Over the course of the 20th century, musical culture had drifted away from its roots in myth, magic, mysticism, and the martial tradition. Metal brought it back. Thrash was faster than everything that came before. It was heavier. It was louder. It was darker. Compared to party-hearty bands like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot, intricate thrash compositions felt closer to classical music.
In the mid-1980s, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax established the broad parameters of thrash metal. The bands were collectively known as “The Big Four” thrash bands. They weren’t always the genre’s most extreme acts, but in that golden age, they emerged as its most successful groups. Eventually, they headlined arena tours, and they put up platinum numbers. Three of the Big Four hailed from California. Over six decades, the state had invested in a thrash incubator.
In the early ’80s, Southern California’s emerging metal scene was built by suburban teens from outlying Los Angeles- and Orange Counties. Its stars weren’t old enough to legally drink. And they weren’t polished enough to play clubs. So Metallica, Slayer, and their pals worked at home, where they smelted metal into a new form, in Downey houses that were soon to be demolished. The blue-collar community had resisted the long-gestating Interstate 105 project tooth and nail.
The 105 had been on the drawing board since 1947. The interstate was intended to link the L.A. County suburb Norwalk and the Los Angeles International Airport. Plans finally came together in the late ’60s. The controversial first drafts cut a swath through numerous low-income neighborhoods, targeting thousands of homes, apartments and businesses for destruction. A class action lawsuit stopped progress in 1972. The lawsuit settled in 1979. Construction began in 1982. And the 105 opened to traffic in 1993 6-1. Ultimately, the $2.3 billion project displaced around 8,000 structures6-2, across nearly 6,400 parcels of land6-3. Between groundbreaking and completion, the multigenerational endeavor yielded some unexpected dividends and left deep marks in metal and punk.
Preparing for the freeway, the California department of transportation bought property after property. Between the time Caltrans cut the first check for a house and the start of demolition, the 17-mile stretch of eminent domain would become a playground of abandoned, condemned and doomed houses where metalheads could party and punks could squat.
(The latter scene of Mohawks and vacant homes was dramatized in Suburbia, a low-budget flick by Penelope Spheeris, who had directed the classic L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. Spheeris later chronicled hair metal in The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years, then spellbound America with longhair hijinks in the Wayne’s World movie. The Suburbia soundtrack featured D.I.’s “Richard Hung Himself,” which Slayer would record on the covers album Undisputed Attitude.)
The sites were also a nexus of bands who were locked in a friendly competition for the metal crown.
“It was great,” recalled Katon W. De Pena, frontman of underrated thrash also-rans Hirax, one of Metal Blade’s marquee acts in the early days. “It was a great time to be young and crazy. There was nobody to really police us, so we could just do whatever, because the houses were going to be torn down anyway. But some people held out in those areas as long as they could before they had to leave, like Metallica. We used to hang out at their house all the time. You heard metal 24/7.”
Before Cliff Burton joined the band, Metallica’s original bassist was Ron McGovney. McGovney’s parents owned four properties in Downey, and held on to them as long as he could. The family rented a row of three homes. And once the writing was on the wall, they let young Ron and his friend James Hetfield live in the middle house for free. McGovney and Hetfield turned the garage into a red-and-white practice space. And the house became the Metallica clubhouse. The 105 scene was an all-star metal rager6-4.
Before Slayer were musical stars, half the members were MVPs on the party circuit. Longhaired heshers would blast vinyl, pound beers and swill vodka into the small hours, until everything faded to black. It was a diverse scene. Araya was a regular, if not a pillar.
Araya clarifies that, though they spent time with other bands, they weren’t tight with them. Hanneman was more likely to bring over friends from Jordan High Panthers. (Hanneman played defensive end. “I’d be the guy who went after the quarterback,” he told Decibel in 20096-5.)
“You gotta get drunk, be young and stupid,” the singer says. “We’d just do just do what everyone else did: stand around and try to look cool.”
For the most part, Araya didn’t find it weird, hanging out with kids four years younger. But occasionally, a downside occurred to him.
“You never think about that until you’re in a situation like, ‘Fuck, I’m the oldest one here – I could get in trouble,’” recalled Araya.
Hanneman was around so much, he threatened to become a lumpy fixture. Walking upstairs at McGovney’s, you wouldn’t be surprised if you had to step over Hanneman, who was passed out on the staircase. Hanneman was the band’s party king, but Slayer’s actual King was absent.
“I’ve never known Kerry to be a party guy,” recalled De Pena. “He’s driven as hell. He bleeds Slayer blood, and I’m sure he goes to bed thinking about Slayer The ones that I remember partying most were Hanneman and Araya. The stories about Jeff Hanneman are legendary.”
King wouldn’t take his first drink until he was 21, and never used drugs. Since he skipped the parties, even scene regulars just knew him as a swaggering, cocksure figure at shows. But he was shy when pinned down one-on-one, hesitant to make eye contact. In either mode, he wasn’t as well-liked as Araya and Hanneman.
“I thought he was pompous jerk,” recalled De Pena. “But now, I totally get him, and I understand what he’s about. He’s one of the guys that I respect most in the music scene.”
