METAL NIGHT IN CANADA

By ROSS MOROZ - VueWeekly.com

Arena rock is back in a huge way, and that suits Megadeth's Glen Drover just fine

It's been a long wait, especially for the fans. At some points, it even looked like it might be over for good. North American arenas have been silent for far too long, but this fall, after an excruciatingly prolonged absence, the symphony of destruction will be making its triumphant return to hockey rinks across the continent, and for a good Canadian boy who's toiled away in the minors for most of his career, the opportunity to step up and play with the big boys in front of a hometown crowd must be exhilarating.

"I'm very excited," agrees Mississauga and Calgary native Glen Drover, on the phone from the dressing room of the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. "It's obviously special to go back to your hometown and play-I mean, I remember watching hockey games at [Calgary's] the Corral when I was like 12 years old, and now I'm going to be playing there."

Of course, unlike his boyhood hockey idols, Drover probably won't make his debut at the Corral by removing his helmet and standing on guard for O Canada; actually, it's a pretty safe bet to assume the national anthem won't be heard at all, unless Drover himself decides to indulge some kind of Hendrix-ian urge. The fact is, for all his intensity, aggression, and power, Drover is a guitarist, not a smooth skating defenseman, and he plays not on the Calgary Flames but for another ‘80s institution which weathered some lean years in the late ‘90s to recently recapture some of their former glory.

"Being in Megadeth is a great thrill," gushes Drover, who joined the band along with his brother Shawn on drums in August of 2004. "It's amazing to be in a band that you grew up listening to. Even after all these shows it's not like that effect has worn off yet-it's still exciting."

Drover isn't the only Megadeth fan excited to see the band back on the road. The band officially broke up in 2002, after founding frontman Dave Mustaine announced that an arm injury had forced him to give up guitar playing, leading Megadeth fans to assume the band was gone for good. But after intensive physical therapy, Mustaine has made a Mario Lemieux-esque comeback, releasing a new album (2004's The System Has Failed) and embarking on an extensive world tour with his new band, made up of the Drover brothers and bassist James MacDonnough.

For Megadeth, the arm injury was just another contretemps in a career filled with more drama than a Stanley Cup playoff run. Mustaine started the group in 1983, after being fired from his first band, Metallica, reportedly because of substance abuse issues. One year later, Combat Records signed Megadeth to a recording contract, giving the group $8,000 to record a debut album. Killing Is My Business... And Business Is Good! was released in the spring of 1985 and sold well, although Combat was angry at the band for spending half the recording budget on drugs. Their second album, Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?, was released in 1986 and its success firmly established Megadeth as a dominant force in the thrash metal scene, alongside bands like Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica. The newly successful Megadeth soon signed with Capitol Records, and continued to tour and record successfully well into the grunge-saturated ‘90s in spite of numerous lineup changes and rumours of heavy drug use by the entire band. While Megadeth never achieved the pop-radio success of certain contemporaries in the ‘90s, they did taste mainstream success briefly with their multi-platinum 1992 release, Countdown to Extinction, which climbed to second place on the Billboard charts (hilariously, Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart occupied the number one spot), and 1994's Youthanasia.

After the arm injury-and a period of general stagnation in the late ‘90s-Mustaine reformed the new Megadeth from scratch, auditioning backup players and eventually finding the Drover brothers rather accidentally, after a fan emailed Megadeth's webmaster raving about this guitarist from Canada.

"I talked to [the Megadeth webmaster] for a couple of days before he got me in touch with Dave [Mustaine], and it just went from there," explains Drover. "We went through that whole process of getting to know each other a bit: he was making sure I was on the same page as he was and he had me send some video and audio files of me playing some stuff to check me out."

Drover acknowledges his musicianship isn't all that eventually got him the gig ("It's a package deal-there's definitely an image involved, and an attitude and work ethic," he admits) although in a band like Megadeth, it's a given he can play a pretty mean guitar.

"It's challenging music, and that's what keeps it interesting. You definitely have to be on your toes, but that's part of the fun for me-it gets boring otherwise," he says, explaining that his job is even more challenging because of the multitude of previous Megadeth guitarists whose work he had to become familiar with.

"All the guitar players are quite different from each other, so it's been quite challenging to try to emulate those solos and feels," Drover explains. "I try to keep it pretty faithful to the album: I find most fans want to hear it like that and appreciate when you try to do it that way, and out of respect to them and to all the guitarists who have come before me I try to get as close as humanly possible to the original, although you have to allow your own personality into the music to a point, because otherwise you end up sounding like a robot."

So far, Drover thinks he's been able to strike the right balance, at least as far as Megadeth's fans are concerned. "You're always going to be compared to people from the past, and there are some pretty big guns there-Marty Friedman, Chris Poland, all of them," he concedes. "Some people are really fond of a particular lineup, but I have to say it's been mostly positive. I'm stepping into a lot of big shoes, and for the most part people's reaction has been really great, which I've been really happy about."

Drover has also been pleasantly surprised by the composition of Megadeth's fanbase. Half expecting a Fubar-esque collection of aging headbangers and mullet-sporting alcoholics, Drover is excited to see whole families at Megadeth's shows. "Our audience consists of everything from 16-year-olds to 46-year-olds, and it's great to see kids getting into us, whether their fathers or buddies or whoever exposed them to Megadeth," he raves, although one has to wonder if the boys in the band are all that positive of role models, considering Megadeth's sordid history of drugs and debauchery.

"We're so tame we're probably boring," Drover laughs, insisting Megadeth's more Behind the Music days are, um, behind them. "There's no crap at all-everyone gets along really well, and it's a real family vibe, which is really refreshing. The crazy part is what happens up onstage."