ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEPT. 6, 2001
By Steve Newton
Two Christmases ago, guitarist Al Pitrelli received a wicked gift he wasn’t expecting. It started with a seasonal dingle from a long-time friend, Megadeth drummer Jimmy DeGrasso.
“It was our basic ‘Merry Christmas’ phone call,” Pitrelli relates from his New York City home, “followed by, ‘So, what are ya doin’?’ He basically said that they were in the middle of the American leg of the tour on the Risk album, and Marty [Friedman] was leaving. And I said, ‘Fly me out tomorrow, I’m there.’ ”
Friedman was a veteran member of Megadeth, having traded licks with founding singer-guitarist Dave Mustaine ever since the Rust in Peace album of 1990. But Pitrelli wasn’t concerned about filling Friedman’s shoes.
“I was only worried about playing Megadeth music properly,” he says. “Filling Marty’s shoes is an impossibility because he’s such a brilliant guitar player, but I play his solos to the best of my ability in the live area. Basically, I was just gonna be the new guitar player in Megadeth and carry on from there.”
Pitrelli didn’t leap into the Megadeth fray at the peak of the band’s popularity. It’s well known in hard-rock circles that the band had alienated key heavy-metal journalists and hard-core fans alike with its 1999 CD, Risk.
“It experimented with production sounds that maybe most heavy-metal purists didn’t take kindly to,” Pitrelli offers. “So I know it pissed off a couple–well, probably several–die-hard fans. Hence the name of the record, you know–it was a risk making that record. But obviously the band has taken the journey back to where it wants to be, and that’s making really aggressive, snotty, purist heavy metal again.
“I mean, me and Dave are just two guitarists who insist on tearing your face off on a nightly basis. When our current manager saw me and Dave go at it, he said, ‘This is like Satan’s version of Thin Lizzy!'”
Before joining Megadeth, and sharing the guitar duties on the band’s latest CD, The World Needs a Hero, Pitrelli apprenticed under ’70s shock-rock king Alice Cooper. He performed with the Coop on the 1990 Trash comeback tour, and cowrote a song for 1991’s star-studded Hey Stoopid album. He wouldn’t have passed up that experience for anything, daunting as it first seemed.
“Growin’ up as a kid, listening to Alice’s music and bein’ told horror stories about him doin’ this, doin’ that, you don’t know what to think. And then when you get a phone call from his manager saying ‘Hi, not only are you gonna be his guitar player, but you’re gonna be his musical director, you’re gonna be workin’ closely with Alice for the next God-knows-how-many years,’ you sit there and you go, ‘Gulp.’
“But I dealt with it a lot better than my mom did. Being an old-school Brooklyn Italian woman, she immediately broke out the rosary beads and started saying her prayers.”
Although he enjoyed learning the hard-rock ropes on tour and in the studio with Cooper, the 39-year-old Pitrelli doesn’t miss being a hired gun. Not for a minute.
“I finally found a home musically,” he says, “and I’m part of something, as opposed to just being a sideman. You know, being a sideman’s cool, because you don’t have to answer to anybody the next day–except the mortgage company when you can’t pay.”
Now that he’s secured a more lucrative position in Megadeth, Pitrelli’s looking forward to having a few bucks to blow. He’s particularly happy about his group playing the Commodore Ballroom on Wednesday (September 12), because he loves cruising the stores on Robson.
“Vancouver is a great town,” he raves, “and the shopping is to die for. Hopefully I’ll have a day off and get to do some shoppin’. I need another black button-down shirt really badly.”
To hear the full audio of my 2001 interview with Al Pitrelli–as well as my interviews from the ’90s with Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine, Marty Friedman, and David Ellefson–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 450 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.