Also absent was drummer Dave Lombardo, who was already sidelined with future wife, Teresa. She was two years older than Lombardo, but her brother had been in his class in elementary school. She caught Lombardo’s eye when shopping at K-Mart in Cudahy, California. At the time, the community was a seedy, small, trailer-park-dense city in Los Angeles county. Lombardo worked at the department store, often serving as a greeter at the courtesy desk. He didn’t always make a great impression. For some shifts, he would show up dead tired, with raccoon eyes from the makeup he wore at the previous night’s show. One day Teresa walked in, and he locked in on her. And their paths wouldn’t diverge for nearly 30 years. (The former Mrs. Lombardo’s name is most often transcribed as “Theresa,” but it’s “Teresa.”)
Teresa’s ongoing presence eventually became the greatest source of friction in the band’s 30-plus year history. The future Mrs. Lombardo saw Slayer play a party early its career. She was on hand for the band’s first club show. But she was no groupie or club rat. As Slayer’s renown for thrashing it up on and offstage grew, the Lombardo clique completely skipped the party scene. The drummer remained loyal to his number-one fan.
Recalled Lombardo, “We had our own party going on.”
Chapter 7:
Slayer Takes the Scene
From the start, Lombardo and Slayer were often on different pages. Araya, Hanneman, and King were the product of local public schools. Lombardo attended Catholic school until high school.
Slayer had played their first show Halloween, 1981 7-1, an afternoon show at South Gate Park Auditorium Battle of the Bands. Hanneman didn’t get much attention at home. But on stage, he did.
“I was nervous as fuck before we went on,” Hanneman recalled for Guitar World’s Randy Howard7-2. “But as soon as we started playing, I loved it, because I loved showing off. Once I got up there, I was like, ‘Yeah! This is great!’”
The all-cover set included “Rock the Nation” by Montrose, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star,” and if Hanneman recalled correctly, UFO’s “Lights Out.”7-3
When the aspiring musicians weren’t partying like rock stars, Slayer played shows wherever they could: high schools, house parties, and back alleys behind in
dustrial units, where they could unload their gear and plug in to an unprotected outlet.
Slayer hit the big time in June 1982, landing their first cover photo. It was part of a feature in South Gate High School’s Rambler. The student paper gave the band a vague review in a feature about a new program that let bands play lunchtime gigs Fridays — if no conflicting events were scheduled7-4.
“When we started, nobody liked us,” said King. “We just kept going, and people stuck around.”
After a year, the band graduated to club gigs at Costa Mesa’s Concert Factory and Anaheim’s bar the Woodstock Concert Theater, a middle ground for heshers from Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The graffiti-filled square room had overflowing toilets and a run-down ambience comparable to C.B.G.B.’s. In 1982, Slayer played a half-dozen or show club shows, all in California.
The members worked, scrimped, and stole to provide for the band. A miniature golf course was King’s last non-Slayer job. The boss told him to cut his hair, and King quit. Later, his dad would offer him an X-ray tech job at the Hitco plant, but Kerry wasn’t interested if he couldn’t take time off to tour. At King’s few retail jobs, he had demonstrated a knack for sticky fingers. When strapped for cash, King kept himself in the reptile game by shoplifting snakes.
As the band grew, the guitarists would use their kleptomaniac skills to assemble an impressive stage show. The group would raid local apartment complexes and steal big light bulbs for their lighting rig, screwdrivers in their pockets in case the lights had protective mesh. The band assembled an eight-foot inverted pentagram of white lights that straddled Lombardo, flashing behind him while they played.
As the band started to gig regularly, Lombardo was the first member to buckle. He didn’t just skip parties.
A year into the band, Lombardo forced the band to cancel a show at the URWA Hall, a former rubber workers’ union headquarters bands regularly rented. The hungry young group was forced to drop off the bill. Pissed that they couldn’t play, the rest of Slayer made a show of posting signs announcing that the band would be auditioning drummers.
The scuttled URWA gig was an isolated incident, but King never forgot or forgave it. To King, Slayer’s incredibly consistent history is a matter of his personal and professional pride. And the very few times members have dropped the ball — those are permanently stuck in his craw.
Between shows, the band’s headquarters was the garage at Tom Araya’s house, which was the Huntington Park midpoint between Lombardo and King’s parents’ houses. Nicknamed “The Club Horizon,” it was a gutted two-car structure that was soundproofed with fiberglass insulation, stuffed with amp stacks, plastered with rock posters, and lined with a wall-long mirror so the band could watch themselves headbang as they practiced.
“It’s a really good family,” says Cuellar. “Very close. The fact that the kids had the garage to play their metal music, I thought, was very big of the parents.”
The bigger the band got, the more time they spent in the garage. Eventually, Hanneman moved in for a spell.
“We were there every fuckin’ day,” said King. “And we’d rehearse. Jeff would play drums, and I’d play a riff or vice-versa. That’s how we came up with a lot of drum parts, believe it or not – not to take anything away from Dave.”
In a corner hung a homemade SLAYER banner with giant red letters on a white bed sheet. When the group bought new gear, they would set off flash pots inside. And after the canceled URWA show, there were fireworks in the driveway.
