Marty Friedman is an alien in a genre made up of outcasts. The guitarist moved to Japan 23 years ago, shortly after his decade-long stint with metal titans Megadeth came to an end. It was there that he found not so much a rebirth as a reinvention that saw an immersion into the Tokyo music scene and foreign environment that somehow led to various television undertakings, the latter making him a household name in the country. One was just as likely to see Friedman collaborating with the latest J-pop act as they might come across him appearing on a TV show.
Here in the United States, Friedman will always be best remembered as a cornerstone of Megadeth’s run with its most popular lineup, which saw the release of thrash landmarks Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction. His new memoir, Dreaming Japanese, leans heavily into his time in the band founded by frontman and guitarist Dave Mustaine; it’s a period Friedman intentionally avoided talking about for the most part over the past quarter century, at least at length.
“From 2000 to maybe 2023, the publicist who books the interviews, the agent who books the tours has it explicitly in the contracts: You can’t mention Megadeth anywhere because it’s not relevant to what I’m doing at all,” Friedman told Vanyaland ahead of Tuesday’s (February 5) show at City Winery Boston and a Wednesday (February 6) gig at Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, New Hampshire.
Recently, he began working his way back into public consciousness in the states, opening for the likes of Queensrÿche and John 5 and even making the occasional guest appearance live with Megadeth. Now, Friedman is coming through as the headliner, ostensibly supporting his latest LP, the gorgeously atmospheric Drama. But like with anyone who’s earned the titles “virtuoso” and “shredder,” the set varies from night to night.
Friedman sat down with Vanyaland for a 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings) where he talked about the isolation he felt upon first moving to Japan, misconceptions about Megadeth’s feud with Metallica, and the things he misses most about home.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: You’ve been living in Japan for more than 20 years and you’ve become a bit of an enigma. People know you as this shredder, former Megadeth guitarist who occasionally pops up on tour and then goes back East. It’s all very mysterious in some ways. If a person comes up to you and says, “Tell me what you do in Japan. What’s your life? What’s the CliffsNotes version?” I mean, now you can just hand them the book and say, “Here’s what I do.”
Marty Friedman: Well, like you said, handing them the book is definitely the easiest way. But it’s really hard to pin it down because every single day is different. In Japan, it could be anything from doing a television program to doing a movie to playing a concert, to producing, to writing, to recording. It’s really, literally, everything. But to really bring it down to the core of it, it’s just, I play music, I make music. My own music is the focus of everything that I do but [has] very luckily branched out into a lot of things where I can bring a lot of other people into my music through kind of unusual mediums.
I didn’t really expect to be involved in TV when I came to Japan. I just wanted to play in the Japanese music scene. But as you’ll see in the book, it was a crazy, crazy ride. Getting hooked up in the world of television and doing that has really kind of broadened my life experiences a lot more than say, just playing music. So, I don’t really know how to answer it. What would the CliffsNotes be? I would like to say, “I’m a recording artist. Here’s my music. Check it out.” That’s the best thing.
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I feel like there’s a lot of almost single-mindedness in metal, much to its detriment. A lot of people, if you’re a fan of metal, that’s it. There’s no room for anything else. But you enjoy pushing the boundaries, going into different types of music, and you love the stuff you do. How much of your success do you think is because you’re so open-minded and genuinely like so many different things?
Well, I think the endgame really, for any artist, is to be able to be in a position where you are creating the exact music that you love and you are creating the music that you want to represent you. That’s the endgame in a lot of cases. [But in] most cases, there’s a lot of compromises, even in very, very successful artists because maybe they got successful on something and they want to keep that going, but it isn’t necessarily exactly what they love or anything. It just happened to hit when you hit it in the music business, you go with it.
But luckily, I’ve done so many different things in Japan that I can afford to make music exactly the way I want it and not be concerned with whether it’s trendy, whether it’s going to hit, or whether it’s going to miss, whether it’s going to be popular or not. And so, as a result, the music you hear is exactly what represents Marty Friedman. You know what I mean? For better or for worse, that’s what it is. And that, I don’t know if it has so much to do with an open mind, it has more to do with just the motivation to represent myself with the exact music that represents me and not try to follow a trend or be in a situation where I’m kind of compromising a lot.
Do you find yourself turning down things and saying, “That’s not my speed.”
All the time. All the time, yeah. I’m very blessed to be offered a lot of different things and believe me, I do most things. I mean, I say yes to everything, but when it comes to music, I’m very… kind of a little bit selfish. If I don’t really like it, I won’t do it because my name will go on it and people will listen to it and say, “Well, Marty’s doing this now.” And no, I’m not doing that. So that’s a very lucky and fortunate situation.
When we talked before, you said that you were speaking Japanese probably 95 percent of the time. Going into writing the book, how hard was it for you to know that this was going to be in English and having to revisit all of that and explain it in English?
That’s a good question. When I’m in Japan, I speak 100 percent Japanese. No one around me speaks English, and so I’m completely immersed in Japanese. But I did write a Japanese autobiography, which came out last year in March, completely different from the English one. Because it’s just such a completely different set of reference points that it was just easier to write each book in separate languages. Japanese people don’t know a lot of the American references and vice versa.
Of course, English is my first language, so I’ll never really forget it, and a lot of the experiences happened when I was not in Japan, so it was really easy to bring those up in English. And actually, having such life experience in a Japanese culture gave me kind of an insight to what Americans might think is unusual and interesting in the story. So, I think it really helped the story itself that I could see things kind of from two angles of cultures, and it was helpful to the story big time.
Japan, for the most part, is made up of very private people. And something you said that stuck with me was that people don’t go to other people’s houses or get into other people’s cars. How much of an adjustment was that for you coming from a place where all you really knew was, “Come on over and hang out” or “Let’s jam or we’ll watch television or whatever.”
