Bass Is His Business… and Business Is Good! Talking With Megadeth’s Four-String Iron Man, James LoMenzo

ALBANY—When longtime Megadeth bassist David Ellefson was contentiously dismissed from the band back in 2021, the iconic thrash metal group’s founder, Dave Mustaine, very wisely called upon James LoMenzo—best known for his work with multiplatinum ‘80s hard rockers White Lion—to once again fill Ellefson’s considerable shoes. And that’s exactly what LoMenzo, who was born and raised downstate in Brooklyn, has done.

Over the decades since White Lion’s 1991 disbanding, LoMenzo, aged 65, has become one of the busiest bassists in metal, playing with a list of musicians that reads like a heavy music hall of fame, including previously serving on team Megadeth from 2006 to 2010. With the band rolling into town to headline MVP Arena on Tuesday, September 10, I spent some time chatting with LoMenzo during a tour stop in North Carolina, where the bassist reflected on his storied past, carrying the Megadeth legacy forward, and the keys to playing alongside legends.

BRENDAN MANLEY: This is your second stint in Megadeth. How’s it going so far, and what’s different this time around, if anything?

JAMES LOMENZO: The personnel…different musicians. As I turn around, I go, “Where are the Drover brothers [guitarist Glen and drummer Shawn]? Oh no, now we have Dirk [Verbeuren] and Teemu [Mäntysaari].” It’s the musicians. It’s funny, because the band is becoming this stately ambassador of thrash. Dave [Mustaine] has kept the band up and afloat in a very big way since its inception in the ’80s into the ’90s and throughout, and so all of us in the band are very proud to be part of this, because it’s a genuine legacy to the genre. We take it serious as a heart attack, and the rewarding part is every night we go out and we see all these people coming out, and we see a lot of young people. We see a lot of parents bringing their kids; a lot of teenagers who are really interested in the band. It’s a real justification of how important this band is and has become.

BM: What’s it like playing with Dirk and Teemu now, versus other members in the past?

JL: Well, you know I’ve been in an awful lot of bands, as anybody who’s ever tracked my career knows. Everybody plays different. Everybody has a certain thing that they uniquely do. Dave is always going to sound like Dave. As a matter of fact, I always say as soon as he lifts up his guitar and puts it on, it really doesn’t matter who’s playing in the band, because that’s the stamp; that’s the familiar sound. That said though, everybody is really completely reverent to the past in a very important way. We try to make the music as authentic as we possibly can. You can’t play it exactly—I will not be able to play exactly like David Ellefson, and Teemu will not be able to play exactly like the 20 guitar players before him, but we try and get the essence of it and try and get those parts sewn up really tight, so they come at the right time and they fire at the right time.

Dirk is just a fantastic drummer. I’ve played with tons of great drummers, but Dirk is really special in the context of this band. He plays reverently to the music, but he has a certain kind of concussion to his playing that’s immediate and very powerful and very strong and right on the money. As a matter of fact, when I rejoined the band, he was the first guy I played with before anybody else showed up. Just out of motor memory we went through a bunch of songs, without any guitars or vocals. I was prepared with the music and he had been playing it for a while, and man it was just astounding how tight we were immediately. That’s a testimony to him, maybe not as much as myself, because my job throughout my career has been to get into a band and get on board real quick and play the music well. But it seemed to me that when I started playing the stuff with him, it almost made me sound like I was playing it better, so I’m a big Dirk Verbeuren fan.

BM: You mentioned David Ellefson. As a bass player, is your approach to playing different than his?

JL: As far as rock ‘n’ roll and metal bands go, I’m an originalist: I love the original band. So as much of an honor and how great it is to be part of this, I still have that little thing, that little fan guy thing, going with the real band. But we are very different in our trajectory. In my estimation, David Ellefson has defined the sound of this band with his bass playing as much as everybody else who’s been in the band, so I try to be very respectful and reverent to that.