The next time the band met, they had a huge argument outside the garage. And it wouldn’t be the last one.
Lombardo laid it out: He was well within his rights to cancel: He was sick. He couldn’t play. If he played, he’d be sick longer. He needed to rest and get better. King didn’t think Lombardo understood his point of view.
“Like, ‘Dude, you don’t get it,” King told Lombardo in his sharp, matter-of-fact intonation. “We need a drummer that plays when he’s sick.’”
In a difference sense of the term, Lombardo was always a sick drummer, and Slayer was always a sick band. They didn’t arrive fully formed, but they always had it. On the club circuit, Slayer smoked competitors like Vermin, Tormentor, and Abattoir.
Early on, like Metallica, Slayer wowed crowds with spot-on cover songs. The band fleshed out set lists with tunes by Judas Priest, Deep Purple, and UFO. A highlight from early sets set was a jaw-dropping rendition of Iron Maiden’s “Phantom of the Opera.” They worked the covers out of the set by early 1983.
King’s vast Slayer archive contains cassettes of early shows, but Slayer cover sets have never surfaced on widespread bootlegs. They are Slayer collectors’ Unholy Grail.
Curious fans can get a taste of Slayer covers, though. In 2009, footage surfaced of Araya jamming with his brother John’s band, Bloodcum. Wearing tight jeans and a leather jacket, Tom sings Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill,”7-6 AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),”7-7 Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark,” and the Scorpions’ “Blackout.”7-8)
Slayer’s catalog quickly took form. Some songs crawled out of the primordial sludge and changed names as they evolved: An early version of the slamming New Wave of British Heavy Metal-spawned “The Final Command” was called “Blitzkrieg.” Early on, the proggy “Kill Again” was called “Warlock.” In its original form, “Crionics” had a slow, clean intro that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album.
Muddy bootlegs preserve some of the unreleased nuggets. “Night Rider” plays like an accelerated cover of a classic-rock tune, with sixty-second drum solo in the middle of the four-minute rocker. The centerpiece of “Simple Aggression” is hot-lick fretwork that demonstrates King’s love of Van Halen. At the heart of “Assassin” is a repetitive, rawkin’ riff that accelerates until the song sounds more like “The Antichrist.” With a razor-tipped riff that recalled Judas Priest, “The High Priestess” splits the difference between “Aggressive Perfector” and “The Final Command.”
Elements of “Ice Titan” survived in “Crionics” and “Altar of Sacrifice.” That cut is the only unreleased, pre-Show No Mercy song that would later see the light of day on the 2004 box set Soundtrack to the Apocalypse. That career retrospect culled the best Def Jam/American material, rare video, alternate versions, bonus cuts, and live versions. The band rerecorded “Aggressive Perfector” during the Reign in Blood sessions, making it the second pre-album cut to become part of the discography.
In the band’s recording days, as ever, Slayer were not prolific songwriters. The band’s unreleased songs amount to an EP worth of material.
While Slayer were hashing out original material like “Aggressive Perfector,” they were getting their look down, too. They played early shows in flashy shirts, big hair and tight pants. In photos from the earliest gigs, Hanneman poses in tight red leather pants and a purple-and-black zebra-stripe shirts. King wears a tight red and black shirt with a functionless chest flap.
December 1982 party flyer by Live Undead/Hell Awaits cover artist Albert Cuellar. Mimeographed on yellow paper. Address and map deliberately obscured for this presentation. Reproduced courtesy of Cuellar.
During shows, Hanneman, Araya, and King would form a straight row across the stage and – emulating Judas Priest – headbang in vicious synchronicity, eyes circled in black makeup, a hesher frontline for the ages. The choreography, raccoon eyes and spandex didn’t last long. King would later refer to those days as their “Scorpions phase.”
A December 1982 ad depicted the band it their spandex glory with the caption, “The heavy metal nightmare begins!” Hanneman looks more like Billy Idol than Matthias Jabs; inspired by his favorite punk musicians, he had shaved his head, and it was still growing in7-9.
Slayer’s flashy show and furious music caught the eye and ear of Brian Slagel, a record store clerk turned Kerrang! kolumnist and publisher of the New Heavy Metal Revue fanzine. He laun
ched Metal Blade Records – which is still a leading metal label – in 1980. Its first release was the Metal Massacre comp, which featured crunchy bands like Avatar, Bitch, Cirith Ungol, Malice, and Steeler, topped with “Hit the Lights,” the first recorded song by Metallica.
In Fall 1982, Slagel attended a club show by Metal Blade band Bitch. He had never seen the opening act, Slayer, before. His discriminating senses were overloaded.
“They were unbelievable live,” Slagel recalled. “They just had a certain intensity and magic on stage. They were heads and shoulders above the other bands. Then once they started to write songs, they were starting to write great metal songs as well.”
Reeling from the experience, Slagel went backstage, and talked to the band’s then-manager, Steven Craig. Slagel told Craig about the upcoming edition of his compilation series, Metal Massacre III.
Slagel got him some copies of Metal Massacre comps. King listened to the B-squad bands and thought, “Oh, I can do that.”
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 5