Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography.

by Ferris, D. X.

  King has the ultimate treasure trove of Slayer artifacts; mere photos of his collection would make for the most kick-ass coffee-table book ever. Slayer’s management team employed ace photographer Andrew Stuart for the final decade of Hanneman’s life. And Kevin Estrada has taken official pictures for years. Both certainly have a book worth of striking images. (I tried to license some of Stuart’s breathtaking pictures from Hanneman’s final concert for this book, but the band is saving them for official use. I understand, and I can’t wait to see the images on a full-color page or posters, as large as possible.)

  Regardless, this account of Slayer’s years with Hanneman and Lombardo should illuminate one of the music business’ great tales of perseverance.

  When I wrote the previous book, Slayer’s rare distinction was its consistency: After some nasty splits, drummer Dave Lombardo had rejoined the band. His return reaffirmed Slayer’s existence as four unassuming California guys with a uniquely volatile chemistry in the studio, on stage, and off.

  The rock world has other great legacy groups. Teenagers may attend Rolling Stones concerts. They do not, apropos of nothing, stop what they’re doing and shout “FUCKIN’ STONES!” the way Slayer heads holler “FUCKIN’ SLAYER!” Twenty-somethings listen to U2, a band that’s older than they are. But rabid young people do not carve RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS into their flesh, as the occasional Slayer fanatic does to salute his favorite band. To quote Slayer’s longtime benefactor/producer Rick Rubin, “People lose their mind at Slayer gigs, and rightly so.”1-2

  Slayer and its fans manifest a phenomenon like no other.

  “There are no fair-weather Slayer fans,” observes KNAC/That Metal Show DJ Will Howell. “You’re in or you’re out. I don’t know anybody who’s just into Slayer for a year.”

  In the metal community, Slayer aren’t just icons. They’re role models.

  “Slayer’s definitely an inspiration to all metal bands,” says Testament guitarist Eric Peterson. “For us, we look up to them: ‘How do they do it?’”

  But Slayer now isn’t what Slayer was then. And it never will be again. Sadly, it can’t. Slayer isn’t who it used to be anymore.

  Still, Slayer remains the all-time quintessential heavy metal band. And metal, more than ever, is significant. The genre has established itself as a permanent part of popular culture. And Slayer are metal’s pre-eminent prophets of rage.

  Once maligned and marginalized, metal was assaulted by the United States government itself. It not only survived. Metal won.

  Metal is in there. Maybe the music itself won’t ever penetrate the collective consciousness of this fractured and niched-out age. But heavy metal has taken root. True metal. Not the party-rock/hair metal/hipster-approved bastardizations of the genre. We’re talking about the true heavy metal aesthetic.

  The Walking Dead is the most popular TV show, especially with the coveted 18-49 demographic. It’s a weekly drama set after a zombie apocalypse. On average, over 12 million people watch its first broadcast run alone. That’s like a Slayer album selling as many copies as the Eagles’ Hotel California.

  One of TV’s more beloved prestige dramas is the epic, medieval-style fantasy Game of Thrones. It’s about people who are slaves to power — some of them leatherclad, steel-wielding warriors. Pure metal. Star Trek: Into Darkness? Pierced people in gnarly outfits slugging it out all over the universe. Rather metal, I’d say.

  Take the CBS drama Under the Dome. In its first minutes, a cow is cut in half by an unseen, inexplicable force. Cattle mutilation. On TV. Metal.

  Television hosts four prime-time vampire shows. The phenomenal Twilight series — a saga about warring vampire and werewolf clans, which is plenty popular with teenage girls — was created by a Mormon woman. These horror tropes existed long before metal. But in decades past, they stalked the underground far from cheerleaders’ bedrooms, relegated to scary movies, gothic literature, and metal artwork. Metal subject matter has penetrated the national consciousness like never before.

  It’s true for the grownups. And it’s true for the kids. And it’s true for the geeks (please don’t read a negative connotation into the term “geeks”). As Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman put it: If the blockbuster Superman reboot Man of Steel were a piece of music, it would be a Metallica song1-3. We live in an age where technology and imagination have combined to give us 40 straight minutes of big American Superpunching. That is metal.

