“I couldn’t even stand up straight. How the hell was I gonna play the guitar?”: The crippling panic attack Marty Friedman suffered during his final days with Megadeth
Former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman has looked back on the crippling panic attack that nearly had him pulling out of his final shows with the band.
In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Dreaming Japanese, Friedman explains how the stress stemming from Megadeth’s waning success following the release of their 1999 album Risk had pushed him to a breaking point.
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“Since I had just quit Megadeth with just a handful of shows before our Christmas break, the mood in the band was as awkward as working with a female coworker you’ve recently dumped,” Friedman writes [via Rolling Stone]. “The last show was December 22 in Corpus Christi, Texas, at a fucking sports bar. The marquee read ‘TONIGHT: MEGADETH and $3.50 Burritos.’”
“In retrospect, it’s funny, but, at the time, it sucked. I hated to see my bandmates glance up at the sign and feel their legacy fade. We rocked the place like it was an arena, and the small crowd left happy, but I was bummed.”
After returning home for Christmas – with his next gig scheduled for 27 December – Friedman faced a panic attack so severe that his then-wife, Chihiro, called for an ambulance.
“It felt like my heart might explode,” the musician recalls. “I thought I might have food poisoning. Then, I was in too much pain to think. I fell off the couch and couldn’t move. My heart was racing like a coke fiend about to go into cardiac arrest, and the palpitations were so strong they hurt the muscles in my chest. Fucking hell, could this be a heart attack?”
“Someone rolled me to the ER. I was so freaked out, I thrashed and shook like I was having a grand mal seizure.”
A doctor soon confirmed that Friedman had suffered an “unusually strong panic attack”, prompting him to reach out to Megadeth’s tour manager, Steve Wood. During their conversation, Wood asked, “You’re not telling me you are going to miss the tour, are you?”
To which Friedman replied, “Dude, I can’t walk! I’m flat on my back in the ER shivering like a moron in the middle of the Arizona desert. I still don’t have a clue what’s happening. So, fuck them all and fuck the whole fucking tour! It ain’t gonna happen.”
Despite his initial refusal though, Friedman ultimately played the scheduled gigs from 27 December (“Megadeth was fucked big time if I couldn’t play since they had no one to replace me on such short notice,” says the guitarist), accompanied behind-the-scenes by Chihiro who was there “every step of the way”.
“I couldn’t even stand up straight. How the hell was I gonna play the guitar? I practiced walking with Chihiro, and by the day of the show, I could walk on my own at a turtle’s pace.”
And while he’d expected to deliver a “subpar at best” performance – having not touched a guitar since their last show in Corpus Christi – Friedman experienced a remarkable transformation once he took the stage.
“As soon as I started playing, however, I was back in full control, like nothing had ever happened. I performed with abundant aggression and pulled off my normal stage moves without pause,” he recalls. “When I sidled up to David or Dave to rock out in tandem, they looked at me with complete bewilderment. To them, one minute I was stricken with anxiety and unable to walk, and the next I was tearing up the stage, business as usual.”
Dreaming Japanese will be released on 3 December via Permuted Press.
The post “I couldn’t even stand up straight. How the hell was I gonna play the guitar?”: The crippling panic attack Marty Friedman suffered during his final days with Megadeth appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
