When Dave Mustaine started thinking about a music video for “I Don’t Care,” a thrashy, punky new single off Megadeth‘s upcoming self-titled farewell album, he knew what he didn’t want it to be. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t want this to be some video that’s, like, an artsy-fartsy thing … this is a punk song’” he tells Rolling Stone. So Mustaine & Co. worked with filmmaker Keith J. Leman, a cinematographer who’s made clips for Jonas Brothers and Kenny Chesney, on a clip with the right energy for a song about listing all the reasons why Mustaine doesn’t care about what people think of him.
“I wanted it to be, ‘What it’s like to be a young Dave again, to hang out with my friends, drink beer, light fires, skate, do house parties and all that kind of stuff?’” Mustaine says. “That is such a part of who I am, although I don’t do it anymore.”
The clip focuses on a group of teens skating, wreaking havoc, spraypainting graffiti and rocking out to Megadeth, all while Mustaine gives the camera the middle finger and slams a bottle in a skater’s face. “I don’t care if I’m out of line,” Mustaine sings. “I don’t care because this life is mine.” Other things he doesn’t care about: if you get high, when the truth is a lie, and if you live or die. What he does care about, though, are crisp, melodic guitar solos, charging rhythms, and telling anyone with ears that he doesn’t care.
Mustaine particularly likes the energy of the actor who got a mohawk and his ears pierced with safety pins on camera. “He reminded me of Gary Oldman when he played Sid Vicious,” he says.
He also liked breaking a prop beer bottle over one of the actor’s heads. That shot, he says, took a few takes. “The only one that really looked good was the one where I hit a guy in the face,” Mustaine says. “I cracked one on his face and he goes, ‘It didn’t really work.’ So everyone goes, ‘Do it harder.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. This is so much fun.’ And I was thirsty and I went to get a beer from those guys and I cracked it and I took a swig off it and I pulled it away from my face and I saw the name of the beer that was on it, and it was like one of those beers that are painted on the outfield wall in minor league baseball teams, kind of like Meisterlager or something like that. And boy, that took me screeching back to reality.”
Mustaine recently revealed that memory lane brought him back to his house-party days in another way on the album, which will come out Jan. 23, by recording a cover of “Ride the Lightning,” a song Metallica wrote and recorded using his riffs. “Our intentions were pure,” Mustaine says of the cover. “[Our version] was more about: This is my life going forward. I want to do things that are respectable. And I think doing something where we can pay honor to [James Hetfield] … because it’s just so fucking arrogant, but the guitar playing in Metallica changed the world.”
