Decibel readers ranked the song #1 by a landslide in the magazine’s Top 50 Greatest Extreme Metal Riffs of All Time. Wrote Kory Grow, “The opening riff… is undeniably the most monumental moment in extreme music’s history.”
The Decibel piece also recounts Hanneman’s memories of writing the seismic riff. True to form, he didn’t have much to say about it. “I went, ‘This is kind of special. This is pretty good…. And Kerry was like, ‘So?’ And I’m like, [laughs], ‘Dude, ‘C’mon, this is cool!” Araya and Lombardo loved it, creating a 3-1 majority15-5.
Some great songs are not just catchy tunes. Some songs tap something so deep and elemental, you can feel them reverberating through the universe, like they’re channeling something that has always existed and always will. Possibly the most galvanizing moment in the history of heavy metal, "Raining Blood" is one of those all-time great compositions, its unforgettable hook deceptively simple. Like a Mozart melody, the music of “Raining Blood” is a striking look at the world from a unique soul’s perspective. They make some part of nature suddenly apparent to listeners, the new scene forever resonant, undiminished by the passage of time.
“Angel of Death” may close the sets and signal the five-minute warning until JägerTime begins. But “Raining Blood” is King’s favorite track from the album. And based on decades of visceral reactions, the fans agree.
“Wherever ‘Raining Blood’ comes in the set, it just electrifies the crowd,” said King. “People just shit when you hit the first few notes. Like, Jesus Christ, it’s just guitar – settle down!”
“Angel” is unforgettable for several reasons. Like Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White,” the song forever linked the band inextricably with whispers of white supremacy. And despite the subsequent 25 years of clarifications, the group’s visuals and the title of its fan club didn’t help the accusations stop.
Some fans interpret Slayer's fixation on Nazi imagery, history and personalities as a tacit endorsement of the evil empire and its lingering ideologies — but the band are ethnically diverse, and their social circles even moreso. The recurring themes are no juvenile obsession with a forbidden aesthetic; rather, they give Slayer's work a sociological, political, and historical subtext that is utterly absent in whatever erudite bands headlined last summer’s hot-ticket music festivals.
To outside observers, Reign stands as a thematically unified examination of the darkest corners of inhuman history. To the band, it wasn’t a grand statement. Witness this 2007 exchange between me and Kerry King, who wrote half the album:
Ferris: Hell Awaits is a big, scary album. But to me, Reign in Blood says something about the world.
King: We just got better.
Ferris: But, to you, is [Reign] about something?
King: No. None of our albums have been.
Ferris: You just look at it as: You wrote ten songs, and that’s what it is?
King: Yeah.
End of conversation.
I did manage to coax some great nuggets out of the band about the album, its inception, the recording, and the aftermath. But that quick back-and-forth demonstrates how Slayer work — and, just as importantly, how they don’t work.
Slayer did not create Reign in Blood by skipping around tra-la-la, sipping lattes, and discussing how to best disseminate dangerous ideas, reinvent the conversation about extreme music, and forge a bold new paradigm.
As artists working in a popular, performance-based arena, Slayer are athletes. They don’t conceptualize and agonize about what it all means. They practice. They play hard. When they have ideas, they carry them out by instinct. When they’re ready, they execute.
While it would be fascinating to discuss the band’s creative process in more detail, their core creativity doesn’t manifest through a process. Ideas for songs and riffs come to them. In earlier years, the songs arrived in something close to their final form. But as the years have gone on, it happens with less and less frequency. Craftsmanship certainly enters into it: If a song is just lying around in parts, they hammer the pieces together in the studio. And when an album’s worth of material is done, the band is done. Unless Slayer have a secret vault of unreleased material, the group have written and recorded with an efficiency comparable to Led Zeppelin, who had famously few leftover tracks.
For Reign in Blood, King sat in his room at his parents’ house, wrote, and jammed, with a cassette recorder rolling to capture the keepers. Hanneman read history books. Inspired, he recorded multitrack home demos on a cassette deck. Lombardo took basic rhythm outlines the guitarists came up with, and he embellished them into intricate tapestries.
Araya didn’t write lyrics for that album. The guitarists not only put words in his mouth, but dictated their delivery: Hanneman and King coached Araya in the studio, describing cadences for his vocals. At Hit City, Rubin would settle into a seat and absorb the music. He encouraged wilder leads, vetoed all reverb — or tried to — and gave a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on individual moments in a calm, firm, deep voice, declaring, “That is not cool.”
On Reign in Blood, Slayer’s creative workload balances nearly even between Hanneman and King. The axemen collaborated on three sets of lyrics: “Criminally Insane,” “Necrophobic,” and “Raining Blood.”
King wrote lyrics for five songs solo: “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Epidemic,” “Jesus Saves,” “Piece by Piece,” and “Reborn.” And Hanneman penned two by himself: “Angel of Death” and “Postmortem.”