  Prime-slot TV features no fewer than four shows with plots centered on serial killers — not to mention overachiever criminals for whom killing is a business, not a hobby. Most Slayer albums don’t have that much content about mass-murderers. During season one of Hannibal, NBC censors objected to visible butt cracks, but not bloody butt cracks1-4. Standards & practices aren’t what they used to be.

  This creeping metal invasion is not just an aesthetic trend.

  If you don’t watch TV and you don’t spend double-digital dollars to see superhero flicks on the big screen, maybe you follow the news. America has been at war over a decade. World War I and II combined didn’t last this long.

  In 2012, military suicides outnumbered the number of troops killed in combat, with an average of one self-inflicted death every 17 hours, according to the Department of Defense1-5. Slayer wrote a Grammy-winning song about the depressing phenomenon on the Christ Illusion album, which was released in 2006, years before the count reached that all-time high.

  Large-scale carnage has become a reality of American life. In that regard, we’re just catching up to Europe and other less fortunate countries.

  It’s Slayer’s world, and we’re living in it.

  So step right up and read more about the kings of metal.

  It’s a good time to check in.

  Click here to Google search “early Slayer photos”

  Chapter 3:

  Postmortem

  or

  Hanneman Made the Difference

  “If you pass away and you know that you sang your song, you gave your gift… that is the greatest accomplishment that I could ever hope for anybody.… The playing of ferocious music is the healthiest release of anger for the performer of it. It is alchemy. It is a metamorphosis. It is turning something potentially destructive and a source of misery into something beautiful…. It is uplifting, and it brings people together.”

  — Flea, speaking about Cliff Burton and metal in general at Metallica’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum induction speech3-1

  Jeff Hanneman died.

  Shit.

  This is unacceptable.

  Slayer as we knew it is over. Even if the group is still playing, Slayer’s classic lineup is now part of rock and roll history, lost irrecoverably in the past.

  Drummer Dave Lombardo is no longer in the band, either. He departed and rejoined before. Twice. Still, Slayer soldiered on. Slayer was still Slayer, more or less.

  And the band may well be approximately what it used to be: a metal institution with a catalog that is as solid as it gets. Slayer Mk. II (or III or VII, depending how you count it) might even be relatively awesome on its own merits. But Slayer will never be who it used to be. And who it used to be, that is a big part of what made the classic lineup special.

  “By all accounts,” singer-bassist Tom Araya told Guitar World reporter Jeff Kitts after Hanneman passed, “he was the band.”3-2

  Hanneman was Slayer’s guitarist and co-founder. He died Thursday, May 2, 2013. Hanneman didn’t have the band’s most writing credits in recent years, but he surely had its best ones. The beginning and end of 1986’s landmark Reign in Blood album demonstrated a new potential for metal that has seldom, if ever, been matched in the many years since.

  The Reign in Blood lineup held together for 23 years of a 31-year run, with a big break in the middle. Still, the wonder of that four-man unit is that it represented a continuity. The same four people did a difficult thing better and longer than anybody else.

  Opinions are deeply divided on the non-Lombardo years
. While fans accept that diminished lineup as legitimate if regrettable, a mere minority rank those albums among Slayer’s better efforts — regardless of whether they prefer Divine Intervention to Diabolus in Musica, or how they feel about Undisputed Attitude.

  But now the Lombardo issue is muted. Whether the legendary drummer ever rejoins the band — be it on a ongoing basis or for a farewell tour — Hanneman cannot.

  As Rubin, Slayer’s longtime producer, wrote in statement that was read at Hanneman’s public memorial service: “Although he might have been the quietest member of the band personally, Jeff was the heart and soul musically.”

  Hanneman named the band. And in the early 80s, “Slayer” was one transgressive title.

