Quick Stats: Dave Mustaine, Grammy-nominated Megadeth frontman

Daily driver: 2006 Aston Martin Vanquish S (Dave's rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)

Other cars: see below

Favorite road trip: near Cleveland

Car he learned to drive in: mid-1960s Mustang Fastback

First car bought: 1964 Renault R8

Rocker Dave Mustaine has a lot of cool rides to choose from these days and that includes his 2006 Aston Martin Vanquish S. "That's my favorite car out of our whole fleet of everything we have, that's my baby," he says proudly.

His favorite car is befitting of the legendary Megadeth frontman and founder, who has real appreciation for all things automotive. In his pre-Metallica days, he worked as a full-time mechanic in Huntington Beach on cars including British imports.

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Mustaine spoke to Motor Trend at length, his quick mind weaving through subjects from cars to Megadeth's first tour to his recent classical music debut as a soloist with the San Diego Symphony.

"I like the fact that I've got James Bond's car and he doesn't have my guitars, to be cheeky," he says, with a laugh, referring to his Aston Martin. "But honestly, I think it's a really sexy car, it's got a lot of muscle, it's really sleek, the interior is really comfortable."

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Mustaine was trying to decide among a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or the Aston Martin, which he rates a perfect 10. "It was more my style and the difference in the ride -- it was more comfortable to me," he says. "The only thing that I don't like about it is it has so much horsepower that if you don't know how to properly drive a car like that, you just end up spinning your wheels everywhere you go."

His taste for British cars is reflected in what's in his garage these days -- a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a Range Rover, in addition to a Mercedes-Benz.

"When I was a kid, I was a foreign car mechanic, so I really enjoyed what I did, especially working on the imports," he says. "We have three English cars and most people will say that they're crap. Well, I think anything could end up crap if you don't take care of it. We've never had problems with these cars and we take good care of them."

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2006 Bentley Continental GT

Rating: 10

Mustaine gives the Bentley a perfect 10 for the "cool factor" as well as the "safety factor." But for maneuverability, this ride is a bit different. "It's like you're driving an aircraft carrier," he says. "It just feels big, really big, like when you see the cartoons and these guys who are getting these cars that are 30 feet long, that's how it feels to me."

His wife chose this car. "You ever hear of the saying 'happy wife, happy life'? It's my wife's car," he says, laughing. "We've got a fleet of these cars; we share. … I drive it more than she does, but que sera sera, right?"

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2006 Mercedes CLS500

Rating: 10

"It's a 2006 and I had Brabus build the motor out on it; it's a B11," he says. Of all his cars, Mustaine drives the CLS500 the most and he says it's been an amazing car, giving it a 10 for reliability. "I've driven Mercedes all my life until we started buying these English rides," he says.

The only thing he doesn't like is that visibility isn't great, with its descending C-pillar. "There's blind spots in it. When you're driving, depending on how quickly you have to look around, it's not as easy. It's the same thing with the Aston Martin and the Bentley. When you're in the Range Rover and you're looking around, it's like you're inside of an old AMC Pacer, like you're in an aquarium," he says, with a laugh.

2010 Range Rover

Rating: 8

The 2010 Range Rover is his wife's car and the "school ride" they use to drive their 16-year-old daughter around in. "I like that one too. We used to have a couple other different four-wheel drives, American-made ones. No offense to this fine country, but the inside of it just seemed rinky dink," he says.

The Range Rover has been a really nice ride all around, with high-end features. The reason Mustaine gives the Range Rover an 8 out of 10 is he doesn't really like riding around in an SUV. "I feel like a soccer mom, no offense to our wonderful soccer moms, but if I'm going to drive around in a car, I want to be able to get out and you hear the soundtrack from 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,'" he says.

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Car he learned to drive in

Mustaine grew up in Huntington Beach, where he learned to drive in his mom's automatic Mustang Fastback at the tender age of 14. "Hated the car. Those freeze plugs on the side were always corroding out and the car was always getting worked on, but long story boring, I learned how to drive in that car," he says.

He does recall a couple of memorable things that happened in the Mustang. "My first Doberman had a litter of puppies in the back of it," he says, laughing. "So the guy that bought the car was like, 'Hmm, smells like puppies in here.' One of the first times I was driving around I also learned how to siphon gas because we ran out of gas. That's really a bummer when you're young and you're sucking on a hose and gas comes out the first time, it's like, man, you learn how to siphon gas real quick. You don't mess up on that twice."

The first time his mom let him get behind the wheel, though, was in her Pinto station wagon. He had two paper routes and she let him drive a little from house to house. "I've been always enterprising as a businessman. At 12, I had gotten my first job at the Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa delivering newspapers and I started working for the Orange County Register and, when Sundays would come along, I was playing little league at the same time."

