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

by Ferris, D. X.

  Slayer’s burgeoning reputation attracted other key allies. April 23, 1983 7-10, Slayer met one of their biggest fans.

  At the heart of Slayer was a hidden love story for the ages. As it turned out, the guy who would write “Necrophiliac” had a romantic streak. Kathryn Hanneman, Jeff’s longtime wife, recalled the story for Guitar World’s Jeff Kitts in his surprisingly tender account of Hanneman’s life and death7-11.

  Kathryn, then 15, was tired of going to the movies. She needed a new kind of fun. She was about to find it. She talked her father into letting her stay out late to attend a metal show at the Woodstock.

  With fewer than two dozen people in the audience, she was able to get a prime spot in front of the stage, in front of Hanneman. Hanneman had a girlfriend. But when the guitarist caught a look at the leggy, buxom blonde, he was moved to action.

  The guitarist kneeled on the lip of the stage, grabbed Kathryn’s hair, and kissed her.

  Rather than slug the stranger, she let the lip-lock continue, and they made out.

  Once Hanneman ditched his girlfriend, Jeff and Kathryn would be together for the rest of his life.

  Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1982”

  Chapter 8:

  Sign on the Axe and Show No Mercy: The Metal Blade Deal

  Released on Metal Massacre III in mid-1983, “Aggressive Perfector” was Slayer’s first formal recording. And it left Slagel salivating.

  Hanneman and King split the credits for music and lyrics. With a slow wind-up, the primitive version’s arrangement owes much to Metallica’s Metal Massacre cut.

  “The intro’s very similar to ‘Hit the Lights,’” observes King. “That’s what people do: You take your influences and do what they do. It’s how you can use it and make it sound different that makes it your own.”

  Slayer’s first song is close to the band’s mature sound — unlike Metallica’s first crack at recording, which is the audio equivalent of an awkward freshman’s photo from a high school yearbook.

  Slagel wanted more. At that point, the Metal Blade CEO had more experience than anyone else on the scene. And he showed more interest in the group. He wasn’t just after Slayer as a financial opportunity.

  “He was the boss,” says William Howell, a Metal Blade staffer during its formative years, now widely known as DJ Will, host of KNAC’s The Vault and That Metal Show’s studio DJ. “He was also the one who enjoyed the music, and still does — the headbanger-in-charge.”

  Slagel offered to both manage the band and sign them to his label — an proposition that was unconventional, but not unprecedented. They accepted. Tenacious and focused, Slagel knew his way around the music world. All the way around the world.

  “Brian had a lot of contacts,” says Howell. “He had the ability to forge those relationships and to have them lead toward staying in business. A lot of different bands, a lot of different magazines. Those were building blocks to continue to sign bands, put records out, and hope that fans will appreciate what comes out on the Metal Blade banner. Good business acumen.”

  The Slayer-Slagel team had two productive years. The band and their manager were learning as they went; some of them recall the time more fondly than others.

  At first, for Slayer, the Metal Blade deal was an opportunity, but not a payday. Slagel offered a short contract for a long-term commitment. Araya remembers it as a single piece of paper with just a couple of paragraphs. Slayer signed and locked themselves into a multi-album deal. Slagel took the lion’s share of the publishing rights, the most lucrative part of a record deal. And he would own Slayer’s master recordings for the label. (Locking down the masters and publishing is a common practice in the business.)

  “Now, he didn’t pay for the recordings, but because we signed a contract, we literally just kind of gave everything to him, trusting our manager,” said Araya. “And later on, you find you signed your publishing away to this guy.”

  King’s recollection of the arrangement is more generous.

  “You’ve got to put it in perspective,” he says. “We wanted to be bigger. [Slagel] made an offer to a band that had no offers, and we took it. I know Tom, in particular, to this day, has been bitter about it. To me, [Slagel] was just doing his job, being a businessman.”

  King and Hanneman remained friends with Slagel. After Hanneman took ill late in his life, Slagel was one of the few music people he kept in contact with.

