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

by Ferris, D. X.

  Unlike Hanneman, the drummer didn’t have the power to veto the art and commission a new draft. Cuellar added some muscles, but it still went to press with Dave as the least prominent figure.

  In future years, Cuellar worked on the Melvins’ “Bar-X The Rocking M” video. Frontman Buzz Osborne, Lombardo’s longtime bandmate in Fantômas, brought the artist and the drummer back into the same orbit. Cuellar’s work in the Slayer machine gave him brief but revealing look at the relationship between Lombardo and the rest of the group.

  “I never really saw the dynamic with them, but the fact that [Dave] left the band was telling,” says Cuellar. “He seemed friendlier than the other two I didn’t know — but it creates some camaraderie, wearing the K-Mart vest. He seemed like a force that they had harnessed — as opposed to [merely] another dude.”

  Cuellar freely acknowledges that he modeled the Live Undead cover around Wrightson’s images. He was a fan and had Wrightson’s comics in his library. But Cuellar notes that he wasn’t merely tracing: The background surrounding the zombies was all his, not to mention the details beyond the basic poses.

  “I was 19 years old,” explains Cuellar. “I was taking an art history class. And if you look at Renoir and all these artists, they use similar poses and similar images. I can flip through an art history book and show you artists who have done the same things: There is a thing called River God. There is a third century sculpture. And then you look at a drawing called Judgment of Paris that was done in 1520, and it’s got the same layout. And you look at Manet’s Luncheon in the Grass, and it uses exactly the same pose. Those are influences I saw. And I figured: This is what artists do; they emulate what is great. I’m not trying to defend my ignorance and my immaturity at the time, but… I know all about plagiarism and copying; this is more an homage.

  “The choices I made would have probably been different, had I been a little more mature,” continues Cuellar. “But unfortunately, that’s that. There’s a book called Fucked Up + Photocopied, which essentially people [taking] other people’s work and Xeroxing it. That was happening at the time, the idea of sampling.”

  If he recalled correctly, Metal Blade paid Cuellar a one-time fee of $600 for the cover. For an independent label and novice artist, it was a respectable payday.

  “It was more money than I’d ever made in my life, so that was awesome, just the satisfaction of having something in print,” says Cuellar. “I was extremely excited, A) because I got to do a cover, B) because it was a picture disc. That was huge for me.”

  At the time, Cuellar was married to a conservative born-again Christian. She wasn’t so happy about his biggest assignment to date. She didn’t mind taking the money, though.

  Recalled Cuellar: “I wanted them to make it $666 and see if she’d cash the check.”

  Slayer were happy with the artwork, too. Cuellar would return the next time Slayer needed a cover illustration.

  Regardless, Slayer’s first live release captures the group’s unstoppable steamroller force far better than 1991’s thin-sounding Decade of Aggression double LP. The live cuts improve on their studio counterparts. And the album was a compelling invitation to listeners who would face the decision whether to buy concert tickets.

  For fans worldwide who hadn’t witnessed Slayer’s live show yet, Live Undead introduced a staple of the concert experience: Araya’s between-song monologues and introductions. The singer was becoming renowned as a quotable onstage character. The Catholic former respiratory therapist was now a master of macabre ceremonies, a horror host like the Cryptkeeper. Fans memorized his between-song bits, quoted them, and shouted along in concert. Many of the raps wouldn’t change at all until well into the ’90s.

  As on Live Undead, before “Die By the Sword,” Araya would intone, “Some say the pen is mightier than the sword, but I say fuck the pen – ‘cuz you can diiiiie by the sword.” Sometimes at shows, fans could catch Araya slip and say “fuck the sword, ‘cuz you can die by the – fuck!” or “I say fuck the sword, ‘cuz you can die by the sword!”12-5

  And later, before “Necrophiliac,” Araya would extoll, in graphic detail, the joys of older women.

  “You know, the best part about ooooolder women is eating them out,” Araya would say, bringing every word up from his gut. “You can hear the maggots crunching between your teeth.”

