Interview with Dave Mustaine about Kerry King
From Guitar One Magazine (USA), February 2001 Issue

...And I guess we all know where Kerry King is [Megadeth guitarist in 1983].

Yeah, Kerry's in Slayer. And he evidently hates me, but that's okay.

What was that early incarnation of Megadeth like, with Kerry?

It was fun, and Kerry was so innocent. His dad was a cop, and I can remember I went to his house, and his dad would call everybody "asshole", because that was one of the epithets of the L.A. County Sherrif's Department - you don't have a name, you're an "asshole", until you've been proven innocent, then you're just an "asshole, sir".

We'd go to his house, and Kerry would be sitting in the front room, putting nails through his leather stuff to make pentagrams, his mom's in the kitchen making dinner, and his dad would be in the recliner watching TV. And Kerry was developing quite a collection of snakes in his garage.

I know that the guys in Slayer were a little bit upset about him doing both bands, but at the time Kerry and I had a good relationship. And I think he even may have respected me a little bit, because I showed him a lot of rhythm tricks on guitar.

Kerry's a really good guitar player; he's no slouch, but he's definitely not a Satriani. Good live player. That's about as far as I wanna go with this, because Kerry's been saying some terrible things about me, and I don't wanna give him any more credit than he's due.

Could we talk about some of the rhythm guitar "tricks" that you shared with him?

Stuff like palm-muting and picking technique - circling the pick around, how to choke the pick off, different ways of jumping strings, and the approach to doing different combinations of up-picking and down-picking. A lot of the other stuff was chord shapes - moving chords, arpeggianting chord movement when you're doing choruses, voicing certain combinations of strings and leaving out roots, inverting chords, stuff like that.

I don't really see any of it in Slayer's music because they have a really unique and terrific style all their own, and for me to say that "they sound like me" would be to discredit the fact that they are really, really exciting musicians.