They collaborated on music for four tracks: “Criminally Insane,” “Epidemic,” “Jesus Saves,” and “Necrophobic.” King wrote music for one by himself, “Piece by Piece.” And Hanneman wrote five: “Angel of Death,” “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Postmortem,” “Reborn,” and “Raining Blood.”
King and Hanneman co-penned some of the band’s signature lyrics, but their definitive collaboration wasn’t quite a co-write. The music was written before the band began recording, but the guitarists finished the lyrics at the last minute in the studio. Hanneman handed off the unfinished “Raining Blood” to King. King meditated on Hanneman’s authorial voice in the studio, thinking about the song’s supernatural scenario as he playing a tabletop Galaga game in the lobby. King dropped a quarter in, and the final verse began falling into place.
King supplied the album title. In a rare act of wordplay, he morphed “raining blood” to “reign in blood.” Araya passed out early cassettes of the album with “Raining Blood” handwritten on them.
[Click here for album's full songwriting credits in Appendix B]
Despite the album’s instant-classic status, the credits wouldn’t calibrate into a comparable Hanneman-King balance again until 2009’s World Painted Blood.
(In 1986, under their current deal, Reign’s lyrics & publishing were credited to Def Jam Music; later pressings saw the credits change to Death’s Head Music. As Araya recalled it, the band initially co-owned its master recordings with Def Jam, but later bought them back.)
Released earlier that year, Metallica’s Master of Puppets gets many of the votes for best mainstream thrash album. But those votes come from a different crowd who want to hear something different in their musical compositions. Compared to Reign, Master has two fewer songs and runs almost twice as long.
“At the time, we always listened to Metallica and Megadeth to see what they were doing,” Hanneman told Decibel’s J. Bennett in an in-depth account of the album’s creation. “But one thing about me and Kerry is we get bored of riffs really quick. We can’t drag the same thing over and over or do the same verses six times in a song. If we do a verse two or three times, we’re already bored with it.”15-6
While Metallica’s Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets may be larger records in terms of their sonic diversity, Reign in Blood crystallized metal at its extreme point. It’s pure, uncut thrash. No ballads. No soft moments. No colorful stained-glass production. It’s all sharp steel and dripping blood, racing forward, barely under control. Groundbreaking guita
r. Unforgettable vocal moments. Metal’s best lyric sheet. It was a game-changer. Metal musicianship would never be the same — especially percussion.
Lombardo’s greatest contribution to metal drumming is his pioneering deployment of the double-bass-drum roll. In “Angel of Death”’s seminal double-bass solo, Lombardo kicks his bass drums 28 times in two seconds. For a moment, the drummer’s feet are literally firing faster than an uzi15-7.
Def Jam released Reign in Blood October 7, 1986.
Reign in Blood didn’t singlehandedly accelerate speed metal. But it deserves a lot of credit for elevating the genre. Looking back, from the right perspective, Reign is one of the albums that divides the metal evolution timeline into before it and after.
“I think that album sticks out,” says Dan Lilker, a metal expert best known as bassist of Nuclear Assault, SOD, Anthrax, and numerous others. “If you had a chart, you’d see [speed metal] spike with that. It had more impact. It moved things along and kicked things up a notch. Dark Angel had come out with Darkness Descends in ’85 or ’86, and that was a tremendously intense album. Kreator had put out Pleasure to Kill, and that was a fast motherfuckin’ record. But by that time, Slayer had quite a following, so I think the popularity they had at the time made that record have more impact. When Reign in Blood came out, everybody bought it and went ‘Holy Fuck.’ Nuclear Assault, we were like, ‘Fuck, dude, we better speed the fuck up.’”
Reign integrated hardcore punk’s ferocity with classic rock’s musical proficiency, meeting at their midpoint to create metal’s new extreme standard. Fans embraced it on either side of the metal/punk divide — and far beyond.
The metal press hailed Reign as an instant classic. And eventually, the rest of the music media caught up.
Kerrang! gave it a perfect rating. Metal Forces scored it a 97 on a scale of 100. A year later, Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal would rank Reign as no. 1 on the Top 20 Thrash Metal Albums of All Time countdown. It remained part of the conversation. The August 2007 issue of Q would rank Reign as the no. 2 loudest album ever. Spin eventually ranked it at no. 67 on its list of 100 Greatest Albums, 1985-2005.
The disc crashed the Billboard chart November 15 1986, landing at no. 127. It stayed there 18 weeks, peaking at no. 94 on December 20. It was certified gold in 1992. Rick Sales, the band’s manager, says it has sold at least two million copies, but has never been certified because the band’s label has changed distributors so many times.
The chart spots weren’t at the top of the mountain, though Metal Mania’s Fabio Testa noted the modest success qualified the album as “one of the most publicly accepted underground statements in music history.”15-8
Reign was the work of a true dream team.
“Rick’s been totally great for us,” King told Gene Khoury in Metal Mania’s August 1987 issue. “And his guidance has given us a better position to deal with the business side of metal, which means the difference between success or failure.”15-9
Reign is still iconic. In 2013 alone, Metal Injection ranked it as the no. 7 Most Influential Heavy Metal Album of All Time15-10. (Note that the list is “influential,” not “greatest”; Slayer is harder to imitate than Sabbath or Pantera.)
