Dave Mustaine Reclaims Metallica’s “Ride The Lightning” For Final Megadeth Album

Megadeth mastermind Dave Mustaine famously served as Metallica’s lead guitarist in the early ’80s before being kicked out and replaced by Kirk Hammett a month before the recording of debut album Kill ‘Em All in 1983. Mustaine has writing credits on a bunch of early Metallica classics, including two that made it onto their 1984 sophomore release Ride The Lightning. Now Mustaine is taking one of those songs back.

Megadeth are in the midst of rolling out their final album, a self-titled affair due out in January. Today they’ve revealed the tracklist, which ends with a bonus track: a new Megadeth recording of “Ride The Lightning,” one of the last Metallica releases to credit Mustaine as a writer. In a press release, Mustaine explains, “As I come full circle on the career of a lifetime, the decision to include ‘Ride The Lightning,’ a song I co-wrote with James, Lars, and Cliff, was to pay my respects to where my career first started.”

He elaborates on that sentiment in a new Rolling Stone interview out today. “It wasn’t really that I wanted to do my version,” Mustaine says. “I think that we all wanted it to turn out a certain way, and for me, this was about something so much more than how a song turns out. It was about respect.” Specifically, he’s talking about respect for Metallica singer/guitarist James Hetfield:

No one ever talks to me about that. One day he’s a singer, the next day he’s this fucking powerhouse and I’ve always respected him as a guitar player. So I wanted to do something to close the circle on my career right now, since it started off with [Mustaine’s band before Metallica] Panic and several of the songs that ended up in the Metallica repertoire, I wanted to do something that I felt would be a good song.

These are kind quotes, and Mustaine performed with Metallica at the band’s 30th anniversary show in 2011, so it seems fair to assume the hard feelings that proliferated after his ouster seem to have long since evaporated.