  Over the years, the singer’s stage banter has mellowed.

  “It just seemed creative, trying to come up with things that will gross people out, something wicked and demonic to say,” explained Araya. “I’ve gone from conjuring demonic tales to ‘Thank you very much. We wrote a song about it; it goes something like this.’ Now it’s more down-to-earth stuff. People come up to me and tell me these quotes, like ‘You said that! That was so cool!’”

  King reserved the rights to veto the raps if they were slowing down the show.

  Over the course of 1984, Slayer played 60 shows all over North America. The band was getting around, and so were the records. All over the country, people were starting to take notice. Slayer’s early releases were respected, popular, and influential.

  In San Francisco, future High on Fire frontman Matt Pike bought Haunting the Chapel because, he figured, anything by a band called Slayer had to be good. He figured correctly.

  In Florida, Haunting the Chapel inspired a major player to make metal more extreme. Death mainman Chuck Schuldiner would tell Sentinel Steel’s Dennis Gulbe the EP was "life changing… That was some of the early stuff that gave me that push."12-6

  In Ohio, a young Brian Warner – who would later be achieve fame as Marilyn Manson and tour with Slayer in 2007 – bought the Live Undead picture disc at Quonset Hut record store, when he was still attending a Christian school. Once he had it home, the illustration of the undead band scared Manson so badly that he had his mother try to return it.

  “I’m not a big fan of a lot of heavy stuff,” Manson told Revolver’s Dan Epstein later, echoing a refrain that many a non-metal Slayer fan lets slip: “For me, it’s Slayer and Slayer only.”12-7

  And back in California, Slayer’s earliest diehard fans were growing into an excitable new breed. Even some of the band’s biggest supporters were surprised at the enthusiasm on display from the early Slaytanic Wehrmacht — the band’s fan club, whose title mashed up “Slayer” and “Satanic,” plus a nod to the Wehrmacht, the Third Reich armed forces.

  The Wehrmacht started developing its own rumors for the growing cult, such as the KISS-like whisper that SLAYER secretly stood for Satan Laughs As You Eternally Rot. That acronym became an official part of Slayer lore, finding its way into album art including Divine Intervention.

  “A band is just a band,” says Hoglan. “Even the Beatles. I think a lot of fans got more into the myth of Slayer more than the music itself. They just got into the whole, ‘What’s the heaviest thing on the planet? I’m going to like it and go to shows and be a complete mutant [and shout] ‘Slayyyyerrr!’ They like to tear their shirts off. To Slayer fans, nobody existed but Slayer.”

  Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1985”

  Chapter 13:

  Hell Awaits, and Hell Arrives

  Slayer’s mania-inducing momentum carried into the Hell Awaits period. Metal Blade unleashed the band’s second proper album in March 1985. This time around, a growing number of chefs made a more complicated mélange.

  Slagel stepped in for production credit. The album was recorded at Track Records with engineer Metoyer and Hollywood’s Eldorado with Ron Fair, then best known for producing Armored Saint, and later a president of Geffen Records.

  Hell Awaits is slathered in reverb, and even a 1993 digital remaster — a loose application of the term “remaster” — sounds like the album is playing over a cheap turntable with a tin tone arm.

  Slayer’s early albums might not sound great, but that’s how they sound, and that’s how they will remain. King has balked at the idea of re-recording new studio versions of the early material.

>   And a true remastering is impossible: Much of the Metal Blade archives were destroyed in a 1994 North Ridge earthquake that devastated the label’s storage facility. Slayer fans may consider it a loss, but even non-believers must admit: It’s cool that Slayer master recordings were annihilated in an event that is legally recognized as an Act of God.

  A mere seven tracks over 37 minutes, Hell Awaits is practically prog metal. (Show had ten tracks and ran 35 minutes, and later, Reign’s ten songs would barely last 28 full minutes.) The early musical influence from Venom and Iron Maiden has waned, and now the band are hopped up on Mercyful Fate. The Danish black-metal pioneers inspired Slayer to spill more blood and write longer songs.

