Slayer’s fanbase has been vocal: Slayer should bring Lombardo back. That idea, while nice, seems idealistic, impossible, and flat-out unrealistic: Lombardo left the band a decade ago. He works steadily. As far as any civilians know, Lombardo and the others hate each other.
But Slayer manager Rick Sales has a surprising take on the suggestion: He agrees. And he sets out to see if he could make the impossible a reality.
Sales calls Lombardo. Lombardo listens.
The drummer’s expenses are rising. Now Lombardo has three children: two teenage sons and a year-old daughter. The paychecks, no doubt, will be a nice supplement for occasional Fantômas tours. After 9/11, the America economy went into the tank — especially non-essential industries like the concert business. And the idea of a limited reunion of the classic lineup seems like a golden opportunity to drum up some ticket sales.
Sales meets with the band. He reveals he had been talking to Lombardo. And Lombardo is in if they are.
The parties agree to meet and see if everybody could play together nicely. They meet, and they decide they can. Nearly a decade after the fight that replaced practice, Lombardo has calmed down. Mostly.
“The day he showed up and hung out was, the feeling like it was the very next day after he left,” Araya tells me during the Christ Illusion tour. “And that’s how it’s been.”
The comment contains an incidental ominous note: A decade earlier, following the fight, hard feelings had not dissipated by the next day.
Lombardo agrees to sit in the scheduled tour while Slayer look for a full-time replacement.
In some ways, Lombardo has always been a part of the band, even when he wasn’t there.
“It comes down to one rule, one rule of law that we all know and understand,” Araya tells KNAC.com later, “that without the other, this wouldn’t exist.”37-1
Lombardo finally has to listen to the albums the band made without him. He skims them. Lombardo doesn’t like what he hears. So he rewrites the percussion parts to match his sensibilities.
“I wasn't a fan of [the Bostaph records],” Lombardo tells Geeks of Doom years later. “I listened to them a little bit, not like listen to a complete song or anything, I just like skipped over the songs, listened to the mix, listened to the drums and it told me the whole story. I didn't have to listen to the whole record for me to get the gist of the whole project. So it was pretty good, but I just wasn't a fan…. Paul really tried to complicate it, tried to get creative which was great. But still, just for me personally, it wasn't the Slayer that I knew.”
Three weeks after Christmas, Slayer are back on the road, their classic lineup restored. Lombardo is billed as a “guest star” in the lineup37-3.
But they don’t ditch all the material they had recorded with Bostaph. With Lombardo back on his throne, Slayer sets feature five songs from the two original records with Bostaph:
1. “Disciple”
2. “War Ensemble”
3. “At Dawn They Sleep”
4. “Stain Of Mind”
5. “Postmortem”
6. “Raining Blood”
7. “Hell Awaits”
8. “Die By The Sword”
9. “Born Of Fire”
10. “Bloodline”
11. “God Send Death”
12. “Captor Of Sin”
13. “Dead Skin Mask”
14. “Seasons In the Abyss”
15. “Payback”
16. “Mandatory Suicide”
17. “Chemical Warfare”
18. “South Of Heaven”
19. “Angel Of Death”
The shows are electric. Lombardo routinely leaves the stage and tells his bandmates, “That was euphoric!”37-3
Crowds, as always, are manic and ready to self-destruct. But Lombardo’s presence evokes extra madness. After some warmups, the tour officially opens January 24. Slayer plays Toad’s Place, a 750-capacity club in New Haven, Connecticut. And the mob almost bring the house down.
Hometown heroes Hatebreed leave the general-admission pit charged up. After an endless tease of a soundcheck, the lights go down, and the blackness gives way to a flood of white spots and strobes as the band launched into “Disciple,” the tense opener from God Hates Us All.
Blogger Crimson Man captures the chaos in a review:
“The intensity, anticipation, anger, and sheer desire for aggression of the audience was at its highest level when the first verse kicked in,” Crimson Man writes. “After that it was smooth thrashing, moshing, climbing, and well… sailing into the rest of the set. Dave Lombardo was sounding amazing on the new songs as well as the old classics. The band conquered the crowd as Tom Araya screamed the intro to the second song: "WAR ENSEMBLE!"
Three songs in, the crowd tear down a barrier. The show stops for ten minutes while the staff readjust the stage barricade.
The frenzied mob don’t want to give an inch. So Araya, as always, is put in the agitating position of pleading for sanity and safety.
“All you guys up here near the fence,” he intones. “I want you to just back away. Come on, come on, back away from the fence so the guys can get it out of here and give you some more room."
The crowd won’t cooperate, and they egg on the madness, shouting "Drop the fence! Drop the fence!" Lombardo starts pounding along, giving a beat to the chant. Tom continues playing good cop, patiently telling the crowd, “It's FUN to play safe!"
The barricade is back up. During “At Dawn They Sleep,” the crowd shout along with an extended take of the refrain, “Kill / KILL / KIIILLL!” Then “Dead Skin Mask” turns into a different kind of spectacle, a true rarity even for the band’s unrestrained constituency.
