The members of Megadeth have gone through a lot of changes since their sordid old days. The group finally has a dependable, solid lineup consisting of Dave Mustaine (vocals/guitar), David Ellefson (bass), Nick Menza (drums) and Marty Friedman (guitar).

This collective has managed to release five straight recordings that have shot past platinum, gaining millions of fans across the world.

As Ellefson is quick to point out, things are looking really good for the group. It has managed to rise out of Metallica’s shadow like a phoenix, procuring the group a following that refuses to erode despite Megadeth’s musical progress and reinvention.

Every member is, at long last, clean and sober. Mustaine, a happily married man, is expecting a second child any day (no word on whether it will be a boy or a girl), and the group’s latest tour has been one of its most successful.

“We are playing a lot of smaller cities on this leg of the tour,” Ellefson commented from a hotel room in Boston. “It has been a couple of years since we’ve been to some of these cities. The music business has changed [since then], the styles have changed and we figured that we would play it safe in the touring aspect, as opposed to thinking we can play these big halls and take all this equipment and take the chance of nobody showing up.

“Fortunately,” he added, “it has been exactly the opposite. We have been playing places that are actually too small, and the shows have been selling out. It creates a better demand for us and it is much more positive for everybody involved in the show.”

Those are words of wisdom from a man who knows more about the pitfalls of the music business than Michael Jordan does about the peaks of playing basketball. But then again, there aren’t too many bands out there that have traveled through more abysses than Megadeth.

Music as a business

Ellefson recently wrote a book, “Making Music Your Business,” that deals with the pitfalls of the music industry and how to overcome them. The book, published by Miller Freeman Books, has become a self-help manual for young talent trying to make a long, illustrious career out of being musicians.

“The music industry is very business-oriented these days,” he explained. “Musicians, unfortunately to a large degree, are the ditch diggers. They are the ones down in the trenches doing most of the work while other people sit around and reap the benefits. That just means that musicians need to be a little bit wiser. The days of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll have kind of fallen by the wayside.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book,” he added, “is because I couldn’t have written it 10 years ago. It has taken me all these years of having some success and also making some mistakes to realize what I could have done if I would have known better at the time. But I think I’ve learned better from my mistakes than I have from my successes. Hopefully, the hindsight in that book will be an inspiration to people.”

The hindsight which Ellefson is referring to includes more than a decade of public misunderstanding about what the band’s music stood for. Of course, this shouldn’t be unexpected for a group that thrives on vivid, horrific images of humankind’s destruction. More than a half dozen songs on each of the group’s CDs have detailed the topic of human mortality.

“Sometimes I think about it every night, to be honest with you,” he explained. “Especially when we’re driving along on a tour bus through snow and ice and sleet and shit like that. I basically try to make sure that at the end of every day I have a clean slate. That I’m right with the people around me.”

So where does Armageddon and black magic fit in?

“I believe that there are negative powers and that if you buy into negativity, you will reap negativity into your life,” Ellefson said. “I’m not convinced that people can go around putting spells on people. I don’t think people have that kind of influence or power over a person.

“I think that we are basically moving out of the industrial age into the technology age,” he added, “and it seems that the rate of progression of modern society is moving along more rapidly during the last century than it ever has before.

“That could be a little scary,” he concluded, “because you never know where it is going to go. Then again, it’s not about anything other than people, and if people misuse their will for selfish or greedy motives, that could be a big problem. The problem and the solution is people, not external sources.”

A history of change

Quite simply, if it hadn’t been for Metallica, Megadeth wouldn’t exist today. When Metallica formed in the early ’80s, the roster included Mustaine (vocals, guitar), James Hetfield (guitar, vocals), Lars Ulrich (drums) and Ron McGovney (bass).

Mustaine was one of the driving forces behind the band, co-writing some of the group’s hardest and earliest hits (“Four Horsemen,” “Jump In The Fire,” “Phantom Lord” and “Metal Militia”).

Prior to the release of Metallica’s debut, “Kill ‘Em All,” Mustaine and McGovney were kicked out of the group for their heroin addictions and alcoholism and were replaced by Kirk Hammett (guitar) and the late Cliff Burton (bass). Mustaine was justifiably upset, especially when “Kill ‘Em All” was released with all of his material on it.

