In a new interview with The Delz Show, former MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson spoke about the band’s song “Mechanix”, which was the original version of “The Four Horsemen”, the METALLICA song that was co-written by now-MEGADETH leader Dave Mustaine and included on METALLICA’s debut album, 1983’s “Kill ‘Em All’. METALLICA wrote new lyrics and renamed the song “The Four Horsemen” after Dave was kicked out of the band. The track “Mechanix” later appeared on MEGADETH’s debut album, 1985’s “Killing Is My Business…And Business Is Good!”. Ellefson said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Dave wrote that song pre-METALLICA, as I understand it. He had ‘Mechanix’ done in its entirety and then he brought that into METALLICA. They kept certain riffs and parts of his songs and created their version of it. ‘Cause if you listen to [METALLICA’s] ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ demo. they play ‘Mechanix’ in its entirety the way MEGADETH did. The only real difference is Gar [Samuelson, then-MEGADETH drummer] played the shuffle beat rather than Lars [Ulrich, METALLICA drummer] played the guitar riff, basically, on the drums. So, both are great — I like both — but [those were] two different styles. So, ‘Mechanix’ was very much Dave’s song, for sure. And he didn’t look at like it was a METALLICA song; it was his song. As I understand — this is what Dave had told me — he brought that in to METALLICA. So when he left, he took it with him. It was his attitude. I think those other songs, I believe he collaborated, or if he brought them into the METALLICA band room, they worked on those together — ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Phantom Lord’, whatever else that he wrote, I got the impression that those were group compositions, whereas ‘Mechanix’ was entirely his song — lyrics and music — that he brought in to METALLICA.”Ellefson went on to say that it’s “ironic” that there has been such a heated debate over two different versions of the same track. “I don’t know, in the history of music, if there is ever a song — let’s just take ‘Mechanix’ — that essentially ‘Mechanix’ is the song, [while] ‘The Four Horseman’ is a derivative of that song as they collaborated even while Dave was in the band to develop it into ‘The Four Horsemen’,” he said. “So there’s essentially these two songs that are two different names, two different lyrics, musically the same, two different copyrights. And the melodies are the same. Obviously, James [Hetfield, METALLICA frontman] changed the lyrics to ‘The Four Horsemen’, wrote an entirely different [set of lyrics]… So I don’t know in the history of recorded music if that’s ever happened before… It’s kind of strange, actually, now that we’re talking about it, that it happened. Of course, that controversy continues to this day, as we’ve seen.”Ellefson went on to defend METALLICA for using some of Mustaine’s music on “Kill ‘Em All”, explaining: “When you work for a company, like, for instance, when I worked for Peavey, we did a David Ellefson signature bass. But when I left, they took my name off of it and they keep the bass. It’s Hartley Peavey’s company, and I worked for him. I think in METALLICA it’s the same way. It’s Lars’s and James’s band. And so if you’re there and you write some songs, what you did there stays there.”I mean, look, again, this was all before I met Dave,” Ellefson clarified. “I met Dave six weeks after he was out of METALLICA. And for me, ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ was my first introduction to them, and I loved what I heard… And it wasn’t my argument to have with that, but I just looked at it and went, man, the fact that this band kicked you out — okay, bummer — but they used your songs, they put your name on the credit, and you got paid. It’s, like, fuck, that’s like a triple win, man.”Look, when members got kicked out of MEGADETH, their songs weren’t used and [they weren’t] credited and paid,” David revealed. “I mean, the song ‘Soldier On!’ on the last MEGADETH record [2022’s ‘The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!’], I brought the lyric and the melody in for that, and then me and Dave were working on that together. He changed the title of it to ‘Soldier On!’ and then when he kicked me out, he just took my words off and kept the whole song to himself and took all the credit. He didn’t pay me or put my fucking name on it. So, as far as I’m concerned, Lars and James were pretty generous to him. I look at that and I’m just, like, yeah, that didn’t happen to any of us in MEGADETH. But whatever. It’s all part of the folklore and the legend of MEGADETH and METALLICA, I guess… Look at it like that: it was a severance package. METALLICA didn’t have any money [at the time]. They were broke. They signed a [record] deal and they made their record. Who knew they’d make any money at all? The fact that it blew up like it did is just incredible. But it’s the feud of our genre.”Mustaine, who was one of the early members of METALLICA, was fired from the band by Ulrich in 1983. He was replaced by Kirk Hammett and went on to form MEGADETH and achieve worldwide success on his own.Back in 2011, Mustaine was asked by Revolver magazine what he remembers about writing music with METALLICA while he was in the group. Mustaine said, “I had always called us, as a group, ‘The Four Horsemen.’ Before I was in METALLICA, I really loved this band called MONTROSE, and their guitarist was Ronnie Montrose. He went on to form a band called GAMMA. One of their records [1980’s ‘Gamma 2’] had a shark fin cutting through the grass, which I thought was so awesome. Anyway, he had a song on there called ‘Four Horsemen’ that I did with my band PANIC, which I was with before METALLICA. So when I joined METALLICA, I had the song ‘Mechanix’, which I wrote, and ‘Four Horsemen’ was a suggestion of mine to do ’cause we were doing cover songs. So that had planted the seed with James. And one day when we were coming to rehearsal, Lars had just said something about slowing down my song, ‘Mechanix’. I had just gotten to the studio with Cliff [Burton, then-METALLICA bassist], and we had been listening to LYNYRD SKYNYRD, and I was being a jerk, so I played ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ instead of ‘Mechanix’, and that’s basically the middle part of what would become METALLICA’s ‘The Four Horsemen’.””No Life ‘Til Leather” was recorded on July 6, 1982 at Chateau East Studio in Tustin, California. All the songs on the tape later appeared on “Kill ‘Em All”, including “Hit The Lights”, “Motorbreath”, “Jump In The Fire”, “Seek And Destroy”, “Metal Militia”, “Phantom Lord” and “The Mechanix”.Mustaine is credited as a co-writer on six METALLICA songs, four on “Kill Em All” (“The Four Horsemen”, “Jump In The Fire”, “Phantom Lord” and “Metal Militia”) and two on “Ride The Lightning” (“Ride The Lightning” and “The Call Of Ktulu”).On December 10, 2011, as part of METALLICA’s 30th-anniversary celebration at the Fillmore in San Francisco, Mustaine joined the band to play several songs, including “Phantom Lord” and “Jump In The Fire”. This was the first time in 28 years that Mustaine played songs that he co-wrote live with METALLICA.Ellefson was in MEGADETH from the band’s inception in 1983 to 2002, and again from 2010 until his latest exit in May 2021.Photo credit: Maciej Pieloch (courtesy of Napalm Records)[embedded content]