This is my metaphysical part of the morning: We all have different electrical systems; the way we react internally. We get the idea, we feel the note coming and then our hands have to react on the instrument. I don’t think everybody can be the same. As individuals we play slightly different, so for me I have to really bear down and think original Megadeth and playing that style, and that’s a delightful challenge. I really love it.

I’ve always played with a pick and I’ve always played with my fingers, but I know that the music here in Megadeth is very pick driven. I’m equally as fast either way. When I first joined the band, Dave said, “I’m aware of the way you play. If you want to play with your fingers, you’re welcome to it.” I did try it for a while, because at that moment I was playing with my fingers quite a lot. But I listened to it and it just doesn’t catch the vibe. So respectfully I play all the music as close to the original stuff as I possibly can, and I think it works contextually with the band anyway.

BM: I put together a list here of all the guitar players you’ve played with over the years, and I don’t know that there’s anybody else that’s played with more legendary guitar players: Vito Bratta. Marty Friedman, Dave Mustaine, Chris Poland, Zakk Wylde, Slash, George Lynch, Ace Frehley… Who was the best out of that group? Is it even possible to choose one?

JL: There is no best! They’re all great. They’re all great. I’m full of loaves of bread. I’m the happiest camper you’ve ever met, because I did get to play with all those wonderful people and you know what? Throughout all of those experiences, we embraced each other as musicians. I had the best experience with each and every one of them and a lot are still phone friends of mine, which is even a better thing.

When I came up playing music, I didn’t know if I could succeed or not, but I knew I loved making music, and that’s the one thing that all of these musicians that you mentioned—and some of the other ones you didn’t—they all have the same thing: They live, breathe and eat this lifestyle and what they do. I get on very well with people like that. I’m not the guy who’s looking for the gig, you know what I mean? I’ve been very fortunate to happen to trip into all these wonderful situations, but at the same time, I’ve always taken my playing as seriously as these people do. So, when I get together with them, we both recognize that, and that makes it fun, exciting and all the great stuff you see on stage.

BM: You’ve also jumped around a bit in terms of genres. Obviously Ace and Slash and George Lynch are doing more of a hard rock thing, versus thrash metal. Do you find it more of a challenge one way or the other depending on the genre?

JL: Brendan, I had this conversation just yesterday with Ryan Martinie, the bass player from Mudvayne, who I think is just amazing and truly one of the great bass players. We were talking about different styles and how we came up and stuff. When I was a little kid, I listened to AM radio: a little 3-inch speaker out of a little box. And in New York as you well know, it was just this amalgam of music mixed together. They didn’t really define all this stuff until later in the ’70s, like, “Okay well that’s rock and that’s classical and that’s blues.” They just used to lump it all in on the radio. So, I listened to Frank Sinatra, and I listened to The Rolling Stones… all this stuff was going on at the same time.

So, what intrigued me about music and ultimately becoming a bass player, was that all these styles overlapped in such interesting ways that I really wanted to explore why the bass guitar sounded different in the Rolling Stones than it did on a Ray Charles song, where you’d have a swinging jazz player. I explored all of that coming up as a musician and I really studied all that; not even books, just trying to play along and slowly realizing, “Okay when you’re playing the blues, you’ve got to hang behind the bass drum a little. You’ve got to sit back.” When you’re playing rock ‘n’ roll or thrash or the Ramones for instance, it was a revelation to me, because I’d already gotten pretty good on the bass and then I heard Dee-Dee Ramone and realized it’s just leaning forward, like you’re going down a slope on a mountain. You’re just playing forward the whole time and that was something I had to develop, because I never thought about it. I never thought it was a thing and then I realized, “Oh okay, there’s so many different ways to approach this.”

