EXODUS - Metal Thrashing Mad! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

Holt breaks down the workload with respect to the words. "I did most of them, but Impaler, Paul wrote; that's 20 years old. And Throwing Down, that's a song from the Wardance band, Tom, Jack and I had back in '96. Those lyrics were written by the Wardance singer, John Miller. But out of the remaining eight songs, I wrote six-and-a-half. Yeah, I think that's right and Zetro wrote one-and-a-half, something like that. But the prevailing theme is just anger; it's a very angry album. I've been told I'm picking a lot of fights."

Political stuff as well? "Somewhat. I've had to answer a million times, questions about my patriotism for Scar Spangled Banner. I've had to answer whether I'm a liberal. It's like no, I'm a proud American and I'm f**king not a liberal. I hate all politicians equally. I just think we have a really dumb one in the White House right now. He's just a couple decades removed from a beer bong. The guy had already driven one oil company into the ground. Yeah, he's a dummy, but they're all dummies; they're all crooks. That's the nature of the beast."

"They're like children; it's hard to pick a favourite," says Holt, looking askance at the songs. "But some of them act up more than others (laughs). Right now my favourites are Shroud Of Urine and Scar Spangled Banner. I just like the riffs. My favourite solo is on Shroud Of Urine. I mean, I ripped Wolf Hoffman from Accept off so blatantly that I should have to pay him royalties (laughs). He's one of my favourite guitar players of all-time."

Finally, I had Holt reach back and reminisce about his fondest memories out on the road... "There are so many. Both tours we've done with Anthrax, including The Headbangers Ball, were great. My favourite is probably the two tours with Venom. And the tour we did in '93 with Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio was awesome. We hung out with Ronnie and Vinny all the time. Tony and Geezer were certainly nice and polite, but even the band itself was kind of fractured. You had Ronnie and Vinny on one side, and them, and they didn't really spend much time with each other. But we hung out with Ronnie all the time. The nicest man I've ever met in rock 'n' roll. Without a doubt. And just last July, we played the Metal Mania festival in Spain, and Ronnie played, and we got to see him again. That was great. He saw that we hadn't changed. We were completely polluted drunk by the time they played. We just crawled up the side of the stage to watch them (laughs)."