Megadeth bassist James LoMenzo discusses career-spanning shows, band's current lineup ahead of Pittsburgh show

Back in the 1980s, the L’Amour club served as the “rock capital of Brooklyn,” drawing metal bands of the era to either play or just hang out.

Glam metal band White Lion grew out of that scene, and their bassist James LoMenzo recalled Megadeth’s “In My Darkest Hour” being used nightly as the headliner’s walk-on music. Fast forward to 2006, when LoMenzo got the job as Megadeth’s bassist.

“When I joined the band, I wasn’t that familiar with all the records,” LoMenzo said in a call before Monday’s show in Reading. “I was familiar with what was on MTV because I was busy doing stuff myself. So when I joined the band, I got the setlist, like, all right, what is this? ‘In My Darkest Hour?’

“So I put it on, I go, oh my God, that’s the L’Amour song, I know this!” he added with a laugh.

Whether “In My Darkest Hour” makes it into the thrash metal titan’s show later this month in Pittsburgh remains to be seen. Megadeth will be bringing their Destroy All Enemies tour to Stage AE on Sept. 18, with Mudvayne and All That Remains opening.

“We’ve been touring all year, and to our delight, man, people keep coming out. They love the show,” LoMenzo said. “There are no complaints from the Megadeth camp. We’re just giving it our all, and for the whole year, we’ve been all over the world already. So at this stage of the tour, usually you’d start breaking down and getting a little tired, but we’re kind of getting a third wind right now because the audience has been just so great.”

Recent Megadeth shows have dug deep into the band’s 40-plus year career, feeling like “a new breath of fresh air,” according to LoMenzo, with less emphasis on video and a revolving setlist that keeps the band on its toes.

“Since we got rid of the video and just made it more of an old school metal show, we’ve had that liberty to just kind of throw songs into the set at will. So that’s been great. And it’s really exciting because it becomes a unique challenge to go up there every night and go, let’s just try and put ‘Rattlehead’ way up front in the set,” he said with a laugh. “Let’s see how we deal with that. So things like that are really exciting.”

Guitarist/singer Dave Mustaine, who founded the band in 1983, makes sure Megadeth is hitting all of its eras.

“Dave’s great like that. We put together a setlist the other day, and Dave was like, ‘Nah, we’re missing this from ‘Rust in Peace.’ We need this.’ So he’s really cognitive of all the songs, like trying to represent as many albums,” LoMenzo said. “There’s so many albums, it’s hard to get everything in, but there’s some key songs that naturally we want to play, which takes me back to having seen Deep Purple all those years ago and Ritchie Blackmore refusing to play ‘Smoke on the Water,’ which even back then, I’d heard enough of, but still, you expect to hear it. So we have a running list of songs that just need to be in the band.”

Those songs, whether it’s “Hangar 18” or “Sweating Bullets” or “Symphony of Destruction,” are required.

“Everybody wants to usually hear ‘hello me, meet the real me’ (in ‘Sweating Bullets’),” he said. “I mean, what would a Megadeth show be without that?”

As a fan, LoMenzo said his top era of the band dates to the 1980s, with “In My Darkest Hour” being his favorite to play.

“I just think that contains everything that Megadeth is in one song,” he said. “You get from this big, broad, familiar sort of lyrics that everybody can identify with. It’s kind of disparaged lyrics, big, wide metal, and then it goes into pure thrash at the end. I just think that’s the best song.”

Of course, he’s also partial to the music he played on with Megadeth in his first stint in the band: 2007’s “United Abominations” and 2009’s “Endgame.” LoMenzo left the band in 2010 when founding bassist Dave Ellefson returned to the fold, then returned in 2021 when Ellefson was dismissed.

Having been with several iterations of the band — which also includes drummer Dirk Verbeuren and guitarist Teemu Mantysaari — LoMenzo thinks this lineup is special.

”You know what, man, it’s the energy. I hate saying anything like that because I don’t want to take anything away from anybody who’s ever been in this band because, I mean, pound for pound, they don’t get in this band unless they have some level of greatness that Dave can work with, you know?” he said. “So it’s just different. I mean, the Drover brothers, when I first came into the band, were great. They were great, and they played very well together. They knew the music really well, and they were just nice guys.

“But this turned into a whole ‘nother level of musicality. And by saying that, I don’t mean that people are playing the music better or anything like that. There’s just more energy behind Dirk’s playing just as a drummer. He’s just an energetic drummer. And Teemu, who replaced Kiko (Loureiro) last year, is just phenomenal. He’s one of the cleanest guitar players I’ve heard play this stuff. And by saying clean, I mean, he executes something like what Marty Friedman would play or Chris Poland, he executes it so like note for note.

“And that’s really tough to do because you’re really changing a lot of gears and you have to kind of de-stylize and re-stylize in order to pull this stuff off. And he does an amazing job. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody in this band do it better. And I’ve heard them all.”

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Their current tour runs through the end of September, so there might be work starting on the follow-up to 2022’s “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead” on the not-so-distant horizon.

“With Teemu in the band and now just the band being locked down like this, Dave is super excited as we all are to, to jump in and start working on a new album,” LoMenzo said. “And that will probably take form quicker than I think, because last year Dave instructed, he said, ‘All right, let’s start compiling riffs. Let’s put it together.’ So everybody’s got like piles and piles of riffs. So I think after we take a bit of a break from this past three years, I think after we do that, we’ll all convene and go to Megadeth central, wherever that ends up being, and start plotting our next record. I think it’s going to be real cool because everybody has a pretty fresh idea of what Megadeth could be right now.”

LoMenzo’s versatility has served him well, as he’s played bass in the past for John Fogerty, David Lee Roth, Slash’s Snakepit and Black Label. But the wardrobe’s a little bit different now in Megadeth than the hair metal days of the 1980s with White Lion. Back then, skin-tight leather and over-the-top wardrobes were the order of the day, like the fringed jacket he wore in White Lion’s video for “Wait.”

“You know where that is? That’s living in, it might be in Hollywood at the Hard Rock, it’s in the Hard Rock system,” LoMenzo said. “I was making a move one day and a friend of mine was a curator, he’s passed away since, but he was a curator for the Hard Rock at the time and he had said whatever you got, right? And I was just packing up stuff, and I pulled it out and I mean I haven’t grown that much, but I’ve grown enough to know I shouldn’t be wearing that stuff.”

But there’s one vestige left from those days, “one very silly vest” that he found while cleaning out his garage about a year ago. Back then, he had famed designer Fleur Thiemeyer, who did wardrobes for Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake and Earth, Wind & Fire among others, create something for him, with patches based on the classic artwork from Playboy magazine in the 1960s and ’70s.

“She was a genius at the time, and that time alluded to having people wear the loudest, most decadent garments. It really did. It’s just what the game was,” he said. “So I’ve got a vest with, I’m trying to think of the artist’s name, but he’s the guy who used to draw all those little nubile girls in Playboy. And so I just had her make me up one, and there’s about 12 little tumbling girls on it. Not that we were the Mötley Crüe of our time, which is the irony of it. It was just a personal choice.”

It’s safe to say that won’t be making any stage appearances any time soon.

“There’s nothing I can do with that except laugh at it,” LoMenzo said with a laugh.