  “He’s not really a bad guy,” Hanneman said of Slagel. “He’s like us: He was a young guy, he didn’t really know what he was doing. He says it’s his lawyer – his lawyer’s the one [that] drew up the contracts. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we signed them. He’s still getting paid writers fees for stuff me, Kerry, Tom wrote. He’s getting half of it. And it pisses you off because he didn’t write any of it.”

  In 1983, Slayer doubled their concert count from 1982, playing a dozen club shows over the year. Sets at the time were 100% original and — “Crionics” excepted — relentless, as documented on a hand-written set list from a July 6 show at the Troubadour8-1:

  EVIL

  AGGRESSIVE

  CRIONICS

  FINAL COMMAND

  ANTICHRIST

  BLACK MAGIC

  DIE BY SWORD

  FIGHT TILL DEATH

  SHOW NO FUCKIN MERCY

  By the time Metal Massacre III hit the streets, Slayer had already outgrown the rough recording. Live, the were a force to be reckoned with. An ad from that period bills the band as “THE HEAVIEST, FASTEST, AND LOUDEST BAND IN THE UNITED STATES!”8-2

  As summer ’83 drew to a close, Slayer’s 35-minute sets were a professional presentation. Tom’s brother John, who would made a career as one the band’s key technicians, was listed as one of the live sound engineers. Manager Steven Craig was listed as “lighting and special effects” in the band’s first album credits. During live shows, he got a workout.

  By now, Slayer’s Scorpions look was part of the past. The band hit the stage in Judas Priest-style studded leather armbands and vests. Whenever possible, the band used smoke and flashpots. In August, the band played the Woodstock three times, almost every week.

  On a video of the August 12 set, the room goes dark, and a intro tape plays of spooky music that’s somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne’s intro to “Mr. Crowley” and Crüe’s “In the Beginning,” with backward-masked moaning. As the white light rises, Araya takes the stage and immediately shouts, "THEY SAY WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO USE FIRE TONIGHT! YOU GUYS WANT FIRE? YOU GOT IT!"8-3

  In a red haze, the band explode into “Evil Has No Boundaries,” the giant upside-down pentagram glowing in the fog. The band burned through its pyro quickly.

  Compared to his later onstage persona, Araya is downright hyper during this show, and he pumps up the crowd from the first seconds. The frontman is wound up and moves as much as he ever would, racing behind Hanneman on stage right, climbing onto the drum riser, and raising his fist in a commanding manner.

  “WE ARE SLAYER!” he barks after “Evil.” “And you shan’t escape us! Because Hell knows no bounds!”

  A song latter, the singer has a succinct, similarly powerful intro: “WE ARE SLAYER! AND WE SHOW NOBODY NO FUCKIN’ MERCY!”

  Soon, Slayer would give the world the songs on wax. That fall, as the holidays approached, Slayer hit the studio.

  At that point, Slayer was a box-office draw, which was good: Even with the Metal Blade deal in place, the money hadn’t started rolling in. In fact, to start, Slayer sank deeper into the financial red.

  King’s dad and Araya — the only member with a full-time job — put up the money for Slayer to record the band’s debut, Show No Mercy. Slayer cut the album at Track Records in Hollywood, with engineer Bill Metoyer (W.A.S.P., Armored Saint, Lizzy Borden) behind the boards. Slayer self-produced, taking responsibility for the songs’ shape and content. Slagel claimed credit as executive producer.

  “Musically, I had never worked with a band like Slayer before,”
recalls Metoyer. “They were the fastest band I had ever recorded. As a recording engineer, working with a band this fast is the most difficult to make sound good! When a band is slower, it is easier to make every instrument distinct and give them their own sound. Slayer was so fast, it was difficult to capture their sound. The good thing is in the long run, people care much more about the songs than they do about how a record sounds.”

