“The good old days in L.A.,” writes one YouTube commenter beneath the Real TV footage.
Writes another, “Awesome show.”
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1988”
Chapter 22:
The Cushion Riot Concert
The summer of ’88 ended with another bang. People who attended the band’s next big show describe it as a riot. It wasn’t quite one, and it certainly didn’t compare to the property damage and unrest at the Hollywood show. But it’s easy to understand why they recall it as a riot.
August 31, Slayer played New York City, the band’s home away from home. In the Big Apple, the group had graduated from multi-night stands in metal clubs. One of the tour’s bigger shows took place at New York City’s Felt Forum, a 5,000-capacity that’s part of the Madison Square Garden Complex. (It has since been renamed the Paramount, WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden, and the Theater at Madison Square Garden.)
The theater had a sprawling, general-admission floor area, with surrounding seating sections. The seats made it a memorable show for the ages.
Before the concert, radio ads featured a deep, exciting, monster-truck-event voice, who promised, “SLAYER… YOU CAN ALREADY FEEL THE GROUND SHAKING!... This is no namby-pamby rock and roll — this is SLAYER!”
The announcer was not exaggerating by much.
Going into the show, venue management expect a madhouse. They marshal a security force that could have quelled a conventional riot. But in the presence of Slayer, a distinct form of mass madness manifested.
Once again, Danzig was roundly booed. The band is supporting a truly great album, but Slayer fans truly show no mercy.
An anonymous account from the time claims NYC police stood shoulder-to-shoulder between the barricade and the stage before the show. But on a video of the concert, no police are visible. Eyewitnesses who were there don’t recall that kind of police presence, just regular Garden bouncers.
“It was '88,” remembers Howie Abrams, co-author of The Merciless Book of Metal Lists and former A&R rep for Warner Bros. and Roadrunner. “So as far as the ‘bigger’ venues go, the type of crowd reaction Slayer got must have freaked them out. They were clearly not ready for it, and this particular crowd was above and beyond!”
Fans decided they couldn’t wait for headlining band to start, and they started the action early.
“The barricade collapsed multiple times, including before Slayer even came on,” recalled Abrams. “And verbal attempts to get the crowd to cooperate with its repair fell on angry, deaf ears.”
Farther back, one fan ripped open his seat, tore open the foam cushion, and whizzed it across the crowd like a massive Frisbee. The idea went viral, and the air filled with white foam squares, like seagulls zooming over a beach. Other fans hurled gutted folding chairs.
“Eventually, Slayer came out and told us that if we didn't mellow out, they wouldn't be allowed to play,” notes the show review. “After a while, they came out and played one of the best shows (outside of a L'Amour show) I've ever seen. The pit was so fierce that night that everyone who was in it left bleeding and battered.”22-1
On this point, the review and the eyewitness agree.
“There was a sense of violence in the air from the minute I arrived at this show,” says Abrams. “It seemed as if half the crowd was on angel dust and just didn't give a fuck about their own safety, much less anyone else's. To this day, I don't recall seeing as many bloodied, passed-out and fucked-up kids in one building as I saw at this infamous show.”
Captured on a bootleg video, the concert is an unforgettable spectacle.
Slayer take the stage and rage in their longhaired glory. Nine-foot squares of Marshall amps flank Lombardo’s three-foot drum riser. Armless T-shirts expose wiry arms on Hanneman and King, and the guitarists shred in front of black walls.
Araya stays rooted, front and center, for the whole set. At either side of the stage, King and Hanneman headbang in place. Periodically, the guitarists casually stroll across the stage, switching places.
With a constant cluster of lights on Lombardo’s riser, the wafting special-effects smoke is a permanent cloud around the drummer, who looks like he’s playing atop a volcano.
And the crowd is a crater full of bubbling lava. By the third song, the pounding “Silent Scream,” the pit is spitting a constant flow of bodies onto the stage.
At the song’s climax, Araya screams, “Death / Is / Fucking you insane!” To his left, a shirtless longhair wearing fingerless gloves and leather vest leaps from the stage, onto the crowd. It’s so dense, he doesn’t go anywhere. He just crawls backward onto the stage, mashing heads and grinding his knees on surprised fans’ shoulders. When he reaches the stage, he jumps again. And this time, he swims away, torso buoyed by a tide of raised arms.
Deeper in the floor, four or five mosh pits break out in the convulsing mass of bodies.
Araya has to stop the show and plead with the crowd for a little respite. “I’m gonna ask you for your cooperation — I KNOW I’M ASKING FOR A LOT! I’m going to ask you for your cooperation, just once, OK?”
At least half a dozen bouncers are stationed across the stage, clustered at strategic points. They’ll hardly get a moment’s rest through the show. And this point, they could have used another dozen.
“We’ve got to straighten some of the shit that’s down here in the front,” Araya says, gesturing to the rapidly disappearing space between the stage and the crowd. The frazzled bouncers shuffle some hardware around, and the crush continues.
