Foreclosure of a Dream

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Foreclosure of a Dream," track four off Megadeth's 1992 album Countdown to Extinction, and if you are out there in Zoo Freak country with a cold drink and the volume up, stick around. This one is not a cartoon about monsters. It is a hard-rock letter home about a family farm that got taken, a promise that got broken, and a title two guys saw on a television set years before they ever had a band big enough to use it. You can catch the whole freeform trip over at THE ZOO.

David Ellefson wrote most of the words, with Dave Mustaine sharing the credit. Ellefson has told the story more than once. He left Jackson, Minnesota, for California in 1983, right as the family farms around him were starting to fold. Farm Aid was on the horizon, grain prices were crashing, and a lot of that mess traced back to Cold War farm policy. Sanctions that stopped American grain from shipping to the Soviet Union left a surplus sitting on the ground, land values dropped, and banks came calling. Ellefson's own folks lost the place in Hartland. In a 1992 interview he put it plain: when he writes, he can only draw on what he has lived, and the song is about something that happened to his family. The demise of a dream, he said, can be economic or spiritual, and politics has a lot to do with which one it is. A farm in Minnesota was the specific case. The recession sitting on everybody else's kitchen table was the reason the rest of the country could hear it.

The title showed up before the record deal did. Ellefson has said that in 1986 he and Mustaine went back to his mom and dad's farm, turned on the television, and caught a news piece headed something like "Foreclosure of a Dream" or "Foreclosure of the Dream." They filed it away. Five years later, while the band was writing what became Countdown to Extinction, Mustaine said they ought to use that title. The finished lyric walks the same ground: borrowed money, borrowed time, barren land that once filled a need, a heartland dying, insufficient funds, and a line about a personal holocaust that still lands heavy. Midway through, the band drops in a bite of President George H. W. Bush from the 1988 campaign, the famous "read my lips" bit about taxes. Rolling Stone later called the whole thing a heavy-metal Farm Aid. That is about right. It is the second single off the album, sitting between the hunting protest of the title track and the Pied Piper politics of "Symphony of Destruction."

The record itself was cut in a strange season. Mustaine has said Countdown to Extinction was the first Megadeth album he made stone sober, after years of pot, coke, heroin, speed, and freebase on the earlier ones. Max Norman produced it with the same lineup that had made Rust in Peace: Mustaine, Marty Friedman, Ellefson, and Nick Menza. They were working in Los Angeles while the city was still under curfew after the Rodney King riots. Mustaine lived two blocks from the studio and walked. Ellefson and Menza drove, and both had handguns in the car, which Mustaine told them was a bad idea if anybody pulled them over. They worked until about six, then got home before the streets got worse. The tension got into the music. The album came out on July 14, 1992, shot to number two on the Billboard chart, and stalled behind Billy Ray Cyrus and "Achy Breaky Heart." Mustaine has laughed about that one for years. He wanted a number one at least once in his life, and a line-dance song beat him to it.

Before any of that, there was a kid from La Mesa, just outside San Diego, whose parents split when he was seven. The family landed poor in the Southern California suburbs. His mother was often gone, and a brother-in-law once punched him for playing Judas Priest too loud. His answer was to join a band. At seventeen he was the lead guitarist in Panic, a Huntington Beach outfit that mostly partied, jammed a little, and got thrown out of a talent show for being too loud. Two friends from that circle died in a wreck on the Pacific Coast Highway after a night Mustaine decided to sit out. He has called it a dark start. The first song he ever wrote was "Jump in the Fire." While he was still in Panic he also sketched early versions of what became "Mechanix" and pieces that later turned up on Rust in Peace.

A few months after Panic folded, he answered an ad Lars Ulrich had placed in the Recycler and auditioned his way into Metallica. He lasted a little under two years and helped write a chunk of the first two albums. On the morning of April 11, 1983, in a live-in rehearsal space in Queens, the band woke him up and told him he was out. Alcohol and drugs, plus a fight over who was steering the ship, were the reasons they gave. They put him on a bus back across the country. On that four-day ride he picked up a pamphlet from California Senator Alan Cranston about nuclear arms. One line talked about the arsenal of megadeath that no peace treaty could get rid of. He scribbled lyrics on the back of a cupcake napkin. That scrap became "Set the World Afire," the first Megadeth song, though it did not land on an album until So Far, So Good... So What! in 1988.

Back in Los Angeles he landed downstairs from two Minnesota kids, David Ellefson and Greg Handevidt, who had come west from Jackson. The early name on the door was Fallen Angels. A short-lived singer, Lawrence "Lor" Kane, heard the word Mustaine had already written into a song and said it would work as a band name. They dropped the "a" in death so it would not read like a straight death-metal tag, and Megadeth was born in 1983. The first album, Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!, arrived in 1985 on a tiny budget and a lot of nerve. Mustaine has said he was driven by revenge in those years, watching the band that fired him turn everything to gold. The farm song came later, once the revenge had cooled enough to let a bassist from Minnesota write about home.

If you want the band in their own words, the lyrics to "Foreclosure of a Dream" are posted on the Megadeth official website, right on the Countdown to Extinction page, credited to Ellefson and Mustaine. The same house keeps the front door at the Megadeth official website. They are easy to find on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans who want the inside track enlist in the Megadeth Cyber Army, the band's own fan club, for presales, a members' store, and a welcome letter from Mustaine. That is the circle. The song is the farm. The band is the long ride home from Queens. And the Zoo Freaks already know where the record lives.