David Ellefson

David Ellefson is Megadeth's co-founder and historic bassist, the musician who stood beside Dave Mustaine through practically the whole building of the band. Born in Jackson, Minnesota, in 1964, he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and became Mustaine's neighbour — that is how, in 1983, Megadeth came about. His bass playing is pick-driven and precise. In a repertoire where the guitars play angular riffs full of metric shifts, Ellefson doubles the lines with millimetric exactness rather than carving out a path of his own, which gives Megadeth the compact, dry weight that sets it apart from its contemporaries. He is on Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! (1985), Peace Sells… but Who's Buying? (1986), Rust in Peace (1990) and Countdown to Extinction (1992) — the records that define the genre. He left in 2002, when the band dissolved after Mustaine's arm injury, and the following period was marked by a legal dispute between the two over ownership of the name and assets. Reconciliation came in 2010, and he went on recording and touring for another decade. He was dismissed in 2021, after private messages of a sexual nature circulated online; he denied wrongdoing and no criminal charges followed. Since then he has kept up projects of his own, among them Altitudes & Attitude with Frank Bello, and Kings of Thrash, which revisits Megadeth's older repertoire.