Since the previous Slayer album, the perception of Rubin as an absentee producer had begun to grow. Now Rubin had a growing roster of arena-marquee names like Mick Jagger and Tom Petty, and he could no longer spend every minute in the studio with every band on his label.
In 2000, Glenn Danzig would accuse Rubin of literally phoning in his work during the making of 1992’s Danzig III: How the Gods Kill. Danzig told Snap Pop!’s Doug Roemer: Late one night, Rubin called the studio, and said he wouldn’t be able to stop in, but asked the singer to play some songs over the phone28-3.
Not that Rubin had lost his touch: Shortly after the Danzig debacle, Rubin recruited Johnny Cash and recorded the classic American Recordings, a smoldering, unplugged album that stripped away decades of studio gloss and reestablished Cash as an American icon. Rubin’s first production credit, La Rock and Jazzy Jay’s “It’s Yours,” read “reduced by Rick Rubin. ” And — as it had on Reign in Blood — the minimal approach still worked.
When King speaks about the band’s relationship with Rubin, he usually creates the impression Rubin gradually lost interest in spending time with the band. But Araya told Decibel that Rubin actually wanted a greater role in the band’s creative process — and that created a rift.
“Seasons was the last time [Rubin] was in the studio with us,” Araya told Chris Dick. “He wanted more input on the music we wrote after Seasons. That’s when he started to butt heads with Kerry. That’s when things changed.”28-4
Rubin is still credited as executive producer on Divine Intervention, but the official production credit goes to Slayer.
The new name in these credits is Toby Wright, who is listed as co-producer, engineer, and mixer. Wright cut his teeth in a long discography including Dokken, Damn Yankees, and Tony! Toni! Tone! He had been an assistant engineer in the Metallica machine on …And Justice for All, the came into his own with Korn’s Follow the Leader and Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies. The sessions started, stopped, stalled, and restarted, but the album happened.
Divine Intervention’s credit counts read more like Seasons than Reign, which was still acknowledged as the band’s high-water mark.
Araya wrote four sets of lyrics by himself. The singer claimed a quarter-credit on the title track. And he collaborated with King on album closer “Mind Control.”
King pitched in on the title song and wrote another three sets of lyrics by himself.
After contributing to the title song, Hanneman wrote just one set of lyrics by himself: “SS-3,” a censuring career recap of Reinhard Heydrick, a Nazi official who was instrumental in the Holocaust. And on this album, that’s it for the author of “Angel of Death.”
Hanneman also wrote music for just one song by himself: “213,” named after an apartment number of prolific serial killer/necrophiliac/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.
King also dominates the musical credits, with five solo credits and four co-writes with Hanneman.
[Click here for album's full songwriting credits in Appendix B]
The Divine credits mark the first official appearance of the members’ individual publishing companies. King’s is Molosser Music, named after a breed of thick-necked, muscular dogs. Hanneman’s is Pennemunde, which shares a name with a North German village where the Third Reich developed rockets. Araya’s is SS810, a number that adorned the license plate of his Jeep. Bostaph’s is Retina.
The album’s big single was “Dittohead,” a reference to followers of right-wing talk-radio phenom Rush Limbaugh. The lyrics lean toward the conservative: “Anyone can be set free / On a technicality / Explain the law again to me…. Unimposing policy / No enforcing ministry / Gaping with judicial flaws / Watch a fading nation crawl.”
In the song’s video, footage alternates footage from two scenes: The band play a small room in an abandoned warehouse, with a batshit moshpit in progress. Outside, in scene reminiscent of the Palladium riot, fans run amok in the streets, arrive at the building, and knock holes in the wall to get inside.
Bostaph clicked with the band. King liked his attitude.
“He’s intricate, and he’s a perfectionist,” King told Metal Maniacs. “He goes out of his way to make sure every drum is in the right fuckin’ place, man. We’ll play a song 20 times because he heard one drum that was off or something…. We told him what we wanted, but he was always free to come up with something better.”28-5
“And he usually did,” added Araya.
Then and later, the rest of the lineup favorably compared Bostaph to Lombardo as contributing force within the unit.
“Paul had a lot to do with the albums he was on,” Araya told Peter Atkinson of KNAC.com, once Lombardo returned to the band. “He didn’t get much credit for anything, and he really had a lot to do with everything. When Divine was being put together, he helped a lot and didn’t get any real credit for any of that.”28-6
Reign wasn’t far from finished long when the band hit the studio. Since that album, the band had been saving more of the creative process for the last minute. For Divine, the band hammered the songs into their final shape in the studio. The muses weren’t visiting Hanneman, and the band finished the album through record amounts of elbow grease.
“I had ideas, and we had to sit through and try to compromise on an idea that would work well,” Araya told Metal Maniacs. “There was a lot of work that was done once we got [in the studio], especially with the melody lines. We had to really sit down and decide how we wanted them sung. And then finally once we had decided on something, we’d go back and write the whole song.”
