Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography.
Page 23
Something was off. When the new “Sex. Murder. Art.” was in the lineup, Hanneman had been stepping offstage, and Slayer had been playing it as a trio.
Hanneman’s stoic nature hid the fact that he was more fragile than any fans could have guessed. The most poignant account of Hanneman during the Divine Intervention period arrived after Hanneman’s death, from Machine Head frontman Rob Flynn (formerly of killer second-wave thrash band Vio-lence). Flynn witnessed something only those closest to the band knew: At the young age of 31, Hanneman was already suffering from arthritis.
For the last leg of the American tour, Machine Head and Biohazard opening shows. Flynn was a huge fan, but he wasn’t friends with the band. In fact, Machine Head had been on the receiving end of some criticism by King. King, who had once been an outspoken fan, had taken to slagging them as sellouts, accusing them of deliberately softening their sound. After some lively verbal exchanges, Hanneman mediated a truce between the bands. And one night, the guitarist let Flynn get a look inside the Slayer machine.
Recalled Flynn, “He had been sitting out some of the new songs from Divine [Intervention], which was odd to me.”
Finally, Flynn’s curiosity got the better of him. Before a show, Flynn found himself in Hanneman’s dressing room. Nervous, steeling his resolve, Flynn decided to ask Hanneman why he had been benching himself during the new material.
Hanneman laughed it off and told Flynn he “didn't feel like learning them, didn't like 'em, Kerry wrote them.’”
Then Hanneman quit chuckling. He looked at the ground, and the conversation turned serious.
“He said he'd been having a lot of pain in his wrists,” Flynn recalled. “His hands and wrists were going numb all the time, and would go numb during those songs because they were really fast.”
Then the unthinkable: Hanneman started crying.
“It was a startling confession,” Flynn recalled.
Flynn tried to come up with some kind of comment to make his hero feel better. It didn’t work.
Hanneman kept crying.
Flynn decided to respect the moment, and he remained in the room. The crying stopped, and a minute of silence meandered past as Hanneman regrouped.
Re-composed and surprised by the sudden sharing, Hanneman hugged Flynn and said "Whoa!”
Hanneman ended the episode and headed off toward the stage. Before he disappeared from Flynn’s sight, he turned back and said, "Thanks, dude.”
“It was an intense moment,” reflected Flynn. “One of those rare, intense moments you have with someone, let alone with someone from another band. It made me really respect the dude. That’s the Jeff I’m gonna remember.”29-1
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1995”
Chapter 30:
Divine Litigation
Slayer demonstrated an unsettling prescience inside Divine Intervention: The inner album art featured highlighted pictures of newspaper articles about music being blamed for violent crimes.
In March 1996, the corpse of a 15-year-old girl, Elyse Pahler, was found outside the California town San Luis Obispo. The investigation revealed that the girl had been murdered and sexually violated by three teenaged heavy metal fans.
Citing songs such as “Dead Skin Mask,” Pahler’s parents filed lawsuits against Slayer and associated record companies from the past and present, including Def Jam, Columbia, Sony Music and American30-1. The firm that brought the case was Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach. The legal eagles had taken on Exxon and successfully sued the R.J. Reynolds company for using the Joe Camel cartoon character to attract children to cigarettes30-2.
"This case isn't about art,” said David Pahler, the girl’s father, about the initial suit. “It's about marketing. Slayer and others in the industry have developed sophisticated strategies to sell death metal music to adolescent boys. They don't care whether the violent, misogynistic message in these lyrics causes children to do harmful things. They couldn't care less what their fans did to our daughter. All they care about is money."30-3
Later, they amended the complaint to include the art, claiming Slayer had knowingly distributed harmful material to minors.
Just short of Slayer’s 30th birthday, the Superior Court dismissed the suit and appeal, delivering a 14-page decision that read, in part, “Slayer lyrics are repulsive and profane. But they do not direct or instruct listeners to commit the acts that resulted in the vicious torture-murder of Elyse Pahler. And because Slayer lyrics cannot be found to have incited Elyse Pahler's murder, the music industry did not unlawfully aid and abet her killers, solicit their criminal acts or contribute to their delinquency.”30-4
Around that time, King repeated that his “Hail Satan!” stance was anti-Christian, not pro-devil.
"I've never been part of the Church of Satan," King told Michael Roberts of Westword Online. "I couldn't even get halfway through The Satanic Bible, because it's worded in a way that would make anyone think they were Satanists. It's propaganda bullshit."30-5
Chapter 31:
Hotly Disputed Attitude
Slayer explored its hardcore roots on 1996’s Undisputed Attitude, the band’s most divisive release.
Bostaph was itching to make diverse music, and he wanted to be a creative voice. Feeling limited, he told Slayer he quit. But he agreed to stick around for a second, final release.
“I knew we could kick it out a lot sooner than [an original] Slayer record,” King told interview website Toazted. “And I knew we were going to have to replace drummers. So it fit in: We can do a product really quick, get it out, and stay in the public eye.”31-1
For once, Slayer took a page from Metallica’s playbook. They decided to bang out a covers album. The band conceived it as a more diverse set than the record that eventually developed.
