Slayer

Photo by Gary Miller

Kerry King needs no introduction, but here's one anyway: co-founding guitarist of Slayer, responsible for the most extreme thrash metal this side of heaven. Terrifying.

Austin Chronicle: You scare me.

Kerry King: That's a good thing, right?

AC: How do children react to you?

KK: Children don't usually give two shits about me. They don't know if I'm scary or creepy or what the hell.

AC: Do you secretly enjoy a children's TV show?

KK: The closest I get would be Family Guy and South Park. I dig movies like Despicable Me, though. That's kind of a kids' movie, I guess.

AC: Slayer was on fire when y'all played Fun Fun Fun Fest in 2011. What do you remember about your time in Austin?

KK: I remember Danzig being a little bitch about playing the day before, saying he should be on the Slayer stage and all of that horseshit. He was saying he was as big as Slayer? Not even when you were popular, motherfucker. That's just how you get a shit reputation. He's always been cool to me, but I know he's been a piece of shit to a lot of people, and there's no reason for that. I don't care how famous you are. There's no reason to be a dick about it.

AC: On a more serious note, how difficult has it been to carry on without Jeff Hanneman?

KK: The hardest part was in February 2011, when we went to Australia. We played without him and Gary [Holt] came along. He's such a great replacement. He has Jeff's good graces, which makes it even better. When we were talking about still working while Jeff was recovering, that was a hard decision and a hard conversation, but the first and only name that came to my mind was Holt. Jeff was completely against it at first, but then he understood. The band has to go on, whether he could come back or not. And we didn't know that then. We were just moving forward because we had to.

AC: Is Gary a part of the songwriting process now, or has that burden shifted more to you?

KK: It's more of me at the moment. We're considering working on some of Jeff's unfinished ideas, but when you rewrite something ... if I'm going to put out something with Jeff's name on it, I don't want it to be mediocre. I want it to be awesome. We have to deconstruct what exists and reuse those riffs in whatever way we can. That's a process that I want to address before we go into the studio, but I have 14 songs of my own, and we're looking to record in January.