Gary Holt sat down with Ultimate Guitar for a new interview and revealed that some people weren’t happy to see him fill in for the late Jeff Hanneman in Slayer shows.
“In all the countless shows I did, I’ve only had two hecklers,” the guitarist started explaining. “Two hecklers that I noticed. Most people looked at my participation like this: ‘Get well soon, Jeff,’ which is how I looked at it, too. ‘But while this is available to me, this is cool. I’ve watched Slayer and Gary Holt play together. Let’s check this out. This is going to be awesome.’”
“And I had two genuine hecklers, one in Germany, this guy with this awful skullet. He was down there, like, flipping me off the whole show,” Holt recalled. “And usually, I’m super thick-skinned — this doesn’t bother me. But I sent a production manager down, and he was on the radio, and they were about to throw the guy out because he was starting to f*ck up my show. And then the guy realized that, and he booked.”
The rocker said that he didn’t understand why people would buy tickets even when they knew he would be filling in for the late guitarist. “But you know, dude, you know this wasn’t a surprise fill-in. You knew before tickets went on sale, you still bought the f*ckin’ ticket. So, why are you here if it’s that bad?”
Holt also shared how he dealt with a hater in the show: “And then we played a show in Milan [Italy], and they had a guy front row, dead center stage, just screaming ‘F*ck you!’ at me, the whole show. And at that one, I jumped down on the subwoofers at the end of the show, like a foot from his face, and asked if he had anything to say now. And he didn’t.”
After Jeff Hanneman was forced to step back from Slayer’s touring duties in 2013 and passed away that same year, Holt officially joined the band and has since played with them at various festival shows.
Earlier last year, Holt shared Hanneman’s reaction to finding out who would be replacing him in Slayer. “It was at his wake at the Hollywood Palladium that a statement from Katherine, his wife, was read,” he recalled in another interview. “And he was really bummed, apparently, when he found they were going to do it without him. And when he said, ‘Who?’, and they told him [it was] me, his exact words were, ‘F*ck yeah.’ So, it means a lot to me.”
“He’s my old friend. I just wanted to do him proud. We all thought he’d be back,” the guitarist added.
In other news, Slayer recently announced their first reunion show for next year. After the comments from the members that they didn’t have any more plans for new shows, the Louder Than Life festival announced that Slayer would perform in 2025.