“Then we had a couple of fucked up rhythm sections that we couldn’t fit words in to save our goddamned lives, but we worked it out,” added King. “It came out really good. It’s just that we didn’t fuckin’ nail that for anything.”28-7
On previous albums, Hanneman and Araya were the most talkative, followed by King, whose lethal armband made him the band's most visibly distinct member.
But when Slayer returned with Divine Intervention, King was doing more of the talking. After 1996’s punk covers album, Hanneman gradually faded out of the press itineraries. By 2001's God Hates Us All, even though Araya continued giving interviews, King was unofficially the group's spokesman.
This time out, Rolling Stone — then and still the rock magazine of record — felt better about Slayer. The venerable journal cozied up to the group with a four-star review of Divine Intervention that used words like “tropes” and connected it to the literary non-movement called splatter-punk.
“Musically, Divine Intervention is spectacular,” wrote Robert Palmer. “Guitarist Kerry King, perhaps the most distinctive guitar soloist in his chosen idiom, makes the instrument howl like the damned in his blitzkrieg feature spots and meshes with fellow guitarist Jeff Hanneman in a great, bracing clamor of sharply etched riffing, while bassist Tom Araya (also the group's hoarsely compelling vocalist) and drummer Paul Bostaph hammer the shifting metric and accent patterns with brutal finesse. Whatever else you may say about 'em, Slayer are one hell of a rock & roll band.”28-8
At the time, the metal press liked it, too. RIP’s Daina Darzin called it “classic Slayer — a punishing, eerie, transcendentally fast descent into the hell that is their willing subject matter.”28-9
“Slayer sound like they want to kill you,” declared Metal Hammer. “This is not only the metal album of the year, but probably of the next few years to come as well.”28-10
It didn’t age so well.
“It was a lot of people’s least favourite [sic] record,” King told the UK music magazine Metal Hammer in 1999. “Looking back now, I listened to that record, and I’m like, ‘This mix really sucks!... Where’s the guitar?... But I think it’s a great record.”28-11
At the time, the general knock on Divine Intervention was that it was a formulaic album, Slayer by the numbers: thrash riff, mechanical drum roll, throaty screams about an overrated God and overachieving serial killers, repeat.
And while that assessment generally hold
s true for the album’s first half, it darts off into a dark sky in its second half. Tunes like the title track sound like an artistically successful sequel to the “South of Heaven” style, winding clean guitar lines around gearwork double-bass drumming, machine-gun riffing, and howling-soul solos.
Slayer bang out some hooky grooves and riffery that prefigured nü metal. It’s an uneven effort at best: Songs like “Serenity in Murder” wobble from steady, crawling sludge to the frenetic lack of focus that marked “Chaos.” Bostaph plays like a metronome set to “murder,” but his steady double-bass work never quite achieves the menacing quality of Lombardo’s barely-controlled beast.
While Slayer had proudly boasted that South of Heaven wouldn’t be Reign in Blood part II, King repeatedly said Divine Intervention was a continuation of that style.
“The fact that a lot of people will probably refer to Divine Intervention as Reign in Blood II doesn’t bother me at all,” King told Guitar World in 1995. “Because [Reign] is my proudest moment.”28-12
Speaking to Borivoj Krgin, now writing for Metal Maniacs, King said fast material came easiest to him: “This is what I do best, so it’s kind of like getting back to basics, I guess.”28-13
Even if it’s not among the better collections of Slayer songs, the album is admirable for what it doesn’t do. Slayer had two golden opportunities to change their sound.
First, Slayer did not chase Metallica’s phenomenal success and try to cash in with a slick, hooky, spit-shined single.
“A lot of people were probably expecting us to do a Metallica thing and change directions, but we couldn’t do that,” King told Guitar World. “Our fans wouldn’t dig it.”28-14
Second, as many reviews noted, the band didn’t pursue a grunge-inspired redirection either.
“We do what we do, and we were going to keep doing it,” Araya told RIP’s Daina Darzin. “We’ll change and grow, but at our own pace. We’re not going to take a 10-step jump just so we can flood the market with our records and sell millions. We’re going to sell them on our own merit, not somebody else’s. People say Pantera and Sepultura, that they’ve gone above us because we’ve been away for so long. To me, it’s like, ‘Who the fuck cares?’ These bands are doing what we used to do.”28-15
There had been discussions about Slayer cashing in — but not ones that involved the actual band. The idea had been batted around the offices of the record company, which was now called simply “American Recordings.”
(Rubin hosted a funeral service for the once-hip term “Def,” with Al Sharpton presiding and lamenting the co-opted street lingo28-16.)
The discussions about a radio-ready Slayer were the last conversations of their kind.
"Divine Intervention, this was the last conference we ever had with a record label where they sat us down and sold us the idea of how they wanted to do Divine and how they were going to do this with the cover and all these different ideas for the album,” Araya told The Quietus in 2009. “Then one guy looked at us and said, ‘But we need a hit song.’ And we said, ‘But you've got eleven songs, and if you can't find a hit in one of them, then you're shit out of luck, because that's what we're giving you.’ So we're like saying to them, ‘Right, you write the fucking hit song and we'll record it.’ That shut the guy up and that was the last time we had any kind of meetings like that!”28-17
Divine Intervention contributed an unforgettable element to Slayer iconography: The CD and interior artwork present a picture of a fan who has carved SLAYER into his arm in pointy, angular letters.
