable mascots in metal with the 1986 Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? cover, returned to paint Rust in Peace and the sleeves for both singles. The image is a tableau: Vic Rattlehead, the band's grinning skull mascot with the eyes wired shut, presides over a cryogenic chamber containing what appears to be a recovered alien body. The object Vic is holding was later confirmed by Mustaine to be a Kryptonite-like material, a direct comic-book wink.
The five world leaders flanking Vic are, from left to right, an unidentified British representative (Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister at the moment of the painting, with both Michael Heseltine and John Major manoeuvring for her job; some readings of the cover identify the figure as Major), Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, West German President Richard von Weizsacker, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and United States President George H. W. Bush. The 1990 lineup was chosen for a reason: this was the year the Berlin Wall finished coming down and the Cold War nuclear standoff that had given the album its title was visibly winding up.
Release and reception
Capitol released Rust in Peace on 24 September 1990 and watched the album do what no Megadeth record had done before. It debuted respectably on the Billboard 200 and climbed to number 23, gave the band their first UK top ten by hitting number 8 on the Official Albums Chart, and charted across mainland Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. It was nominated for the Best Metal Performance Grammy at the 33rd Grammy Awards in 1991 (the prize went elsewhere). At the 1991 Foundations Forum, the single Hangar 18 won the Top Radio Cut award and the album took a Concrete Foundations Award.
The reviews were uniformly good. Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune called it Megadeth's most accomplished album and praised the "instrumental virtuosity, thoughtful lyricism and punkish rage". Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone wrote that the album proved how far the "nasty speed thrash" template could go without becoming "formulaic and boring". Jim Farber in Entertainment Weekly summarised the music as "sheer velocity, combined with dexterity" and the lyrics as "nihilistic whimsy". Tom Nordlie in Spin described it as "mature, complex, surprisingly consonant and sparely produced". Rock Hard's Holger Stratmann called it "pure Megadeth" with "razor sharp guitars" and "snotty vocals". AllMusic and the Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal both gave it perfect or near-perfect scores. The Rolling Stone Album Guide, normally cold on thrash, rated it three and a half stars.
"Megadeth's most accomplished album: instrumental virtuosity, thoughtful lyricism and punkish rage."
Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune, 8 November 1990
Sales followed the reviews. The RIAA certified Rust in Peace platinum in 1994 for one million US shipments. Music Canada gave it platinum status, the British Phonographic Industry certified it gold, and the recording industry bodies of Japan, Italy and Argentina followed with gold certifications of their own. Megadeth had been a gold-selling band before; this was the album that made them platinum.
Singles and music videos
Two singles were released, both Mustaine-written or co-written and both backed by music videos that became staples of MTV's Headbangers Ball.
| Single | Release date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Holy Wars... The Punishment Due | 23 September 1990 | Released the day before the album; opening track; the video, intercutting band performance with footage of religious and political conflict, became the band's most-shown clip on Headbangers Ball |
| Hangar 18 | 4 February 1991 | Won Top Radio Cut at the 1991 Foundations Forum; the video plays out the UFO conspiracy plot with stock footage and a goggle-wearing Mustaine; sequel Return to Hangar followed in 2001 |
Neither single was edited dramatically for radio, which is part of the reason the album feels coherent rather than front-loaded: the singles are six and five minutes long respectively, and they are first and second on the running order. Megadeth, in 1990 at least, were not in the business of three-minute thrash.
Touring and live
The Rust in Peace touring cycle is the one almost every Megadeth fan over forty remembers personally, and it centred on the Clash of the Titans package. The first leg ran across Europe in summer 1990 and paired Megadeth with Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies and Testament. The much larger second leg ran across North America in summer 1991, with Slayer and Anthrax co-headlining alongside Megadeth and an upcoming Seattle band called Alice in Chains opening the bill. It was the first time three of the so-called Big Four of American thrash had toured the United States together. Metallica, by then on the cusp of the Black Album, were the conspicuous absence.
