Four decades into one of thrash metal’s defining careers, Gary Holt sat down for a career-spanning breakdown with Metal Injection, walking through the whole story — the air-guitar kid from a house full of hard rockers, the m**h years that nearly swallowed his creativity, the Slayer chapter that came at a terrible cost, and a band that, in his own words, is charting higher in their 60s than ever before. What comes through most is a man who refuses to romanticize any of it and refuses, just as hard, to let it go.
Holt grew up the youngest of six in a working-class family, raised on his older brothers’ record collections and light-years ahead of his years in rock knowledge. Before he ever held a real instrument, he was a devoted air guitarist. “For a kid, I used to play a lot of air guitar, a lot of air guitar. I was really good at it. Tennis rackets, you know, feared me,” he joked (as transcribed by Metal Stop).
The spark that turned it real was seeing Ted Nugent live. “Seeing Ted for the first time live, it’s like he was like 10 feet tall to me and like, just ripping that big hollow body Gibson Birdland. And he was the guy who made me want to play guitar, you know. Ted. Terrible Ted. He was the number one concert draw in the world at one time,” Holt recalled.
The actual lessons came from an unlikely teacher: a young Kirk Hammett, years before Metallica. The two met, went to see Ted Nugent and the Scorpions together, and became close friends, with Holt hauling gear at the backyard parties Hammett would play. One day, Hammett offered to teach him. Because he was the sixth kid, Holt‘s parents, who’d watched every older sibling quit their music lessons, assumed it wouldn’t stick, so nobody bet on him, but Hammett did.
“But Kirk asked me if I wanted to learn and he showed me my first chord and six months later I was in Exodus. And then we played our first show at Montero Bay Community Center on New Year’s Eve and I knew I’d found my calling,” Holt said.
Exodus‘ 1985 debut, Bonded By Blood, was famously held up by release problems on a brand-new label, but Holt has no patience for the endless “what if it had come out first” debate that follows the record around.
“I don’t live on what ifs,” he continued. “I couldn’t give a f**k about the what ifs of the world, you know, and people will. What if it came out sooner, you know, ‘Metallica this and Slayer that, you guys technically were first’. I mean, this band was founded in the 70s, like we’re a 70s rock band, I guess. But, you know, I’m still f**king here, you know, like I’m not going to like, oh, we could have been bigger. I make a living playing music. It’s pretty awesome, but the albums, it’s f**king amazing. I personally think it’s the greatest thrash debut of all of them. I may be biased, but, you know, Charlie Benante [drummer of Anthrax and Pantera] agrees with me.”
He added: “And he made a good one himself, too. He says Bonded by Blood is better than all of them. But I mean, you know, we were just, we’re kids playing the music we wanted to hear ourselves. We had no idea anyone else liked it.”
The making of it has become legend, and not only for the music. Recording at Prairie Sun in Cotati, California, the band and their inner circle “wreaked a level of destruction on that place that had to be admired.” The damage was memorable enough that when Exodus returned years later, the studio’s owner was nervous to have them back. This time, Holt said, “we’re not the same guys anymore. We left it it clean and then we got it the second time. But yeah, we raged and wrecked the place. But, you know, it’s legendary fun.”
The most candid stretch of the conversation is Holt‘s account of addiction. By his telling, m**h had inverted his whole life. “You start out as a musician, dabbling in drugs and become a drug addict, dabbling in music. The priorities are flipped. And when I got clean after that European tour where we smuggled a bunch of drugs with us, and we smoked it all in the first like two days and got d**e sick.”
He got clean after a European tour, and the way he tells the story of the last time he ever handled the drug is unforgettable: “But then I gradually felt better and felt better. I came home and the last time I ever held sp**d in my hand, I had a rock the size of a golf ball you know, that I hid for when I get back.” He’d let the repo man take his car before the tour and used the stash instead. Sobriety, he said, flipped a switch he thought was gone for good: “all of a sudden I could do this again,” and the creativity came flooding back on 2004’s Tempo Of The Damned, which he credits directly to clearing the drugs out of his life.
“And, you know, now I’m clean and clear and riffs came back, like all of a sudden I could do this again. And I got real creative,” he said.
Even for a founding thrash architect, the business has never been glamorous, and Holt doesn’t pretend otherwise. Through years of singer and guitarist changes, Rob Dukes coming in, Tom Hunting stepping away over anxiety, Rick Hunolt drifting from rehearsals, Lee Altus (a friend from the Kirk Hammett era) joining mid-recording, his logic never wavered: “The show’s got to f**king go on because I don’t know what else to do. I got no other job skills. I haven’t found a way to make a living off charm.”
The reality behind the legend was lean. In those days a month-long tour was a win if it covered two months’ rent on a cheap $750 apartment.
“This is what I do, you know, like for better or worse, what I do. And those times were lean. You know, I go out on tour for a month and I was happy if I could pay two months rent at my cheap, sh**ty 750 dollar a month apartment, you know, at least. All right. I’ll do a tour for a month and I’m home for a month. And I paid the bills for that time. And then I got another tour. You know, it was living month to month what it was. They hit me up and asked if I could do it. And I had time. And it was it was fun. The budget was so small, like I think we did the whole album in a week,” he recalled.