Released the following year, the Live Intrusion home video captures the cutting. Wearing a Metallica Ride the Lightning T-shirt, the fan has written SLAYER onto his interior left forearm. A long, angled blade the size of a box cutter in his right hand, he slices along the lines, opening up letter-shaped cuts in his skin. When the wounds don’t flow to his satisfaction, he pokes the sharp blade into a dozen points in the red lines, making blood well up in crimson beads.
Carving SLAYER became part of the band’s legend, some of it suspect, some real. The “Serenity In Murder” EP cover art features a shirtless longhair with the band’s name sliced in eight-inch letters between his shoulder blades, blood trickling freely.
The “Serenity” single picture is fake, but the concept became a reality.
At the August 2006 Reading Festival in England, Day19 photographers Jeremy and Claire Weiss snapped an unforgettable picture of a fan with a real, even larger SLAYER carving from shoulder to shoulder. The image ran in full gory glory across two color pages in Spin magazine’s November 2006 issue. (The Weisses didn’t get the guy’s name, but assure us it’s real — unlike the popular image of a bald man with a bloody SLAYER Photoshopped across his rear scalp28-18.)
“Our fans are psycho, devoted fucks,” King told Spin. “But it’s hard to relate to that level of devotion. I mean, I wouldn’t do that for my wife!”28-19
In 2011, the theme became a meme when an image went viral. Inside the restroom of L.A. metal label based Southern Lord Records, a sign declared, “NOTICE: Employees Must Carve Slayer Into Forearm Before Returning to Work.” After the label tweeted a photo, several variations of the design popped up as stickers. Eventually, Slayer itself began selling not only stickers, but a metal road sign with the phrase.
Something had changed in Slayer’s visual presentation, too: When Slayer resurfaced for Divine, King’s head was shaved. And his ink collection was spreading; eventually, he would add tribal tattoos the length of his arm, plus a full-sized demon face on the back of his head. Along with Pantera’s Phil Anselmo and Anthrax’s Scott Ian, King’s new image pioneered a metal look for the next century: shaved head in the place of long hair, extreme beard optional.
“I shaved it, for no reason apart from wanting to do something different,” King told Metal Hammer’s Kirk Blows. “The tattoos… I thought about it for a couple months, because if you do it you’re stuck with it.”28-20
In the anemic mid-90s musical landscape, fans clamored for Slayer’s long-awaited return. The band finally crashed the Billboard top ten, debuting at no. 8 28-21
Released September 27, it was certified gold December 6, which made it the band’s fastest-moving album. Slayer’s future video releases would achieve gold & platinum status (which is lower for videos than albums). But as of this writing, Divine was the last Slayer album to receive Billboard metallurgical certification.
Slayer had a new drummer, and the family was growing. King has already married and divorced, but he would settle down eventually. Now Araya, the group’s final bachelor, married. The speed metal kings’ life in the fast lane was ending. The group weren’t throwing raging parties any more, but not all of them were living, clean, either. Hanneman in particular had his reasons.
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1994”
Chapter 29:
Hanneman’s World of Hurt
Hanneman had a good reason for making meager contributions to the album. The former athlete was suffering through some real physical problems. And playing hurt wasn’t easy. His arms ached. By tour’s end, it was agonizing.
Slayer’s Divine Intourvention ran between November 1994 and March 1995. The trek was booked in theaters and arenas worldwide, from Paris’ 6,700-capacity Zenith to Philadelphia’s 18,000-seat Forum. In New York, the band played a two-night stand at the 3,000-seat Roseland. After spring 1995 gigs in Australia and New Zealand, Slayer hit Tokyo and Honolulu on the way home. Aside from two European shows in August, Slayer’s year ended in April, after almost nine months on the road. The group had played around 45 shows in late 1994, followed by another 50 or so in early April.
By the time the relatively long tour wrapped, Hanneman’s arms were shot. An impressive 15 years into their career, Slayer still weren’t slowing down and — unlike many a metal band — they weren’t saving fast songs for strategic points in the set. For the band, performing was as demanding as ever. The set lists generally ran something like:
> 1. “Hell Awaits”
2. “The Antichrist”
3. “Spirit in Black”
4. “Mind Control”
5. “Die by the Sword
6. “Postmortem”
7. “Raining Blood”
8. “Altar of Sacrifice”
9. “Jesus Saves”
10. “213”
11. “Sex. Murder. Art.”
12. “Captor of Sin”
13. “Dead Skin Mask”
14. “Seasons in the Abyss”
15. “Mandatory Suicide “
16. “War Ensemble”
Encore:
17. “South of Heaven”
18. “Angel of Death”
Midway through the sets, after a sustained sprint, Hanneman needed to take a breather.
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 22