  Hanneman wasn’t the band’s most skilled musician; he was a helluva player, but unlike King, he wasn’t the kind of guy who could sit down, watch Dave Mustaine play a lead once, and shred it back. As Hanneman put it in Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman’s exhaustive metal oral history, Louder Than Hell: “I used to be totally into Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and other shredders, and I tried to emulate what they did and really grow as a guitarist. Then I said, ‘I don’t think I’m that talented, but more important, I don’t care.’”3-3

  Hanneman also was the band’s second-best singer. No, he never sang on a Slayer album. But plenty of their classic tunes began as demos recorded in his bedroom, on which he sang embryonic versions of the lyrics. He was the frontman for Pap Smear, a short-lived side project with Dave Lombardo. If King never discovered Hanneman, he might have been a perfectly capable vocalist in a subterranean hardcore band like Dr. Know.

  Hanneman made the difference between Slayer being underground heroes like, say, Mercyful Fate or Exodus, and Slayer being Slayer, a Grammy-winning, iconic metal band with some crossover appeal.

  Hanneman’s punk ethos reshaped the Slayer sound early in the band’s career. Hanneman was the kind of guy who would bring a date to a party, then ditch her to watch the band and slamdance. As he told Kerrang!’s Steffan Chirazi in 1996, “[Hardcore] was true, honest, crazy, out of control, and I loved it.”3-4 And while Slayer’s punk influence waned over the years, Hanneman’s unconventional style formed a pillar that’s impossible to truly replace.

  Hanneman made Slayer’s songs tight. Punk and hardcore, for all their ferocity, chewed a hole directly down to the elemental level of how — and where — music affects you. Whether it’s metal, polka, punk, folk, or crossover, music with the right rhythm and velocity provokes a response that’s more than a feeling: It’s a call to action. If you can handle its rough edges, hardcore has a mutant strain of pop appeal. King, the band’s other major writer, grew up on traditional metal like Judas Priest, and he hated hardcore. Slayer’s second album, Hell Awaits, features seven-minute songs about vampires and demons.

  But Hanneman had a way of wearing down all who would resist him. After Hell, he convinced King that punkrock was good. Slayer’s next record, Reign in Blood, crammed ten songs into 29 minutes. Some people reasonably assume credit for that new sophistication belongs to producer Rick Rubin — a top-notch songsmith who later worked with Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other all-time greats. But that assumption is wrong: Reign’s music was written before Rubin arrived in California on a mission to sign Slayer.

  Without Hanneman, maybe Slayer would have kept writing six-minute epics about necrophilia. Without his morbid mind and top-shelf talent, we definitely wouldn’t have “Angel of Death” (lyrics and music by Hanneman) and “Raining Blood” (concept and music by Hanneman, lyrics by Hanneman and King). [See the Reign in Blood book for those tunes’ amazing origin stories.]

  Hanneman was an intuitive talent. Much of his unconventional technique was self-taught. A blond California longhair, he wasn’t the kind of guy who looked like he paid attention in English class. But he was the member of the band who used a thesaurus when he wrote. He’s the one who called bullshit on hokey, lame lyrics like “spit on your corpse.”

  His songs were poetic, but they weren’t slavishly bent to some prescribed, classical rhyme scheme. As a writer, and as a musician, and as a professional, he did what worked, and he ignored the rules. He had a hand in writing nine of the ten songs on Slayer’s signature album, 1986’s Reign in Blood.

  Hanneman even drummed. You can’t overstate Lombardo’s contributions to Slayer. But Hanneman would include skeletal drum structures when he delivered songs in demo form. (King sketches out drum parts too.) The unforgettable, mythic triple-thud knock that heralds “Raining Blood”? Hanneman wrote that. The classic funky, cymbal-riding intro to “Criminally Insane”? Hanneman wrote that beat, then gave it to Lombardo to flesh out.

  Your favorite Slayer songs probably started in Jeff’s bedroom. Hanneman recorded the first Reign in Blood demos at home, where he filled in the percussion parts with a drum machine. Not many metal dudes owned a drum machine in 1986. But they were standard issue for hip-hop musicians. And Hanneman was a rap fan.