Beyond Clash of the Titans the band played the inaugural Rock in Rio II in January 1991, sharing stages with Judas Priest, Guns N Roses and a hundred and forty thousand Brazilians at a stretch. Television appearances followed in volume: MTV Headbangers Ball, European music shows, late-night promo spots. The Friedman-Menza lineup quickly developed a reputation as one of the tightest live acts in metal, and the Rust in Peace material, particularly Holy Wars and Hangar 18, would stay in the band's set for the next three decades.
In TV, film and media
Rust in Peace's tracks have had unusually long tails in games and other media:
- Hangar 18 was a tracklist standout on Guitar Hero II in 2006 and was added as Guitar Hero 5 downloadable content in 2010.
- Holy Wars... The Punishment Due was selected as a featured track on Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock in 2010, and a Steve Ouimette cover appeared on Rock Revolution in 2008.
- Tornado of Souls appeared in Tim Schafer's Brutal Legend in 2009 and was later released for Rocksmith 2014.
- The entire album was released as downloadable content for the Rock Band series on 9 February 2010, one of the first thrash albums to get the full-album DLC treatment.
- The Onion published a satirical piece in August 2015 with the headline "Humanity Still Producing New Art As Though Megadeth's 'Rust In Peace' Doesn't Already Exist", which became one of the most-shared metal memes of the streaming era.
Covers, samples and tributes
Rust in Peace songs have been covered by a long list of bands working in thrash, death and progressive metal, with Holy Wars and Tornado of Souls accounting for the vast majority. Steve Ouimette's officially licensed Holy Wars cover for Rock Revolution is the only mainstream-released version. Friedman's solos in particular have become a kind of teaching set for technical metal players; in interviews everyone from Avenged Sevenfold's Synyster Gates to Trivium's Matt Heafy to Children of Bodom's late Alexi Laiho has named the Tornado of Souls solo as the one they had to learn note for note. Sample use is, predictably, almost non-existent; the album is too riff-dense and too dry-mixed to be useful as source material for anyone else's record.
Reissues, remasters and anniversaries
The album has had two significant catalogue events. In 2004, as part of a label-wide overhaul of the Megadeth Capitol catalogue, Mustaine remixed and remastered Rust in Peace with engineer Ralph Patlan at his Phase Three Studios in Texas. The reissue added Breakpoint and three demo tracks, and reframed the original liner notes; opinion among the fanbase remains divided about the remix, with a large constituency preferring the original Max Norman mix for its rawness and air. The mastering on the 2004 version, by Tom Baker, is loud in the way 2004 albums tended to be.
The bigger event was the 2010 twentieth-anniversary tour, on which Megadeth played the entire album front to back, twenty-two North American shows long, then extended into Mexico and South America after demand. The Hollywood Palladium stop was filmed and released by Shout! Factory in September 2010 as Rust in Peace Live on Blu-ray, CD and DVD; it debuted at number two on the Billboard DVD chart. There has been no further super-deluxe edition, no half-speed master vinyl and no Atmos mix to date, an absence which feels increasingly conspicuous given how aggressively most early-nineties metal flagships have been re-pressed.
Legacy and influence
Rust in Peace is, by any honest reading of the list-making industry, one of the small handful of thrash records that every greatest-of poll has to reckon with. Kerrang! placed it at number one in its 50 Best Albums From 1990 in 2020. Decibel inducted it into its Hall of Fame and called it a "genre-defining work". IGN ranked it the fourth most influential heavy metal album of all time. MusicRadar's 2010 reader poll voted it the sixth-greatest metal album ever made. Martin Popoff ranked it eleventh in his Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time and gave its Collector's Guide entry a perfect ten. Rolling Stone, normally indifferent to thrash, placed it at number nineteen in its 2017 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. It appears in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
For Megadeth themselves the album is the line in the sand. The classic lineup made three more studio records together (Countdown to Extinction in 1992, Youthanasia in 1994 and Cryptic Writings in 1997) before Menza was fired in 1998 and Friedman left in January 2000 to pursue a Japanese television and pop-arrangement career that he is still running from Tokyo today. Ellefson left and rejoined twice across the 2000s and 2010s, and Mustaine has continued more or less alone, leading new lineups through Risk, The System Has Failed, Endgame, Th1rt3en, Super Collider, Dystopia and The Sick, the Dying... and the Dead!. None of the later records carries the cultural weight of Rust in Peace, and a 2014 attempt to reunite the Menza-Friedman-Ellefson-Mustaine lineup collapsed before producing a finished album; Menza died of heart failure on stage at The Baked Potato in Los Angeles in May 2016, closing the door on any future reunion.
