Music

Slayer's Kerry King goes off on Mayhem Festival organizers

by Jeremy Mersereau

Word to the wise: if there’s one musician you probably don’t want to get on the wrong side of, it’s metal icon/sentient tribal tattoo Kerry King. The guitarist has some harsh words for the organizers of the Mayhem Festival, which he’s currently headlining with his band, thrash-metal titans Slayer.

King took the fest to task for not booking enough high-level talent, with attendance suffering as a result. “Do I know this tour wasn’t booked correctly? Absolutely I know this tour wasn’t booked correctly,” King told Metal Insider. He goes on:

“Usually there’s the main stage, a second stage, a third stage, and then that piece of shit record stage… now what they’re calling a second stage is at best a fourth stage and they’re wondering why people aren’t showing up. I think they waited too long and think all the talent that could have been on this took gigs in Europe… To me a second stage headliner is Anthrax, Machine Head… Whoever booked this made a gigantic error.”

Oof, I wouldn’t want to be The Devil Wears Prada right now! It seems tensions started to mount when Mayhem Fest co-founder Kevin Lyman called out top-tier metal bands (and metal doesn’t get much more top-tier than Slayer) for not taking pay cuts to benefit the scene as a whole. Sounds like Slayer’s guarantee must be pretty hefty! Lyman, who is also the founder of the long-running punk-focused Warped Festival, compared the philosophical differences between metal and punk in an interview with the Detroit Free Press, with metal not coming off so well:

“That’s how punk rock was. That’s how we nurtured punk rock. Bad Religion would take a little less than they could on their own to bring the whole scene forward, so we could make sure we had a good package around them. Metal doesn’t seem to have that concern, never has, never has since I was working in the clubs in the ’80s. It’s always about a me, me, me thing.”

Lyman didn’t exactly hype the hell out of the festival either, saying that this year’s Mayhem lineup is “the best available for what we had to work with.” Whoa, I’m pretty stoked to go now! Kerry King agrees, calling out Lyman for “basically throwing his tour under the bus.” King continued: “I understand it from a fan’s perspective. I wouldn’t spend money to come to this either.” When asked if this would be the last time Slayer as a headliner at the festival, he replied: “This might be the last time you see Mayhem.”