“It’s Kirk’s riff, it’s my lyrics”: Gary Holt jokes that he’s owed royalties for his part in writing this classic Metallica track
Gary Holt has joked that he’s owed some royalties for his part in writing Metallica’s megahit Creeping Death.
As the story goes, both Gary Holt and Kirk Hammett were bandmates in Exodus in the early ‘80s, before Hammett left to join Metallica in 1983, filling the slot left vacant by Dave Mustaine’s firing.
But before Hammett’s Exodus departure, the band recorded their 1983 demo Die By His Hand. And as Holt asserts, while Hammett wrote the song’s riff, he was behind its lyrics, which were later tweaked for the middle section of Creeping Death, which appeared on Metallica’s 1984 sophomore album, Ride the Lightning.
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“It’s Kirk’s riff, it’s my lyrics,” Holt laughs in a new episode of the the Heavy Stories podcast [via Louder]. “I’ve never been credited, so yeah, that’ll tell you how I feel. I should get paid for that shit.”
He continues: “The song was ‘dying by his hand’ and they – James – changed the line to ‘die by my hand’.
“You know, I mean, I’m entitled to some money, James. I’ll send you my bank info! It’ll be a fat cheque! But those are Kirk’s riffs and he was more than welcome to them. They were his. I had zero ownership of any of that.”
Gary Holt has waxed lyrical on his appreciation of Kirk Hammett in the past. Back in 2024, he explained how he “owes it all to Kirk”.
He recalled meeting the Metallica guitarist in their teenage years: “We became immediate friends. One day, he just said, ‘Want to learn to play guitar?’ And I said, ‘Yeah’, because I always wanted to, but I’m the youngest of six.
“My parents had purchased pianos for my brother to take piano lessons. It ended up being a place to put family photos [on]. You know, there’d be a trumpet in the closet that someone played for six months, and I think my parents didn’t think I’d stick with it.”
“Six months later, I was in Exodus. So yeah, I owe it all to Kirk [laughs]. The first song he taught me was some Rolling Stone song; for some reason I can’t remember what it was – maybe Wild Horses, something like that.”
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