At the song’s chorus, Araya backs off the mic and screams along like the tune’s very victim. Then, halfway through the song’s slow, torturous groove, two blondes in tight pink dresses make their way to the stage. They begin go-go dancing, shaking their money-makers.
Araya dedicates “Payback” to the crowd, but he’s not mad. After the ripper is over, he compliments the seething, sweating mass of humanity on behaving themselves: "What I'm really impressed with is how you guys always find a way to enjoy yourselves,” he says. “That's what's important.”
As the road unfolds, the crowds remain hot. Tempers stay low. Nobody strands Lombardo, alone, waiting, in the practice spot. Lombardo doesn’t call anybody a moron. Teresa’s presence doesn’t stress out the family men — the rest of the band are married by now. Dave later tells me everyone is more “respectful” since he returned.
Content and enjoying himself, Lombardo signs on to play through September. It turns into one of Slayer’s busier years, with around 90 shows on the books for 2002.
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 2002”
And Lombardo is back. It worked. The trek is not a replay of the Reign in Pain tour. Without everyone crammed into one bus, and with sizable steady checks coming in, the classic lineup peacefully coexist.
But Lombardo’s return is still penciled in as temporary. In some cities, the group hold auditions for new drummers, setting up a drum kit in empty rooms and playing with competent no-names and capable journeymen. Even though Lombardo is a staggering 37 years old, as always, none can match his combination of time, feeling, and power.
In February 2002, the band hit Chicago, their reliable middle-America staging ground, looking to pick up a permanent addition. The group hold auditions.
Lombardo himself has invited Soulfly drummer Joe Nunez to try out. Nunez nails the audition, mouthing along the vocals as he pounds away37-5.
After the audition, the band think Nunez might be the guy. Weeks later, to everybody’s surprise, he backs out of the audition process. King changes his mind: He liked Nunez. Now he doesn’t like him. Blowback singes Lombardo, King’s perennial scapegoat.
“I was like, 'Dave, why ain't your boy fuckin' into this? What's going on?'” King later recalled to Martin Carlsson of Sweden’s Close-Up Magazine. “H
e's like: 'His family is giving him shit about Slayer.' You know, God complex. That's not me ditching his story, that's straight from Lombardo, who doesn't usually go out on a limb and say shit. I was like, 'Alright, whatever.'”37-6
As the group toured the country, they auditioned more drummers, from unknowns to Dying Fetus/Misery Index/Chimaira drummer Kevin Talley. Blink-182/Transplants drummer Travis Barker later claims Slayer offered him the job37-7.
King, the band’s leader, develops a nagging hunch: Lombardo might be the solution for their drummer problem. He decides the original drummer is welcome back — if he can commit to the program.
Months later, Carlsson asks King if he wanted Lombardo back. King says, “Yes and no. I have no reason for 'no,' other than it's really odd right now, 'cause we're two different camps. Not that we're at each other's throats or anything, but we're not a unit. If it was always gonna be like that, I'd say 'no.'… He's a hired gun, and he acts like it. I know he's got ties with Mike Patton, and I won't take a backseat to Mike Patton. Never.”37-8
As the tour goes on, the band plays fewer clubs and more theaters. Spring gives way to Summer. King puts aside hard feelings for the sake of business: Soulfly is direct support for the band in August and September.
By now, bigger venues are the rule, not the exception. Shows include another two-night stand in New York City’s 3,000-capacity Roseland.
And now, Lombardo has been around longer than he planned.
“So you go out on the road, and you talk some more,” says Araya. “And the conversation goes on to, ‘We not only need a drummer to do the tour, but to start recording.’ That’s when Dave spoke up and said, yeah, he had an interest in recording an album with us.”
Summer fades to fall, and that interest turns concrete. Slayer are ready for another album. And so is Lombardo.
Which wasn’t to say that past problems are gone and forgotten.
In 2007, I ask Araya how things are different now that Lombardo is reinstated. He laughs. For a long time.
So I ask if things are different.
He laughs more, showing a full mouth of pearly whites.
“Things haven’t really changed,” says Araya. “The only thing that’s different between then and now is that we’re older. We probably have different coping skills.”
Now reunited, Slayer’s four founding members still had the same musical skills. And they could still put on a brutal show. Now they set out to prove it to the world, by revisiting their most heralded achievement.
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 2003”
Chapter 38:
Raining Theatre Blood
Slayer’s most vivid nightmare became a reality. The day came when it rained blood. A ton of blood. Literally. And more would follow.
Lombardo continued working on the side. He recorded with Apocalyptica. He worked on the new Fantômas disc and announced another Grip Inc. album.
Then, in 2003, Lombardo’s return to the band was officially announced as permanent. It was official. The band’s handlers drew up a contract that would pay Lombardo a percentage of the band’s take. The drummer had surrendered his ownership stake in the band during the 1992 split. Now, he wasn’t a full-fledged member of the organization with an equal cut of revenue and full voting rights. Lombardo was an employee, not a partner. But back he was.
