A Tout le Monde

The Zoo Crew has got "A Tout le Monde" rolling out of Youthanasia, and if you have ever stood in a room when that chorus hits, you already know why the Zoo Freaks keep asking for it. Megadeth cut the record in 1994, the sixth album, with Dave Mustaine, Marty Friedman, David Ellefson and Nick Menza, and this one sits in the middle of the set like a letter somebody left on the kitchen table. The title is plain French for "to everyone." The line the crowd sings back, "à tout le monde, à tous mes amis, je vous aime, je dois partir," comes out as "to everyone, to all my friends, I love you, I must go." That is the whole heart of the thing, and for thirty years people have argued about what it was supposed to mean.

Mustaine has told the story more than once, including a 2023 sit-down with Spin. He said it came from a dream after his mother died suddenly. In the dream she was allowed to come back and say one thing, and the one thing was "I love you." He figured if he ever got the same chance, he would not waste it on something small. He would tell the people he cared about that he loved them, then go. On the official site he put it even plainer years earlier, answering a fan on the band's own pages: MTV called it a suicide song, but why would the line "I'd love to stay with you all" be in there if that were the point? He has also said, going back to interviews around the album itself, that it is the words he would want if he had three seconds left. Good, bad, indifferent, he loved them all. These are the last words I'll ever speak, and they'll set me free.

The trouble started almost as soon as the single went out in February 1995. Capitol had the record, the video cost a fortune, and MTV banned it. Mustaine has said the network told the band not to use director Wayne Isham again because they had used him too much. Management tried to slip the clip through under another name anyway, MTV caught it, and the video got shelved. American radio, which was still taking its cues from MTV, mostly left the single alone. Mustaine later wrote that the song was left at the altar, and that he got sent the bill for a clip that ran past three hundred thousand dollars. Overseas it found a home anyway. The French chorus did not hurt in Europe, and the melody was the kind of thing a room full of longhair bikers and old album-rock heads could sing without a lyric sheet.

There was a darker turn in 2006, when a man in Montreal mentioned the song before a shooting at Dawson College. Mustaine answered the next day that he was horrified, that the song was the dream about his mother coming back to say she loved him, and that he was not going to let somebody take it away from the people he wrote it for. He compared the blame to the old Judas Priest case, where a band got dragged into court over lyrics they never meant that way. He has kept playing it. In 2007 he rebuilt it for United Abominations as "À Tout le Monde (Set Me Free)," a duet with Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil. He said he had wanted to hear it as a love song with an angelic voice, that he had even had Lisa Marie Presley lined up at one point, and that Scabbia was the right call for the metal crowd. They sped it up toward the tempo he had wanted on Youthanasia before the album tracks got slowed down, and Marty Friedman's original solo got a longer run with Glen Drover's lead woven in.

Youthanasia itself was the record after Countdown to Extinction, cut with Max Norman, the band living in a Phoenix place they nicknamed Fat Planet. The title is a jab at a world that keeps its young people down. "A Tout le Monde" is the quiet room inside that record. Friedman’s lead does not show off so much as it answers the vocal. Nick Menza plays it like a procession. If you caught the band on the Night of the Living Megadeth broadcast the day the album came out in 1994, Mustaine even mixed up the set list once and started talking before the wrong song. The tune stuck with people anyway. Zoo Freaks who grew up on the deep cuts know it belongs next to the ballads that album rock stations used to slip in after midnight, the ones that were heavy without being a sprint.

The man who wrote it did not come up through a music school. David Scott Mustaine was born in La Mesa, California, in 1961. His folks split when he was a kid, and the family landed hard in the Southern California suburbs. He has talked about poverty, about a house where his mother was often gone working, and about a brother-in-law who once hit him for playing Judas Priest. The revenge, as he has put it, was to pick up a guitar and get in a band. As a teenager in Huntington Beach he was in a short-lived outfit called Panic, playing backyard keg parties, watching how a guitar player could walk into a yard and own the place. When Panic ran out of road he picked up a classified rag called The Recycler, saw an ad for a lead guitar player, and called. Lars Ulrich answered. Mustaine mentioned Motörhead and Budgie. Ulrich lit up at Budgie, a little three-piece from Wales, and that was the icebreaker. Mustaine drove down to Newport Beach, heard an early version of "Hit the Lights," and told them it needed more solos. He got the gig.

He was in Metallica from 1981 until the morning of April 11, 1983, when the band woke him in a rehearsal dump in Queens and put him on a bus home. They were about to make Kill 'Em All. Mustaine has said the ride west was miserable, and that somewhere on that bus the word megadeath, a Cold War term for a million dead, flipped in his head into a band name. He started scratching lyrics on the back of a cupcake napkin. That scrap became "Set the World Afire," which waited until So Far, So Good... So What! in 1988 to show up on a record. Back in California he found Dave Ellefson, another kid who had come out for the same scene, and Megadeth was a band before the summer was over. The first album, Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!, came out in 1985 on Combat, fast and mean, recorded on a budget that would not have covered a used van. Mustaine has said he was driven by revenge, and also that the world already wanted to know what the guitar player from Metallica was going to do next. Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? followed in 1986, Rust in Peace in 1990, and by Youthanasia the band had learned how to put a slow song in the middle of a metal record without apologizing for it.

That is the long road into the track you are hearing. A kid from a broke house in Southern California, a classified ad, a bus ride, a napkin, and years later a dream about his mother that turned into a French chorus half the world still sings wrong on purpose. The Zoo Crew will leave it right here for the Freaks. If you want the rest of the station, the deep cuts and the old Dallas rock spirit that built this place, you can find THE ZOO any hour you feel like tuning in.

Megadeth keeps the books open on the band's own site, where Youthanasia and the words to "A Tout le Monde" are still up for anybody who wants to read them straight from the source: megadeth.com. The official pages are Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans who want the club the band actually runs can enlist in the Megadeth Cyber Army, the long-running fan outfit with the presales, the store, and the news the road crew posts first.