Interview with Kerry King
From The Age (Australia), August 2001

Kerry King, Slayer's shaven-headed guitar brute, doesn't mince words. "Making records is like pulling teeth!" he snaps over the phone from his home town of Los Angeles, where the band are resting up. "I mean, nobody wants to be there in the studio - it's just a necessary evil so you can go out and tour some more."

Hardly necessary but certainly evil is perhaps how many of Slayer's critics regard the band, renowned for pioneering a deliciously offensive brand of thrash metal in the 1980s with such classics as Show No Mercy and Reign in Blood. And, like any metal band worth their salt, King, fellow-guitarist Jeff Hanneman, drummer Paul Bostaph and vocalist-bassist Tom Araya have built a career on making objectionable music, then feeding off the ensuing controversy.

During their 20-year career, Slayer have been accused of committing just about every sin imaginable, all loosely arranged under the banner of corrupting youth with the devil's music. King finds it amusing that fans turn up at the shows with the word SLAYER carved into their backs with broken beer bottles. Suggestions the band have incited anti-Semitism are also laughed off, since past collaborative successes with Jewish production guru Rick Rubin, former Def Jam head and now American Recordings boss, speak for themselves.

Such finger-pointing is hardly likely to subside after Slayer's latest - and 10th - album, God Hates Us All, an unforgiving blend of power and wrath.

On the subject of Christianity, King is typically blunt: "Well, I don't buy it," says the former high school maths wizard. "I'm not religious in any way. I'm the kind of person who says, 'If I can't see it, it doesn't exist, and if it does, then show me - and until you do, I don't believe it'."

For the GHUA sessions at Bryan Adams' plush Vancouver studio, the Warehouse, Slayer created their own in-house ambience by redecorating the rooms with spooky items such as skulls and crime-scene sketches.

"The funny thing is, it was our crew that went and did all that," King says. "They just went to a local props store and came back with all kinds of devil heads and winged demons and posters of all kinds of who-knows-what. And so it became Slayer's home."

Under the guidance of producer Matt Hyde (Monster Magnet), who worked with the band on the song Bloodline from the Dracula 2000 soundtrack, the sessions also found Hanneman and King experimenting with lower guitar tunings and, in King's case, a seven-string guitar.

"I went to my guitar company and borrowed one to see if I liked it," he says. "I mean, it's just an extension, really. But I remember reading in a guitar magazine a lot of people saying, 'Oh, I don't need a seven-string; the only people who should play those are Steve Vai and (Joe) Satriani'. That's like telling a drummer he doesn't need a double-bass kick."

Unlike such performers as Satriani, however, King says guitar groupies don't usually pull him aside to talk shop.

"I think the guitar-playing factions are the ones who stand and look from afar, like I used to do as a kid when I had my cheap seats and binoculars to see what Eddie Van Halen was playing from 1000 feet away. Ha, ha!"

Fancy fretwork aside, Slayer's methodology has altered little in nearly two decades, with the band eschewing gimmickry and Metallica-style orchestral flourishes, dismissed by King as "self-indulgent crap", in favor of their customary monster riffs and ghoulish lyrics.

For the band members, Slayer is very much a lifestyle thing, and if the level of demon drink consumption on their recent Extreme Steel tour with Pantera is any indication ("That was like two alcoholic vortexes coming together - just a mess"), fans may be in for an accommodating set this weekend.

King, a big fan of the band's early work, says: "I like the new record, but I don't think it's going to have the impact of anything like Reign in Blood. That record was all about timing and hooking up with Rick Rubin, and taking your production, getting your reverb out of it and hitting you square between the eyes with it. I think that was the first time people heard thrash music with clarity, and I think that's why it stands out in people's minds as one of the best."