We found out last year that Slayer will reign one last time before calling it quits. And while there’s plenty of time to shed tears (from a lacerated sky!) before the band play their final show, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine has stated that he’d like to do at least one more Big Four show along with Anthrax and Metallica, He opened up to Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM about the 25% of the bands that might not be ready to do that just yet, and the answer probably won’t surprise you!
“I think if you asked the three of us that, our camps would probably say yes. If Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth all want to do it, and Metallica doesn’t, then what do we do? The Big Three? I’m sure that a lot of people would like to see that, and that may be what it is. You know, you may end up having it be the Big Three plus No. 5 if we have Exodus play with it.
But it’s not about just doing concerts for the sake of concerts. It was about the movement. It was about what we did together as a group.
Excluding Anthrax, we’re all like neighbors almost ’cause we all lived so close. It was just a half hour to an hour at at most between each other’s houses on the freeway. So, I think it would be great to do more Big Four stuff—do one in Japan. Do one in South America—we never did one in South America; we haven’t done one in Asia. Give the people an opportunity to see it before it goes away forever.”
Slayer still hasn’t given a timeline as to when their final show will be, and it seems like some of this might be conjecture. There hasn’t been any statement from Metallica about not playing with Slayer. In fact, if the last run of Slayer shows took place sometime, say, next year and were Big Four shows, they would probably sell out everywhere. However, even if it’s just Metallica with openers like Avenged Sevenfold and Volbeat, shows sell out, so it seems like they really don’t need the other three bands. We’ll see what Metallica says at some point in time, but Mustaine stoking the fire in public probably isn’t helping.