Megadeth’s Angry Again was a part of The Last Action Hero soundtrack, which was as acclaimed as the film itself was criticized. The song was a hit for Megadeth and the video, which featured scenes from the film mixed with the band performing, went into heavy rotation on MTV.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who directed several videos for Megadeth and just about every other band that was prominent during the 80s and the 90s. If you were in a famous band, you probably worked with Wayne Isham at least once.
This video is just Megadeth doing what Megadeth does best.
The Blair Underwood who directed this video is the same Blair Underwood who co-starred in L.A. Law and several subsequent films. They seem like an unlikely combination, as Underwood was outspoken in his support of President Obama while Dave Mustaine was definitely not. However, this is actually just one of several videos that Underwood did with Megadeth. Music brings us all together.
In 1988, Megadeth covered this Sex Pistols classic on their album, So Far, So Good … So What!? Even though they changed the name of the country to the U.S. for the song, they kept the title the same. Steve Jones also played on the song. The video, directed by David Mackie, mixes the brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange with the test video of the Parallax View.
This is one of the many song that, though having been a hit for the band, Dave Mustaine now refuses to perform. In this case, it’s because of the references to being an anti-Christ.
No More Mr. Nice Guy was originally written for Wes Craven’s Shocker, a movie about someone who was never a nice guy. The video pays homage to the film’s electric chair-inspired plot. This video was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who is best known for Wayne’s World and The Decline of Western Civilization trilogy.
Just to clear up some confusion that apparently shows up online, the Blair Underwood who directed this video for Megadeth is not the same Blair Underwood who co-starred on L.A. Law. Considering that Blair Underwood the actor reportedly based his L.A. Law character on a young Barack Obama and Dystopia was undoubtedly Dave Mustaine’s commentary on America under Obama, the collaboration would have been an unlikely one.
It was for Dystopia that Megadeth won their first Grammy. Unfortunately, during the Grammy ceremony, the house band played Metallica’s Master of Puppets when Dave Mustaine and the band went up to accept the award. Mustaine, who was famously kicked out of Metallica before then forming Megadeth, said that he didn’t take it personally. That doesn’t really sound like the Dave Mustaine that most people know but let’s take his word for it.
In this video, Megadeth performs behind a wire fence while their fans attempt to get to the band. It doesn’t have much to do about the song, which is about a man sneaking back into his house after cheating on his girlfriend. But it probably is a fair representation of what it was like to be in a popular thrash metal band in the 80s.
Directing this video was Penelope Spheeris, who has previously celebrated metal in the documentary, The Decline of Wester Civilization Part II. Spheeris would later direct the film for which she is best remembered, Wayne’s World.
“I was homeless at the time, and I was living in a rehearsal place in Vernon, California. I was seeing a girl, Diana – there were a lot of songs I wrote about her. I actually wrote the lyrics to that song on the wall, in that building. I didn’t have any paper in the studio, but I had a Sharpie, so I just wrote on the wall. Whoever inherited our rehearsal room after I moved out, saw the original lyrics to ‘Peace Sells’ on the wall. They probably painted right over it and didn’t even know it.”
— Dave Mustaine on Peace Sells
The video for Peace Sells was directed by the painter, Robert Longo, and is probably best known for the cut scene that features a teenager in a Slayer t-shirt telling his angry father that the video and the news are one in the same. Among Longo’s other videos: R.E.M.’s The One I Love and New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle. He also directed the regrettable cyberpunk movie, Johnny Mnemonic.
If the opening bass line sounds familiar, you may have heard it used as the opening theme for MTV News. Or maybe, like me, you spent an early being chased by the police in Vice City while listening to Megadeth on V-Rock.
Lisa recently spotlighted a music video for a Megadeth song called Hanger 18. In that post she mentioned that she didn’t really know much about them except that the song fit World UFO Day. Because of that, I feel I need to provide what little backstory I know about them.
When I was a kid I remember seeing the album Countdown To Extinction in the store. I remember it to this day–not because I was listening to them at the time, but because of that cover.
I saw that, and figured this band was not for me. I was a child at the time. I didn’t really get into heavy metal till I went to Cal in 2007. I knew some of the big bands, and had probably heard music they had done, but that was about it. The only band I remember having an album for in the 90s was Metallica. That’s fitting when discussing Megadeth because they are an unintentional spinoff of that group.
Lead-singer Dave Mustaine was the guitarist for Metallica until he was kicked out of the band in 1983. Metallica were well known for their heavy drinking. They were even nicknamed Alcohollica for awhile. The problem was apparently that while the rest of the band were funny drunks, Mustaine was a violent drunk. That was too much of a deadly combination, so they kicked Mustaine out of the group. Kirk Hammett would end up taking his place. To say that Mustaine was heart-broken. I remember an interview he gave close to twenty years later where it did, or nearly brought him to tears.
