EXODUS/SLAYER guitarist GARY HOLT quits drinking alcohol: 'the booze has crept up on me'
17-06-2021
EXODUS and SLAYER guitarist Gary Holt has officially quit drinking alcohol. The 57-year-old musician announced his newfound sobriety in a social media post earlier today.
He wrote: “Day one for me, here I go. This last year has been one in which I’ve come to realize the drinking needs to go. Been a long party for me but it doesn’t feel like a party anymore. I’m not perfect and the booze has crept up on me. Here’s to feeling clear and lucid from here on out”.
Holt‘s decision to give up alcohol comes seven months after his wife Lisa revealed that she had quit drinking in 2012 after using alcohol since she was 13 years old. She also thanked her husband and credited him for making her “want to be a better person. I definitely wouldn’t have him or anything kick-ass in my life today if I hadn’t made this choice to quit drinking 8 years ago,” she wrote.
In Jon Wiederhorn‘s book “Raising Hell (Backstage Tales From The Lives Of Metal Legends)”, Holt reminisced about the lengths he and his onetime EXODUS bandmate Kirk Hammett (now in METALLICA) would go to nearly 40 years ago in order to get free alcohol.
“Near where we lived, we had a local liquor store called the Wagon Wheel that burned down,” Holt recalled. “We had nothing to do with that, but we waded through the burnt rubble of this condemned building, risking life and limb to get to the alcohol. The bottles with plastic caps were all melted. Kirk had this old Buick Skylark. We called it the Skymobile. And we filled his trunk with gallons of whiskey bottles with these black melted caps on them. We were scavengers. It’s part of what made EXODUS great, that hunger and ambition.”
Holt began filling in for SLAYER guitarist Jeff Hanneman at live shows in 2011, and became the band’s full-time co-guitarist as of 2013, while remaining a member of EXODUS. Holt played on SLAYER‘s final album, “Repentless”, which came out in 2015.
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