SLAYER - A Chat with Tom Araya, Part III Page 2
by Tim Henderson

MTH: So if things die in North America there are still other places for you to play!

Araya: "In all honesty, I don't think they will, because I know how kids are with their music. They share. And there's always that new kid going 'that's heavy' and another kid going 'you want to hear something really heavy? You think this is heavy? Listen to this.' And nine times out of ten they'll crank on Slayer! And the kid will go like 'whoooaaa.' Cuz that's exactly like I did. When the band go together and Kerry (King) was coming over. He gave me a list of songs to learn and I was going to try out, to see if the band was cool or not. And Kerry was the one to introduce me to Iron Maiden. I went to the record store, bought Iron Maiden - blew my mind. I went 'whoooaaa.' And I consider myself somebody who listens to heavy music. But I was into radio music. I was in Top 40 bands, so I was very aware of music that was o the radio. But I like the heavier music. At the time it had to be VAN HALEN - anything heavy like that. BLACK OAK ARKANSAS, SKYNYRD ... '70s stuff. Kerry introduced me to metal. I knew about Priest, SABBATH, ZEPPELIN. Maiden's type of metal was new to me. I didn't know that this music had even evolved. So when I heard that I went 'f**k, this is awesome.' So we started doing that stuff and started developing our own music, fast and furious. And coming across EXODUS and realizing 'god-damn, there's another band that plays fast!' We ran into them and they thought we were fast. Those bands that came up around that same time, tapped into that universal mind. We all tapped into that source of music and all of a sudden there were four or five bands doing this style of music that started around the same time. They didn't influence each other, they had some outer influence."

MTH: You can really hear the Maiden-isms on Show No Mercy.

Araya: "Yeah, you can also hear it on Hell Awaits. When Jeff showed up at rehearsal with the MERCYFUL FATE EP with the nun on the cover on the cross - it said Nuns Have No Fun. He said 'I went to the store and bought it thinking it was a punk album.' He used to buy EPs cuz of their covers, not because of the band. So e bought covers that were really cool looking and he put the disc on and heard Mercyful Fate. 'It blew my mind,' he said. He thought it was really cool, so he brought it over and said 'you guys have got to listen to this.' We're like, 'holy crap, where did you find this?' You'll hear that to, because of song-structure and the length of songs. When we did Hell Awaits, everybody was doing five or six song albums, really long songs. So we thought we'd do the same."

SLAYER - A Chat with Tom Araya, Part III Page 3