Marty Friedman sat down with FaceCulture for a new interview and shared his current thoughts on Megadeth.
When asked about the reunion shows he did with the band in 2023, the guitarist said they sounded better than when he was in the band. “Oh, it was wonderful. I thought that they sounded better now than they did when I was in the band.”
“They just sounded great and it was a joy. I’m their biggest fan,” Friedman added.
Last year, the rocker looked back on his relationship with the band and the members, saying there is no ‘sourness’ between them. “What Megadeth did for my career, it was absolutely my first step into the real world of the music business and how incredibly grateful I am for that opportunity,” he revealed to Talk Louder in an interview. “There’s absolutely no sourness related to Megadeth at all. There’s absolutely no negative feelings, and none of that. So there’s no kind of bashing; there’s no negativity. There’s just truth.”
He also opened up about his sobriety during his time with the band. “All the things are exactly from my eyes, how it happened, how I wrote it. I was completely clean and sober the entire time I was in the band. I didn’t even drink a beer. When I was, like, 14, 15 and 16, I was a maniac. I lived three lifetimes of doing all the drugs, all the drinking, all the partying, all the rock-star shit in my first band Deuce. I did so much of that, and there was something that made me just stop cold turkey right there, which is a long story, which I got into.”
“But by the time I was in Megadeth, I was straight edge way before straight edge was even a term. So I remember all that stuff with clarity and great appreciation,” he added.
Friedman also recalled his tough final days with Megadeth in his memoir ‘Dreaming Japanese.’ Before his last performance, he had a severe panic attack and ended up in the ER. Even though he struggled to walk, he still performed on stage as if everything was okay.
