On a recent episode of the Talk Louder podcast, former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman discussed his upcoming autobiography, ‘Dreaming Japanese.’
After chatting about the details he included in his upcoming book, the rocker admitted that he didn’t reveal any ‘dirt’ from his times in Megadeth.
“But back to Megadeth, I think people, they’re gonna really enjoy it. I think it’s gonna be a very pleasant read for them, because they’re gonna [go], like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this,’ Just a lot of things that don’t get talked about and that I really never had an opportunity to bring to light. A lot of good things,” the guitarist said.
“[I am] incredibly proud of all of that time in Megadeth, what we did. What Megadeth did for my career, it was absolutely my first step into the real world of the music business and how incredibly grateful I am for that opportunity,” he continued. “There’s absolutely no sourness related to Megadeth at all. There’s absolutely no negative feelings, and none of that. So there’s no kind of bashing; there’s no negativity. There’s just truth. All the things are exactly from my eyes, how it happened, how I wrote it.”
The rocker also admitted that during those times he was completely sober. “I was completely clean and sober the entire time I was in the band. I didn’t even drink a beer. When I was, like, 14, 15 and 16, I was a maniac. I lived three lifetimes of doing all the drugs, all the drinking, all the partying, all the rock-star shit in my first band Deuce. I did so much of that, and there was something that made me just stop cold turkey right there, which is a long story, which I got into. But by the time I was in Megadeth, I was straight edge way before straight edge was even a term. So I remember all that stuff with clarity and great appreciation.”
Though it’s now clear that the guitarist might leave out a thing or two, he earlier said that he was ‘putting it all out there’ with his book.
“The entire criteria of the book was things that I’ve never said in the media, things that I couldn’t say in the media, private things and all of the inner interpersonal relationships in all of the bands that I’ve been in, all of the projects I’ve worked on,” he said during a chat with Guitar World. “And it’s almost like a spy-like double-agent look into the Japanese music business and the Japanese entertainment industry, because I came in completely as a foreigner, but I’m working within that industry as someone who is in Japan, lives in Japan, speaks Japanese, works on the Japanese projects.”
“So I can kind of report to the rest of the world what it’s really like from an American’s perspective, which I think the publishers of the book found quite fascinating and I really drew that to a complete conclusion. But it’s basically everything that no one knows about me. So if you’re slightly interested, hopefully you will get a lot of very unexpected information out of it,” the former Megadeth rocker added.
‘Dreaming Japanese’ goes beyond a memoir about Friedman’s years in Megadeth. The narrative details his story of rebuilding his life from scratch. The story follows his journey to adapt to a foreign society, language, and culture. In detail, Friedman explains how he broke into the Japanese entertainment industry, becoming a known figure on mainstream television and earning respect as a solo artist.
The autobiography is scheduled to be released on December 3 via Permuted Press.