  The album begins with backward-masked messages that, when played in reverse, feature demonic voices hissing, “Join us, join us.” Volume gradually builds, as does a chugging guitar riff.

  The songs are long, complex and tight — but the band is still in Venom’s black sway. The album’s nasty narratives are a graphic progression of violations. Track no. 2, “Kill Again,” follows a prolific, schizophrenic killer whose extensive body count includes a preacher’s only son.

  Araya sings as fast as Lombardo plays. During his most frantic blurting, the singer’s voice still pops into a higher register, an Araya convention that wouldn’t survive this second disc. On Reign, he would settle into a growl and improve his diction. Here, his lyrics blur together, and the first verse is entirely unintelligible until the chorus — a demonic, echoing roar of “HELL AWAITS!” The album’s leadoff vocals present inadvertent symbolism: in the thrashing chaos, only one thing is certain: eternal damnation.

  “Praise of Death” revisits the themes from “Kill Again,” graphically depicting a crank binge. Between two finger-shredding solos, Araya spits a metal verse for the ages: “Running and hunting and slashing and crushing and searching and seeing and stabbing and shooting and thrashing and smashing and burning, destroying and killing and bleeding and pleading then death.”

  Before Araya can catch his breath, he delivers a two-second bass solo, his instrument’s most prominent moment in the Slayer catalog. The instrument is usually lost in the mix.

  The bass guitar has never been a prominent part of the Slayer sound. In fact, in 30+ years of Slayer articles, the term “rhythm section” almost never appears. The music’s overall drive has always been rooted in the guitar and drums’ groove. The bass is not an inconsequential presence on the records — whether in early years, when Araya played on the albums, or in later years, when King recorded all bass. But regardless of how audible it is, delivering the bass for Slayer isn’t easy.

  Playing bass while singing, and — for most of his career — conducting circular headbanging is an impressive physical feat, regardless. Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson calls Araya “the Geddy Lee of thrash.”

  The material was complex, but getting it on tape was easy.

  “When I worked with Slayer we were all still pretty young,” recalls Metoyer. “Tom was close to my age. The rest of the guys were still kids. There was one session that the band all brought water pistols to the studio and they were running around squirting each other with water around all the very expensive equipment in the studio. As much as they would act like children with water fights and fart contests, when the record button was pushed, they were all business and never needed more than two takes to get anything right.”

  Hell Awaits is a drastically different album than Reign in Blood — but in some ways, it sounds like a dry run for their masterpiece, like they were overtraining for a fight. At the end of “At Dawn They Sleep,” Lombardo rolls a seven-second double-bass break that stands as an early attempt at the famous burst in “Angel of Death.”

  As with many a memorable moment, it began as a throwaway gesture, but other members of the band picked up on it. Lombardo double-kicked, and the guitarists thought it was worth repeating.

  “I used to do drum solos at that time,” said Lombardo. “And anything that stuck in Kerry or Jeff’s mind, [they’d say] ‘Why don’t you put that in the record? Why don’t you try that there?’ So they would feed off of my ideas, and pick off pieces like vultures.”

  Writing the album, the players very much worked as a team. Hanneman and King collaborated on one set of lyrics. Araya had contributed to Show Now Mercy. But here, he scored his first writing credits, having collaborated in with the guitarists on “At Dawn They Sleep” and “Crypts of Eternity.” King penned two songs by himself, as did Hanneman. The guitarists co-wrote the music for two songs. King wrote music for two, and Hanneman edged him out with three.

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

  Metoyer recalls the band being a partnership at the time — with the guitarists as first among equals.

  “Kerry and Jeff wrote the songs,” says Metoyer. “Therefore, I would rely on their opinions heavily when it came to everything. But I can’t say that anyone in the band stood out as the leader.

