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

by Ferris, D. X.

  After some coaxing, the singer gets a half-hearted shout for Christ. Doubtless, some fans went home, worried that the new album was “gonna be all about God and shit.” The uninformed reception had some parallels to the “Angel of Death” controversy: Without the proper context, newcomers knew simply that Slayer were writing songs about Auschwitz and Jesus. If Anthrax or Wayne Campbell had written “Jesus Saves,” they’d have added “(Not)” at the end.

  While in New York, Slayer hung around L’Amour several nights. One night, Overkill headlined, and Araya introduced the band. Before Overkill’s set, they watched the opening act, Whiplash, another Jersey band with a pretty good drummer.

  Slayer’s all-killer-no-filler sets from ’86 even sound impressive on unmixed bootlegs. The band rushed from song to song like a train picking up momentum — never had the “Black Sabbath at 45 RPM” cliché been so appropriate.

  But apparently, that diesel wasn’t running on all cylinders. As the tour moved East, miscues are buried in it all. King said Lombardo would regularly wander off point, which the rest of the band attributed to the drummer being distracted from fights with his wife.

  “And it winds up to the point where he wouldn’t perform his gig correctly,” recalled King. “Anything less than perfect is a waste of my time. I think about it as perpetuating the brand, so to speak. If you come through and you suck, those kids may not come to see you next time.”

  Hanneman and King roomed together, and would find themselves brewing and stewing, creating a drunken feedback loop of resentment toward the Lombardos. By the end of the first leg, the vat was boiling over.

  If tensions were high within the camp, outside, some real hatred was developing. Sales recalled religious groups picketing outside most venues, inspired by Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music Resource Center.

  Then, as Slayer’s Silver Eagle was cutting a swath through the country, Araya’s parents started receiving phone calls threatening Tom’s life. The calls kept coming. As December approached, the caller said he was going to kill Tom during Slayer’s two-night stand at New York City’s Ritz, a hall with a capacity around 1,500. Annoyance turned to concern, and the Arayas called Sales, who took it as a credible threat.

  Sales added extra security to the venue. Years before hand-held metal detectors were standard gear, security guards patted all audience members. They would report confiscating one gun.

  Sales also changed the protocol for the band’s arrival. The Ritz had an unusual entrance; bands would normally enter through front, coming in past the line. The tour manager set up a diversion, arranging for an empty limo – the band never used limos — to arrive while the band entered, climbing in up fire escape on the other side of building.

  Inside, extra plain-clothes security staff were positioned through venue, a Slaytanic Secret Service. Extra muscle was also onstage. With a hulking chief named Big Charlie front-and-center, a line of five burly bouncers dispatched stage-divers with ease, scooping them up and tossing them back into the lake of hair and leather.

  Slayer thrashed through the sets in a demonic fog. The shows went off without incident.

  As with the record company complications, management let the artists concentrate on their performance.

  “I didn’t know about it,” said Araya. “I just thought it was odd that we had this extra security around us. And then finally Rick Sales told me what was up.”

  The first leg of the Reign tour was done. But they weren’t home safe yet.

  Gallery 3: Slayer 1986 and 2009

  Slayer live, during the second show of a two-night stand in New York City’s Ritz, 7 December 1986. Left: Hanneman, playing a BC Rich Bich. Right: King and his first love: a BC Rich Mockingbird. Both axes fortified with note-bending Kahler whammy bars. Note Hanneman’s sleeveless Yngwie Malmsteen shirt. Photo by Georges Sulmers, one of Rubin’s informal rock department at Def Jam.

  Live at the Ritz, Araya front and center. Background: King. Photo by Sulmers.

  Live at the Ritz: Hanneman. Photo by Sulmers.

  Live at the Ritz: Hanneman shreds, showing some soul. Photo by Sulmers.

  Live at the Ritz: Hair flying, Lombardo thrashes his kit. Photo by Sulmers. The Ritz shows were his last before he left the band (the first time).