  When the group recorded its debut, most of the people in the room didn’t have much studio experience, so Slayer deferred to Slagel. Slagel, still a rookie, didn’t have much of a playbook to work from. When recording drum tracks, the rookie crew encountered some fundamental problems: The cymbals were bleeding into the other mics. Slagel had a solution: Just record the initial drum tracks without the cymbals, then add cymbals later.

  Gene Hoglan – the future Dark Angel/Death/Dethklok/Anthrax drummer and all-around percussion icon — was Lombardo’s drum tech at the time. He remembers watched Lombardo smashing away at the kit, air-drumming the cymbal crashes. It must have felt like playing with a missing limb, but Lombardo handled it well.

  “That’s got to be mentally taxing,” recalled Hoglan. “Like, ‘Welcome to your first album — here’s some boxing gloves to play drums with.’ Dave was such a fun guy, and I’m sure by the end of the first track, it stopped being fun.”

  Araya would later characterize the no-cymbal drum tracking as “one of Brian’s stupid ideas.”8-4 But the unusual solution worked.

  In its conception, Slayer’s first album was a near-even balance of contributions from Hanneman and King. For lyrics, they worked together on four songs, with Hanneman penning another four solo and King writing two others.

  They split musical credits on six songs, with Hanneman writing two by himself, and King another two.

  [Click here for album's full songwriting credits in Appendix B]

  Slayer’s debut launches with a full-frontal attack of power-drill riffs and squealing hot licks. In a half-formed version of his deep demon voice, Araya declares the young band more powerful than Lucifer, and he welcomes listeners to Slayer and its mission: “Blasting our way through the boundaries of Hell / No one can stop us tonight.”

  The record’s Satanic 1-2 salvo continues with “The Antichrist,” which was an incredibly edgy title by the era’s standards. Still playing a single-bass kit, Lombardo pushes along a mathematic riff. The guitar work is more adventurous but derivative in the Iron Maiden-indebted “Crionics,” a half-hearted bid for crossover that Araya came to hate. (“The Final Command” plays like a rewrite of Maiden’s “Transylvania.)

  “I was always a big Priest fan,” said King. “And at that point, probably a Maiden fan too. And it was up until Number of the Beast – that was the last one I really liked. The other ones, there’s some songs here and there… I think you see the influence so on the first album. ‘Crionics,’ that’s got a Maiden riff in it. But that was the first record, and you’re emulating your heroes. But after that first record, we were our own thing, period.”

  Hailing Satan’s might and underscoring it with baroque guitar flourishes, the band play like a cleaner version of Venom. The reverb-heavy production is dated, but “Die by the Sword” is still in the band’s set list, and “Metalstorm” kicked off shows on the band’s 2007 tour nearly 25 years later. The ten songs whiz by in just over half an hour.

  By modern standards, it’s also hard to appreciate how evil the album artwork seemed at the time. Craig, now billing himself as part of Platinum Management/Direction, took photos of the band and designed its pentagram-of-swords logo.

  The original cover art was a 3’ x 3’ painting by Lawrence R. Reed, also known as Larry Rydzewski, a former Marine who went on to paint cosmic spacescapes and posthumous portraits of John Wayne. Reed was the dad of Kevin Reed, a friend of the band who is listed among Slayer’s road crew in Show No Mercy. (A 2010 blog post by the elder Reed admonishes readers, “Rise Up Rise Up! against all evil on the Earth, and take back our Earth from all evil!”)8-5

  The original artwork vanished into King’s extensive Slayer archive, as have several pieces of original album art. Technically, it’s a collectible item, but it’s not exactly a masterpiece. Many a headbanger drew a better tableau on his high-school algebra notebook. On the cover, a humanoid figure with a flaming goat’s head, cloven hooves, and steel-studded wristbands wields a longsword, guarding the band’s pentagram logo. And though it looks hokey now, at the time, it was completely badass — as was the music.

  In 2001, King told Metal Hammer he looked back on the band’s debut fondly: “I listened to Show No Mercy the other day,” he said, “and it fucking rules.”

  It does. Show No Mercy was an instant landmark.

