HYDROGYN Featuring Ex-MEGADETH Members Jeff Young And James Lomenzo - So Far, So Good… What’s Next! By
Carl Begai
Guitarist
Jeff Young is known in metal circles as one of the many talented guitarists to have put in time with
MEGADETH over the course of the band’s 25+ year career. His tenure was short lived, lasting only one album (So Far, So Good… So What! in 1988) before getting the boot from frontman / founder
Dave Mustaine. Since then he has made a successful career focusing on world music and classical guitar, taking on several different projects, with a solo album entitled Equilibrium released in 2009 being his latest achievement. Young remained more or less under metaldom’s radar for all but the diehard fans up until December 2009, when he called out
Mustaine via MySpace for “talking smack” about him (details to follow). News a few weeks later that he’d officially joined Kentucky-based rockers
Hydrogyn raised some eyebrows, with fans on both sides seemingly taking a wait-and-see attitude. Word came down soon after that ex-
Megadeth bassist
James Lomenzo had also joined the Hydrogyn fold, however, and reserved curiosity became a full-on buzz. Once applauded as a decent-to-kick-ass outfit, for the fence-sitters
Hydrogyn has suddenly become a band to watch for more than easy-on-the-eyes vocalist
Julie Westlake.
Guitarist / founder
Jeff Westlake discusses his thinking behind getting two former
Megadeth members on board for the band’s new album, Judgement, which was in the process of being written at press time.
Westlake: “To be honest with you I think the seed was planted in the fall of 2005. We’d been working with (producer) Michael Wagener, and Jeff had been working with him on and off for a couple years for his solo album, Equilibrium. Michael had played Jeff some of our stuff and
Jeff really liked it, and it seemed like every time
Hydrogyn was in the studio Jeff was right behind us. It was just a weird coincedence, so we were always being kept up-to-date on each other without even meeting. This last time
Jeff was mixing Equilibrium with Michael – it was actually the day
Michael Jackson died – and they called me over Skype asking if I wanted to hear Jeff’s version of Aerosmith ‘Seasons Of Wither’, which is one of my favourite Aerosmith songs. One thing led to another, we were sending emails back and forth, and Jeff ended up being a guest on my radio show Westlake And The Pig. From there went from ‘Hey, you should do a track on the next album with us…’ to ‘maybe you should do two songs with us…’ to ‘Fuck it, you should join the band.’ That’s literally the way it happened.”
Young: “Once we got to talking, Jeff told me that if I knew any musician on par with ourselves that he’d trust me on it, and I immediately thought of Joe Migz from kHz. I discovered them through MySpace and they instantly became my new favourite kick ass band. We became friends over MySpace and it turned out that kHz were big Megadeth fans. Joe happened to mention he was a big fan of Megadeth and my playing and he said flat out that if I ever put anything together, if I was going to get back into metal or rock, to give him a call first. That’s what I did and he immediately said yes. As far as the bass player slot, as soon as we heard that Lomenzo was out of Megadeth we called Michael Wagener and asked if he had any way of getting hold of him. He hadn’t had any contact to Lomenzo since White Lion, so I hit him up on Facebook with a letter. We talked on the phone after that, and what an amazing person he is. I can’t say enough about his professionalism. He was instantly down as well.”