EXODUS guitarist Gary Holt recently spoke with Metal Hammer where the longtime shredder discussed the rise of the Bay area thrash metal scene in the early ‘80’s.
When asked: ‘The $64,000 question: no Exodus, no thrash scene. True?’ Holt replies, “Absolutely. I’ll own that. We created the violent scene.”
“The scene was rad,” says Holt. “You could go to a different club five nights a week and never see the same band twice. There wasn’t thrash metal competition, cos in the beginning there was only us and Metallica – the first time I ever heard with them was when we played with them, and it felt like looking in a mirror. Later on, there was some competition. The bands were all friends, and we hung out together, but Exodus owned Ruthie’s. Everybody was gunning for us, but nobody could take us.”
“The last time we played a proper show with Metallica was a New Year’s Eve show [1985] at Bill Graham’s Civic, and we stomped them into the dirt. We were getting wasted after the show, and James [Hetfield] was laughing and saying, ‘Haha, that’s the last time you guys’ll ever support us.’ And it was the last time we ever supported Metallica.”
EXODUS guitarist Kirk Hammett would leave the band to join METALLICA in 1983 which put Holt in the role of creative control for the group. Though Gary admits that Kirk’s leaving of EXODUS made him “mad for a minute”, he still has fond recollections of his former band mate.
“Kirk Hammett and I spent an entire summer taking acid,” Holt recalls. “We’d sell some old jazz records or whatever that his dad had left at his house and go buy a 12 pack of beer and a purple microdot [of acid] or whatever. We used to love our psychedelics. We learned a lot of guitar on LSD.”
You can read the full interview with Gary Holt in Metal Hammer on Friday (October 29).