How the Megadeth mascot Vic Rattlehead was created

Like sports teams, many Heavy Metal bands created their own mascots and they often appear on the album covers or even during their live shows. Formed and led by Dave Mustaine for more than 40 years, Megadeth has Vic Rattlehead.

He was on the cover of most Megadeth albums and at least during the last decade appears in all their live shows, usually when the track “Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?” is being played. But how the band came up with the name and the image for Vic?

How the Megadeth mascot Vic Rattlehead was created

Dave Mustaine explained that in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine back in 2017. “Me and Dave (Ellefson) were living in Hollywood, kind of squatting apartments and there was this one grocery store that we used to shoplift from. We would usually buy something. anything. Just so that we did some kind of business there and then we’d grab something else.”

“I remember waiting in line one time and there was a book that had something similar to that for the title and it showed a skull with the skin pulled back over half of it and I thought, ‘Well, that’s a really interesting title.’ And then I ran with it because of the idea with our whole moniker and the way that the (mascot) character Vic was developed, with the see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil stuff.”

He continued:

“Vic came to me like really in the early process of making the whole band. I wanted a mascot because Eddie was the mascot for Iron Maiden, and Motörhead had Snaggletooth. I thought it would just be, like, an image. So I came up with a skull with two crisscrossed human bones made into crucifixes so that it signified fucked-up religion, conflict in religion. But also like the symbol for poison, and then came the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil thing. For me, it was all those metaphors in one image. We had this guy named Peyton Tuttle drew the very first version,” Dave Mustaine said.

Formed by Dave Mustaine after he was fired from Metallica in the early 80s, Megadeth became one of the most influential Thrash Metal bands of all time. The group released 16 studio albums and have sold an estimated amount of more than 50 million records worldwide.