Tales From Tour: Slayer

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-We're Slayer.
-I'm Gary.
-[ Laughs ]
-I'm Gary! -Tom.
-Paul.
-And Kerry, and apparently, I'm starting.
[ Laughter ]
My story is from the first time we went to Europe on tour.
And this is just one I picked out.
There was a number of them, but this one's pretty good.
It was 1985, like, forever ago,
and we were in Amsterdam, and we played a show.
And for some reason, our "tour manager"...
-[ Laughs ]
-...who was cleaner than me, and I'm drug-free all my life.
But this dude, you know, he's clean,
and he's really just our friend
that's pretending to be a tour manager.
But anyway, after the show,
for some reason, he decides he's gonna try hash.
And he did.
He was freaking out in the office for awhile.
And then he just vaporizes.
He just disappeared,
and we looked all over the city for him.
And I'm thinking, "What am I gonna tell his mom?"
You know? 'Cause we were kids.
And we're looking up and down the streets,
walking every which way,
and we finally made the executive decision.
We had to leave him
'cause we had to get to the next town, so...
We pull up in -- I think the next place was Rotterdam,
and he's sitting outside, waiting for us.
[ Laughter ]
Turns out, he found an open car
and passed out in the back seat
and then got his own way to Rotterdam.
-I was gonna tell a different story,
but you just reminded me of a story
we were talking about the other day.
We were in Japan
and it was the first time I had been to Japan with the band
and he was there when it happened.
Kerry and I would go to Hard Rock Cafe there.
When we arrived in there, they had a basketball hoop
set up at the end of the inside of the building,
and I guess Magic Johnson's all stars were there
or something like that.
That was on the Divine Intervention tour,
so prior to that album,
Kerry and I roomed together in an apartment,
and we played basketball all the time.
So fast-forwarding to the Hard Rock Cafe incident.
Well, it began Magic Johnson's all stars were there.
So, Kerry and I were having a drink,
and one of the guys was getting ready to leave,
and so everybody eggs him on to take a free throw.
So this guy takes a free throw --
he's one of the all stars --
and it bounces off the rim,
and it comes bouncing over to me and Kerry,
and it lands at my feet.
Kerry's like, "Man, take a shot, man.
Take a shot."
So I'm like, "All right. Man, I got this," you know?
So I take a shot, and I always say this
when I tell the story --
There's two different kind of shots.
Mine is a high-archer, high arch.
Kerry throws a dart, and it goes in.
So I set up my shot. "I got this, man."
So I launched a shot,
and no sooner did I launch the shot,
we were around a group of all these people,
guys and ladies, whatever.
All of a sudden, this thing hit the bar.
I mean, it just crashed down
like a satellite coming from outer space,
and it, like, spilled drinks all over the place.
Well, apparently, my free-throw shot
hit a surveillance camera that was on the ceiling,
and it just came barreling down.
And I remember just standing there
just, like, not knowing what to do.
And Kerry's all, "Let's get out of here, man!"
But yeah, I was embarrassed as hell.
So, that happened.
[ Laughter ]
I never made the free throw, by the way.
-My best, I guess you'd call it family friendly story
involves my other band, Exodus, and my drummer, Tom Hunting.
Because everybody in a band knows what being oil-spotted is.
That's when the bus leaves, and you're not on it.
Most people, you know, they find out pretty quickly
they've been oil-spotted or you've oil-spotted someone,
and you turn around and go get them.
We stop at a Roy Rogers truck stop in the morning,
get off so people could use the bathroom,
buy snacks, whatever.
We get back on the bus,
and our tour manager does his usual head count.
He counts our drum tech, who's blond, as is Tom Hunting,
and then for some reason still unknown to this day,
Todd, his drum tech, goes and climbs in Tom's bunk.
And so the tour manager just peeks in the curtain,
sees a blond head, and he says, "All right,"
counts him, and we drive.
We drive to the next gig -- 8 hours.
And when we get there, of course,
he had to use a pay phone, called management
who called the venue and said Tom is at the truck stop.
And by the time -- We were discussing
putting him on a prop plane, like a crop duster,
and Tom, who's afraid of flying, wasn't even having that.
So basically, he sat at a Roy Rogers truck stop
for, I think, like, 16 hours with no money.
Like, I think he even only had, like, slippers on
'cause he went in to use the bathroom to drop a deuce.
And he was fed by some strangers.
-[ Laughs ] To drop a what? -Dude, drop a deuce.
-Some strangers bought him some, like, Arby's
out of the kindness of their heart.
Biggest oil-spotting I've ever heard of.
I don't know anybody who's been left someplace longer than that.
That's one of my favorites.
-Well, mine deals with the very first time we toured.
That was, like, in '84.
We had crossed into Canada, and we were in Montreal.
And this is a drinking one. It's a drinking story.
We actually sat down at a bar, and it was a 2-for-1,
and they were getting ready to close up,
so we bought a shit load of beer.
So we had all this beer on there,
and we're just pounding beers, pounding beers, pounding beers.
And it was cold, so it's snowing.
So we make our way outside, and I got ill.
I just had a belly full of beer,
so I just kind of walked out the front door
and turned my head.
It melted all the snow in front of the door.
[ Chuckles ]
And then we went walking.
We were walking back towards the hotel,
and there was a parking lot full of cars.
And I told everybody, "Hey, watch this. Watch this."
And I projectiled
about a good 6, 8 feet all over a car.
And Jeff was just laughing.
He goes, "Oh, do it over here! Do it over here!"
So I did it again on that one.
That's how much liquor I had in my body.
But that's my funny and gross tale.

Tales From Tour: Slayer

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