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

by Ferris, D. X.

  King’s self-described “pretty normal” family was a tight ship, and he learned to run one, too: His mother held together a household of two daughters and a son, the family’s youngest child. Mr. King worked swing shift as an aircraft-parts inspector. And for a spell, he held a part-time position as a sheriff. Officer King also dabbled in music. He passed down his Tobacco Sunburst Stratocaster to his son, and Kerry was on his way. After quitting ROTC, King began growing his hair and dedicated himself to the instrument. The former junior-military leader and athlete proved himself to be an apt talent scout and an uncompromising leader.

  When King needed brothers in arms, he turned to The Recycler, a weekly classified-ads publication that helped connect members of Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Mötley Crüe over the years. The paper led him to an audition for heavy classic rock band called Ledger at a local rehearsal spot. The group didn’t impress King. But he discovered some talent at the audition.

  On the way out, something caught King’s ear. He noticed the guy at the reception desk, a blond dude who was playing rough renditions of Def Leppard’s “Wasted” and tunes by AC/DC and Judas Priest — all songs that King liked4-2.

  "That's interesting," thought King.

  The kid’s playing was far from polished. He had only been playing two months, but King smelled talent. He stopped and talked. The rookie was Jeff Hanneman. The conversation went somewhere.

  The last of five children, Hanneman grew up with a hands-off parenting approach. A sister introduced him to Black Sabbath. And before long, he began to suspect music was his destiny. Even before he sung or played, he heard rock and roll calling his name. He couldn’t say why, but he knew he’d be in a band. So he headed down that path.

  “I just started hanging around a guy I went to school with who had a guitar,” Hanneman told me. “And I just started playing around, whatever. And I met a guy, and we were going to form a punk band. And my uncle or someone got me an electric guitar. And this guy was a total flake. He never practiced, and didn’t want to do anything.”

  Hanneman took his destiny into his own hands. He saved up $500 and bought a black Gibson Les Paul4-3 (which appears in early Slayer pictures).

  And that’s what he was picking away at when King overheard him. Hanneman had jammed with the guys King had come to see. Those sessions never led to anything. But when he talked to King, they both felt a spark.

  “I found out I had more in common with [King],” Hanneman recalled. “And he goes, ‘Want to start a band?’ And I’m like ‘Fuck yeah!”

  “Me and Jeff would hang out and see bands,” King recalled on the [Stone Cold] Steve Austin Show. “We saw Metallica at the Woodstock in Orange County…. We were blown away.… They were doing what we were doing, the way we wanted to do it…. Me and Jeff were six months apart in age. We were just like the same person.”

  Hanneman was a quick study. Before long, he was installed as Slayer’s co-lead guitarist. Hanneman would spend the rest of his life trading wailing leads with King. In 2004, Guitar World ranked the team as number 10 on its list of the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time.

  Drummer Dave Lombardo also wanted to be a rock star. Growing up, he was a member of the Kiss Army. After leaving Pius X Catholic high school, he began attending South Gate with King. After an ugly split with his band old band, Lombardo was a free agent. He delivered pizzas to pay for his growing drum kit. He had heard of Kerry King, a local kid who had both gear and skills. One day, he saw King in the yard, pulled over, and asked him about if he wanted to start a band.

  Envisioning a metal assault squad, the former Sergeant King told Hanneman, “I’ve got guys. I think we could be pretty cool.”4-5

  Slinging pies around the neighborhood, Lombardo frequently found himself at the Araya house. (It’s pronounced “ar-EYE-uh.”) It was home to seven siblings, and, thus, plenty of guests, including some musicians. Tom Araya, the middle kid, was a bassist and singer. His Top-40 cover band — Tradewinds, later called Quits — rehearsed in the family garage.

  Quits guitarist Russell Dismuke gave lessons on the side. Dismuke had no patience for books of charts. He just taught his kids to play. His golden-star student was Kerry King. Dismuke began teaching King to play songs from the Quits set list, grooming the rookie for a spot on the team.

  When King was still 16, Quits got a gig at Gazzarri’s, the Sunset Strip six-string sleaze pit that spawned Van Halen. Now, for the first time in his life, the squeaky-clean King needed doctored driver’s license.

  “I was the one guy that didn’t want a fake ID to drink,” explained King. “I wanted it so I could play.”

  Shortly after King met Araya, the band fired the singer. A few months later, when King decided to strike out on his own, he invited Araya to audition.

  King and his guys were still in high school. Araya could not only buy beer, but afford it. He was 22, working as a respiratory technician. After Araya completed a two-year program associate degree, his short but respectable run in the medical field made him the only member of Slayer to ever hold a full-time, working-stiff job.

  Bass in tow, Araya walked down the street to meet King and his crew at Lombardo’s garage. The singer was, on King’s instructions, ready to play 13 songs by hard-rock bands like Montrose, Deep Purple, and UFO. The set turned into one of the scenes so common in rock history: The songs sounded great. Everything gelled. And when the first practice was over, the players looked at each other and knew they had something. So the four members of Slayer saddled up for a long and bloody ride.

  Hanneman, King, and Lombardo graduated high school in 1981, and they had already found their lifelong vocation. They didn’t know it, but a metal gold rush was afoot.

