Once again, it is time for the Defector staff to go into seclusion for our annual company meetings and fall frolic. This year we are gathering in Atlantic City, America's abandoned playground. We decided to hold a mini theme week to keep the site robust and full of blogs while we're in meetings. This year's theme: Risk!
Eight years earlier, Metallica had become the biggest rock band in the world. How they did it depends on who you talk to. The self-titled "Black Album" was either softer, slower, more accessible than their previous epic thrash, a concession to the tastes of contemporary music fandom, or, if you ask an early Metallica fan, they sold out. No matter. They sold. It went 16x platinum. Metallica, once the band of nitrous-huffing burnouts and metal-militia headbangers and your older brother who can't keep a job and people who thought Guns N' Roses was for girls, was now MTV-famous, solidly mainstream. This was absolutely not a given. It could have tanked. Their fans could have turned on them. Bruce Dickinson, frontman of Iron Maiden, gave Metallica credit for "taking the risk and deservedly reaping the enormous rewards."
So when, in 1999, Megadeth decided to try a record with pop sensibilities, what else to title it but Risk? What would come of a band even louder, faster, less accessible than Metallica, making a play for that alternative rock radio market? That shit sucked, man.
How was this the same band that wrote "The Conjuring?" How did they get from "Tornado of Souls" to this in nine short years? Everyone rejected Risk, from diehards to casual audiences. It debuted at No. 16 on Billboard and peaked there. It went uncertified, meaning sales figures didn't even have to be reported, but doesn't crack the band's top 10.
Risk is considered one of the biggest missteps in the history of rock, and the band's biggest failure. That said, now feels like a good time to say outright that this blog is absolutely not a reappraisal of the album's artistic merits: It's poop from a butt. Everything people say about it is fair.
Here's another thing, though: This album was my first exposure to Megadeth. I surely first heard it when WCW heavily promoted "Crush 'Em," and if you wish to know anything about my youth, "a 15-year-old sort of liking the dumbest song on the worst Megadeth album because he heard it on pro wrestling" is a pretty good summary. It's a cornily earnest fist-pumper with the stupidest lyrics you've ever heard, and its origin story is incredibly cynical: Dave Mustaine has said he wrote it specifically to be played at sporting events. And you will occasionally still hear it at hockey games, many of which have not updated their playlists in 25 years, right between "Du Hast" and "Sandstorm." So, mission accomplished there. But if you listen to it now, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, without Matt Rempe or Bill Goldberg hyping up a bloodthirsty crowd, it evokes a kind of pathos: A wickedly talented and beloved band wrote this because they thought that was what they had to do to make money.
Dave Mustaine, possibly the only man who Earth who could have gotten kicked out of Metallica for drinking too much, and did, has gone back and forth on Risk in the years since its flop. He's blamed lead guitarist Marty Friedman for pushing the band away from metal and toward his own more alt-rock sensibilities. "People wanted a Megadeth record," Mustaine said in 2018. "They didn't wanna see Dave bending over backwards to keep Marty Friedman happy, 'cause Marty wanted us to sound like fucking Dishwalla." Friedman would leave the band after Risk.
But Mustaine has also called it a "great record"—just not a Megadeth one. Defending the songwriting, he said in 2014, "it just should not have had the name Megadeth on it, because if anybody else's name was on Risk it would have sold, I think, really well. Not only did we hurt the record by putting our name on it, the record hurt our name."
Out of a desire to be fair, I listened to Risk again before writing this. It's probably the first time in decades I've thought about most of these songs, and definitely the first time since 1999 I've heard them all in order. Is there anything to like here? Sure. There are some real riffs on "Prince of Darkness," even if you have to sit through a cheesy spoken-word section to get to them. "Wanderlust," which Mustaine calls his favorite song off the record, is a stab at the Southern-fried outlaw rock which Metallica was doing much more successfully at the same time, and if it's not good, it's interesting, which can't be said for most of the songs here. "I'll Be There" is notable for how shamelessly naked a stab at the AOR market it represents. The two-part closing suite, "Time: The Beginning" and "Time: The End," at least shows a band with some creative ambitions. But just about everything else is safe and bland and blah, and if Mustaine was feeling piqued by occasional pokes in the music press from Lars Ulrich about how Megadeth wasn't doing anything new while Metallica was evolving, Mustaine didn't do himself a favor by, eight years after "Enter Sandman," releasing his own single about how scary it is to go to bed.
Do I wish Risk didn't exist? That's a different question. I think bands should feel the freedom to change their sound, to experiment, and yes, to chase commercial success. Sometimes it works! I love Into The Unknown even if Bad Religion doesn't, and even if it's certainly for the better that the punk titans didn't become synth-heavy. Sometimes it doesn't work. Risk is a rough album, not good enough to float on its own merits, and not bad in ways interesting enough to be a curio. Megadeth would quickly go back to its older sound, with some lasting success. They'd like to pretend it doesn't exist, anyway.
However! However. While the actual quality of the album doesn't get any sort of boost from nostalgia, it's impossible for me to ignore that this was my way into Megadeth. Accessible and commercial is exactly how you hook a 15-year-old boy. If not for Risk, maybe I never discover the back catalog. And I'd listen to any number of bad records in exchange for "Hangar 18."
