Thrash/shred guitar virtuoso/J-Pop idol/TV presenter, Marty Friedman’s new memoir, Dreaming Japanese (co-written with Jon Wiederhorn) is set for release on December 3 via Permuted Press. It’s a nearly 400-page tome that covers the incredible arc of his unusual professional career, as well as plenty of personal anecdotes.
Friedman is obviously primarily known to the metal world for his years in Megadeth, arguably some of that band’s finest, but as Dreaming Japanese exposes, that wasn’t really the nadir of the talented guitarist/songwriter’s career. This was perhaps the most eye-opening element of this book for me. Well, that and the fact that Friedman is not afraid to put in a lot of hard work to achieve his goals, however outlandish/unlikely/insane they happen to be.
No surprise, he didn’t become the guitar virtuoso he is today by accident. As we learn here, he was putting in the hours playing and learning both his instrument and what it takes to write a good song from his early days as a stoned teenager in Maryland, with his band Deuce.
This was all news to me, as I first encountered his playing when he was living in Hawaii and playing in Vixen/Aloha/Hawaii. My pal K.J. Doughton put “The Pit and the Pendulum” on a mixed tape for me and I was convinced that was one of the fastest, most brutal songs I’d ever heard in 1982. I always assumed Friedman was a native Hawaiian. Nope. His curly locks aren’t Samoan, they’re from his Jewish roots.
Hawaii was just the beginning of his metal odyssey, but unfortunately when he joined Megadeth in 1990 (after a couple guitar shred records with Jason Becker in Cacophony) he sort of went from being in the forefront to backing Dave Mustaine, a player who’s clearly his musical inferior. He made some great records and some not so great ones with Megadeth and left on a decidedly low note, Risk.
At this point, he’d achieved enough fame and success that he had the usual trappings: nice house, fancy cars, a pool, etc. No doubt a decent bank account. And he probably could have continued on in the metal world in some fashion. But doing instrumental solo albums for Shrapnel Records and playing thrash (even if it was at the highest level) wasn’t enough, so he moved to Japan to follow a musical passion (his love of J-Pop) and reinvent himself. Which seems insane on the surface, but wait until you read how fucking hard it was, and how fucking successful he ended up being.
This is probably where Friedman disappeared off the radar of most (non-Japanese) metal fans. He didn’t go to Japan to take advantage of whatever modest amount of notoriety he may have attained there as a member of Megadeth. Quite the opposite, he went to completely reinvent himself, which is really fucking hard for a gaijin to do in Japan. He had to pay his dues times a hundred. He wasn’t just starting from scratch, he was starting from a serious deficit, as detailed in Dreaming Japanese. The fact that he became so successful in Japan is not only a testament to his skills as a guitarist, but as a talented individual willing to do whatever it takes—learn a difficult new language, assimilate to a very different culture, change your playing style, etc.
You may not like or care about Friedman’s J-Pop fascination or the music he’s been making for the last 20 years, but the story of how he got where he is is fascinating. The Megadeth years have been well documented by Mustaine and Dave Ellefson, but there’s so much more to Marty Friedman’s story and it’s well worth reading about in Dreaming Japanese, which can be ordered here.