  After the gory onslaughts, the second song on side II, “Necrophiliac” dragged metal to infernal new lows. The lyrics read like a twisted, anarchic cinquain stretched between points of a lopsided pentagram. The song’s narrator manages to offend Satan himself.

  “Virgin child, now drained of life / Your soul cannot be free, not given the chance to rot in hell,” sneers Araya in one of the tamer passages. The narrator not only copulates with an underage corpse, but impregnates it. The damnable act instantly spawns a demon, attracting the notice of Lucifer himself. Then the First of the Fallen drags the defiler to Hell’s fiery depths. The Venom school of black metal may have plumbed darker, more graphic material over the years, but “Necrophiliac” stands as the era’s apex. “Over the top” or “O.T.T.” was a common positive descriptive term in the early days of thrash, and “Necrophiliac” is as O.T.T. as it got.

  “To me, Haunting the Chapel, Hell Awaits, they were the ultimate Slayer records,” says Pantera/Down singer Phil Anselmo. “And second, Reign in Blood. Early Slayer is the ultimate satanic band.”

  Over 25 years later, neither Slayer nor Venom is considered “black metal” by contemporary standards. At the time, Slayer could accurately be described as thrash-, speed-, black-, or death metal. Not that the group cared about the emerging subgenres.

  “There’s no competition between us and Venom or anyone else,” King told Metal Forces in 1985. “We don’t want to be black metal gods or anything stupid like that.”13-3

  A Kick Ass review of a June Slayer-Destruction show in Ludwigsburg, West Germany by Fred Ruttinger and Bob Muldowney praises that band as “US Masters of Death.”13-4

  Formed in 1983, California band Possessed coined the term “death metal.” As death split from thrash, it emerged as technically intricate, breakneck music that was preoccupied with mortality and the macabre. Hell Awaits did as much as any album to spark the genre.

  “One of their peaks for me was Hell Awaits,” Schuldiner — mastermind of Death and arguably the greatest death metal pioneer — told Sentinel Steel in 1997. “They were in their prime…. That was a pretty complex album. There were some trippy things going on for back then rhythm-wise definitely.”13-5

  Metoyer agreed: Slayer were entering uncharted territory.

  “In my opinion, every time Slayer recorded new material, they outshined what came before,” says the engineer. “Personally, I think Hell Awaits blew away everything that they had done.”

  Hanneman had the idea for a skeleton in a German war helmet. During the Live Undead brainstorming sessions, cover artist Albert Cuellar sketched these first versions of the Slaytanic Wehrmacht mascot. He also drew a more refined version that didn’t surface until Hell Awaits. Reproduced courtesy of Cuellar.

  Detail from Cuellar’s Hell Awaits cover. If the artist had final say on the Hell cover, it might have looked like this enlarged snippet from the actual album: just flames, no demons, no logo, no forms, all subliminal dread.

  After the band voted down Albert Cu
ellar’s idea for an all-flames Hell Awaits cover, the artist drew some demons and cut them out on this art board; note the size of the horns in contrast to his hand. Reproduced courtesy of Cuellar.

  Live Undead cover artist Albert Cuellar returned for the band’s second full album. He had a visionary idea for the cover art. But after a compromise with Hanneman, he finished the job with an unauthorized assist from one of the age’s greatest graphic artists.

  As with Show No Mercy, the Hell Awaits cover may seem cartoony now. But spread across a 12-inch record, the Stygian scene is a convincing vision of hell: Floating in fiery abyss, howling horned demons decapitate one doomed soul, claw another’s face, and pull the guts out of a third. At the time, the illustration was more striking than most horror movies.

  Like a rap song, it contained elements from other work.

  In 2011, Billoney of electric fanzine Bang Your Head or I’ll Rip It Off identified the piece’s roots: Key images are sourced from the illustrated short story “Approaching Centauri,” written by Philippe Druillet, with pictures by Jean Giraud, the iconic artist better known as Moebius, who contributed elements to Alien, The Empire Strikes Back, and Torn.