Slayer kick into the slower “At Dawn the Sleep,” Hanneman and King both stage right, headbanging in unison, at either side of a giant, bedazzled, inverted crucifix mounted on the Marshall wall. The crowd has subsided for now, but it doesn’t last. By the time the song reaches a crescendo and Araya chants, “Kill/Kill/KILL!” the crowd-stage overflow has resumed.
“You guys have to be one of the fuckin’ wildest bunches we’ve played for yet, man!” the singer barks after the song. “I take it there’s no taming the New York hardcore influence!”
In about 75 minutes, Slayer plow through 17 songs, playing at their tightest:
1. “South of Heaven”
2. “Raining Blood”
3. “Silent Scream”
4. “At Dawn They Sleep”
5. “Read Between the Lies”
6. “Fight Till Death”
7. “Mandatory Suicide”
8. “Kill Again”
9. “Behind the Crooked Cross”
10. “Postmortem”
11. “Reborn”
12. “Die By the Sword”
13. “Altar of Sacrifice”
14. “Jesus Saves”
15. “Chemical Warfare”
16. “Ghosts of War”
17. “Angel of Death”
Even on the bootleg, the performance and sound quality are more impressive than anything from the band’s official live album, 1991’s double-LP Decade of Aggression.
By the set’s penultimate song, “Chemical Warfare,” the entire floor area is a churning pit. The main set concludes with “Ghosts of War.”
For two tense minutes, the crowd surfing dies down. But deeper in the hall, the frenzy escalates.
“I began to see packs of kids with knives and other sharp objects running toward the back of the venue, where there were several rows of seats,” says Abrams.
The cushions keep coming. Once again, the air fills with whizzing white-foam squares.
Recalled Abrams, “It looked like it was snowing.”
Rather than milk the tension for an inevitable encore, Araya takes the stage and pleads with the crowd to settle down.
“Listen, man,” he says, chuckling. Under inadvertent assault by loyal fans, he issues some directions to the light crew: “Can we drop the spots, cuz I can’t see shit flying at me?!”
Alone in front of the pulsing crowd, the frontman continues: “Listen! I’ve been asked to infor
m you guys: Stop throwing these fuckin’ cushions around! You guys came here to have a good time, and you’re fuckin’ blowin’ it, bigtime, man!
“Listen, this isn’t me talking,” he continues. “This is common sense here, dudes! Fuckin’ A, come on! I know you’re here to have a good time — you’re having a good time. But fuck, man, why don’t you give us a break? Do me a favor? Leave the fuckin’ spots off. I can’t see shit flying! We can probably never play here again because of all this shit!”
And, after a killer “Angel of Death,” they never did play there again. Not that century. When they returned to New York in October, they were back in L’Amour, for a two-night stand.
Araya plays the final song with a bouncer stationed on his left, who spends the tune trying to catch or deflect flying foam. The studio version of the song runs 4:51, but the band finish it in 4:36 tonight, about 5% faster.
“Thank you, fuckin’ New York!” Araya shouts after the song. “Good night, assholes!”
Chapter 23:
Priest and Puke
After the W.A.S.P. fiasco, Slayer’s days as an opening act were almost over. For that era. Almost.
South of Heaven worked in some slower material, and Slayer’s lifestyle was decelerating, too. The band would be hard drinkers for years to come, but drugs exited the picture shortly after the band began making some money.
“Everybody reaches a crossroads,” said Araya. “And I remember looking at myself in the mirror one day and thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ And we faced that moment at an early point in this band. I just knew what I was doing wasn’t cool. Then I just stopped.”
In fall ’88, booze was still a fixture. In October, hair metal princes Cinderella dropped off a dozen shows opening up for Judas Priest. Slayer filled in on a run dubbed “The Mercenaries of Metal.” The arena concerts didn’t constitute an ideal match of bands, but King was excited to be on tour with his idols.
Slayer even got along with Priest’s crew. Uncharacteristically, the band had a little too much fun. At Hanneman’s public memorial service, King recalled an incident.
“I hold my liquor well,” King said. “I’m not usually a problem. This day, I was a problem”
King, Hanneman, and the band’s tour manager had been partying with the Priest crew. King, on this rare occasion, had too much to drink. Unable to drive, he and Hanneman piled into a the back seat of a rental car.
Before the drive even started, King felt queasy.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” he warned. “Don’t put me in the back seat.”
“No, you never throw up,” the driver said. “You’re fine.”
But if King says he’s going to do something, he does it.
A mile later, he still felt the uncontrollable urge. “Listen dude,” he said from the back. “I think there’s gonna be an episode here.”
“You’re fine,” the driver said. “You hold your liquor great.”
“I’m gonna tell you something,” said King. “I’m going to puke in this rent-a-car.”
At least he had a window seat.
King started to roll down his window. But child-resistant safety window only came down halfway. As the acidic puke surged forth, King tried to hurl out the window.
“It didn’t make it,” King recalled, laughing.