It’s actually perfect for me because my personality is way more private, so I was never the type to, “Dude come over” – never that type. And so, it was really perfect for me on that angle. And what that allowed me to do in writing the autobiography was, this is my chance to say all the private things that I would never say in an interview, or even people close to me don’t know these things. The whole book is just stuff that I’ve never ever talked about to anybody. Private family things, insecurities, things that I’ve done wrong. It doesn’t really paint me in the best light a lot of the time, but it’s just a true account of everything and very private in my real life.
How did you develop a social circle and how long did that take for it to happen?
It took a long time because all of the many times I came to Japan [before moving there], it was always with the record company or the tour promoters, and there’s always a staff of people taking care of me. But when I went to live there, I wanted to be in the domestic music scene, and I didn’t know anybody. They knew people in the international scene, but no domestic people. So, it was kind of a lonely first, maybe, five, six months, and then a couple of really lucky things happened, and then I started to get my feet into the business that I wanted. But until then, it was, “Wow, what am I doing here?” Am I blowing it or just keep going? Just keep going, type of thing.
In the book, you talked about sometimes the aftershows or other types of parties, and it’d be like 20 people who would break off into their own little groups of three or four, and then you’d be kind of standing there, “Alright, now what do I do?” And it seems like that would be a bit isolating.
That was really the hardest part because I had gotten my dream gig over there. The shows were fantastic, and the band got along great and it was just a love party. It was really, really fantastic. My dreams were coming true, except I had nothing in common with these people and I didn’t know any of the people they knew. And so once the topic of “What’s it like to be a rock star in America,” once that topic was done, which was probably the first day every other day on the tour, there was really nothing left to say after “Great show.” Everybody else had long histories with each other and they knew everyone in Japan and they were talking about people I didn’t know and places I never heard of. It was really hard to jump into those conversations and that was the hardest part.
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What are some of the main differences going from a rabid metal audience to, for example, performing with J-pop singer Nanase Aikawa?
Nanase Aikawa’s fans are just as rabid as metal fans, sometimes even more enthusiastic. In her music, there is lots of room for me to play very aggressively as I normally do, and go into full contrast with melancholy ballads, also as normal. It’s not much of an adjustment for me, except the solos are a bit shorter in her shows!
Living in Japan for so long, how strange is it for you when you come here that so many people, probably the majority, associate you with Megadeth, a band you haven’t been a part of in a quarter century?
Yeah, that’s the hardest thing. I’ve shut down so many interviews when they bring it up, and the only reason I don’t shut it down now is because it’s a big part of my book. It’s important and it’s topical. Although I’m completely proud of my Megadeth career and I don’t discount it in the slightest. I love it. But yeah, I’ve been out of the band… I left the band 20-something years ago. It has nothing to do with what I’m doing now.
When you were in the band, it was at the height of the so-called feud between Dave Mustaine and Metallica. But you say in the book that much of that was “fabricated hype,” although there was this idea that Dave was just sitting around plotting how to keep up with Metallica or how to get out of that shadow. You paint quite a different picture of that.
I don’t think we cared as much about Metallica as people put in the press. We were definitely our own band, our own entity as far as I’m concerned. We admired Metallica for the great work that they did, and they’re playing a similar genre of music to what we were doing. So, there is no question that we were watching their every move, what they were doing, what we could learn from it, what we could adapt to our situation from their success. I mean, we’re both heavy metal bands, and Mustaine pioneered this heavy metal rhythm guitar style. Hetfield pioneered this heavy metal guitar style. They both were very, very important in the formation of thrash metal.
I think we could both learn from each other and we could certainly learn from Metallica’s great success. And so there was no question that we watched that. However, it wasn’t like any kind of, “Look, we hate Metallica” and “We want to beat them.” There was absolutely no — not that I saw — any kind of feud type of thinking, but I have no idea what Dave’s personal relationships are with those guys. I just remember the journalists, it’s a juicy headline, and so they go with it, and that stuff goes on to this day. But that part was probably fabricated a lot in the media from our side. We were just way, way too busy with our own music, our own careers, to really follow them that much. However, we did respect them a lot. I respected them a lot. I continue to respect them, and I think they’re an awesome band and [there’s still] lots to learn from them.
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You’re coming through as a headliner this time around and playing some intimate venues where the fans are coming primarily to see you. How do you approach the set as opposed to when you were supporting, say, Queensrÿche?
It doesn’t matter if we are supporting, playing a festival, or headlining, we don’t take into consideration any of the other artists, etcetera. We have our show that is largely improvised around an ever-changing set list, so the only adjustment is how long we play.
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Cap’n Crunch’s Arctic Crunch cereal is awesome! I just picked it up on the tour here in the U.S. I wish they had it in Japan, but sadly cereal in general is not really a thing over there.
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
What are seven things you miss most about living in the United States?
Not in order:
Junk food from my childhood.
Colorful cereal.
Garbage cans everywhere.
Meeting my friends who I don`t see too often after living in Japan.
Uber/Lyft doesn`t exist in Japan because taxis are extremely efficient, and no one would allow a stranger in their car.
Being on the same time zone as people I am contacting in the U.S.
Most importantly, my family that lives here.
MARTY FRIEDMAN + NIKKI STRINGFIELD & PATRICK KENNISON :: Wednesday, February 5 at City Winery Boston, 80 Beverly St. in Boston, MA :: 7:30 p.m., all ages, $35 to $60 :: Event info :: Advance tickets ::: Thursday, February 6 at Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St. in Derry, NH :: 8 p.m., all ages, $30 to $35 :: Event info :: Advance tickets