  Chapter 5:

  Metalstorm: Meet Slayer

  In the early days, the individual members of Slayer’s classic lineup were a motley crew with little in common beyond their long hair. Well into the internet era, the men of Slayer existed nebulously, not as popular personalities, but as shadowy figures behind the scenes of a metal legend. Even when they were young men, they guarded their personal lives, either out of privacy or humility.

  Far later in their career, the men of Slayer can tell captivating stories when they feel like it — but they usually don’t feel like it. Hanneman hated interviews. Araya seems to cherish the ambiguity that crops up between his life’s work and his personal life. Lombardo’s outspokenness may have cost him his job. King is the most social member of the group, and while he’ll gladly talk about music or sports, his personal life exists behind a steel wall. The band have plenty of buds in the music business, but the people truly close to them are related, married, or on the payroll, with a strong incentive not to talk too much.

  If the band’s full story is ever going to emerge, they’ll need an incentive to tell it. But that’s not the kind of thing Araya or King are likely to do. Trying to extract detailed stories from the band is both frustrating and refreshing; at least they’re not the kind of self-important musician who will spin a long and boring tale about himself in the role the visionary hero. As Metal Hammer’s John Duke wrote around Seasons, “Slayer are perhaps the most enigmatic and opaque of all thrash bands.”5-1

  But the details we have — whether divulged or unearthed — are colorful ones.

  SLAYER, THE FACE: TOM ARAYA

  Slayer’s saga began on 6/6/61, when Araya was born in Viña del Mar, on the coast of Chile. When he was five, his large family moved to America. And by then, the serial-killer-obsessed singer had already died. When he was two or three, he dropped a toy car into a wash tub, bent over to retrieve it, fell in, and quietly drowned. Luckily, his wet little body was discovered in time, and he was successfully revived5-2.

  Araya, who has made a living singing lyrics like “Hail Satan,” hails from a devout Catholic family. Late in their lives, his parents became ministers in a charismatic branch of the faith.

  “I can separate the two,” Araya told Noisecreep’s Chris Epting in 201
25-3. “The band’s really good at what it does. A lot of the anti-religious stuff is written by Kerry. I hate to say it, but some of the stuff he writes is like, ‘Wow, this is going to piss people off. This is good. This is going to make somebody mad.’ There’s no room to judge. I’m not going to be the first one to throw stones. My type of Catholicism allows me to [accept other viewpoints].”

  Of the original Slaytanic quartet, Araya’s offstage personality is the most obscure. Within the context of the band, his instrument is also hidden in the mix.

  Araya grew up in the 1960s, listening to California radio. He didn’t dream of being famous, but did always want to be in a band. As a kid, he would hold a broom and played air guitar to Beatles songs. Then sisters’ friends brought over some Black Sabbath records5-4. Those he liked, but he remained partial to acts like Paul Simon, Black Oak Arkansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd until Iron Maiden showed him how far hard rock had evolved5-5.

  Still, over the course of his life, Araya has spent far more time listening to the Beatles than other metal bands. Behind the mic, especially in the early days, he was a hellaciously fast singer. But when the music stopped — especially after 1988 — he usually came off as a mellow soul, even when he was dressing down frenzied audiences for destroying a venue and stopping the show. Which happened frequently.

  “Tom was always a super, super, super good person,” says Albert Cuellar, a friend of the family who created Slayer’s Live Undead and Hell Awaits cover art. “You’d never think he’s the same guy that’s [singing about] summoning demons and necrophilia.”

  THE PULSING HEART: DAVE LOMBARDO

  Slayer is a multinational band. Despite its lyrical themes, they’re not Satanists, and certainly not Nazis. Born in Cuba, Lombardo also comes from a Catholic background.

  In the 1950s, as Communism took root in Cuba, the Lombardo parents sent Dave’s older siblings to school in America. They intended to join them in coming months. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the parents were stranded in Cuba. The kids were placed with a foster family in California. In Cuba, Communism crushed Mr. Lombardo’s business, and the pressure nearly led to a divorce. But when Dave’s mother became pregnant with him, they decided to stay together. Five years after their separation, they followed their children to sunny California5-6.

  Lombardo’s older siblings helped him discover music. When Dave was just a kid, his older brother would lay out a series of cardboard boxes, play Rolling Stones albums, put pencils in his hands, and tell him to drum5-7. He took to it.

  A dedicated family man, the hyper drummer is relaxed in conversation, but has a boundless ability to wind himself up about band business. Other times, he has a limited attention span — when he starts a song on his iPod, he’s unlikely to make it all the way through without moving to another tune.

  Early in Slayer’s career, Lombardo established himself as the group’s most talented player, and his public stock only rose in subsequent years. Regardless of his talent and renown, he was doomed to be the low man on Slayer’s totem pole, for as long as he could take it.

  Over the years, Lombardo frequently found himself on the losing end of arguments with King.