L.A. Weekly not only dubbed it the Greatest L.A. Metal Album of All Time15-11, but the Greatest Metal Album in History15-12. And it’s an obligatory staple in pieces like L.A. Weekly and the Dallas Observer’s “Heavy Metal Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” (no. 1 and 4, respectively)15-13, 15-14.
And Hell was about to get hotter.
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1986”
Chapter 16:
Touring Blood
Dave Lombardo leaving Slayer is nothing new. He quit the band the first time in 1986, during the Reign in Blood tour. The dramatic trek around the country should have been a victory lap. It felt more like a series of trials.
While writing and recording Reign in Blood, Slayer had been a well-oiled machine, loud and harmonious. Collectively, the band had brushed their historical tensions aside.
Preoccupied with a new album and label, Slayer didn’t play a dozen shows between January and October 1986. But the Fall ’86 Reign in Pain tour brought Slayer more money and more problems. After a skimpy year for concerts, the band crammed in two dozen concerts between Halloween and December 8. The year’s total of 30 shows was not a high number for the group. But if Slayer had played more than that, the band might not have survived.
There was never question that Slayer would meet the challenges. But for a time, it looked like the group would emerge as a diminished force. They could have joined the legions of bands who made an amazing album, only to have the classic lineup split, and then continue on, forever diminished.
Touring Reign in Blood, Slayer would weather pickets, steal the show, bring the mosh pit to middle America, survive a death threat, and – temporarily — lose a member in the climax of a long-running conflict that could have ended in real bloodshed.
“Yeah, there were tensions,” recalled Lombardo. “They didn’t agree with [me] – I was losing. I didn’t care to unload my drums. I had other interests. And I don’t think they liked the fact that I was married.”
Lombardo barely made it to the tour. He orchestrated a power play within the organization. It failed miserably, briefly scarring Slayer’s reputation in the promised land of Europe. The drummer was lucky to exit the episode with his skin intact.
Work on Reign wrapped in March 1986. Slayer returned home and played just a handful of shows over the next few months, barely keeping busy before the album’s October release date.
In the fall, just before the Reign tour was scheduled to kick off, Slayer passed up an opportunity to fill in for the newly coronated kings of metal.
Metallica was riding high on the Master of Puppets, a disc one could argue as the best metal album of all time. “If they ever award a titanium album, it should go to Master of Puppets,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Tim Holmes16-1.
The rising stars released the disc and tore through the United States. Metallica were on the road in Sweden when bass god Cliff Burton was killed when the band’s bus wrecked September 27.
Metallica were scheduled to play a starring set at Holland’s Aardschok Festival October 26. With Metallica knocked out of commission, Aardschok’s booking agent reached out to Slayer to fill the slot.
Or, rather, the booker thought he was reaching out to Slayer. Like Rubin before him, the agent had managed to contact Lombardo. According to King’s 1987 account of the bizarre story in Metal Hammer16-2, Lombardo had been discussing the deal with the European parties, but not the rest of his band or their management.
In Europe, Slayer was announced as Aardschok’s replacement heshers, the headliners, the top of the bill. When word reached the group in America, it was news to Slayer. They never made the trip. King attributed the cancellation to a phenomenon that would plague Slayer over the years:
“Miscommunication with the booking agent who took things into his own hands with relaying anything to us,” King told Metal Hammer. “He was working with Dave, and Dave wouldn’t tell us a lot of things…. We weren’t ready to do a headlining show there, either.”16-3
Araya later said the decision had an emotional component, too. “We all felt it would have been a travesty to replace Metallica as billtoppers,” Araya told Metal Hammer’s John Duke later, in 1989. “We simply didn’t have the heart to do it.”16-4
But at the time, Kerry said the band just needed time to practice. He wasn’t going to take the stage unless the band had its steel sharpened and ready to slay.
“A lot of word was going around that we didn’t want to do it because Metallica couldn’t, which was bullshit,” King told Metal Hammer at the time, shortly before leaving their first UK tour. “We would have done it. We weren’t ready. All the money talks were misinterpretations too…. It was the agency that fucked it up. That’s why we don’t use that agency any more.”16-5
It wouldn’t be the
last time Lombardo interfered with a European festival.
Meanwhile, Slayer’s American agency had a tour lined up, ready to kick off November 1, after some warmup shows.
Chapter 17:
Blood in America
or
Love, Def Style
Tensions had been building between the band and Lombardo for years.
The drummer’s unsuccessful attempt to earn a voice in the band’s affairs pushed him further toward the margins.
In conversation 21 years later, Lombardo was the most contemplative member of the group. He has the air of a suburban dad who can dress you down without raising his voice. But you don’t rise to the top of metal drumming by being a chill guy all the time.
Said King, “He’s a caffeine head. He’s always ampin’. He can’t sit still. We call him A.D.Dave.”
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 14