Mustaine embarked on a mission to create the heaviest band ever heard. The first step towards this purpose occurred one day while he was practicing on his guitar. Ellefson, who lived in a nearby apartment, heard the noise and rushed over to make Mustaine’s acquaintance. A long-lasting bond was soon developed, one that would introduce a lot of problems for the two of them.

Take the band’s earlier constantly rotating roster, for instance. When the group released “Killing Is My Business … And Business Is Good” on an independent label called Combat back in 1985, the group included Mustaine, Ellefson, Chris Poland (guitar) and Gar Samuelson (drums). Poland and Samuelson stuck around for 1986’s “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?” and were eventually replaced by Jeff Young (guitar) and Chuck Behler (drums) on the group’s third release, “So Far, So Good … So What?” in 1988.

All four of these previous members were fired for excessive drug habits (mainly heroin addiction) that led to them selling off their instruments for another fix. When Mustaine decided to kick the habit, he surrounded himself with musicians that could help him stay clean. Enter Menza and Friedman. Enter success.

Friedman and Menza joined the group sometime in 1989 and provided the fresh artistic direction found on 1990’s “Rust In Peace,” which was a commercial breakthrough for the metal collective and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. That album went on to become certified platinum. “Countdown To Extinction” (’92), “Youthanasia” (’94) and “Cryptic Writings” (’97) would follow — all eventually becoming certified platinum or double platinum.

So far, the group has sold more than 12 million albums. This figure does not count the sales of singles (the most popular of which was the single for “Symphony of Destruction” which included a gristly remix by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) or all of the soundtracks that the group has appeared on (including “Last Action Hero,” “Beavis and Butthead Experience,” “Super Mario Brothers” and “Mortal Kombat: Annihilation” among others).

Personal views

Megadeth has a rather unusual method of making music. First of all, Mustaine and Ellefson write controversial songs that deal with human morality, the human condition and government conspiracies. This, in itself, is not really unusual or unorthodox. What is noteworthy, however, is that Ellefson doesn’t necessarily agree with the images he presents in the song lyrics he creates with Mustaine.

“I’m not a big conspiracy guy, to be honest,” he explained, “because it seems to me that people who are into conspiracies have very little faith.”

The group also presents a double standard as to what it deems fit to release.

“We get asked to do [soundtracks] and if it seems to be the right thing to do, then we do it,” Ellefson said when explaining the abundance of soundtracks — eight in all — with Megadeth material, most of which was recorded specifically for the film. “We’ve been asked recently to do a couple of things that we’ve actually turned down because it didn’t seem to be in accordance with what we really wanted to be doing.”

Yet, the group contributed a song for the movie “Shocker,” a horror film dealing with a mass murderer who is executed in an electric chair and then comes back to kill even more people. However, Ellefson doesn’t particularly have a stand on capital punishment.

“I understand both sides of it,” he said. “For a human to take another human’s life, that isn’t fair. But at the same time, how do you serve just punishment to somebody who does heinous crimes? Fortunately, I’m not in a position to make that call.”

Ellefson also doesn’t take a strong stand either way on the legalization of drugs, although drug abuse is embedded in the group’s history.

“I’ve heard statistics that in Amsterdam,” he stated, “where certain drugs are legalized, that there isn’t any more of a problem and that the rate of addiction isn’t any higher than elsewhere. I don’t know if that is a true statistic or not. I don’t think drugs are the problem. I think people are the problem.”

This root problem is evidenced in a lot of what the group and its individual members choose to do. Ellefson reads the paper daily so he can “tune into what is happening in the world.” He was also prominently featured alongside Mustaine on MTV’s “Rock The Vote,” trying to persuade a young generation to vote.

“They asked us to be involved with that,” he explained, “because they were really trying to reach out to the younger demographics in our country. Our only goal in aligning with them was to get people to be proactive instead of reactive. It seems that it worked because we have a younger president in office than we have had in years.”

Ellefson also can’t help noticing the differences between American and foreign audiences, especially after touring Europe and Japan (where “Cryptic Writings” debuted at No. 1) last November and December.

“I hate to say this because I live in America,” he stated, “but American audiences, in a lot of ways, don’t seem like they are very appreciative of a lot of music and being able to go to see concerts.

“I think it’s because in America, they’ve seen everything before. You go down to Argentina to play and they don’t hardly get any rock shows there. You could probably list on one hand the number of bands that tour there in any given year. We go down there to play and they absolutely adore us because they are so happy to have anyone there. It is nice to know that our music is understood at a universal level.”