Up until Megadeth, I hadn’t really played with a thrash band per se, although I did kind of jam along with Ramones records, just to see what that felt like, so I had an inkling of what that was. In fact, when Dave called me up, he asked me to send him some stuff, and I sent him something I had done with Ray Luzier, who plays drums in Korn, and Toshi Hiketa, who is a fantastic guitar player from Japan. We were David Lee Roth’s backup band at the time and we put together this record [2004’s The Hideous Sun Demons] just to kind of show off. It was like a rock fusion record; a little bit like Rush without vocals. There was one song in particular where I had a six-string bass, which I still have, called “The Mummy” and it has all these stylings, but it was the most metallic thing I had, even though it wasn’t steeped in metal. I sent that to Dave and that was the only thing I had to show him, because everything else was rock ‘n’ roll pretty much. Well, that did the trick, because I guess there was enough in there and he thought it was very good, so we auditioned and here we are sitting here today again.

BM: Are you a fan of the genre? Do you listen to much thrash on your own?

JL: I do. Here’s the thing: When thrash was really picking up steam, Bobby Gustafson who played in Overkill was a neighborhood guy in Brooklyn. I used to see him at the club L’amour, and we were friends. I thought Overkill was great. He turned me on to Slayer for the first time: I was hanging out at his flop house apartment on 12th Avenue and he goes, “Check this out!” Just like the movies, he dropped the needle and I’d never heard anything like it. I caught the bug, but at that time White Lion was taking off and that was a whole other thing, so I was more steeped in listening to what was popular to try and maximize what we were doing, than going for different genres. So, I kind of really missed a lot of that obvious stuff.

I was playing Judas Priest earlier on before, in the ’70s in clubs, so I knew what that kind of metal was. I gravitated toward that: more of that heavy metal like Judas Priest and certainly Dio; bands like that. That’s the stuff I really latched onto. The thrash thing, for some reason the rug kind of went below me, and eventually I caught up with it. When I came here to Megadeth, I was aware of it. I’d heard a lot of the songs.

Here’s the funny thing: When I used to hang out at L’amour in Brooklyn…before the main band would come on every Friday and Saturday night, they would play [Megadeth’s] “In My Darkest Hour.” Now here’s the funny part: I never knew who played it. So, when I was learning the stuff from Megadeth I’m going through the catalog, and I have to tell you if I knew five Megadeth songs, I was rich, because I honestly didn’t. So, I’m listening through and then it comes on, and I go, “Oh my God! That’s the L’amour song!” It’s one of my favorite ones to play. It encapsulates Megadeth; it has everything in it. It has drama, it has personal experience, it has relatable lyrics and it moves from like half-tempo to this just thrashing thing.

BM: I loved how the live performance of that song ended the film The Decline of the Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years [1988]. After all the Hollywood clowns were done, there was Megadeth.

JL: That’s funny. When I showed up in Hollywood the first time, it had to be 1982-83, before White Lion, I wanted to see what was going on, so I crashed on my cousin’s couch. I’d go to the clubs—Gazzarri’s and the Troubadour and all those places—and I remember the bands looking stellar, but not being very good. [Laughs] But their clothing was impeccable and their staging was incredible.

Coming from Brooklyn, we were all hard workers, man. It was mostly a lot of cover bands; that’s how we learned how to play a lot of music. We’d play the Tri-State area; we’d go through Long Island and that was my weekend. I would finish working on the construction site on Friday, get on the train, pick up my bass, meet the drummer, and we’d load. We’d go to the garage, get the PA and the lighting out, go to the club, set up the PA and the lighting ourselves, play four sets of music, four different costume changes, get our $200 for the night, put it back in the truck, sleep overnight, do it again Saturday and then pack it all in and I’d be back on the construction site on Monday… Up toward Deer Park [Long Island] we used to play a place called Cheers—I think it was named after the show—but we used to call it Chairs, because we used to play Thursday nights, and nobody would come.

BM: Not to put you on the spot, but is there ever going to be a White Lion reunion?

JL: No, there never will be one. I can’t foresee it and I can say that confidently, because Mike [Tramp]’s doing his thing, and Vito [Bratta] really as far as I know, he’s just had no interest in going out, which is a shame. He’s such a great guitar player. Greg [D’Angelo] has gone off and done a ton of other things. We have to talk every now and again to go through some of our leftover business, and honestly nobody really wants to do it, just to do it. Nobody’s motivated by the money, because there would be [money].