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Being a mechanic and 'The Mechanix'

When Mustaine was a teenager, before he joined Metallica, he worked as a mechanic. He had a falling out with his mom and found himself living on his own and scrambling for work. There was an opening at a gas station in Huntingon Beach Harbor for someone to pump gas. "I'm not like some of these people who are sitting around waiting for somebody else to take care of them. I got in the mix and I went and got a job," he says. "I have a sense of accomplishment when I did that and there was an opportunity to start working on the cars. There's a little gas station in a section there, it's really snooty, so it was a cool gig because nice cars came in all the time."

He was finding his musical muse while he was a mechanic. "I went from being somebody who pumped gas, which was the inspiration for one of the first songs I ever wrote 'The Mechanix,' which is on our very first record. It was also recorded by my previous band Metallica, as the song called 'The Four Horsemen.' Same song, different lyrics, just a teeny little bit."

Mustaine was a mechanic for just two and a half years, but it seemed much longer then. "When you don't go to school, you're living on your own and that's your job and you're 15, by today's standards that would almost be considered almost sweat-shop stuff," he says, with a laugh. "I just wanted to get out of my circumstances, regardless of what I had to do..."

He worked on cars that included MGs and Triumphs. "I started to doing the remove and replace stuff. The hardest part for me was some of the jobs they placed me on. They'd say, 'OK, you've got to get the bell housing off of the tranny, and we've got to do a clutch repair. And with those old cars you'd have to take the floorboard out. It's like, God, not another one!" he says, laughing.

Once when he was working at the gas station, a friend who lived in the apartment below him asked him to fix his Camaro.

"He had this just dimed-out Camaro. The guys that owned the gas station were these two Lebanese guys and they had Z28s; they were monster cars," he says. "So my friend Jim was one of the toughest guys in Huntington Beach … Jim asked me, 'Hey, man, can you do work on my Camaro?' I figured, sure, I've got this thing down. He goes, 'I want to put a high-rise Edelbrock manifold on my Camaro.' I'm was like, How hard is that? I'm thinking, you just take the carb off and put it on top and you replace the gasket and you just tighten it down. Boy, was I wrong."

Mustaine tells the story with verve, describing it as if it were yesterday. "We took the manifold and somehow his distributor got moved, so the timing chain and the distributor and everything stopped. Consequently I ended up avoiding him for a little while," he says. "I was tough, but I was not one of the toughest guys in town for sure, and the last thing I wanted to do was get beaten up for messing up somebody's Camaro. It ended up getting fixed by the guys at the gas station, thank God."

Cars have always been part of Mustaine's life in one form or another. "My stepfather-in-law used to race when he was a kid. That's where we got a lot of our racing pointers, Bob Estabrook. And his dad, my kids' great-grandfather, was a racer too. So, it is kind of in our blood by proxy," he says.

Today, he still enjoys wrenching on anything mechanical when he's home and has the time. Conscious of how quickly time passes, Mustaine is hoping to be able to find the right car that he can work on as a project with his stepfather-in-law.

Mustaine and his daughter have also been talking about doing some restoration work together. "My daughter Electra said she wanted to get an old Ford pickup. And I was thinking, 'How cool is that?' Because she sings country and she's into this whole pickup truck stuff and I thought, 'Oh cool! I see these burnt-out shells of trucks all over the road all the time when we're traveling.' You can pick them up and restore them."

But the car project also depends on his daughter's changing whims, he says. "You know girls; they change their minds. So now she goes, 'I've been thinking about this Mercedes thing that you're always talking about, so I want a Mercedes Jeep.' I'm like, 'Oh, God, why didn't I say like Kias were cool or something!'" he says, with a laugh.

First car bought

"I learned how to drive a stick shift when I got the worst car I ever had -- the first car I ever had was a Renault R8. Nowadays an R8 is killer. Back then this model looked like the car that Mr. Bean drives," he says, laughing. "It was really cool to step on the gas and hold the brake and do donuts at parties and stuff."

Mustaine was still a "surf punk'' when his cousin sold him the R8 for $50. The color: what he describes as Kermit green.

But the Renault leaked oil like a sieve and didn't last long. "I was driving up to Huntington Beach and it just seized. I parked it on the side of the road because it ran out of oil and I just hitchhiked the rest of the way there and left it there," he says, with a laugh.

Metallica days and the car he hated most

Mustaine said the same thing happened to a Mazda he owned later, when he was with Metallica, which he calls the "car he hated most."