  THE CAPTAIN: KERRY KING

  Like the rest of the group, King isn’t introspective about himself or his art — he has more to say about next season’s defensive prospects for football teams he doesn’t even follow. He’s a lightning rod for fan criticism. When Lombardo was fired, the more outspoken factions of the fanbase blamed King, the band’s taskmaster. But in the music world, King is the band’s diplomat. And he still comes off as the kind of friendly, older metal dude you met in high school, who’s happy to do a shot and educate you about some of his favorite music.

  King has always been the band’s card-carrying metalhead, despite his background as a mathlete and military leader. Even his hobbies are metal: He’s a prolific breeder of snakes, and has also raised show-quality dogs. King has long served as Slayer’s driving force, captain, and disciplinarian — though he hates all externally imposed order, whether it’s political or religious.

  He loathes religion with a fervor traditionally reserved for people who suffered through years of Catholic school. But King’s experience with the Good Book was limited to a short stint in vacation Bible school one summer. He doesn’t remember the church’s Christian denomination. As Slayer songs like “Cult” demonstrate, King is the kind of atheist who won’t even acknowledge the possibility Jesus Christ existed as a historical figure — and certainly not a divine one.

  Much like Hanneman’s self-taught musical technique and the guitarists’ instinctive gravitation toward the diablous in musica convention, King’s worldview might be unschooled. But his instinctive philosophy parallels previous insights from acknowledged deep thinkers. Witness Voltaire’s spin on a phrase from 17th century philosopher Jean Meslier, a priest turned atheist: “The world will not be free until the last king is strangled with entrails of the last priest.”5-8 Now that is a 400-year-old Slayer lyric.

  King’s intractable philosophy encapsulates Slayer’s larger, career-long, atheist-existentialist thesis. The band’s message is antithetical to Christianity’s supposed central message of brotherly love and peace on earth: From Slayer’s point of view, humanity’s heart is black, and it pumps violence and destruction. As philosopher Norman O. Brown wrote, "Human history cannot be viewed as the unfolding of human love."5-9

  In Slayer’s world, Heaven might be a fantastic concept, but Hell is real. It’s not a flaming netherworld somewhere at the bottom of the universe. Hell is what happens when power grows unchecked. As depicted on Reign in Blood, Hell is Auschwitz.

  SPIRIT IN BLACK: JEFF HANNEMAN

  The reclusive Hanneman was the band’s history buff. His father, of German-American extraction, had served in World War II. Mr. Hanneman brought back a collection of Nazi memorabilia. When Hanneman discovered the keepsakes, they sparked a lifelong interest in the period.

  “I’m the war guy, ‘cause I’m already reading about war,” Hanneman told Decibel. “Tom chimes in with his devil and war stuff. It’s been that way since day one. Every now and then, I’ll tell Kerry, ‘Calm down with that anti-Jesus stuff. I don’t believe in God either, but it’d be nice to talk about something else for a change.’ He probably says the same about my war stuff.”5-10

  When Hanneman died, King recalled, “When Slayer played Russia for the first time — I think it was 1998 — Jeff and I went to one of Moscow's military museums. I'll never forget him walking around that place, looking at all of the tanks, weapons and other exhibits. He was like a kid on Christmas morning. But that was Jeff's thing, he knew so much about WW II history, he could have taught it in school."5-11

  Despite his impressive poetic ability and an active interest in history, Hanneman was far from an academic. As a growing teenager, he added metal, punk, women, drugs, video games, and alcohol to his list of interests. And after the band dropped drugs from their party plate, he never updated that list again. Hanneman probably wasn’t the only guy in metal with both Raiders and Dead Kennedys stickers on his guitars, but he’s the only one that comes to mind offhand.

  If you overlooked his pale skin, his laconic manner and dude-ly dialect would have suggested he was a surfer. He also had a belligerent streak. He told Kerrang! about an old romance that evoked his destructive side.

  “A girlfriend I had at the time was from a really rich family, and I wasn’t, so I was also going through this stupid class-envy thing,” he told Steffan Chirazi. “I’d take out her car and smash it into things for no reason. I’d look at the car and start thinking, ‘Goddammit, rich little — and BANG!”5-12

  Cars and tanks were integral to Hanneman’s identity. As a teen, he dabbled in auto theft, but his days behind the wheel were numbered5-13. After some DUI arrests, he surrendered his driver’s license, leaving King and Araya to chauffeur him to and from practices for years. Drinking was a priority for Hanneman. It may seem like a contradiction, but over the year
s, he became less and less of a party person, and more of a drinker.

  In the early ’80s, as metal grew heavier, those four dissimilar, competitive, performance-driven personalities were drawn together by a need for speed.

  RAD PHOTOS MADE POSSIBLE BY UNDERWRITERS LIKE…

  Chapter 6:

  Thrash Incubator

  The state of California didn’t just host the thrash metal revolution. It sponsored it, to the tune of $2.3 billion, via a project whose inadvertent results included a stronger version of metal.

  Southern California is place of contrasts, a sun-baked melting pot of religious Republicans, conservative businessmen, their rebellious kids, chill surfers, stoned hippies, belligerent rednecks, a handful of Latino cultures, an equally unhomogenous black population, other nationalities, and cornucopia of good-looking type-A personalities drawn there from all over the world. Given the weather and culture, the area is a fertile ground for gritty alternatives.