Former MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson has once again defended the band’s “Risk” album, saying that the LP served as a gateway for a lot of fans into the world of MEGADETH.
Issued in 1999, “Risk” received a mixed response from critics and alienated hardcore MEGADETH fans due to its departure from the band’s heavy thrash metal roots to a more commercial, pop rock sound. The album debuted at No. 16 on the Billboard chart and was later certified gold for selling half a million copies in the United States.
In a new interview with Mark Jackson and Jason Gardner of The Metal Forge podcast, Ellefson reflected on “Risk”, saying (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): ”The ‘Risk’ album is probably the most controversial album in the catalog. And admittedly, we did not sort of deliver a record that probably we even wanted to because we kind of took for granted, like, ‘Well, we’ll write the heavy metal tunes when we get down to Nashville.’ And then, of course, what happened is we got so involved in the task of writing the other songs for the album that we didn’t have any time to really play the metal tunes. And it’s interesting because going through that process, it sort of takes you away from being a metal band. With [MEGADETH‘s 1997 album] ‘Cryptic Writings’, it worked because we were very much a metal band writing these, say, four songs — ‘Trust’, ‘Almost Honest’, ‘Use The Man’, ‘A Secret Place’, for example; those were the four singles — that were gonna be deliberately aimed at the active rock, American FM radio, because metal was changing, music was changing.”
Elaborating on MEGADETH‘s decision to explore a more commercial sound on “Risk”, Ellefson said: “Look, if you’re in any line of work, whether you’re Starbucks or you’re MEGADETH or you’re Chevrolet or whoever you are, ryou have to be aware of market trends, market changes and be able to adapt to what’s going on or else you’re out of business. So we played the game on ‘Cryptic Writings’ and we hit the bullseye and we won. With ‘Risk’, we played the game, but there was other… The music was actually getting heavier, as a friend pointed out… As we were going lighter, DISTURBED and GODSMACK and Rob Zombie and this heavier kind of modern rock, nu metal sound was coming out. KORN was kind of the new METALLICA for the nu metal; I call ’em the METALLICA of the nu metal movement.”
Regarding how some of MEGADETH‘s contemporaries dealt with the rise of grunge and nu metal in the 1990s, Ellefson said: “Look. SLAYER didn’t change. TESTAMENT didn’t change. I’ll say this: ANTHRAX, kind of, I guess being forced a bit, ’cause they had a singer change, but John Bush packs a punch, man. I mean, when that guy sings, you listen, ’cause he’s just such a great singer. And so he sort of gave them a jumpstart and a restart in the ’90s just by having that one member change. And when it’s the singer, it matters especially, because it’s kind of the main thing [you hear in a band’s music]. So they also went through it. Out of the ‘Big Four’ [of 1980s thrash metal], SLAYER didn’t really play the game, [while] ANTHRAX, MEGADETH and METALLICA did. And then, finally, by the time we got into the 2000s, it was, like, ‘Oh, thank God that decade’s over.’ And look, I’m not complaining about the ’90s. MEGADETH, that was our biggest decade. We were very prolific. We had our most successful, and to this day, probably some of our most applauded work with that lineup.”
Circling back to why “Risk” remains an underrated album in MEGADETH‘s catalog, Ellefson added: “Look, it was what it was. I remember, and I’ve told this story before, one day a fan hit me, and they said, ‘Why do you guys sort of talk down against ‘Risk’?’ They said, ‘I was really young and that was my very first MEGADETH album I ever bought. I fell in love with it and I bought every other album since.’ And I thought, ‘You know what, man?’ I came into KISS at ‘Destroyer’. Now I’ve talked to some people recently, they went, ‘Oh, ‘Destroyer’.’ That was like their ‘Risk’, you know what I mean? ‘Oh, I couldn’t take KISS anymore after that,’ because they bought ‘Hotter Than Hell’ and ‘Dressed To Kill’. But I thought about it. I thought, whatever age we’re born, we have no say in that. So whatever’s kind of coming across our plate, culturally, musically, artistically, that’s where we are at that time. And like this fan said, they bought ‘Risk’ and then they went and bought every other MEGADETH album afterwards, just like I bought ‘Destroyer’, and then I bought KISS ‘Alive!’, and then I bought ‘Dressed To Kill’ and ‘Hotter Than Hell’… But it was ‘Destroyer’ that got me in the game. And so I thought the same thing is true. It’s, like, people like things for different reasons. And some people don’t like things for different reasons, and whatever. It’s power of choice. It’s what the good Lord made us. So, you’re not gonna please everybody all the time, and we’re not in that business, to be honest with you. Our businesses is to create and make things that we like, and hopefully there’s just enough other sort of black-t-shirt knuckleheads like us who actually are gonna like it too. And then, once the first record comes out, the die is cast. And then from then, it is a bit of a chess game how you traverse the rest of the years of your career because it would be sad if we just made ‘Killing Is My Business’ 15 more times. It’s, like, what person does that? You grow, you experience new things and your music reflects that.”
Last October, Ellefson looked back on the making of “Risk” for the album’s 25th anniversary, telling Oran O’Beirne of Overdrive.ie: “I think with ‘Risk’, with MEGADETH, we wrote that record mostly at rehearsal, then we went to Nashville and finished it in the studio and it didn’t have time to simmer and percolate and really kind of sink into us.