  Live at the Ritz: King sports a Venom tee and stubble. Photo by Sulmers.

  Flash forward 23 years: King at the 2009 Mayhem Festival. Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Photo by Johnny Angell Multimedia/Photography/Music Production, www.ClevelandFrequency.com.

  Hanneman, 1986. Salinas, California. Photo by Harald Oimoen.

  Hanneman, 2009. Mayhem Festival, Blossom Music Center, Ohio. Photo by Amy Weiser Photography, reproduced with permission. www.amyweiser.com

  Chapter 19:

  The First One of the Gang to Bail. And the New Guy.

  After the New York show and the death threats, the band faced a threat from within.

  “We had been noticing that Dave was becoming more withdrawn,” Araya told Gene Khoury in the August 1987 issue of Metal Mania, “not wanting to participate as much in band activities since he was more involved with his wife.”19-1

  King was achieving his lifelong goals. And so, he thought, was Lombardo. He couldn’t believe the drummer wasn’t ecstatic.

  “Dave announced one day at a band meeting that he wasn’t very happy with being in the band,” King told Khoury. “We asked Dave if he was sure that his feelings were this way, kind of prodding him to see if he was in another dimension.”19-2

  Rubin, now their acting manager, caught wind of the simmering tension. Before heading home for the holidays, the band cooled their heels in New York. Rubin reached out to the Lyor Cohen, the future Warner Music Group CEO.

  Cohen was a third right hand for Russell Simmons, Rubin’s partner in Def Jam. What Rubin was to Def Jam’s art, Cohen was to the label’s artist relations. As head of Simmons’ Rush Artist Management, he oversaw business, promotions, publicity, management, and day-to-day affairs on tours like the 1986 Raising Hell roadshow. He was another unlikely fit for Def Jam’s rag-tag band of street-smart movers and players. Cohen was Rubin’s doppelganger: an aggressive, white, Jewish college graduate with a punk past and hip-hop present.

  Cohen’s wealthy parents were from Israel, where his grandfather had been a general in the army. Cohen earned a business degree from University of Miami, then bounced to L.A., where he promoted shows by the Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  Running Rush, Cohen was able to bring a more formal structure to business at hand. As his clout grew, he would develop a reputation as a blustery ogre. But in the early days, he was the nice guy at Def Jam, the peacemaker, the negotiator. He defined conditions, terms, and issues. Cohen could bring people together, get them talking, find a neutral ground, and find a way everyone could make some money moving forward.

  As Cohen would become more involved in Def Jam, a rivalry would develop between the label’s resident college boys. But now, in December 1986, they were harmonious allies. Rubin turned to him for help with his boys. The producer arranged for a sit-down, with Cohen mediating.

  “That was a strange experience,” recalled King.

  Even with Cohen facilitating the conversation, it wasn’t so much a negotiation as an echo chamber. At the heart of it was the Lombardo family. Slayer didn’t want Teresa on the road. Lombardo did.

  “Every point we made, Dave would say, ‘Yeah that’s right,’” said King. “So Jeff and I would say, ‘So this is going to happen?’ And he’d agree with everything you said, but he’d say no. We’d make these points, ‘This is why we don’t want your wife here. So she’s not coming, right?’ [And Lombardo would say,] ‘No, she’s coming.’”

  The meeting was a qualified success: Lombardo agreed to remain in the group. And quit being a prick.

  “Everything was ironed out,” said Araya.

  Or so they thought.

  The truce didn’t last long. Slayer retu
rned home for the holidays. In California, their first meeting almost turned violent.

  Lombardo called the group and requested a meet at Slayer Central, the Araya garage, where the band still practiced.

  Lombardo thought it would get bad, and he was ready. He brought a knife with him, but left it in the car19-3.

  Adrenalin pumping, the high-strung drummer met the band in Araya’s driveway, and got right down to business: He was out. He quit.