Holt‘s near-decade filling the guitar chair in Slayer, stepping in for the ailing Jeff Hanneman in 2011 and staying on after Hanneman‘s 2013 death, is something he refuses to sugarcoat, even as he calls it one of the great experiences of his life. “The unfortunate circumstance that I joined up with Slayer, because it’s not luck. It eventually cost Jeff his life,” he said, adding that he always wished Hanneman had been there and never left.
He’s just as unvarnished about the work itself. His solos for Slayer‘s final album, 2015’s Repentless, were knocked out in a single marathon session fueled by beer and football.
He said: “I had a six pack of beer sitting next to me and I drank beer and shredded. And I actually blew out my wrist. I’ve never done that before. The next day, couldn’t even move my wrist. I shredded for like f**king eight hours straight… You know, had football up on the screen, watching football, drinking beer and just shredding till I couldn’t move my hand the next day. But if I hadn’t finished, I would have had to wait like a week because I f**king couldn’t move. And I thought it would be super awesome and cool to do, to play someone else’s songs for a change. And I thought it would be a two month thing. And it ended up just shy of 10 years before the breakup and, you know, not counting the subsequent reunion shows. I mean, we all wanted Jeff back. I wanted Jeff back, you know, like, people might go ‘oh, bulls**t he’s luckiest guy in the world’. I’m f**king happy in my skin and happy where I was, you know. I feel lucky that I have two families. Exodus being family number one and Slayer being my adopted family. And I love them all the same. And I wish Jeff had been there, but it was amazing. And I got to play with fire, which is awesome. As a kid, when you’re writing those first riffs in your bedroom at your parents’ house, you’re like, you’re fantasizing about things blowing up in fire.”
If there’s one thing time hasn’t dulled, it’s Holt‘s competitiveness onstage. “We refuse to let anybody take us down live. Any band, we’ll f**king smoke you. We don’t give a f**k who you are,” he said, framing every night as a challenge. “I mean, I won’t name names, but I’ve played with other bands and where they knew they were getting blown off stage and they wouldn’t do anything about it. Me, if I think someone’s kicking my a**, I’m stepping up. I’m gonna beat myself to death to correct that.”
That drive feeds directly into where Exodus stands now. The band’s twelfth album, Goliath, grew out of a writing burst so productive they nearly finished two records at once. He’s clear-eyed that the record split opinion, and clear-eyed that he doesn’t care: “Some people f**king hate it. We love it. That’s all that matters. It charted higher than any album we’ve ever done worldwide, you know, in our 60s. So I guess we did something right.”
After everything, gratitude is the throughline. “Every day is a gift,” he said. “We squandered a lot of time. So we’re making up for time.” It’s the same place he landed when he told Fistful Of Metal earlier this year that he doesn’t “wanna die on stage” — a man who’s watched grown men weep at a farewell and knows a last show is coming someday, but insists Exodus still has “a lot more gas in the tank.”
Holt saved some of his bluntest thoughts for songwriting and the state of the genre. Speaking about whether Exodus had ever made a true misfire, he reached for the ultimate divisive record, and, notably, refused to swing at the band who made it. “We never made Lulu. I’m not a Lou Reed fan anyway and I’m not ripping on Metallica,” he said of the 2011 Metallica and Lou Reed collaboration. “They’ve earned the right to do exactly what the f**k they want and that is to do an album with Lou Reed. So be it, you know. Knock yourself out. But I mean, the worst album I ever made and that’s subjective, you know, different opinions.”
“It wasn’t that f**king bad,” he continued. “You could always say, that album isn’t like completely nailed down and there’s some like filler or whatever your opinion is. But you also say there’s some ripping riffs and savage solos and there’s some good s**t.”
His own writing philosophy comes down to a phrase former drummer Paul Bostaph used to throw at him whenever a riff got too clever: don’t forget the “two IQers.” As Holt put it: “You got to write for the two IQers as well, you know. You’re getting too cerebral there. Got to think about the caveman. ‘Blacklist‘, our most popular f**king song. It’s a caveman riff, you know, but it’s catchy as f**k. It’s heavy as f**k. Got a big chorus, you know, that’s all any song should have.”
That’s also the lens through which he views a lot of current heavy music — with respect, but real reservations. “I’m not slagging any of it, but I’m like, there’s no choruses, there’s no hook. It’s just breakdown after breakdown after breakdown,” he said. In a full-circle jab, he recalled how relatives once dismissed early Exodus as “a lot of screaming,” when singer Tom Hunting was actually singing, “Now these bands out there, they literally just scream.” At heart, he remains what he always was: “I’m still an old rock guy. I still listen to the same music I grew up on, and it was all based around hooks and choruses. That’s what I like.”
Goliath is out now via Napalm Records. The self-produced twelfth Exodus album marks the return of vocalist Rob Dukes and was mixed and mastered by Mark Lewis.
