SLAYER's KERRY KING Says Upcoming 'Big Four' Shows Will Be 'Groundbreaking'

ARTISTdirect.com editor Rick Florino conducted an interview with SLAYER guitarist Kerry King earlier this week. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ARTISTdirect.com: Where does "World Painted Blood" stand in your catalog?

Kerry: I think everything we've done this decade is pretty awesome. It's funny. I take our career in thirds. There are the first five records that we did. Then there was the '90s. The once we started up with "God Hates Us All", it seemed like we got back on track again. I think the '90s just fucked everybody up, with all of the stupid fads that got popular.

ARTISTdirect.com: With "God Hates Us All", you embraced a new energy. It bubbled more on "Christ Illusion", and then exploded on "World Painted Blood".

Kerry: Yeah, it's definitely another upswing. For "Christ Illusion", Dave [Lombardo, drums] came back. It's really fun working with Dave. When he got back in, it'd been enough time where it was no skin off anybody's ass. Everybody was happy to see each other. He's really enjoying himself on this tour. He's having the time of his life. I don't know. I guess it's good timing.

ARTISTdirect.com: The record's only eleven tracks, but you say everything you need to say in that span.

Kerry: That's another thing we did in the '90s — we got caught up in that whole thing where people just fill up CDs with music and generally it's just filler. It's garbage. By the time I figured that out, we were going into "Christ Illusion", and I said, "How many songs did your favorite records have when you were a kid?" When you think about it, it's just ten, period. That's the way I want to do it. If we didn't put "Psychopathy Red" on there, we would've just done ten songs, but since everybody had access to "Psychopathy", we wanted to add it to the collection.

ARTISTdirect.com: Tell me about the tour with MEGADETH in the U.S.

Kerry: If you became a fan of either of us since 1990, you've never seen us play together. So I think it's pretty cool. That's a long time. It's 19 years — more than many people's careers [Laughs]. Dave's [Mustaine] always been a great guitar player too! We were supposed to play Madison Square Garden, until we had to manipulate our dates and we lost the building because things get booked so far in advance there were no other openings. Now, we're playing the Izod Center in East Rutherford. We haven't played MSG in a long time though, that would've been really cool.

ARTISTdirect.com: You're obviously excited about the shows in Europe with the other "The Big Four" — METALLICA, ANTHRAX and MEGADETH…

Kerry: That's the first time ever this is happening. It's really legendary. It's groundbreaking. I don't think people realize how big of a deal it is. Mustaine said something like, "It's the biggest four metal bands from America," and I never thought of that. I just think of metal as metal and I thought, "No shit, we are one of the four biggest metal bands in America. That's pretty cool [Laughs]."

Read the entire interview from ARTISTdirect.com.