  The rest of the band had seen it coming. Holding their poker faces, they decided to let him go without a fight.

  “It was like, ‘I thought we discussed this in New York,’” recalled Araya. “For me, it was more of a confusing moment. That was about it.”

  “They were like, ‘Oh, really, OK,’” Lombardo later told Metal Maniacs’ Borivoj Krgin. “It was like it didn’t even hurt them. They didn’t even say anything about it. They just went on with their lives. So that kind of, like, got to me.”19-4

  King, never a repository of Christian patience, had been pushed to the brink over the previous month. He was still furious about the Aardschok incident. After the painful negotiations in New York, Lombardo’s sudden resignation sent King over the edge. He decided living without Lombardo would be easier than having the same conversations every week.

  King and Hanneman started talking about where they were going to find a new drummer. Lombardo sat there, in stunned disbelief, listening to them talk, surprised to be outside the circle so quickly.

  After a couple minutes, he spoke: “You know what, you guys? This was easier than I expected. It was great. See ya.”

  “He got in the car and drove off,” remembered Araya. “And we just looked at each other like, ‘We need to find a drummer.’”

  With Lombardo gone, the rest of band were pissed, but mostly relieved. It had been a bloodless bloodletting.

  “It was a relief to us,” said King. “Like, ahhh. That’s over. Cool.”

  The Lombardo-versus-the-rest-of-Slayer conflict was a personal grievance with some business to fuel the fire. Lombardo would later admit the timing for his exit was bad. In fact, it was intentionally bad. Without cutting anybody, he got in a last stab.

  “That’s the way I believe anybody should work,” Lombardo explained to Metal Maniacs’ Borivoj Krgin in 1991, shortly before another split. “If you feel like anybody is taking advantage of you or doing the wrong thing, do anything you can to fuck them, and then let them sit there and realize what they did.”19-5

  Back at home and ready to relax, the band decided to let its new corporate backers handle this headache.

  “We called every drummer we could think of,” says Georges Sulmers, one of Rubin’s rock staffers at Def Jam. “And the list of people we auditioned is smaller than the list we called. The first question was always, ‘Who can play ‘Angel of Death’? And you went from there. And now, you can think of 40 people immediately. But [at the time]…”

  Def Jam’s three-man rock squad mobilized, making a list of every possible candidate they could think of. John Tempesta — the Anthrax drum tech and future Exodus/White Zombie drummer — didn’t bite. In New York City, Nuclear Assault’s Glenn Evans and Anthrax’s Charlie Benante were busy.

  Word got out quickly, and the team collected some audition tapes from both coasts. Sales recalled holding auditions in L.A. practice facility S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals). The cattle call wasn’t encouraging.

  “We had a room full of drummers,” recalled Sales. “It ran the gamut — people who heard what was going on, and they were bullshit. All they wanted to do was come in and jam, so they were horrible. They knew they were horrible. They knew they never had a chance of getting in the band. But they wanted to come in, jam a few songs with Slayer, and for the rest of their lives, they could walk around going, ‘I auditioned for the band.’”

  Between Slayer and Def Jam’s efforts, the best candidate was Tony “T.J.” Scaglione, the drummer from Whiplash, the band Slayer had seen open for Overkill at L’Amour that October.

  At the time, Whiplash was still pushing 1985’s Power and Pain, an early Roadrunner release with a cover that would have earned an A in a high school art class. Like Exodus’s Bonded by Blood, it’s a metal album about metal itself. The platter opens with “Stage Dive” and moves on to chunky tunes like “Power Thrashing Death” between some real cult classics like the brutal “I Spit on Your Grave.”

  (Discussing Slayer’s sophisticated lyrics, Hanneman would cite the phrase “spit on your corpse” as “bullshit” writing.)

  While it’s a good listen, it lacks the finesse and accessibility of varsity metal bands like, say, Overkill. At Metal Forces, Bernard Doe ranked it as his no. 18 album of the year. Mike Oxley placed it at no. 15 and eventually listed it as his no. 20 favorite for the decade19-6.

