After several days of getting bounced around Nuclear Blast America in order to set up an interview with MESSHUGAH for their Toronto date, we FINALLY managed to set something up but NBA wasn’t able to hook us up with tickets for the show.  Instead, they put us in touch with SLAYER's publicist to see if tickets could be arranged through them… hmmm… a good contact to have?  Anyways, we did manage to get tickets secured about 8 hours before the show but there was one condition… that we interview SLAYER as well… ummm, let me think about that one… so once we got to the venue, we got bounced around some more until finally, we were able to catch up with Paul Bostaf and get some answers out of him concerning all things SLAYER…

How has SLAYER managed to stay so damned angry for so long?

- We’ve got lots to be angry about I guess… that’s probably why we’re in this band… there are a lot of things around us which really piss us off…

How have things changed in heavy metal since you guys started off?

- In any kind of music I guess, trends come and go… thrash metal like we write was a trend for a while… a lot of other thrash bands like EXODUS and METALLICA were kind of on the fore-front of that movement… ANTHRAX seemed to kind of fall off along the way when they changed their sound… unlike a lot of bands though, METALLICA always had the capability to write ballads, dark ballads ala "Fade To Black" ("Ride The Lightning") but once they hooked up with Bob Rock, that all changed…

If there were another Clash Of The Titans tour, who would you want with you?

- I would definitely want to do it with PANTERA… and maybe someone like MACHINE HEAD… or SYSTEM OF A DOWN maybe…as long as its PANTERA and SLAYER though, I just wouldn’t really care…hell, if we could get METALLICA on that bill to play a bunch of their old stuff, I’d be all for it…

Do you think Kerry (King)’s ever going to bring back that spiked arm-band of his?

- Well, he’s still got it but I doubt it’ll be making an appearance any time soon…he thought about bringing it back for awhile but he changed his mind and decided to keep moving forward instead of going back…

Where do you see SLAYER's sound moving?

- Forward…its definitely evolving but its staying heavy…there’s no conscious decision on where we’re taking the sound though…obviously I don’t have any input on the guitar side of things but I’ve tried to keep the drums as aggressive as possible and since I’m kind of a new entity in the band, I’ve had the opportunity to bring in some new ideas...certainly a lot of new ideas in terms of drumming anyways, like on "Gemini" ("Undisputed Attitude"), I felt I added a lot to that cut…we’re certainly trying to keep the thrash edge in SLAYER's sound though…

You mentioned that you’re bringing in some new blood into SLAYER's creative pool…Where are you drawing those influences from? What do you listen to?

- Everything…my tastes are really broad…I try to give everything a chance…I think there can be good music in every genre…I don’t like country music, I’m not a big reggae fan but out of 10,000 songs or so, there may be one I like…as far as influences go though, I think what I’m primarily bringing is a taste for groove oriented music… James Brown, LED ZEPPELIN…something with a nice pocket you can fill with drums…with thrash music, everything is just so fast that you just don’t have a ton of options… ”State Of Mind” on the other hand managed to squeeze in a nice groove though…

What bands / people really piss you off right now?

- Eddie Veder…he personifies to me someone who is successful and complains about it…if you’re going to be popular, enjoy it!…here’s a guy who is a band who’s complaining about popularity and becoming renown…I’m sure when they were playing in the garage ten years ago that they weren’t hoping to play in bars and be “underground” forever…I just don’t understand that…I play music
for myself, but if people come and enjoy it, the more the merrier…he had his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone once and my brother had it on his coffee table when I was living there and I just kept seeing his picture on the cover and turning it over and just getting irritating with it…one day when we were just sitting around getting baked, I asked him if I could just throw the damned thing out…since it’d been pissing him off too (he hates Eddie Veder as much as I do), we actually ripped the cover off and used it as a dart board in the garage…we have pictures of this…we used a whole roll of film…

Who’s your favorite up and coming band right now?

- I really like SYSTEM OF A DOWN right now…there’s an unsigned bay-area (San Francisco) area band called SYSTEMATIC I really like too…

Any plans to play any Russian dates soon?

- We’ve already played Moscow for Diabolus in November ’98 but I’m not sure when we’re headed back yet…I really want to go back though because it was a great experience…

What has been the funest show you’ve had?

- Wow…I’ve had so many fun shows but I think I can honestly say that I’ve had the most fun in Russia…I don’t think I’ve ever been so drunk in my entire life…not “puking drunk” but just really messed up…

Funniest thing that’s ever happened on stage?

- The most peculiar show I think we’ve ever played was in Istanbul, Turkey…we were sitting backstage and we could hear the crowd going nuts out front…people get hyped before a show but they were going right crazy so we knew SOMETHING was going on out there…Turns out there was this girl running back and forth across the stage without her shirt on…so one of the crew guys grabbed her and gave her a pass and she hung out for the whole show, flashing her boobs at people and stuff…anyways, she came around to the back of the drum kit at one point and she’s looking at me in awe, and giving me my water and drying my face between songs and stuff…it was really weird at first but it was cool…aside from the fact that she was gorgeous of course…

What’s the story behind the guy who carved “Slayer” into his arm? (see "Divine Intervention" CD - ED)

- The guy was actually a friend of someone we knew at American Records…he’s a huge fan…one of the sides is now cauterized and is permanently scarred…he kind of personifies the “crazy SLAYER fan” I guess…

How was the process (writing, recording, etc…) different between "Diabolus In Musica" and "Divine Intervention"?

- We used a different engineer this time and he was around for the entire recording so that was great… "Divine Intervention" had two different guys, one of which had never done a heavy metal album before…He was a really cool guy, very good engineer but he’d never done a metal record before so not everything turned out exactly how I would have liked it to…I wanted to bring something new to the band but I also wanted to maintain some of Dave’s (ex-drummer) momentum…this time, my tracks took a lot less time to lay down
and Rick Rubin was around for the whole recording…in and out of the studio but constantly in touch…it was great…

So how long before you guys get hair cuts and start writing ballads?

- When hell freezes over…do I look like Lars Ulrich?

If you could change something about the music industry, what would you change?

- So many things…the most glaring example though is probably the amount of control its holds over what gets heard…I think that the fact that MTV picks the “flavour of the week” is kind of irritating…rock and metal were big in the 80s and late 90s but now, they seem to have decided that rap is the big thing…and as a result, the music buyers follow suit…

What venue would you like to play the most?

- Having played Castle Donington, I guess I can’t really use that one but I’d definatley love to play the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum…it’s a bay area thing I guess…

Plans for the future?

- Tour and keep writing… hopefully get an album out before the new year…

"OR" questions

Rob Halford or Rob Zombie?
Rob Zombie

Boots or Shoes?
Shoes

Fascism or Communism?
Do I HAVE to pick?

Crunchy or Smooth?
Smooth

Beer or Liquor?
Beer

Ice Cream or Yogurt?
Yogurt

Black or Red?
Black

Standard or Automatic?
Automatic

Death or Taxes?
Death

Nuns or Cheerleaders?
Cheerleaders

Kerri King or Kerri Kendall (ex-Playboy model)
That’s not fair…