EXODUS's GARY HOLT On Financial Realities Of Touring: 'If Your Guarantees Cover The Entire Cost Of The Tour, You're Way Ahead Of The Game'

In a new interview with Nick Bowcott of Sweetwater, EXODUS guitarist Gary Holt was asked about the comment in his memoir "A Fabulous Disaster: From The Garage To Madison Square Garden, The Hard Way" where he referred to himself as "a traveling clothes salesman". He explained (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): " That's all any of us are now. I mean, some bands — METALLICA, I'm sure, could do well without selling a single shirt — but for bands like EXODUS, we're a traveling pop-up store. We play music, so you'll come in and visit our store. I mean, we're lucky — I still get some royalties and stuff. If your guarantees cover the entire cost of the tour, you're way ahead of the game, because then the merchandise is yours. So you can go home with some money."

Holt went on to say that if anybody orders merchandise from his Holt Awaits online store, he will most likely personally put the package together before shipping it off to the buyer.

"[It's] my own shirts with all my tasteless serial killer merch and celebrity guitar picks and making fun of everything," he said. "If you order that, if I'm home, I'm the guy putting it in the thing. I'm not hiring someone to do it. There's no warehouse. I'm sitting in my office, and it's me stuffing that t-shirt in that poly mailer. But these are the things we have to do to stay ahead to keep the bills paid."

Gary previously talked about his online merchandise store this past July in an interview with Germany's Metal.de. He said at the time: "People think, 'Oh, you're a rich rock star.' No. I sell shirts, and I sell them outta my fucking closet. All right. Pack this one up, label it, send it off. But no, that just helps. It doesn't pay the bills. It helps to keep pay the bills. It helped really a lot in the pandemic. But I don't know. If I honestly retired, I'd probably do more producing. I'd stay in music. But sometimes I daydream about not leaving the house. 'Cause I hate leaving — I hate getting on the plane to leave — but as soon as I arrive, I have fun."

Holt was also asked about EXODUS bassist Jack Gibson's recent comment that he and his bandmates are "traveling t-shirt salesmen". Gary said: "[Selling shirts is] where we make our money. We're lucky… If you're in a band where the money you're paid to play covers your expenses and the t-shirt money is yours, you're doing really well. Because everything, especially since the pandemic — tour buses cost way more money. Everything costs more. Airfare costs more. It's fucking hard. We do okay, we do pretty good. But then when you come home and you don't work for two months, that money you made has to cover, stretch out over all of it. So it's not what people think."

In a July 2024 interview with Danielle Bloom, Gibson was asked what advice he would give to musicians who are just starting out, as well as to those musicians who maybe are a little jaded at this point in their career. He responded: "I don't know what to tell young musicians today because I am jaded. And it isn't that I'm just jaded, it's that there's no music business anymore.

"When I was young, there was a path, there were steps to take," he explained. "You got your band together, you put your music together, you started looking for shows, and if you could draw people to your shows, then the next step was that label people would be interested. Then you had to get your promotional pack together to give to the labels that were interested. And then you tried to get signed and then you tried to make records and sell records And those steps don't exist at all anymore. Now the step is make a band — or not even make a band. Let's just go viral. I don't know to do that. Don't ask me how to fucking do that. I'm in my fifties. I don't know how to do that shit. It's totally a mystery to me. I don't know how things get popular now, other than just total luck. So I don't know.

"Here in Nashville [where I live now], young musicians, they ask me that all the time," he continued. "And I kind of feel like a dick when I'm answering, because I'm, like, 'Guys, I don't know.' I don't know what makes things tick. The bands that are real popular, I don't know why those bands are popular. And I'm not saying that they're not good; I just don't know why those ones are the ones that stand out from the other ones right now. It all kind of sounds the same to me. I guess it's probably because I'm just old. But I don't know what direction to give anybody."

When Bloom noted out that "we are living in different times" right now, Gibson concurred. "There's no business," he said. "Once they started giving the music away, there's no business. We don't sell shit for records. If we don't go out and sell t-shirts, we don't make money. I'm a t-shirt salesman. I'm not a musician. I'm literally a traveling tchotchke seller. That's what we do. We play music to try to get people to the store and sell them our fuckin' stuff with stuff printed on it. That's the business. If you can't fill up a room, 50,000 units moved on the Internet, then they don't wanna talk to you. And any day now, we're all gonna lose our jobs to these fuckin' robots. Once the A.I. figures out how to actually make music that people enjoy, they're not gonna pay us to do shit."

After Bloom expressed her belief that people will always be interested in seeing live music being performed by humans, Jack said: "Well, that's true. But at this point in time, most of the music business isn't that; most of it is licensing and commercial jingles and music editing and music recording. All that's gonna just disappear. There's gonna be 50 people out there who make music that people are interested in that can't be reproduced. And then the rest of it… Like, who's gonna pay somebody to write music for a movie? Or pay an orchestra, pay 60 people to come in and perform it when one guy can just go [punch a few commands into a computer] and it comes out. And we're not gonna know the fucking difference. Things are changing so fast that I don't really know what to say."

Earlier this month, EXODUS filmed music videos for three songs from the band's upcoming studio album, tentatively due next spring via Napalm Records. The clips are being helmed by Jim Louvau, a musical and visual creative artist based in Phoenix, Arizona, who previously worked on EXODUS's music video for the song "The Fires Of Division" from the band's previous LP, 2021's "Persona Non Grata".