  In 1987, Don Kaye would rank the album as the no. 18 Thrash Metal Album of All Time (So Far) in the magazine special Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal’s. He wrote, “As crude and basic as Show No Mercy is compared to everything else Slayer has done, the album still packs a punch and was extreme at the time of its release.”8-7

  Slayer’s first album was a hybrid of the day’s extremes in style and content. And nothing on the Southern California scene could compete with it. At the time, Slayer seemed destined for their own little corner of the Abyss.

  “We loved them for the fact that nobody was ever going to be into this band,” recalled Hoglan. “The state of heavy metal at the time was that there was no heavy metal. There was cock-rock. There was poseur L.A. rock, and that was heavy metal to most people. Mötley Crüe had their little record, and Quiet Riot had just put Metal Health out. [Fans thought] ‘Slayer rules because nobody’s ever going to hear of these guys, because they’re way too heavy. They’re heavier than Motörhead, heavier than Venom, and people are stupid.’ Metallica had their style, and Megadeth came out with their style. Nobody was evil and brutal like Slayer.”

  Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1983”

  Chapter 9:

  Metal Moonlighting: Kerry King Joins Megadeth

  With one album under their studded belt, Slayer were feeling their way around — as a group, and as individuals. King strayed the furthest.

  In late 1983 and early ‘84, King took time for a brief apprenticeship with an experienced metal master.

  Late in ’83, King was honored to receive a call from Dave Mustaine, the show-stealing Metallica guitarist who had been unceremoniously fired. Metallica and Mustaine broke big in Northern California’s Bay Area scene, but they both had roots in the L.A. area.

  When Metallica scored a record deal, they fired Mustaine on the East Coast and sent him home on a bus. On the west coast, he formed Megadeth and embarked on a blood vendetta to crush his former bandmates.

  “I had the privilege of seeing Mustaine in Metallica, and he was an untouchable metal guitarist in the early days,” recalled King. “He was the show.”

  For time, Mustaine was the guitarists’ guitarist. King was blown away by his ability to shred without so much as a glance at his fingers.

  Mustaine and King both played B.C. Rich guitars. Mustaine told his Rich representative that his new squad needed a rhythm guitarist. The rep put the frontman in touch with King, who was a rising young prospect.

  “I was flattered,” said King.

  King — never one to idolize anybody lightly — saw it as a good learning opportunity and started moonlighting with the new band.

  Mustaine and his crew would build a multi-level plywood stage and paint it black at King’s house, hammering away as King’s parents were inside, mom cooking dinner, dad relaxing in his recliner, watching TV.

  “It was fun, and Kerry was so innocent,” Mustaine recalled for Guitar One in 2001. “His dad was a cop, and I can remember I went to his house, and his dad would call everybody ‘asshole,’ because that was one of the epithets of the L.A. County Sherriff's Department: You don't have a name, you're an ‘asshole,’ until you've been proven innocent, then you're just an ‘asshole, sir.’”9-1

  In early ’8
4, Megadeth were ready to make the eight-hour trek north to San Francisco. King did his part to plant the Megadeth flag deep in Metallica territory: He played the band’s first three shows February 15, 18, and 19, 19849-2. The rest of the frontline took the stage shirtless, but King — big hair teased to the max — covered his belly in a leather getup.

  “Kerry’s one of the greatest rhythm guitar players I’ve ever played with,” says Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson. “We hoped that Kerry was going to stay in the band. Especially because he’d just walk in and watch Dave play the riffs a couple times, then he’d put his hands on the neck, and he’d basically play the lick note-for-note perfectly. Kerry just understood metal so well. I think he was just a big writer, and he understood it from a composition point of view. He just got it.”

  Megadeth and Slayer crossed paths socially a few times over the years. Ellefson remembers King’s primary band as partiers, but not to the degree of some other locals, who fueled by cocaine and crank. Slayer kept their eyes on the prize, King especially. On the drive to San Francisco for the Megadeth shows, King had a headache, but refused to take aspirin.