“Playing guitar was one, and I think karate was one,” Kerry King, 60, says via phone from his New York home where he was rehearsing for the tour that brings him to House of Blues on Friday, Jan. 31. “To this day, I can’t remember what the third one was. I saw a guitar sitting there in the corner, and I thought, ‘You know what, that guitar isn’t going to hit me back. Let’s go that route.’”
It proved to be the right decision. King initially gravitated toward the hard rock sounds of acts such as Motor City Madman Ted Nugent, who was “everywhere on rock radio,” and then to the more technical style of Eddie Van Halen, who “changed everything,” as he puts it. Randy Rhoads and Tony Iommi became influences.
King would then famously found the thrash metal group Slayer when he was only 17 and put out his first album with the band when was only 19. King, who now has a successful solo career, says his songwriting skills were pretty primitive at that point. But his ability to write and play continued to develop as Slayer released its magnum opus, 1986’s Reign in Blood, and then followed it with 1988’s South of Heaven and 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss.
“That’s when we solidified what we were going to sound like forever,” he says. “I knew that when Slayer started catching on, it was going to be around for awhile. But my perspective of time and age was very different then than it is now. I was 26 when Seasons in the Abyss came out, and if you told me then that I’d be playing guitar when I was 45 in a popular band still touring the world, I would have said, ‘No way.’ Here I am, a young 60 starting out in a new career. Your perspective changes.”
Slayer had a remarkable run before bringing things to a close dramatically with a farewell world tour in 2019 (the band would reunite to play a couple of festivals in 2024).
After all those years of playing with Slayer, King launched his solo career last year with the release of From Hell I Rise. To cut the tunes and to play them live, he assembled a band of heavy metal all-stars, including Death Angel singer Mark Osegueda, Vio-lence/Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel, Hellyeah bassist Kyle Sanders and Slayer/Testament/Forbidden/Exodus drummer Paul Bostaph.
“At the end of the day — and I thought through all my trials and tribulations of 40 years on the scene — I wanted this band from Day One to be my fucking friends, and I wanted no head trips and no divas,” says King. “Any of these guys can play the shit out of their instruments and Mark [Osegueda] can sing his ass off. Luckily, I have friends who are are at the top of their game, and they are all my first choices. I’m a very lucky individual.”
As he began to cull material for From Hell I Rise, he dug into his archive of unreleased material to see if he had anything he could use.
“There is stuff I used on this album that was leftover from Slayer,” he says. “I remember working on ‘Residues’ with [drummer] Paul [Bostaph] the first time he was in the band. It just took 20 years to finish. I’m glad I have the wherewithal to know when a song isn’t finished yet. I’m particularly happy that version made it on the record because it’s better than it has been for the past 20 years.”
Other songs emerged as King tried to find ways to pass time during the pandemic.
“I was trying to make the best of the downtime,” he says. “’Rage’ was one of the last ones I finished. Paul [Bostaph] and I were both hung up in a Hollywood hotel with COVID. Mine was very short, but my whole MO was ‘I’m stuck here, and I should finish shit.’ I finished the last two songs for Hell I Rise during that time. ‘Rage’ has some feelings of isolation, but I wrote most of it at the beginning of the pandemic.”
“Trophies of the Tyrant,” a song driven by a meaty guitar riff, finds Osegueda barking his vocals with authority as he addresses the Ukrainian war.
“It’s not so pinpointed close to home,” says King of the tune. “It’s definitely influenced by the war in the Ukraine, but it has some fantasy parts too. I didn’t want it to be a bummer for the Ukrainians, so I streamlined it a bit. I have actually never played there. [Slayer] were booked there about four times, and it just didn’t happen. We played Moscow three or four times, but I think that’s never gonna happen again.”
The instrumental album opener, “Diablo,” features distorted guitars and pounding drums that initially recall ’80s Scorpions.
“It’s anthem-y without lyrics, and I thought it should be an intro to something,” says King when asked about the track. “I decided it could be the intro to the record. It has that vibe to it. We come out to it at every show we play, and we’ll do that until the next record. It carries that idea of the music that we present.”
The prolific King says he has already started to work on the next record.
“It’s still diverse and still sounds like I wrote it,” he says of the new material he’s developing. “It doesn’t all sound the same. I’m stoked about it. I have stuff to work on for the next record.”
Despite the legacy that King has left behind with Slayer (King compares the band’s farewell world tour to Peyton Manning’s Super Bowl win in the final year of his career), the group has never been nominated for induction into the Rock Hall. It’s arguably a major oversight.
“I only think about it because I think it’s inevitable that we’ll at least be on the ballot,” King says when asked about the snub. “Will it change my life? Not at all. I’ve been to the Rock Hall on a day off one time. I thought I would be there for an hour, but I was there for three or four hours. It is cool. The criteria is just such a gray area. It’s like the metal Grammys. You have a metal Grammy. So what? You just happened to be the biggest name out of the acts that are nominated. Jethro Tull got the first metal Grammy. Everyone thought it would be Metallica. When they announced that Jethro Tull had won, everyone’s jaw dropped.”
Now 60, King says his passion for metal remains strong, and he has no desire to retire anytime soon.
“Despite my age, I still feel the kid in me,” he says. “I want to write that riff that people want to hear. I want to hear it myself. I’m highly motivated in that respect I’ve got another record in my sights and another record after that too. At that point, we’ll sit on top of whatever hill we’re on and check out the terrain and see where we’re going.”
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This article appears in Dec 18-31, 2024.