“Undisputed Attitude was supposed to be a collection of everything that molded Slayer into what Slayer was,” King told Vice in 2011. “But in the context of the punk songs it didn't really make sense. We were working on ‘Gates of Babylon’ from Rainbow, ‘Burn’ by Deep Purple... In the context of the thrash style, instead of punk doing metal, it was metal doing punk, so it kinda gave it more focus, and they were so fucking edgy it made all the other ones sound stupid.”
Araya told Midwest Metal Magazine they wanted to try a brooding Doors song like “When the Music’s Over” or “Five to One.” But they couldn’t make those songs work either.
On paper, the classic rock was a good match. Back in 1988, Slayer had nailed Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on Def Jam’s Less Than Zero soundtrack, which was heavy on cover songs. By ’96, the classic rock spirit had left them. In 2002, they took another stab at the genre, covering Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” in midtempo Slayer mode, changing the lyrics to “a true metal child.” They completed the song and released it on the covers-heavy comp NASCAR: Crank It Up. It’s heavy, but the unpolished, half-hearted track lacks the heartfelt menace of their three-minute abbreviation of the Iron Butterfly tune. While it’s intriguing to imagine Slayer covering the Doors, the Steppenwolf song suggests they made the right decision to tackle some punk tunes instead.
King later told Toazted the band had considered covering California icons from the opposite end of the musical spectrum: hardcore heroes the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. King said the band practiced the DKs’ “Forward to Death,” but its “corny” melody grated on Araya. And Black Flag’s morose vibe and jazzy time signatures didn’t quite match Slayer’s musical style — though Araya later aced Flag’s “Revenge,” singing it with the Rollins Band on the 2002 benefit album Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three.
Another iconic punk band that didn’t make the cut was the Misfits. Unlike Metallica — who made Misfits songs “Last Caress” and “Green Hell” a highlight of their 1997 covers EP — Slayer didn’t even consider covering the horror-themed punk band. When King did take a minute to think about the group, he didn’t regret the decision, given the prickly reputation
of founding frontman Glenn Danzig, Slayer’s former labelmate and opening act.
“He’s miserable,” King explained to Toazted. “In the business, he really irritates people. Personally, I can hang with him, until he gets too full of himself… He’s like a Mustaine.”31-4
While the aside doesn’t say much about Slayer’s music, it gives some insight into how King carries himself: He’s not the most popular member of Slayer, but at least he’s not a dick.
OK, maybe King was a dick once. During the Undisputed era — July 5, 1996 — the band crossed paths with industrial godheads Ministry at a Norway’s Quart Festival. In his autobiography, Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To Al Jourgensen, the frontman recalls arriving at the open-air venue and finding their designated trailer occupied by Slayer. The metal band wouldn’t let Ministry in, so and crew tipped the trailer over.
“I became friends with all those guys except Kerry King — he’s not a nice person,” wrote Jourgensen. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder, and he hated Mikey [Scaccia, guitarist, formerly of Texas underground metal heroes Rigor Mortis], which means I hate him.”31-5
Jason Fisher of website The Gauntlet asked Jourgensen about the passage. The singer said Norway wasn’t the last time the bands crossed paths. On a later tour, Ministry found King in the band area at the Anaheim House of Blues.
“He came backstage,” Jourgensen told Fisher, “drank our beer, ate our food, and then told me that Mikey is a shitty guitar player and that we sucked and we will never be Slayer.”31-6
Now that was a dick move. Actually, it’s kind of funny. Slayer’s publicist, who handled both acts at the time, declined a request to have King tell his version of the Anaheim incident. Anyway…
After the false starts, Attitude became, primarily, a compilation of hardcore covers by the band’s punk heroes, including D.I., D.R.I., Dr. Know, and Verbal Abuse.
Foreign editions included two bonus cuts that were as strong as anything from the American album: manic versions of G.B.H.’s “Sick Boy” and Suicidal Tendencies’ “Memories of Tomorrow,” a speedy mental meltdown with lyrics that read like one of Araya’s apocalyptic visions.
Hanneman still scored some writing credits. The band dusted off two tracks from Hanneman and Lombardo’s aborted side project, Pap Smear. Hanneman received credit for their music and words.
Though King saw the record as a stopgap release, Hanneman said the punk set scratched an itch he’d had since ’84. And after Green Day’s commercial success, subsequent bands bastardized punk into another candy-assed pop genre. So Hanneman wanted to remind the public what the style was like at its hard core.
“I just can’t stand this pop-punk stuff,” Hanneman told Roy Christopher of Ride BMX magazine. “I can’t go out and buy any records that I like. There’s nothing that I want to hear…. [Attitude] kinda turned out later to be reactionary, but it was planned a long time ago.”31-7
Nobody tried to claim credit for the new words in I’m Gonna Be Your God,” a half-assed, accelerated rewrite of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” (Hanneman, a Sex Pistols fan, told Ride BMX he knew the tune from Sid Vicious’ cover, not the original.)
Attitude ends with an original Slayer song, the sludgy “Gemini” — music by King, lyrics by Araya. On it, for the first time, King uses a seven-string guitar and drops down to D tuning.
