Ever since joining the celebrity video greeting app Cameo a few weeks ago, Dave Mustaine has been offering juicy bits of Megadeth information. In a pair of new clips, the frontman insisted that ousted bassist David Ellefson will never be welcomed back to the band, and also teased his replacement.
As reported last week, in yet another Cameo video, Mustaine had revealed that a mystery bassist had already re-recorded Ellefson’s bass parts for the upcoming Megadeth album.
Mustaine followed that up with a video message to a different fan in which he shared a glimpse of the new bassist, albeit obscured behind an office chair (see image above).
“I’m walking around the studio right now,” said Mustaine in the video. “That’s [engineer] Chris Rakestraw sitting back there on the console. And you’ve got our mystery bass player hiding behind the chair down there on the floor, so you can’t see him. But we will be saying who that is soon. And you actually saw him before anybody else — even though you can’t really see him.”
There’s not much to make out, other than that the mystery bassist is either reclining or doing sit-ups. As Mustaine mentioned, it won’t be long before his identity is revealed, as Megadeth will embark on a co-headlining tour with Lamb of God next month.
In an even newer clip, the music news YouTube channel Rock Feed cleverly used Cameo to get Mustaine to answer a couple of questions, one of which was whether Megadeth would ever welcome back Ellefson to the band in the future. The frontman responded, “Any chance on Ellefson coming back later on? The answer to that is no.”
In that same clip, Mustaine also confirmed that the new bassist is not former Metallica member Jason Newsted, just as Newsted’s wife already insisted several weeks ago.
Ellefson was fired from the band on May 24th after video leaked of a private online sexual encounter with a young woman. The married bassist insisted that the interaction was consensual, dismissing allegations of grooming, and launched a revenge pornography investigation into the person who leaked the video. In firing Ellefson, Mustaine also cited an “already strained relationship” with the bassist.
Watch Mustaine “reveal” the mystery bass player here, and see him talk about Ellefson’s future in the band below, and pick up tickets to Megadeth’s tour with Lamb of God via Ticketmaster or StubHub.
