“It would have been a very different band”: Slayer legend Kerry King explains how he nearly joined Megadeth
It turns out there’s a parallel universe out there where Kerry King is a member of Megadeth.
In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, a fan asks the Slayer legend: “If you could have been in any other band, who would you pick?” While Kerry does elaborate on the bands he would have liked to have teamed up with, he also sheds some light on what could have been if he and Dave Mustaine had found a way to live harmoniously alongside each other.
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“I was almost in Megadeth,” he says. “I think if myself and Dave Mustaine could have co-existed for four years, it would have been a very different band. I’m not saying I’d have made them better – I’d have made them different.”
King had spent a brief tenure with the band in 1984 before choosing to focus on Slayer.
“He could just recite these riffs right back,” former bassist David Ellefson recalled earlier this year. “Dave would show him something, and he’d fuckin’ play it right back. I was like, ‘Jesus, man.’ This was cool… With my bass playing, we created a sound, we created a style – as bands should. Bands create something together.”
Credit: Mariano Regidor/Redferns
King would, however, happily play with Mercyful Fate any day of the week. “It’s funny, I was backstage at Mercyful Fate’s show at Las Vegas and got talking to [guitarist] Hank Shermann and said to him, ‘I thought you guys might come knocking,’ and you could see his head explode. ‘It never fucking occurred to me!’ I’m a huge Mercyful Fate fan so I’d have done it in a heartbeat.”
King is also known to be a huge Judas Priest fan, who he also says he’d have liked to have performed with.
“That brief second where Richie [Faulkner] got sick and they suggested going out with one guitar player, I thought if they called me and said ‘Can you be that one guitarist?’, I honestly don’t think I could, because they’re such a dual guitar band. Thankfully they never did it, but if they’d have asked, I think it would have been the hardest ‘no’ of my life!”
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