On 23 April 2011, in a field at Indio, California, a man who had spent thirty years in one band walked onstage in another. Slayer, whose singer Tom Araya had been on that stage for thirty years, were playing the Big Four bill and their guitarist was not there. The player filling the gap had been in Exodus since he was seventeen, had written most of what that band ever recorded, and would end up holding the position for eight years, through the last night Slayer ever played. His name is Gary Holt, and the thing worth understanding about him is that he was never the famous one and never stopped being the necessary one.
Richmond, 1981, and a job nobody else wanted
Gary Wayne Holt was born on 4 May 1964 in Richmond, California, at the industrial end of the Bay, and he joined Exodus in 1981 to replace a departing guitarist named Tim Agnello. He was a teenager taking a seat in a band that did not yet have a record, in a scene that did not yet have a name, at the exact moment when a handful of rooms between Berkeley and El Cerrito were about to decide what American metal sounded like for the next decade.
What happened next is the fact the whole career hangs from. In 1983 the band's other guitarist, Kirk Hammett, left to join Metallica, and the writing fell to the one who stayed. Holt did not inherit a style. He built one, and he has now played on every album Exodus has ever released, which no other member can say.
What the hands actually do
Strip the biography away and listen to the mechanics, because that is where this man is unusual. The Exodus riff is not built on speed for its own sake, it is built on a downstroke worked like a machine tool, held past the point where the wrist should have given out, and then bent sideways into a groove that lands half a beat behind where the ear expects it. Where the Bay Area's other writers stacked riffs like bricks, Holt milled his to fit, and the joins do not show. Forty years of it have left a body of work with almost no filler in it, which is the rarest thing a thrash guitarist can own.
He did not inherit a style. He built one, and he has played on every record the band ever made.
The line-ups change, the writer does not
The first singer, Paul Baloff, gave Exodus a wildness nobody has matched since and left the band in the middle of the eighties, replaced by Steve Souza out of Legacy, the group that would rename itself Testament. Baloff came back for a period in the nineties and died in 2002. Souza returned, left, and returned again. Guitarists, drummers and record labels came and went across four decades.
Through every one of those changes the constant is the same person, and it is worth being blunt about what that means in practice: for most of its life Exodus has been a band whose sound is one man's writing, played by whoever was standing next to him that year. That is not a criticism of the others. It is the shape of the thing.
The records his name is on
The debut is the wound the band never fully closed. Bonded By Blood was recorded in 1984 and did not reach the shops until 1985, and by the time it did, the album it would have been measured against had already been released by somebody else. Anyone who heard the tape circulating in the Bay in 1984 knew what Exodus were. Everybody who bought the record in 1985 heard a band arriving second.
What followed is a working discography rather than a legend: Pleasures Of The Flesh in 1987, Fabulous Disaster in 1989, Impact Is Imminent in 1990, Force Of Habit in 1992, and then the decade that closed the door on all of them. The band came apart, reassembled, lost a singer to a stroke, and only returned properly with Tempo Of The Damned in 2004, at which point the writing was recognisably the same hand at work twenty years on. Blood In Blood Out followed in 2014 and Persona Non Grata in 2021.
| Album | Year |
|---|---|
| Bonded By Blood | 1985 |
| Pleasures Of The Flesh | 1987 |
| Fabulous Disaster | 1989 |
| Impact Is Imminent | 1990 |
| Force Of Habit | 1992 |
| Tempo Of The Damned | 2004 |
| Blood In Blood Out | 2014 |
| Persona Non Grata | 2021 |
Read that column of years and the shape of the career is plain. Two clusters of activity separated by a gap of twelve years, and the same writer at both ends of it, producing on the second run material that stands beside the first without leaning on it. Bands who lose a decade rarely come back able to write. This one did, because the person who wrote the first half was still there to write the second.
Eight years in a dead man's place
On 12 February 2011 it was announced that Holt would fill in for Slayer's Jeff Hanneman, who had fallen ill. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. Hanneman died on 2 May 2013, and Holt stayed until Slayer played their final show in 2019.
It is a strange job, standing in the place of a man who wrote the songs you are playing, in front of an audience that knows exactly whose parts they are, and Holt has been unsentimental about the difference between the two roles. Speaking to Guitar World around the release of Exodus's Persona Non Grata, he said he had one job in Slayer and one only, to go out, play well, bang his head and take a little of the guitar hero role, while in Exodus he wears a great many more hats.
I had one job in Slayer and one job only. Go out, play killer, bang your head and play a little bit of a guitar hero role. I wear a lot more hats in Exodus.
Gary Holt, to Guitar World
That is a more honest description of session work than most players would give about their own second band, and it explains why the arrangement lasted. He was not auditioning to replace anyone. He was doing a job, carefully, for eight years, and then going back to the one that was his.
What he is owed
Holt has never had the profile of the men he shared stages with, and the reason is not mysterious: Exodus were nine months late with their first album, lost their lead guitarist to the biggest band in the world before they had released anything, and spent the rest of the decade watching four other groups take the space they had helped clear. Anyone reading about the musicians who made thrash runs into the same pattern repeatedly, and Holt's band is the sharpest case of it.
What is beyond dispute is the record. Four decades on one instrument in one band, every album carrying his writing, plus eight years holding a position in the most feared group in American metal without once being accused of not deserving it. Very few players in this music have done one of those things. He is the only one who has done both.
