During the latest episode of “The David Ellefson Show” podcast, former MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson reflected on the 2010 Jägermeister Music Tour featuring the original 1991 “Clash Of The Titans” lineup: MEGADETH, SLAYER and ANTHRAX. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “That [2010] tour, technically it was kind of a ‘Clash Of The Titans’ — it was ANTHRAX, SLAYER and MEGADETH. It didn’t have a rotating lineup. It was just that lineup the whole tour. But we couldn’t use the name ‘Clash Of The Titans’. Apparently they had done another [action fantasy] movie [using that title] since 1991, and so we couldn’t get the name. So Jägermeister was the sponsor, so it just became the Jägermeister tour featuring SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX.”
Ellefson continued: “I remember that was always such a thing. Dave [Mustaine, MEGADETH leader] hated playing before SLAYER. We’ve always played before SLAYER, even when we went out and did L’Amour and City Gardens in Trenton back in 1985. And just because SLAYER was a band before we were, they kind of naturally would be given that closing slot. But I tell you what, even though [we] were always co-headliners with SLAYER, I felt like… that middle slot is always the best slot, because, to me, I feel like, look, ANTHRAX fans are gonna stay, especially if they’re SLAYER fans. All the MEGADETH fans, of course, are gonna stay. The SLAYER fans have to stay ’cause they’re waiting to see SLAYER. So it’s like, we got everybody. It was the creamy center, because after we played, sometimes the venue — it didn’t clear out ’cause it’s SLAYER playing, but if you’re a MEGADETH [or] ANTHRAX fan and you’re not a SLAYER fan, you might not stay. So, to me, being in that middle slot was always the best position.”
The so-called “Big Four” of 1980s thrash metal — METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLAYER 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 and shared a bill again for six more shows as part of the Sonisphere series that same year. They reunited again for several dates in 2011, including the last “Big Four” concert, which was held 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.
Back in 2018, Mustaine said that he would love play a “Big Four” show where all the bands “got treated fairly” instead of METALLICA performing a longer set and getting more stage space than the other groups on the bill. “It always kind of soured to me when you watch [METALLICA guitarist] Kirk Hammett say on the DVD [‘The Big Four: Live From Sofia, Bulgaria’], when they’re praying, and he says that ‘we’re the Big One,'” Mustaine told SiriusXM. “That just kind of shows you how the mentality was there — that it really wasn’t the ‘Big Four’; it was METALLICA and then the three of us.”
Mustaine added: “I would love to see it done in a way where we all got treated fairly and we all played together, same amount of time, same kind of stage situation, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. And it’s cool, because SLAYER‘s gonna down in history, and they don’t need the ‘Big Four’ to make them any more legendary than they already are. Nor do I.”
Twelve years ago, SLAYER frontman Tom Araya said that the only thing that was standing in the way of further “Big Four” shows was “the politics of character in one particular band,” with some fans speculating that he was talking about Mustaine and MEGADETH.
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.”
Mustaine was a member of METALLICA for less than two years, from 1981 to 1983, before being dismissed and replaced by Hammett. He went on to form MEGADETH and achieve worldwide success on his own.
Mustaine feuded with the members of METALLICA for more than two decades before finally patching things up over the last few years. He has jammed with his ex-bandmates on several occasions during “Big Four” shows and at METALLICA‘s 30th-anniversary concerts in 2011.