"The exhaust pipe came off that thing; it was when I first joined Metallica, and we were driving and it'd be like (makes a sputtering sound, AAAHH!). Those rotary motors were the loudest obnoxious sound ever in the world," he says. "I think it was an R3 or an M3. It had a 3 in it."

Mustaine used to take the 405 freeway to the 605 to Norwalk, California, where Metallica rehearsed at the time. He left the Mazda one day on the 605 South.

"Lars (Ulrich) and I were driving home from rehearsal, and let's just say, we were both feeling pretty good. The car for whatever reason died again and I pulled over on the side of the road. Somebody came and got us, finished taking me back to Huntington and him back to Newport," he recalls. "I went the next day to go get the car and it was gone. We called every junkyard and nobody knew where it was. I was like, 'Ah, well, I hated that car anyway. '"

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Favorite road trip

Mustaine's favorite road trip was the first time Megadeth toured. The band started out in a motor home, but it broke down and the band had to squeeze into a station wagon.

"I remember it plain as day. It was a white station wagon, I think it was a Chevy and we were driving to Cleveland on one of those beautiful little two-lane highways," Mustaine recounts. "… All of a sudden, a deer jumps out in front of us -- at least this is what Gar (Samuelson) says. Unfortunately Gar is deceased now, so he won't appreciate the humor in this now because that was his story."

Mustaine starts to laugh as he thinks about that trip, with his broke bandmates in an overstuffed wagon and Gar behind the wheel, a drum pedal pushing against the driver's seat. "He turned around to move it and he drove off the freeway," he says. "He tells people it was a deer. It wasn't; it was a drum pedal. But we drove off the side of the road."

The station wagon then clipped a large highway sign. "We take out the two posts and the sign goes 'Bam!' and crashes in the roof of the car," Mustaine says, laughing. "We finally come into a big, screeching dust stop, like Pig-Pen. And we get out. 'Everybody OK? You got all your parts? OK, whew.' We look at the front and the headlights dangling off, and we're like, 'This is going to be so embarrassing, you roll into the next town, you've got a white station wagon, the roof looks like it's a chop top and your headlight's dangling out. This ain't cool, guys!'"

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Megadeth's World Tour and "Super Collider"

Mustaine has been busy with Megadeth's world tour that started in April. The band also has a new album "Super Collider," which came out in June. The DVD "Countdown to Extinction" is out now as well.

While Megadeth's not touring the States this time, Mustaine says the band will be recording the next record soon. "We're going to be demo-ing up some music in October, so we're pretty excited about touring this year. We're going to use this year of touring internationally to start putting some ideas down."

Mustaine's San Diego Symphony debut

A first for Mustaine occurred in April when he joined the San Diego Symphony for a sold-out concert called "Symphony Interrupted." He brought his lead guitar style to well-loved classical pieces that included "Summer" and "Winter" from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," Bach's "Air on a G string" and Dvorak's "New World Symphony."

Mustaine has always had a deep appreciation for classical music. "I like listening to it; this is the first time I've every played it. Never played a note," he says.

What's the connection between heavy metal and classical music? "The correlation between the two is that we try and tell stories," Mustaine says. "Pop music is kind of like background music to dance and have fun to. It's beat, melody, in 10 simple words basically. And when you get into opera or the classics, they're telling a story. A lot of really great heavy metal songs, they'll tell a story. There's lot of hard rock bands that sound like they're metal, but they're not, they're rock bands and rock bands sometimes tell stories, and sometimes they're distorted pop bands."

Mustaine was excited to join the symphony in a new musical experience for both. "They have never had a heavy metal lead guitar player of my caliber go and play the classics, and they don't play it the original way that's it's written -- with the rests and the timbre and the volume -- the different ways that you play a violin, because it's so much different," he says.

It was also a thrill when he got to talk about music with legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman, who Mustaine calls a "genius."

"We were talking strictly about vibrato. How many people can have a conversation about vibrato?" he says.

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With the distinctly different fanbases, Mustaine wondered before the concert if his enthusiastic fans would heckle or clap after each piece. "In between the songs in a classical performance, the song ends and I'm ready to go 'clap clap clap clap' but all I hear is (coughs). Nobody talks, they don't clap, they wait till the end of the movement and I'm very curious what's going to happen because the song's going to end and someone's going to go, Play 'Holy Wars'!" he says, laughing.

After an hour of Dvorak's symphony without Mustaine, one fan did yell out, "Where's Dave?" He came out and played the encore, a medley of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction."

The collaboration might inspire Mustaine one day to try his hand at composing classical music as well. "I'm hoping," he says.

For more information, please visit www.megadeth.com