Friedman has, however, played with Megadeth twice in the years since. In February 2023 he joined the band on stage at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo for the first time in twenty-three years, playing Countdown to Extinction, Tornado of Souls and Symphony of Destruction. He returned that August at Wacken Open Air for a four-song guest spot that included Holy Wars... The Punishment Due. For a few minutes in front of eighty thousand people on a German festival field, the Rust in Peace lineup was back together at last.
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The title's source | Mustaine spotted the bumper sticker "May all your nuclear weapons rust in peace" on a car while driving back from Lake Elsinore, California, and wrote it down on the spot. |
| Dimebag almost played it | Dimebag Darrell was offered the lead guitar job before Friedman and accepted, on the condition that his brother Vinnie Paul be hired as drummer; Mustaine declined and went back to auditioning. |
| Chris Poland's ghost record | Ex-Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland recorded lead parts on seven of the album's nine songs as demos and, by his own count, was 99 percent certain to rejoin the band before his manager talked him out of it. |
| How Menza got the gig | Nick Menza was the band's drum tech and got his audition by playing soundcheck at Rock City in Nottingham when Chuck Behler was unavailable; he was hired in 1989. |
| Mustaine missed half of it | Mustaine spent the first stretch of Rumbo Recorders sessions in rehab, leaving Mike Clink to cut bass, drums and Friedman's lead guitar without him. |
| Clink quit for Guns N Roses | Mike Clink left the project mid-tracking to start work on Guns N Roses Use Your Illusion I and II; engineer Micajah Ryan finished the album with Mustaine. |
| The oldest song on the record | Rust in Peace... Polaris, originally titled Child Saint, was written by Mustaine before he had joined Metallica in 1981. |
| Five Magics is fantasy fiction | The lyric is drawn from Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber novels and references the five powers of his Court of Chaos. |
| The Northern Ireland riot | Holy Wars was inspired by a 1988 show in Antrim where Mustaine, unaware of the phrase's meaning, dedicated a song to "The Cause" and triggered a riot; the band were driven to Dublin in a bulletproof bus. |
| The Punisher influence | The second half of Holy Wars... The Punishment Due is named for and lyrically inspired by Marvel Comics vigilante Frank Castle, the Punisher. |
| The world leaders on the cover | The five figures around Vic Rattlehead are an unidentified British representative, Toshiki Kaifu, Richard von Weizsacker, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush; Mustaine has confirmed that the object Vic is holding is a Kryptonite-like material. |
| The single uncredited vocal | The opening laugh on Lucretia belongs to Sandra Rabin and is the only outside vocal on the record. |
| Mustaine had to publish his own tab | In 2017, twenty-seven years after release, Mustaine posted a corrected transcription of the Holy Wars main riff online because almost every guitar-tab site had been hosting wrong versions. |
| The 2010 live album venue | The official 20th-anniversary live release Rust in Peace Live was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium, not in Mexico City as is sometimes claimed, and debuted at number two on the Billboard DVD chart. |
| The Onion's headline | In 2015 The Onion ran a piece titled "Humanity Still Producing New Art As Though Megadeth's 'Rust In Peace' Doesn't Already Exist", which became the album's most-shared internet endorsement. |
From the Riffology podcast
Rust in Peace by Megadeth is one of the records the Riffology podcast keeps circling back to, because there are not many albums where the recording process, the lineup change, the lyrical universe and the production sound are all worth talking about for an entire hour each. If this article has put it back into rotation on your stereo, the show is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and every major podcast app: subscribe, dig into the back catalogue, and let us know which Rust in Peace song you can never skip.
