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Slayer’s Gary Holt Praises Metallica, Hasn’t Listened to ‘Lulu’
Exodus and former Slayer guitarist Gary Holt said he’d always support Metallica and “give them credit” — which is why he's never listened to Lulu, their controversial 2011 album with Lou Reed.
He also recalled the New Year’s Eve concert Exodus played with Metallica on Dec. 31, 1985, along with the accurate prediction Metallica’s James Hetfield made that night. “We crushed Metallica,” Holt said on a new edition of the Alive & Streaming podcast.
“I’m not gloating — we crushed 'em, and they knew it. ... It was their big homecoming. They’d just finished recording Master of Puppets. ... We came out, and we had more amps, we had a bigger riser. We came out looking like the headliners.”
He recalled how everyone was “partying hard” after the show. “James comes up, and we were just getting wasted," Holt recalled. "[He said,] ‘That'll be the last time you guys open for us.' And it was — we never played with Metallica again until in the recent decade, and that was, like, festivals somewhere.”
You can listen to the interview below.
Holt said he loved the members of Metallica “to death” and that he’d “always support them and always give them all credit where credit's due. ... I consider Master of Puppets the greatest metal album ever made. Nobody's ever come up with anything close to it — maybe close would be Judas Priest’s Stained Class.
“But I give them all respect. Even with St. Anger, I always said, ‘Yeah, if they made it sound right, it wouldn't be so bad.’ On YouTube, some guy re-recorded the whole album but did it with a proper drum sound and guitar sound, and the songs are killer.” He continued with a laugh: “I never listened to Lulu because I don't want it to sully my opinion of the band I admire so much!”
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