“Here’s what I found: if you’re not a fan of your music first, it’s hard to convince someone else to be,” he explained. “And that album just didn’t — and now I listen back to it, and it still remains one of the great MEGADETH records, even though it doesn’t sound like a MEGADETH record of the past, leading up to that point. But we didn’t have enough time to let it just kind of absorb into us. And then next thing you know, we’re right on the road playing these songs and it’s, like, ‘Oh, shit. These songs aren’t really connecting so much.’ To just have the time, to let the stuff, to let the material absorb…
“[Former MEGADETH guitarist] Jeff Young is really big on this whole mindset of we’re analog creatures, and that’s why digital music, it doesn’t connect with us, and it doesn’t stay with us.”
Asked if he would go back in time and do something different with that album if given the chance, he said: “No, because you’d have to start all over on that. You’d have to go back to the rehearsal room.
“Here’s the long and the short of it: our manager at the time was really leaning on us to dig deeper into this radio approach, an approach that worked very well on ‘Cryptic Writings’, because we said, ‘Hey, let’s make a third of the record… We’ve gotta reinvent the band in a way that’s competitive with what’s happening around us.’ There’s a radio format here in America called active rock radio, and now bands like DISTURBED, SHINEDOWN, GODSMACK, they own that, HALESTORM, they own that format. And we had some success with it, with ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ and ‘Sweating Bullets’ and stuff like that in the early ’90s. And then with ‘Cryptic’, a third [of the songs were] radio, a third metal, a third kind of whatever, and it worked. It was the right approach. With ‘Risk’, there was just kind of this really heavy push, ‘If some is good, more must be better.’ And our attitude as well, ‘When we get down to Nashville [to make the album], we’ll crush out these metal tunes. That’ll be easy. No problem.’ And the truth of it is it took so much time crafting the other songs for the record that we didn’t really have the time or the mindset to make those metal songs that the record should have had to sort of balance it out. So it tended it to be a record that was skewed more as a crafted radio album. And admittedly, there’s a piece of it that we didn’t include, that we just kind of ran out of time, focus and energy for. And that’s the part that’s on us, for sure. And I think what that taught us was, and then for ‘The World Needs A Hero’, we started to re-chart the course of the ship again, was we have to like the songs. If we like it, there’s gonna be a bunch of other knuckleheads just like us who are gonna like it too. So let’s preach to that choir, rather than trying to go out and get a tribe that we aren’t a part of and may never get invited into, let’s just make our tribe tighter. ‘Cause, look, that’s ultimately how MEGADETH and thrash, our genre, that’s how it grew.”
In July 2024, former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman once again said that he and his then-bandmates did “the best” they could while making the “Risk” album, saying that the controversial record was “exactly where we were as a band at that time.” In an interview with Whiplash.net journalists Gustavo Maiato and Mateus Ribeiro, Friedman was asked how he looked back on “Risk” 25 years after its release. He responded: “I haven’t heard it since back then. I don’t think it was much of a risk, actually. And I just remember we did the best we could. And it’s exactly where we were as a band at that time. And that’s all any album is, really. An album is like a yearbook in school or in high school or college or whatever. An album is a yearbook of that period of time. So you can’t really go back and say, ‘Oh, this sucks’ or ‘We didn’t mean to do that’ or ‘It was not a good idea,’ or whatever, you can’t go back and say that, because it is what it is and it was what it was. At the time, we believed in it and we did the best we could and that’s all I can say about any album, really. It’s the same answer for any album.”
Friedman previously discussed “Risk” I na December 2018 interview with SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”. At the time, he said: “Well, I think anything that needed to be said from me about that was probably said at the time. I haven’t even thought about that since then, so I couldn’t give you an intelligent answer. I’m barely thinking about what I did yesterday, much less back then.”
He continued: “I’m sure whatever it was at the time that it happened, everybody involved with it was doing the best that they possibly could — I’m sure of that — because that is something that’s happened on every record before that and every record since that and every record I’m doing now.
“When you’re doing it, you’re doing the absolute best that you can. And pretty much if you look at any press of any record, when it comes out, what the people are saying right then, right at that time, that’s what it is. And then, depending on the results of that, people’s stories change, but at the time, you’re doing the best that… You really, really, really believe in that — everybody believes in it — and then that’s it. So I definitely wouldn’t even begin to think of whatever specifics were going on back then — it’s just the farthest thing from my mind — but I can assure you that anything was done with the best of intentions and the hardest work. And everybody was just trying to do their best.”
Seven years ago, MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine said that “Risk” was the result of him “capitulating” to Friedman‘s “desires to be more of an alternative band.” He told SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation LA Invasion: Live From The Rainbow Bar & Grill”: “We kept slowing down and slowing down and slowing down. If that record would have been called THE DAVE MUSTAINE PROJECT and not MEGADETH, I think it would have been successful. People wanted a MEGADETH record. They didn’t wanna see Dave bending over backwards to keep Marty Friedman happy, ’cause Marty wanted us to sound like fucking DISHWALLA.”
