Exodus/Slayer Guitarist Gary Holt Talks Metallica Songwriting Credits, “I’m entitled to some money”

Gary Holt has a wild footnote to add to Metallica history. Part of “Creeping Death” is actually built on lyrics he originally wrote for Exodus. During an interview on the *Heavy Stories* podcast, Holt points back to Exodus’s 1983 demo “Die By His Hand” and notes that some of that wording quietly resurfaced on Metallica’s 1984 classic album, Ride the Lightning, joking that his old Bay Area friends now owe him for it.

“It’s Kirk’s riff, it’s my lyrics. I’ve never been credited, so yeah, that’ll tell you how I feel. I should get paid for that shit,
The song was ‘dying by his hand’ and they – James [Hetfield] – changed the line to ‘die by my hand’. You know, I mean, I’m entitled to some money, James. I’ll send you my bank info! It’ll be a fat check. But those are Kirk’s riffs and he was more than welcome to them. They were his. I had zero ownership of any of that.”

Holt’s ties to Kirk Hammett run long before Metallica: Hammett brought him into Exodus and gave him his first lessons.

“When I first met Kirk, we became immediate best friends. Shortly after we started hanging out, he asked, ‘Do you want to learn to play guitar?’ He taught me my first chords and a couple licks and I ran with it. He loaned me this piece of shit guitar. He had an extra one around the house. He owned two. One was his Gibson V and one was this Montgomery Ward’s guitar with the horrible action. It was terrible. But I learned how to play on it and six months later, they asked me to join Exodus.”

You can listen to the entire Gary Holt episode below.

(Around the 1:50 mark on the video)