Earlier this year, when promoting his then-upcoming new namesake project, Slayer guitarist Kerry King casually said that he had been tracking the bass on Slayer albums since the 1990s. It wasn’t widely known at the time that Araya had only been providing vocals on a substantial portion of the band’s catalogue. In a recent interview with Guitar World, King explained why he took on that role. After declaring his new solo album, “From Hell I Rise,” as “the first record I haven’t played bass on, probably, since the Nineties,” King was questioned by the aforementioned outlet on why Araya was not playing bass on Slayer‘s albums.
We would always let Tom play bass until he got tired of not being good at it. In Tom’s defense, up to that point, he had never played the songs. It was always just me and Paul going through ’em. And then we get in the studio, it’s time to record. I think Tom’s got it in his head that he’s gonna be able to pull it off. But for anybody that’s never played a song before, to come in without knowing the music and get it up to recording level is not realistic. So, if I’ve already done my guitar tracks, Jeff’s done his guitar tracks, And Tom doesn’t know the bass parts, I can pick up a bass and get it done in less than a day ’cause I already know the songs. It got to where he’d mess around and play one song for eight hours before he got frustrated and just said, ‘Here, you do it!’ I don’t want anybody to think for a second that he couldn’t do it if he had the time to learn it.
Kerry King’s friends say they like his debut solo album better than any single record he’s done in his career
Kerry King, the guitarist for Slayer, has published the third in a series of interview films to promote his debut solo album, “From Hell I Rise”. When asked about the response of “From Hell I Rise” thus far, Kerry stated:
I’ve heard from not only friends, journalists, people I’m doing interviews with that they like this better as a whole than any single record I’ve done in my career. It’s hard for me to say that, because I’ve been a part of all that stuff. But good friends are really fired up about this record that wouldn’t blow sunshine up my ass. And journalists I’ve known for a long, long time, but we’re not just acquaintances; they’re friends of mine that I don’t get to see because of the pandemic. And now things are getting fired up. I’m gonna see all my journalist friends again. But people are talking this record up really big. And they’ve all heard the whole thing, of course, ’cause they’re doing interviews about it, so they have backup to their story. But I’ve heard people are really stoked about this record. I like this record a lot. I like ‘Repentless’ a lot. But I think the performance of everybody is better on this one.
He spoke about the decision to name his project Kerry King:
Well, first and foremost, it was never supposed to bear my name. [Laughs] It just kind of fell into place. We worked for months, we worked for years trying to come up with a fucking name that worked that wasn’t taken, wasn’t used by some other company that made a trademark, a conflict of interest. And it was time for some of our first shows to be announced and we had to roll with something. So we had this logo. Somebody said, just call it Kerry King. Everybody knows who you are, everybody knows what you’re about. That being said, the pressure didn’t really hit because everything was done and recorded before we ever got to Kerry King. It was an afterthought, and we had nowhere to go. And everybody loved the logo, so, you know — insert my name.
And his bandmates as well:
I’ve already had questions about somebody asking me, ‘Is this gonna be a touring band for this album, and then the next album you put another band together?’ which I thought was the oddest question I’ve been asked in a long time. And I’m, like, ‘No, I want this to be a band from day one. I want it to be a band.’ We’re allnabout the same age and hopefully we all decide when time is to retire that we all agree on it. So, we can stick together for three records, four records, five records. Depends how fast we put stuff together, depends how fast touring cycles go. But my intention is for this to be the band from now until the day this band’s done.
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