After Metallica, Mustaine would go on to form Megadeth. A couple of successful albums later, and they hit upon the one that featured the classic, Peace Sells. That song was so popular that according to Mustaine in the book I Want My MTV, MTV even stole part of it to use it in the theme for MTV News:
MTV scammed me. They never paid for using the bass line from “Peace Sells” as the MTV News theme. I wrote that music.
Several albums later, they released Countdown To Extinction. The album did well–I’m sure this amazing video didn’t hurt.
There are different stories floating around about the source of the song. If you go to Wikipedia, then you get this alleged quote from Mustaine:
I wrote that about myself. It was pointed out to me that I’m kind of schizophrenic and that I live inside my head. Which is something I don’t subscribe to, but I enjoyed the theory nonetheless.”, and “I think all of us are sweating bullets all the time. Society’s a joke right now, and people are getting more and more hostile. When you think about having an evil twin or schizophrenia, I think a lot of us are schizo, because we live inside our heads. There’s someone we all confer with; it’s called our conscience. Some people cannot control their other side; it takes them over. Everybody has that psychotic side. Everyone has a thing that will make them snap.
The problem is that if you actually follow the source cited for the quote, then it takes you to a page that no longer exists even though it was apparently retrieved on January, 23rd 2017.
Hop over to Songfacts and you get a bit of a different story.
Dave Mustaine has said that the song is about himself, and that he wrote it after “it was pointed out to me that I’m kind of schizophrenic and that I live inside my head.”
He revealed on VH1’s That Metal Show, however, that the song was inspired by a friend of his girlfriend (and later, his wife), Pam. This friend suffered from anxiety attacks – Mustaine called her “s–thouse crazy.” She would take Pam to a party, have an anxiety spell and leave her; Mustaine would get the call and have to pick her up.
After Mustaine wrote this song, Pam thought it was about her, but Dave assured her she was “not that crazy.” Said Mustaine, “I wrote this song about her nutty friend.”
The video is a perfect storm of concept, director, and cinematographer.
The video shows us Mustaine in a nightmarish mental health cell where we are taken into his brain by literally seeing multiple versions of himself talking and interacting with each other.
There are two parts that I particularly like.
The first part is when two Mustaines are harassing another from the sides while that one is holding what looks like a human heart before they all come into sync to say the lyric, “Mankind has got to know his limitations.”
The other part is when you see one Mustaine kicking another in the face who is sitting in a corner.
The director of the video is Wayne Isham. Isham has worked with everyone from Rod Stewart to The Spin Doctors to Faith Hill. He seems to have primarily worked with heavy metal bands that include both Metallica and Megadeath. He is credited with inventing the Bon Jovi video for Mötley Crüe–Home Sweet Home–and then giving it to Bon Jovi, who built their career on that style.
The cinematographer is none other than Daniel Pearl. Pearl is the man who has shot well over 400 music videos from the early 80s to today. You could probably write a whole book that is comprised of a series of interviews with him about each video he remembers working on, and you would have a mini-history of music videos from the MTV-era.
He has only helmed a couple of projects because he has stated that he’s perfectly happy with being a cinematographer. One of the few videos that he got behind the camera for was Butterfly by Mariah Carey. He has shot seventeen of her music videos. He has also worked on several feature films, including the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
That’s why I referred to this video as a perfect storm.
If y’all already didn’t already known in which direction my musical tastes tends to run, you probably could guess just by doing a search and seeing who, out of the 18 writers on the site, has spent the most time writing about The Chemical Brothers and the Electric Daisy Carnival. In other words, I’m not going to pretend that I know much about Megadeth.
But I do know that it’s World UFO Day and this video certainly seems to fit with the theme!
I sound like a broken record every time I say this, but there isn’t much to talk about here beyond it being a good song.
Even if somebody didn’t know anything about Megadeth or director Penelope Spheeris, it would make perfect sense for someone to look at this music video and think it was extracted from a documentary. I haven’t seen The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988) yet. According to Songfacts, the music video was either shot before the documentary, then integrated into it, or it was part of the documentary, then extracted to be released as a music video. Either way, you’d be right to look at this and think it was from a documentary.
I like what Spheeris did here. She made a stripped down concert video that lets the band shine on their own merits rather than her work as a director. It isn’t devoid of her touch though. She clearly tried to capture them as people performing for other people rather than creating a stylish representation of the material like you would see in their music videos for Peace Sells and Sweating Bullets. The thing that subtly jumps out at me when I watch this over and over is that Mustaine is largely invisible due to the limited amount of time he is shown on stage, the sunglasses, and his face being partially darkened during parts of it. I would imagine this was done not only to visually show the darkness of the lyrics, but to keep your focus on the lyrics and how they are resonating with the crowd.
Speaking of the lyrics, this is one of those music videos that was banned from MTV. According to Wikipedia, it was due to alleged references to suicide.
According to mvdbase, the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris produced this music video. They would go on to do a lot of other famous music videos together as well as the movie Little Miss Sunshine (2006). They were also producers on The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
Through the Shattered Lens 