Despite the well-documented animosity between former SLAYER guitarist Kerry King and MEGADETH‘s Dave Mustaine, Kerry reminisces fondly in a new Metal Hammer interview of his first time seeing METALLICA take the stage – an experience which left him awestruck.
“They were great at that point,” King says. “They were ahead of us by at least 16 months to a year. They were doing originals and we were still doing covers. I think we opened for METALLICA with Mustaine, I can’t recall, but I know me and Dave [Lombardo, SLAYER drummer] definitely saw them in a club and we were blown away by Mustaine.
“Still to this day, he’s a f**king great guitar player,” Kerry continued. “It was very awesome, it wasn’t big clubs, you could see from anywhere, and I was very enamoured with seeing Mustaine play these insane leads and James [Hetfield] playing these insane rhythms and barking out these lyrics.
“It was way more extreme than what I thought metal was or could be, it was like another arm of it, so to speak. We all came out around the same time, but METALLICA certainly influenced me.”
On the 22nd of October, 1982 SLAYER and METALLICA played together at Woodstock Concert Theater in Anaheim, California for what happened to be SLAYER‘s fourth performance ever.
In 1984, Dave Mustaine reached out to King and asked him to join his newly formed band MEGADETH. King accepted the invitation and began performing with them on a few shows while SLAYER‘s future was uncertain. Ultimately though, he chose not to be part of MEGADETH due to his dedication towards staying in SLAYER.
Reeder, the visionary behind Metal Addicts, has transformed his lifelong passion for metal into a thriving online community for metal aficionados. As a fervent devotee of black metal, Reeder is captivated by its dark, atmospheric, and often unorthodox soundscapes.
