MARTY FRIEDMAN On Being Calling An Ex-MEGADETH Guitarist In Headlines: “It Really Bugs The Sh*t Out Of Me”

Marty Friedman has had an incredible career. The man played in Megadeth and Cacophony, has a handful of solo albums to his name, and has become a TV and musical superstar in Japan. Yet headlines still refer to Friedman as an ex-Megadeth guitarist despite having quit the band 24 years ago.

In a new interview with THAT Rocks!, Friedman said it bugs the shit out of him that he’s still referred to as an ex-Megadeth guitarist in headlines. Friedman made it clear that he’s a Megadeth fan and he’s got tons of respect for Dave Mustaine and his crew, but would prefer Megadeth and Marty Friedman to be two separate things at this point.

“Of course, once I left Megadeth, the tag ‘ex-Megadeth‘ was stuck to my name, and I understood that for about a year or two. And then I really, really wanted to cut that out because I was no longer in Megadeth and I was doing my own thing doing other things not related to Megadeth at all.

“So from about 2002 or 2003, I just made it a strict rule that any kind of media when they published whatever they were doing, no ‘ex-Megadeth‘ next to my name. Just don’t put it in the headline. Don’t put my name with Megadeth — ‘former Megadeth‘, all of that stuff was like a very, very strict rule. Of course, as you all know, in the media they tend to ignore those rules about 90 percent of the time. They ignored that a lot, but then, as time went on, it started to get less and less, and I started to feel better about it.

“And then in the mid-2010s, a lot of places stopped completely putting that next to my name, because there was nothing I was doing even remotely related to Megadeth, so why put it in there? Of course, sometimes they even still do it now, and it just really, really bugs the shit out of me, because it’s not doing Megadeth any favors either.

“It’s not doing me any favors. It’s 25 years ago. They have their own band, and I’m the biggest fan of their band, and my thing is completely different from theirs. But sometimes you can’t control what the media does. But that still doesn’t mean that I don’t have a lot of love and respect for the band. Of course I do. We’re both doing separate things.”