  King is exactly the kind of metalhead who hated rap on general principle in the 1980s, when it was breaking big. Without Hanneman to vouch for the guy’s work, when Rubin showed up at Slayer’s practice spot, maybe the famously insular crew wouldn’t have felt so good about the stranger. And maybe Slayer wouldn’t have signed to Def Jam — which was strictly a hip-hop label at the time. Maybe they would have signed to Capitol and ended up a cult sensation like Testament or Death Angel.

  Reign in Blood was engineered by Andy Wallace, who mixed Nevermind, produced Jeff Buckley's Grace, and mixed Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy. According to Wallace, Kurt Cobain picked him because of his work on Reign in Blood.

  If Slayer wasn’t on Def Jam, they never would have connected with Wallace. And then maybe Nevermind wouldn’t have been quite so perfectly calibrated. So maybe the 1990s’ alternative revolution wouldn’t have happened.

  Hanneman wrote the music and lyrics for “Angel of Death” — maybe the most infamous metal song of all time. “Angel of Death” was a disapproving account of atrocities committed by Nazi surgeon Josef Mengele. Its point of view was largely objective, but it includes negative adjectives that tip the scales: “sickening ways to achieve the Holocaust” and “rancid Angel of Death flying free.” Historically, most people have overlooked those subtle qualifiers, even when they had a financial incentive not to.

  At the time, CBS-Columbia distributed Def Jam. Scared and offended by “Angel,” CBS refused to release the album. So Geffen Records distributed the disc instead. Now Def Jam owed CBS another album. So the label signed Public Enemy, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2013.

  Without Hanneman’s controversial song, Def Jam would not have needed to sign Public Enemy. Maybe PE would have signed to a label like Jive/RCA or 4th & B’way. KRS-ONE and Eric B & Rakim are all-time greats, but they’re not in the Rock Hall. Who you know — that makes a difference.

  Without Hanneman, there’s no "Raining Blood," which began in one of his nightmares. Rick Rubin, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Axl Rose, Andy Wallace. Hanneman made ripples that reverberated through the whole rock community. And beyond. Play Six (Six Six) Degrees of Jeff Hanneman, and you can connect to pretty much anybody. (Two moves will get you to Robert De Niro, three to Mario Puzo, four to Superman, four to F. Scott Fitzergerald.)

  Hanneman was not a social guy, and he wasn’t a self-promoter. So he wasn’t the most visible member of the band.

  But Jeff Hanneman is the reason we’re talking about Slayer.

  May he rest in peace.

  Chapter 4:

  Aggressive Perfectionist

  Slayer was Kerry King's idea. The guitarist could have done other things with his life. He had options. After Show No Mercy, King’s dad offered him a union job as an X-ray technician at Hitco, a company that made airplane parts. And given his eye for detail, he would have been good at it. But when he was a teenager, being in a successful rock group was the only idea that held his interest. And he made it happe
n.

  King had been a competent baseball player, but his talents only took him so far. He had been an award-winning math student, but when the game transitioned from trigonometry to calculus, he was left in the dust. He had been a star sergeant in South Gate’s junior ROTC program. But he decided he didn't like hard-assed military leadership, and he quit. Then he called his shot. King wanted to be in a band. His musical taste was all but set in steel by 1980.

  Heavy metal had been hanging in the air in California for years, waiting to be summoned by the right adepts. In 1966, when Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson had wanted to channel the elemental sound of fire, he produced the power chords and crushing beats of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” (later recorded as “Fire”). Metal manifested in John Densmore’s heavier drum rolls. And make no mistake: Van Halen was never a metal band, but metal as we know it wouldn’t exist without the godlike kings of guitars and groupies. (Van Halen’s debut is on King’s short list of near-perfect albums, alongside Sabbath’s Sabotage, Judas Priest’s Stained Class, and early Iron Maiden4-1.) As the 1980s crested, the members of Slayer fully tapped that artistic ether, and it flowed freely.