  Power and Pain is the kind of dirty thrash album that diehards will swear is two letter grades better than it actually is. A generous 2010 Encyclopaedia Metallum review written with a healthy dose of retrospect praises it as, “Dirty, distinct, and unforgiving. As far as East Coast thrash, Whiplash were certainly one of the best we had, blitzing alongside the better works of Anthrax, Nuclear Assault and Overkill, and leaving most of the rest completely in the dust.”19-7

  One evening, Scaglione got a call from a Def Jam staffer with a job offer. Scaglione couldn’t believe he was getting an invitation to the big show.

  “My initial thought was that one of my friends was playing a joke on me,” recalled Scaglione, who was just 18 at the time. “I said ‘Yeah right! If this is true then have one of the guys in the band call me directly.’”

  Five minutes later, Hanneman called, told him to learn all the Slayer catalog, and said they’d see him in L.A. in two weeks.

  After Christmas, Scaglione flew to L.A. King picked him up at the airport, took him to a hotel, and left him there.

  Scaglione waited for two days, watching TV and cramming. Practicing the material, he sat in front of the bed, pounding pillows with his sticks while the Slayer albums played on a tape recorder.

  Eventually, King picked Scaglione up and took him to the Araya garage.

  The band jammed an acapella version of the set. The auditioning drummer fumbled without vocal cues, but not too badly. Araya took Scaglione back to the hotel and let him sit for another day. They jammed again. This time, Scaglione held his own.

  “They said, ‘We’ve got this tour booked. Would you like to go on the road?’” says Scaglione. “I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, that would be great.”

  Scaglione says learning the most demanding body of work in metal over just two weeks wasn’t easy. To him, it wasn’t as involved as, say, Rush’s intricate, elaborate rhythms. Once he was in major-label metal’s most extreme band, playing 45-minute sets was, in many ways, easy than his time in lesser bands, who headlined bars and played three hours a night.

  “It’s not difficult drumming patterns, per se,” says Scaglione. “I think the key to it is the stamina aspect of it. Slayer was pretty much the fastest thing going at that point. The speed… The execution of it was probably the main hurdle. You can play a drum pattern or any rhythmic pattern slow, but to speed it up and play it accurately is a challenge.”

  As the tour went on, Slayer began to wonder whether their young replacement drummer was up to the challenge.

  Chapter 20:

  S.L.A.Y.E.R. vs. W.A.S.P.

  Slayer’s new drummer spent New Year’s Eve with the band, headed home, and packed, preparing for a busy January and February. Slayer were booked to spend two months opening for W.A.S.P., an L.A. metal band that was at its commercial apex. Its frontman had done his share to make the pentagram a part of metal iconography.

  Acronyized to represent “We Are Sexual Perverts,” W.A.S.P. was led by Blackie Lawless. Born in Staten Island in 1956, he briefly played with the late-era New York Dolls in 1975, filling in for Johnny Thunders while the band was managed by Sex Pistols hype-macher Malcolm McLaren. Lawless followed the Dolls’
Arthur Kane to Los Angeles, fronting the Killer Kane band as Blackie Goozeman.

  When Kane left, Lawless stayed in the city and formed Sister, a hard rock group credited as the first L.A. band to use of the inverted pentagram as a logo. Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx would do a stint in Sister, where Lawless would teach him how to set his leggings on fire. By 1982, permutations of Sister would gel into W.A.S.P. The awesome single was “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)” became a collectible sensation, thought it was omitted from the band’s self-titled 1984 debut, which positioned the band as an edgier alternative to Crüe.

  Right when Crüe went soft, W.AS.P. might have eclipsed the popular band in metal circles. But after 1985’s The Final Command went platinum, Lawless also went the glam route with 1986’s Inside the Electric Circus, which found the singer on the cover, painted up like an extra from Cats.