“Not to put down Bostaph, but Lombardo coming back is just amazing because he just brings such an intensity to the band," Hanneman told the Chicago Sun-Times38-1.
“Having Dave back in the band is one of the highlights of my whole time in,” King told Metal Hammer in 2005. “There are kids that could've been into us for over 10 years that never got to see us the way we are meant to be.”38-2
The band isn’t given to sentimentality – they were on the road in 2006/7, but didn’t celebrate it as their 25th anniversary. But they decided to commemorate the Lombardo reunion.
“The idea to play Reign in Blood as a piece came years before that,” said King. “ I think John Jackson, a promoter in England, ran it by us. And I’m like, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’ And then, timing comes around.”
Slayer jammed Reign and decided it worked.
In October 2003, the band set out on the road, headlining a Jägermeister-sponsored tour with openers Hatebreed, the kings of the first hardcore generation that had unambivalently accepted metal.
For months, rumors had swirled that Slayer would be playing all of Reign, but the band didn’t even officially announce their special plans for their set. Then, at the last minute, Jägermeister publicists confirmed it: Slayer would be playing all of Reign in Blood, like Roger Waters performing Dark Side of the Moon or the Who touring Quadrophenia.
But once the tour had begun, toward the end of Slayer’s show, the rumors still sounded like rumors.
After a full set, Slayer played “Angel of Death,” which has long marked the end of the show. The band thanked the crowd and left the stage. Apparently the internet rumors, published reports, and reliable sources had combined to serve up a crock.
Then the band returned to stage, launching into an old favorite that even the biggest diehards in the audience hadn’t heard live before: Reign in Blood, side one, track two: “Piece by Piece.”
“That was the first time we’d ever played ‘Piece by Piece’ live, if I remember right,” said King. “That beginning is really hard to play. I have to really look at Dave to lock in and play it. I find myself doing that more on these last [few] tours.”
And, then, in order, followed the other eight songs from the album.
The tour was booked in big clubs, theaters, and arenas. Some pits were pure pandemonium, and the men’s bathroom at shows — as always — looked like a triage area, full of fans with red-gushing noses and gashed-open foreheads.
Some of the shows were more subdued – many old-school fans braving the pit at 11 p.m. had worked a full day. But a raging nucleus always whipped up a swirling vortex of muscle and bone, experiencing a long-gestating fantasy come true: The best thrash album, live, in its entirety.
The live rendition of Reign turned the shows into Slayer’s longest sets, tied with the Attitude shows in a count of songs played, but running longer, usually:
1. “Darkness of Christ”
2. “Disciple”
3. “War Ensemble”
4. “At Dawn They Sleep”
5. “Necrophiliac”
6. “Captor of Sin”
7. “Stain of Mind”
8. “Payback”
9. “Mandatory Suicide”
10. “Fight Till Death”
11. “Dead Skin Mask”
12. “Hell Awaits”
12. “South of Heaven”
14. “Reign in Blood”
15. “Angel of Death”
16. “Piece by Piece”
17. “Necrophobic”
18. “Altar of Sacrifice”
19. “Jesus Saves”
20. “Criminally Insane”
21. “Reborn”
22. “Epidemic”
23. “Postmortem”
24. “Raining Blood”
“For us, it was for the fans, because the fans have given us so much support, [and said] the album is legendary,” said Hanneman. “So we just wanted to do it for them.”
The band played Reign in full about 40 times, until King was sick of it. The tour wrapped in late November at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheater. It had been a good year, 2003, but a light one, with a mere 50 shows.
Too late, the band decided they should have documented the Reign set. Then they thought of the one way they could possibly top metal’s massive encore: Do it again, once more — with blood.
In 1986, the band had toyed with the idea of somehow raining blood during their set. Smoke and red lights were all they could afford. Now they had more money to play with. In 2004, the let the blood pour.
Before JägerTour, King and his wife had seen Cavalia, a new-age circus comparable to Cir
que-du-Soleil. Watching glistening white sand rain down on the contorting acrobats and gallivanting horses, King had an idea: Red sand might look like blood. King pictured a hellstorm, and his mind grapes started making crimson juice. Slayer, he decided, would make it rain blood.
(As of 2008, King wasn’t included in Cavalia’s list of celebrities who have seen the show, which included Larry King, Wayne Newton, Stevie Nicks, and Adam Sandler. The only figure on the list with any metal cred was Kiss’ Paul Stanley.)
Slayer management sent out some feelers to theatre-effects companies. Eventually, they found North Hollywood’s Reel Efx. The company came though with the right idea and the right price. Technician Kevin Berve lobbied hard for the assignment — he’d been a Slayer fan since 1986, when he saw the Reign in Blood tour play Norman’s Place in Denver.
“They thought it was funny that I was so excited,” says Berve. “And they gave me the project.”
Berve got to work with his boss, Jim Gill. To make visible red rain, Kool-Aid and water weren’t going to get the job done. After pondering the logistics, they had two options:
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 27