Seeing that he’s been living and breathing metal for most of his life, SLAYER guitarist Kerry King was asked on Talk Is Jericho whether he ever gets sick of, to which he replied (as transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.com):
“Not really. But I call Rainbow metal. It is, I think. I go through phases – I’m going through a gigantic Ritchie Blackmore phase right now for some reason.
“When I’m in my room I don’t want to put on Netflix and watch something. So I hit YouTube and I start watching videos. I found a kick ass Deep Purple live ’74 ‘Burn.’ You can tell that Coverdale is just refreshing the band. And it’s awesome, dude!
“I’ll be watching videos for 3 hours. I also went through a big Heart kick. I wanna go see Heart, because she’s still belted out like nobody. Always been one of my favorite singers.”
Kerry also discussed Slayer’s reputation of not changing their formula a whole lot, saying he’s proud to be the AC/DC of metal:
“We made our own path and just stuck with it. I’ve said it a million times – I think we’re the thrash metal AC/DC.
“And I think that’s a good thing because I never understood when people like bands but they say, ‘Yeah, but they don’t change.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t like a band because they change, I like the band because they sound like what I like about them.’
“I like Judas Priest because they sound like Judas Priest. Nobody sounds like f**king Rob Halford. That’s important to me. And [Iron] Maiden – it’s Bruce [Dickinson].
“I think a lot of bands become mega bands because they have the unique singer who sounds like no one else. Look at Axl Rose – Guns N’ Roses is one of the biggest bands on the planet because of that. And great songs, of course.
“My point was I like AC/DC because they sound like that and they made the same record for 40 years. We made the same record for 35 years, we’re getting there. [Laughs] But that’s why people like us. I don’t wanna be something else, this is the music I want to play and luckily people give a s**t about it.”
During the rest of the chat, Kerry admitted it’s become increasingly difficult to scare people with Satanism like back in the day, saying:
“It’s very weird making up records today. A question you get from all the journalists is ‘How do you scare people anymore?’
“Well, it might not be with Satan and demons and stuff like that, you scare people with terrorism and every day events. Life kind of giving you stuff to write about every day these days. [Laughs]
“I think about it [terrorism]. Last year, the Eagles of Death Metal Show, we were in Paris a week before that and then something went down in Belgium and we were in Belgium two days before that.
“It’s on your mind for sure but that can happen anywhere at anytime. As a matter of fact I think something like this [Download Festival] would attract it because it’s a big bunch of people. 50,000 – I don’t even know how many’s here.
“For me, if I was ever worried about a target it would be something like this because because there is an ass load of people here. But at the end of the day this is my job, and if you shut yourself down you’re just doing what they want. And I’m not about that.”
