HOLT: Audience Response During ARCH ENEMY U.S. Tour Made EXODUS Feel Like Headliners

Live-Metal.net conducted an interview with EXODUS guitarist/founding member Gary Holt prior to the band's March 16, 2010 concert at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Maryland. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

Live-Metal.net: Where do you think [MEGADETH's] "Rust in Peace" ranks in the all-time great thrash metal albums? Is it better than [EXODUS'] "Bonded by Blood"?

Holt: Nothing's better than "Bonded by Blood". [laughter] But it's awful damn good. I love the album. I don't even know if I'd say it's my favorite MEGADETH album because I love "Countdown to Extinction" and it's fuckin' such a great record. And, of course, "Peace Sells" is right there. It's one of Dave's [Mustaine, MEGADETH mainman] top three, although his new one is really, really good, "Endgame". It's hard to say. It's hard to rank things anyway. Where do you put something? You have to take in so many different factors — the time it came out, what it meant to a genre — so there's a lot more to the importance of a record than just how good it is, like what it did to inspire other bands and kickstart a genre that helped kickstart the next one and the next.

Live-Metal.net: I saw you guys open up for ARCH ENEMY back in January. You had a pretty good response. I saw you guys at the Recher Theatre in Towson, the very first show of the tour. Do you feel the MEGADETH crowd is more EXODUS than the ARCH ENEMY fans?

Holt: I don't know. For 90 percent of the ARCH ENEMY tour, the crowd response was such that we felt like the headliners anyway. But our audience is really young now and this tour, ever since we got back into the States, the audience has been kind of old. [laughs] We came back in the States and the first two shows were all seated venues, so that sucks for an EXODUS show. And then the last two weren't seated, but the audience was showing their age. We want to see a pit, we want to see some mayhem. The first shows in the States and the Canadian shows were just insane. They were fuckin' great and then we got back here. So we're hoping the U.S. audience can pick it up and deal with the hip replacement later and start getting a little fuckin' crazier.

Live-Metal.net: You had your ex-vocalist, Steve ["Zetro" Souza] [join you on stage at a recent show in San Francisco] — he did a song or was it whole show he did with you guys recently?

Holt: Just a song. I talk to him from time to time, and he hadn't seen us since his exit from the band. I said, "Why don't you come on up and sing something with us?" [Paul] Baloff used to always come up and sing with him, so I figured it was an OK thing to do.
Live-Metal.net: So there's nothing more coming out of that.

Holt: Hell no. He came up and sang one song, and people are like, "Is he coming back in the band?" I said, "Dude, we just fuckin' recorded a new album. If he was gonna come back in the band, don't you think we would've had him sing it?" [laughter] It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. How can anybody even think that? Everybody knows we just recorded an album. He sang one song, half of it — he shared vocals with Rob [Dukes, current EXODUS vocalist]. It's funny, you know, maybe had the Internet existed when Paul would come out and sing with him, maybe everybody would've been speculating on Paul's imminent return. There wasn't that World Wide Web back then. People read into things way too much. An old guy who's a friend of mine now after some rough times — it's not like we talk more than three times a year — but he called me up and wanted to come to the show, and if he was gonna be there — I know he wanted to come up and do a song.

Read the entire interview from Live-Metal.net.

Fan-filmed video footage of EXODUS performing the song "Piranha" on March 13, 2010 at the Town Ballroom in Buffalo, New York can be viewed below.