I’m in Megadeth man, so there’s no summer vacation time for me. But I love that Mike is out there and still doing the music. He’s the most identifiable with this. I know he picks up really good guitar players who can kind of ape what Vito did so well and that’s kind of what you have now. I think our moment was probably about 10 years ago.

BM: Mike Tramp rolls through here quite often and does well. But I think it’s one of those things that will never truly satisfy the cult of White Lion.

JL: Again, as I said, I’m an originalist. I would love to see the whole band, you know?

BM: You were also a contestant on The Amazing Race. What was that like?

JL: That was fun, man. That was the last thing on Earth that I really wanted to do…me and reality TV. I get enough reality in reality, you know what I mean? But David Ellefson had just come back to Megadeth and I had just exited, so I was sitting around. Mark Abbattista who acts as my manager, he’s my friend and he’s also a friend of Dave’s. Him and David were going to do The Amazing Race but David came back to Megadeth, so Mark called me up.

The whole thing about reality TV is, they set you up for a couple of weeks. They walk you in, they figure out who you are, what you do, why it would be interesting and how they will pair you with all these people. I started getting excited about it, because it was a new adventure. I thought we probably could do very well, because Mark’s a really smart guy, and I’m a pretty smart guy, but we’ve already toured. We already know what it’s like to be uncomfortable every day and what it’s like to sleep on a park bench if you have to. So, we figured we had the edge over most people coming out of their homes.

Anyway, it was a great experience. I always equate it to reminding me of when I was a wee little lad—like five or six years old—and your parents are tying your shoelaces. You’re going to go out into the big bad world and you have no idea what’s out there, because you haven’t experienced it yet. I’ve been all over the world, but not like this, not by my wits. The show sets up all these little scenarios that you have to accomplish, so that was exciting. As we started moving along, I was like, “What are we going to do today?” One day they were like, “You have to make a scale out of three pieces of wood and twine.” I was like, “I was a Boy Scout. I know how to do that. Yay, I win that one!” So in the end, it was great. It didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped, but that’s for you to watch and find out.

BM: You’re a graphic artist too, right?

JL: Yeah. I actually started as a photo re-toucher, because I moved over to the digital world when it became the digital world, right away as a photographer. I’d always been a photographer and I had a family member who did high-end retouching for movies, so I started doing retouching for TV ads and movie posters. I’d see my ads go by on buses and that was really exciting to me for some reason.

Then I went from that to studying graphic design and doing album covers and books, and I integrated that as part of my business at the time. Because as a bass player—kids, I’m looking right in the camera now—you really need to always have some other way to form an income. All those great players I played with, nobody plays forever all the time. You do the gigs, you make the money for the gig, and then you move on and you have a little bit of space. So, you kids coming up who want to do this, keep that in mind.

BM: Anything else exciting going on right now in terms of stuff you’re working on?

JL: Well actually right now we’re winding down [with Megadeth]. We’ve had a couple of breaks. I have to say I’m totally tickled: I met Bill Ward [from Black Sabbath] a bunch of years ago—I actually met him many years ago on one of the Ozzfest tours—but I played a charity thing at The Whiskey [in Hollywood] with him and got to know him fairly well. He’s been calling me and other musicians in to help him complete at least three or four records he’s been working on over the years. So, I’ve been doing a lot of that every time I get off the road. His assistant figures out when I’m home and then gives me a call. It’s really amazing music. Bill is as vital as he’s ever been and he’s a really interesting cat and a sweetheart, but a great musician. Not just as the drummer that you think he is: He’s a well-rounded, beautiful vocalist. So that’s been going on throughout this and I can’t wait for his record to come out and to listen to how it gets finished.

Other than that, we’re winding down the end of the year with Megadeth. We’re talking about a few interesting things that might pop up, that we haven’t really locked down yet. We’re looking into starting to collaborate on a new Megadeth album as well, so that’s seriously the talks as we get to the end of this month and get off the road and start planning that legitimately.

BM: How much input will you have on new Megadeth material?

