Will Thrash Metal's 'Big Four' Take Part In Another 'Jam' In California

When the so-called "Big Four" of 1980s thrash metal — METALLICA, SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX — played last summer at the Sonisphere festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, all the bands took the stage to perform DIAMOND HEAD's classic song "Am I Evil?" So when the groups all play at California's "Big Four" festival this April, will they do something similar and perform another song together?

"Well, I don't think that we're going to do that again," MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine told VH1 Radio Networks' Dave Basner. "It hasn't been presented to us and the beauty of that was just the serendipity of it."

He continued, "I don't know if it was [METALLICA singer] James [Hetfield] or [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] that came up with that but they came to us, one of their techs had come over and said, 'They wanted to know if you guys wanted to do 'Am I Evil?' for the big filming thing.' And I chuckled, of course, because I played that song, I've played just about every DIAMOND HEAD song that there is from those first couple records, so I thought, 'Man, we could do that, we could do a whole bunch of songs.'"

When asked in a September 2010 interview why he didn't take part in the "Big Four" jam in Sofia, SLAYER guitarist Kerry King said, "There's a damn good reason. It isn't too long an explanation. Mustaine came to me that day and James came to me that day saying, 'Hey, it would be really cool if you played.' I knew Jeff [Hanneman, SLAYER guitarist] wouldn't do it, and I knew Tom [Araya, SLAYER bassist/vocalist] wouldn't do it. And I also knew after we played that neither one of them would edit our video that was going to cinemas in a couple hours, so I told James and Mustaine both, 'Listen, man. I've gotta edit our video before I can even think about playing with you guys.' So the entire time of the set change between SLAYER and METALLICA, I was editing that video. I came running to the tuning room after I got done picking the songs, and they were already onstage. And to make it an even better story, I found out at 1 a.m. the night prior, so I really had no chance to work on that stuff or anything. So I wanted to; it just couldn't happen. I've got a lot of flack for that but yeah, that's the story."

During a November 2010 interview on "The Kevin & Bean Show" on the Los Angeles radio station KROQ-FM (106.7),METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich was asked about the "Am I Evil?" jam in Sofia. "It just seemed like because this thing was being broadcast to a couple of thousand movie theaters around the world and there was such a historical element to this that to get everybody up and play a song together would be cool," he said. "So, obviously, we didn't wanna do a METALLICA song, so we felt that something that would be close to home for everybody would be the song called 'Am I Evil?' by this very influential and inspirational band to all of us called DIAMOND HEAD. And the great thing about 'Am I Evil?' — with no disrespect to [DIAMOND HEAD guitarist] Brian Tatler, who wrote the song — it's sort of like the... call it the 'Smoke Of The Water' of '80s metal songs. It's not the most challenging song to play on the guitar. It was certainly one of the easier songs and in a big stadium of 75,000 people, it sort of translates, sound-wise, to sound probably pretty good. So we got everybody into the tuning room before the show and everybody sort of learned the basics of 'Am I Evil?' and then pretty much all the other musicians in the other three bands came up and joined us. And we had a couple of extra snare drums and some other stuff up there.

"There's been so much over the years of... The press have been trying to set us up against each other and all this competitive crap and all these ego issues and all this type of stuff. We, the bandmembers, have known that we've all been getting on and have much more love and respect for each other, but I think to the fans, it was important that they got a chance to see that everybody was playing nice in the sandbox, you know what I mean?!"