During a recent appearance on the Metal Voice, Marty Friedman said he didn’t intend to reunite with Megadeth.
“I’ve never been approached for any ex-Megadeath stuff because I think everybody… It’s widely known that I’m completely not interested in doing that,” the guitarist revealed when asked whether he has ever been approached about Kings of Thrash or doing anything with David Ellefson.
He continued, “[I] left an absolutely spotless history that I’m very proud of. Revisited it twice with Megadeth at Budokan and Wacken and it’s absolutely way back there in the past.”
Friedman joined Megadeth in 1990 and appeared on five albums. He left the band in 1999. Friedman reunited with them in 2023 in Tokyo, at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, and at the Wacken Open Air.
In a 2024 interview with THAT Rocks!, the rocker said he prefers not to be associated with Megadeth. He explained, “Once I left Megadeth, the tag ‘ex-Megadeth’ was stuck to my name, and I understood that for about a year or two. And then I really, really wanted to cut that out because I was no longer in Megadeth and I was doing my own thing doing other things not related to Megadeth at all.”
“So from about 2002 or 2003, I just made it a strict rule that any kind of media when they published whatever they were doing, no ‘ex-Megadeth’ next to my name. Just don’t put it in the headline. Don’t put my name with Megadeth— ‘former Megadeth,’ all of that stuff was like a very, very strict rule,” Marty noted.
Friedman recalled his difficult final days with Megadeth in his memoir, ‘Dreaming Japanese.’ Before his last performance, he suffered a severe panic attack, ending up in the ER. Despite struggling to walk, he managed to perform on stage as if nothing had happened.