JL: I’ve already worked with Dave years ago [LoMenzo played on Megadeth studio LPs United Abominations in 2007 and Endgame in 2009] and it’s as much as we can give him. Ultimately, he’s the arbiter of what Megadeth will sound like, and I totally respect that. I think that’s the way it should be. But he takes all ideas. He takes everything into consideration. He likes the spark and he also likes the collaboration.

BM: What are the toughest tunes to play in the set list?

JL: We haven’t gotten to one of them yet that I’ve been practicing and it can only be “Killing Is My Business.” It’s not because it’s fast; it’s just the end kind of falls off a cliff, so I’m still curious how we’re supposed to do that together as it is on the record. But no, everything is playable. If you break down everything into little bits and you learn them slowly and then you slowly pick up your pace just like you would do with any music, it’s all doable, so none of it is particularly difficult.

There are stamina issues: Like on the new record [2022’s The Sick, the Dying… and the Dead!], some of the songs are really fast. “We’ll Be Back” is incredibly fast and it is just flipping up and down stroke 32nd notes, practically. That’s really hard on a bass guitar and I think that song is tuned down to D. That’s a full step, so the strings are pretty loose, so it takes real discipline to just kind of hold the instrument and keep that going really easy. It’s been going great but when we first started playing that live, man it was a real trick to bear down and get that so it sounds like a hornet coming at you.

BM: What’s been the biggest challenge of your career, and the biggest highlight?

JL: I can’t say man, because I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve done so much stuff. Getting into this band Megadeth was amazing to me. It was a challenge, because like anybody who joins this band knows, you’ve got like two-and-a-half to three weeks to learn 20 odd songs. And if you didn’t know them like me, that was a big challenge, man. That was 24/7 at home listening, learning and perfecting…getting all that ready just to do a gig; just to do one gig. I didn’t even know if it’d be more after that. So that was a real challenge.

Getting picked up by John Fogerty [of Creedence Clearwater Revival] was a real delight, because when I was really young that stuff was on the radio, so I was playing acoustic guitar and just singing, and I could sing that stuff clean, because my voice hadn’t changed. “Born on the Bayou,” and all that stuff, I used to do as a kid. So, like 45 years later to have the opportunity to go and actually be his bass player and play all those great songs with him, that was a really great thing for me.

BM: You’re kind of the busiest bass player in metal, if you look at it.

JL: I’m tired, Brendan. I’m tired.

BM: What’s the secret? How do you do it?

JL: You’ve got to love it. That’s it: That’s the whole secret. I do clinics sometimes and people ask how I get to do what I do, and I say everything is possible. I have no idea why I ended up in this thing. I know I was always doing it; I was always prepared to do it, but you have to have these things fall in line. They have to fall in your lap in a weird way. I made myself available to people. I did as much as I could. I tend to choose people that I really believe are real people. If they’re a musician, they’re a real musician. I don’t really fluff around with people who talk big and aren’t as good on the instrument as I would hope they would be. I choose all that stuff wisely.

But the secret for me being able to do this every night is I see that kid I used to be in the audience. It totally gives me wings, because as you get on—and I’m not saying I’m ancient, but I’m older than I used to be—it takes a little more stamina and energy than it used to, as it should. But every night when I’m out there and I see that dad who feels the same way I do at that moment—he still feels like he’s 20 years old, which is what this music does to you—and then I see his kid next to him, who is less than 20 years old, but they look the same. Man, that’s what gets me on the bus. That’s what gets me on the stage every day.

BM: So many of the artists you’ve worked with over the years with have notoriously strong personalities, too. Is there a psychology to managing that?

JL: I respect everybody I play with. I take them on their own terms. Some people are quirkier than others, as they should be. If you can create at this level, there’d better be something wrong with you, because not everybody can do it. Obviously, there’s something different about most of these people, and I respect that. I try to help them get to where they want to be. I think that might be the secret to my success.

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Megadeth headline MVP Arena in Albany on Tuesday, September 10, with special guests Mudvayne and All That Remains. Tickets may be purchased here.