King rode along, puke on his chin, arm, and chest. At the time, he didn’t think it was funny. But Hanneman did.
Howling in the back seat, Hanneman looked at King and said, “Dude, that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen!”
King, pissed, didn’t agree: “Oh yeah?” he said and wiped it on him.
Hanneman just laughed more. And louder.
Smeared with King’s vomit, he looked at the his partner in crime and told King, “Dude, that’s the best thing EVER!”
Hanneman didn’t mind paying the price for a good time.
Concluded King, “He was stoked to have my puke on him because he had such a good time that day.”
King didn’t start drinking until he was 21. Drinking became a hobby for the late starter, but it became a habit for Hanneman.
Talking to Guitar World’s Jeff Kitts after Hanneman’s death, Lombardo remembered the guitarist as always having a can of Coors Light in his hand. So did King.
“Jeff and I always drank,” King told Kitts. “They called Steven Tyler and Joe Perry the Toxic Twins. We were the Drunk Brothers.”23-1
The mayhem didn’t end until the tour did. At the Dallas State Fair Coliseum, the triple bill of Slayer, Motörhead and Overkill drove the crowd into a frenzy the night after Thanksgiving. When fans started chucking heavy lengths of pipe onto the stage, Araya blew his cool and berated the crowd.
After the holidays, the band spent January 1989 in Europe headlining over Nuclear Assault and Overkill. Slayer were running hot, but the six-month tour ended abruptly, with 70 shows over 1988 — all of them in the fall — and under 20 in 1989. The band wouldn’t hit the road again for over a year.
Hanneman and Kathryn married that year, and the decade ended with one long, hard-earned vacation and honeymoon.
“Slayer had been touring continuously since the release of Show No Mercy in 1983,” says Lombardo. “We had reached a point where we were exhausted. We were comfortable with the money we had made and simply needed some time off.”
When the warlocks did reappear, they still had that old black magic.
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1989”
Chapter 24:
Seasons in the Abyss
Slayer’s frontline — and back line — held for the band’s third consecutive classic album. Season in the Abyss came together over the first half of 1990, with old friends, in familiar terrain. As with Reign and South, some of the sessions took place at Hit City West.
Over the disjointed sessions, more recording took place at Hollywood Sound, a haunt on Selma Avenue that Rubin became fond of, which hosted sessions for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute, the first System of a Down album, and Danzig’s debut. And it had welcomed the Jacksons, Belinda Carlisle, and Earth, Wind & Fire24-1.
The band also recorded at the L.A. location of the Record Plant, the site for sessions including Billy Joel’s Piano Man, Suicidal Tendencies’ Join the Army, and the Eagles’ On the Border. (King, a California native, is an Eagles fan24-2.)
When Slayer reconvened, the band was still the same four guys. Rubin is credited as producer. Wallace was slated to serve as the project’s producer, but by the time the sessions were was over, he was credited as co-producer, alongside Slayer. Wallace also received engineer and mixing credits.
“Working with Andy was almost like a supervisor,” Araya told me in 2010. “Rubin was almost the same thing. I’d ask Andy, ‘How’d that sound?’ He’d say, ‘Try it again, but do this.’ He just basically let us do what we did.”24-3
Carroll returned, unassisted, for the album art. The Seasons cover is an earthtone collage, a graveyard of raining skulls, towering tombstones, and inverted crosses.
The budget was higher, and Wallace had extra helping hands: assistant engineers Chris Rich (Wet Wet Wet), Allan Abramson (who would later work with Dio, Richard Marx and Guns N’ Roses), and David Tobocman (a Cher and LL Cool J engineer-keyboardist who worked his way out of rock and into film & TV music and garnered an Emmy nomination for the Nickelodeon series Robot and Monster’s “The Forgiveness Song”).
“It was like being in the pit at Indy,” Tobocman told me. “The band would finish a take, and I had to, as quick as humanly possible, spin off the current reel, get it back to its proper box, crack a new reel of tape, splice on some leader, spool it onto the machine, and locate it to the top of the reel. “24-4
And by now, Sales was a permanent part of the Slayer machine. Collectively, the organization sat down with Rubin and decided to make a run at the big time. Sales, Rubin, and Slayer renegotiated the band’s contract a long-term deal that would carry the band through its tenth album, two decades later.24-5
Seasons was Slayer’s first release for Def American. At the time, the songs’ lyric publishing was a split copyright between American Def Tune Inc. and the band’s Death’s Head Music. (Starting with this release, the band placed music first in the album credits, followed by lyrics.)
Hanneman and King, such cohesive collaborators on Reign, do not co-write any lyrics on Seasons. In retrospect, it’s odd that the “Drunk Brothers” didn’t work together more. But at this point, the band’s collective work didn’t suffer for it… much. The words to “Temptation” (lyrics by King) and “Hallowed Point” (lyrics by Araya and Hanneman) are unprecedented clunkers, but in the company of A-list songs like “War Ensemble” and “Seasons in the Abyss,” they didn’t seem like anything to worry about.
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 19