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According to Marty Friedman, there’s nothing that quite beats playing live. “I love playing live more than anything. That’s my favorite thing to do, whether it be Japan or anyplace in the world. It allows me to express a completely different emotion than what I’m expressing when I’m sitting down recording, or playing in a completely vocal context.”
Marty is commonly associated with the dying breed of 80’s shredders (for lack of a better term), and this may have had something to do with the pairing of him and Jason Becker in the instrumental group Cacophony in the late 1980’s. After that, Marty went on to play for Megadeth, which was probably one of the most prominent gigs of his career. He helped give Megadeth that boost they needed to propell their Rust in Peace album to platinum sales and rank them alongside the likes of Metallica, Pantera and Slayer. But this was early in Marty’s career, and he believes he has progressed significantly since then. When Friedman was asked by an Argentinian radio station if he would ever consider rejoining Megadeth, his response was “it would be a huge step backwards“.
Before Marty’s success in the 80’s, he spent much of his time paying his dues with school bands. His first main band was called Deuce, a high-energy metal group from Maryland. 
“Sometimes I look back and I think those were really like almost the best times of my life compared to now. There was just some kind of magic about the band and we were really like brothers. We felt kinda like closer, you know where you’re in a band, you get this closeness playing live that you don’t have in any other kind of relationship. There was just some kind of really good chemistry within that band. Maybe it was just the circumstances; we had a lot of fans and we were really young and there was immediate gratification. There was really a lot of positive response to us. We were like 15, the singer was like 14, but we looked the part. We were totally into looking like rock stars and trying to play like rock stars and we were pretty good at what we did. Maybe we weren’t very technical or talented, but we were definitely seriously into what we were doing. And I think it showed – we had this attitude of a band and we were just so young and I think that was really, really cool.”
Apart from his success in metal bands, Marty has also been prominent on live Japanese TV shows, particularly with composing and playing for well-known Japanese singers. “My music is not exactly Justin Bieber. It’s not super-commercial and super-mainstream, although I’ve done a lot of songwriting, recording and producing and guitar playing for Top 10 acts here in Japan. So I think that had I not been so visible on television, it would be harder for me to get a major label anywhere to release my stuff, especially with all creative freedom in my corner. I mean, nobody really tells me what to do. I can only attest that to the face familiarity I have. They know me from being on TV or being in the media and stuff like that, so it’s kind of almost like a free pass to do what I want, despite the fact that it’s not going to necessarily be the biggest mainstream commercial hit that they’re going to make billions of dollars off of.”
Based on Marty’s gained popularity, you can now find him embarking on his own career as a solo artist. “It’s been a really wonderful process ever since I started doing tours with my solo band. It keeps getting better and better. It’s a fun thing to do because you have freedom to change things. You don’t have to do the entire song, or the whole entire album. You can do parts of this and parts of that and people get excited. What we do is take the things that work in a live atmosphere, and we just use all that“. According to Marty, it’s very important to treat your live shows as a performance. “When you’re playing live, that’s really the only thing that matters. Sometimes you have to arrange the music differently, and throw in a lot of surprises and do a lot of special things to make it more fun than just listening to a CD“.
Besides Marty’s love for playing live and touring, there are still a couple of things that get on his nerves. “It’s not a big complaint but I really hate the fact that you can’t take shampoo into an aeroplane. Little things like that. I don’t have a lot of complaints about life. I am not a big complainer. I don’t have a lot of problems to complain about. Those little things bug me like I had a tube of toothpaste in my bag and they took it out. What’s toothpaste going to do to disrupt an aeroplane? Anyway I mean it’s no big deal“. Marty doesn’t take well to hand-shaking either, an inevitable part of his career. “Guys come and tell you that they’ve loved your playing for 50 years, and then they squeeze your hand so hard that you can’t play guitar anymore. I try to avoid it as much as I can“.
Sources:
http://www.martyfriedman.com/info_detail.php?id=6
http://www.metalsucks.net/2015/04/10/marty-friedman-asked-re-join-megadeth/
https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/interviews/rock_chronicles_rock_chro…
http://popdose.com/marty-friedman-interview-2014/
http://myglobalmind.com/2015/01/04/interview-marty-friedman-guitars-mar…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs1MOASlQq0
