MEGADETH's DAVE MUSTAINE: What It Would Take For Another 'Big Four' Concert To Happen

MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine was interviewed on a recent episode of “Talk Is Jericho”, the podcast of Chris Jericho, the world champion pro wrestler, actor, New York Times best-selling author and lead vocalist of the metal band FOZZY. You can now listen to the chat in the YouTube clip below.

Speaking about the possibility of there being more shows featuring the so-called “Big Four” of 1980s thrash metal — METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLAYER and ANTHRAX — in the future, Mustaine said: “I think that the ‘Big Four’ thing that we did, it was really important. It was necessary for a lot of different reasons. You know, if it happens again, that would be great. If it doesn’t, the people who got to see it got to see something really remarkable.”

He added: “Am I supposed to doing it? You know, it would have to be the right thing. I think that, you know, MEGADETH is at a place right now where we’re successful to a degree where we would be happy continuing to do what we do on our own. So if we’re gonna do another ‘Big Four’ thing, I would want it to be something where we walk away as content as METALLICA does from something like that. It’s not METALLICA and three other dudes.”

METALLICA, SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX played together for the first time in history on June 16, 2010 in front of 81,000 fans at the Sonisphere festival at Bemowo Airport in Warsaw, Poland. The night before the concert, METALLICA organized a dinner with members of all four bands, a get-together that MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson called “very relaxed and comfortable” and “a class way” to ease into the tour. Mustaine concurred, telling Jericho: “It was very laid back, and I thought it was very enjoyable. [METALLICA bassist Robert] Trujillo was out front greeting everybody when we walked in the door, which was really nice. And he hugged me, which was, you know… It wasn’t startling by any means — it didn’t shock me or anything like that — but it was just a great way to start things. And when the night kind of rolled around to about ‘It’s time for Dave to go home’ time, I decided I should probably leave. And I guess those guys roared into the night — the rest of my band and a bunch of crew guys, and they just had a great time.”

The “Big Four” played its last concert on September 14, 2011 at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Since then, METALLICA, SLAYER and ANTHRAX have played a number of shows together, including the 2013 Soundwave festival in Australia. They also performed at the 2014 Heavy MTL festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

In his autobiography, “Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir”, Mustaine addressed the issue of where his band fit in the “Big Four” order. According to The New York Times, he assured the reader that he was not offended by being put behind SLAYER. But he added an interior monologue: “O.K., we’ll play ahead of you guys on this trip, and God willing we’ll do it again sometime in the near future and we can flip things around.”

Fonte: Blabbermouth.net