The sessions were produced and mixed by Dave Sardy, who worked on their Ice-T collaboration. In future years, he would win three Grammies, working with Marilyn Manson, OK Go, and Wolfmother. At the time, he was one of American’s go-to guys for projects like Johnny Cash and System of a Down. The engineer was Greg Gordon, a former Def Jam engineer who had worked with Public Enemy and LL Cool J, and whose hard-rock credits would eventually include High on Fire and System of a Down.
To speed up the recording process, King played bass on all the songs. In a cover of D.R.I.’s “Violent Pacification,” Slayer had to back to down from the kings of fast hardcore: Araya used multiple tracks to keep pace with the vocals from the original outburst.
On the US release, the band plow through 14 songs in 33 minutes. Without the 4:53 of “Gemini,” 13 of them go by in 28 minutes.
From fans to artists, the punk set pissed off a lot of people.
One punk cover was “Guilty of Being White” by Washington, DC harDCore legends Minor Threat. Frontman Ian MacKaye wrote the song about his experiences attending a predominantly black high school, where some of the black students harbored a grudge against white classmates for America’s centuries-old legacy of racial inequality.
On the other side of the country, King had some experience with the sentiment, too.
The guitarist’s best athletic performance spared him from some racial violence. It didn’t happen on a sports field. King’s SportsCenter highlight took place when he was barely a teenager, outside Henry T. Gage Junior High.
The Huntington Park and South Gate areas were beginning to transition from blue-collar, predominantly white neighborhoods. Over the ’70s and ’80s, increasingly, they became increasingly Latin, and later turned into ganglands. White kids got a taste of what it was to belong to a minority.
In the late 1970s, Gage had a hazing tradition called Surfer Stomp: On the last day of school, Latino tough guys would single out white kids and beat them up.
After several other Caucasian kids suffered through the rite of initiation, the pack of juveniles got King in their sights. They advanced on him.
Staring down a beating, King decided he wouldn’t go quietly. He broke into a sprint, embarking on the greatest running back play of his career.
King cut around the mob, racing toward the school. Scanning the landscape, he spotted a possible safe haven — if he could just make it that far: a gym teacher was standing outside the building.
Feet moving fast, King sped closer and closer to the school. As he approached the teacher, one of the Latinos chucked a bookbag at his feet. King leapt over the bag, high-stepping into the air. He came down safely, landing at a run.
The mob still in pursuit, King made a beeline for the teacher. Lungs pumping, he finally reached the adult. Safe, he doubled over, breathing heavy, huffing. He had made it to base. The alleged surfer was not stomped that day.
Nearly 20 years later, Slayer collectively agreed the full-throttle “Guilty of Being White” was a good choice for a cover. Araya, a full-blooded Chilean, made a controversial change to MacKaye’s defensive lyrics.
Having grown up in America, Araya experienced a polarizing phenomenon: In most of the country, after generations of slavery and segregation, you were considered either black or white. And when it was time for arbitrary ethnic classification, Latinos and Chileans generally weren’t considered black (as long as true equal rights weren’t on the line).
At the end of “Guilty,” Araya modified the lyrics from a defensive “Guilty of being white” to an aggressive “Guilty of being right!”
The guy who wrote the song didn’t care for Slayer’s interpretation.
“It’s so offensive to me,” MacKaye commented in Steven Blush’s punk history American Hardcore31-8.
Araya would later explain that he meant “right” as in “The ideas and sentiments expressed in Ian MacKaye’s song are correct.” But the damage was done.
“Personally, I think Ian should relax and have some fun,” Hanneman told Kerrang! 31-9.
The band thrash up another Minor Threat cover, “Filler.” Araya screams MacKaye’s lyrics: “Is it really worth it? / She cost you your life / She’ll never leave your side / She’s gonna be your wife.” King told me the song choice wasn’t a jab at Lombardo, and that’s plausible: It also features the line “You’re full of religion / You’re full of shit.”
Other punk signers didn’t mind the adaptations.
TSOL frontman Jack Grisham, one of the credited writers of the single “Superficial Love,” was happy to have a bonus payday. He bought a trampoline with the royalties check, spraypainted a giant white pen
tagram across the black bouncy surface, then added a giant SLAYER31-10.
If you can stomach hardcore, it’s the band’s most exciting release since the Trilogy. But the album is encoded for a punk filter, literally: The Slayer version of “Superficial Love” ends with an Araya growl that’s all but indecipherable: “[Mumbly-mumble] can suck my motherfuckin’ dick!” The original song ends with TSOL’s singer shouting “President Reagan can shove it!” Once you know that, Araya’s garbled shout becomes clear: “President Clinton can suck my motherfuckin’ dick!”
The album has another Minor Threat cover, “Filler.” Araya screams MacKaye’s lyrics: “Is it really worth it? / She cost you your life / She’ll never leave your side / She’s gonna be your wife.” King says the song choice wasn’t a jab at Lombardo, and it’s plausible: It also features the line “You’re full of religion / You’re full of shit.”
If you’re the kind of metal guy who hates punk — and in the metal world, that’s a vocal majority — Undisputed Attitude is the most optional release in the Slayer catalog.