“[Rubin and Simmons are] both shrewd businessmen,” says Glen E. Friedman, who started shooting classic Def Jam photos after the Beastie Boys brought back pictures he’d taken of them while on tour L.A. “But Rick is much more artistically motivated than Russell is. Rick would put out a record that wouldn’t sell a million copies. Russell wouldn’t put out a record unless it was going to sell.”
Rubin’s records did sell. The producer graduated NYU in 1985. By then, a series of singles by L.L., the Beasties, Jazzy Jay, and Original Concept had earned the label a hot reputation. That September, Rubin and Simmons signed a $2 million deal with CBS subsidiary Columbia Records. CBS labels were home to superstars like Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Barbara Streisand. Their distinguished history included Bob Dylan and the Clash. In its first year of the deal, Def Jam was to provide four albums and a string of twelve-inch singles—which Columbia would distribute, sell, and promote as its own.
“In ’85, ’86, I was pretty much exclusively listening to hip-hop,” says Rubin. Playing punk rock was in his past, but he still liked rough-and-tumble pop culture like heavy metal and pro wrestling.
“He’s into really extreme things,” says Friedman. “Always was, always will be. He’s always been into the worst of the worst. But he has a pop sensibility, too.”
And while Rubin may have looked like a headbanger biker, he was starting to talk like a Buddha. Even then, he was developing a sage-like reputation. With a cool presence and a deep voice, he’d issue opinions that became valuable directives, like “That’s really soft,” “Get busy or get lost,” or “I don’t think that is cool.”18 More capable hands did the heavy lifting. With an ace engineer working the boards, Rubin was free to guide the creative process.
“I have no technical ability whatsoever,” Rubin told Rolling Stone’s Mark Binelli in 2005.19 Conserving his energy has served him well. His discography impresses because no two of his acts sound alike.
“I don’t think I have a sound,” Rubin told Binelli. “I think it’s more about capturing the most direct sound of the artist—what they’re supposed to sound like.”20
Rubin’s contribution comes from his ears and his gut.
“The guy has a sixth sense,” says Slayer manager Rick Sales. “Particularly on a musical level. He is one of the world’s true musical visionaries. With razor sharp accuracy, the guy can listen to a song or the vibe in a song and tell you what can be done to improve it.”
Def Jam and its major figures have long since split. They’re now major parts of three of the four remaining major-label groups. The Def Jam label lives on, as a part of the Island Def Jam Music Group, which is a major division of the Universal Music Company. Twenty years after leaving Def Jam, Rubin now runs Sony BMG’s Columbia Records. Cohen stayed with Def Jam through 2004, then left, and is now CEO of Warner Music Group. But in 1985–86, the Def Jam crew were untested outside their unproven genre. Slayer would give them the chance to show the rock world what they could do.
Engineer Andy Wallace
Andy Wallace might be best known for mixing Nirvana’s Nevermind, the 1991 smash album that put grunge on the map, reinvigorated rock and roll, and sold over ten million copies in the process. Two years later, Wallace produced Jeff Buckley’s Grace, a delicate masterpiece as transcendent and unclassifiable as any record has ever been.21 He’s mixed At the Drive In, Avenged Sevenfold, the Beastie Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Ben Folds, the Foo Fighters, Faith Hill, Korn, Linkin Park, Phish, Rage Against the Machine, Sonic Youth, the Wallflowers, and a slew of platinum acts. He won a Grammy for his engineering work on Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions. He’s reportedly attached to Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy. He might owe it all to his engineering work on Slayer’s Reign in Blood.
Wallace does far more mixing than producing, and he’s as big as behind-the-boards figures get. His name is well known, but not much has been written about him. He’s something of phantom, a well-regarded ace whose name is synonymous with sterling quality.
Lombardo calls him “a genius,” and King and Hanneman simply say he’s “cool.”
The audio engineer actually studied to be a chemical engineer. Born in New Jersey in 1947, he enrolled at Notre Dame at the tail end of the 60s. When the hippies were getting groovy, Wallace rocked. He played different instruments, and his first major band featured him on bass, the often-invisible foundation of many a combo. That group, the still-active First Friday, was popular on the college circuit, where they covered bands like Zeppelin and Cream.
“Andy was a multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter-arranger with an exceptional ear,” says Chuck Perrin, who produced First Friday’s self-titled debut album in 1969. “He was a lot like he is today: easygoing, affable, obviously talented, committed to the love and knowledge he had for music. I don’t think back then he would have imagined the road he’s on now. But in a way, he was doing it back then, making a realization of the music he was hearing in his head.”
At Notre Dame, he accumulated over two hundred credits, but left without a degree. He moved to New York City to make a run as a singer-songwriter. He couldn’t break through, and moved to Los Angeles.
“I went to the West Coast as an artist, and I shifted gears while I was out there,” says Wallace, in a relaxed voice with the smallest hints of Jersey in it. “I found that I liked recording records, making records just as much. And as the roll of the dice had it, I was connecting more in the studio than I was as an artist.”
In 1975, he and two partners established Hit City West in Los Angeles. The small storefront studio was named after Hit City, a private studio Wallace had run out of a parish house in Jersey.
A series of production and engineering credits climaxed with work on the Doors’ An American Prayer, a posthumous mashup of Morrison poetry and new music by the band. But most of the work he found was more mundane.
“I felt I wasn’t addressing the industry the way I wanted to,” Wallace says. “So I got out of owning a studio and into production.”
He headed to back New York, where he felt the dance-club scene was more exciting than a glut of peaceful, easy Eagles knockoffs. In New York, Wallace found work making “club records,” specializing in remixes. For dance clubs, producers like Wallace would take three-minute songs by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Prince and stretch them into seven-minute versions by adding in samples and new instrumental tracks, overdubbing new beats or vocals, or changing rhythms.
As a musician, Wallace played a piano solo on a remix of Madonna’s “Into the Groove” that’s available on The Immaculate Collection. As an engineer, Wallace would often find himself with thirty-two rolls of two-inch tape, not clearly labeled or annotated—if at all. He’d comb through, find the good parts, cut them out with razor blades, and tape them into one final version. In 1980, his work on funk group Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit” earned him his first piece of a gold record.
Wallace did much of his work at Shakedown, the studio run by production bigwig Arthur Baker. There Wallace met Rick Rubin, a hot young producer and omnivorous music fan. They clicked. In 1985, they collaborated on a twelve-inch remix of Big Audio Dynamite’s “The Bottom Line.” A series of singles followed. Wallace mixed and engineered. Rubin called the shots.
“He’s a very potent producer,” Wallace says of Rubin. “He’s unique. He looks at things from a slightly different direction. He’s not a super-hands-on producer. He relies on putting together a good team. He also has the smarts to choose very talented musicians to work with. He doesn’t tell them how to play their instruments. He’s the ultimate filter. He has a really good sense of what works and what doesn’t work, on a lot of levels.”
Wallace mixed much of Run-DMC’s 1986 smash Raising Hell, which shattered MTV’s resistance to rap with a team-up that was unimaginable—that is, outside the mind of Rubin: Run-DMC and Aerosmith collaborating on a cover of “Walk This Way.” The song invented rap-rock and rejuvenated Aerosmith’s long-flagging career. Wallace helpe
d with some preproduction on the long sessions for the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill. When Rubin needed an engineer for his first rock record, Wallace got the shot.
“He’s a really nice guy,” Araya says of Wallace. “He’s an older, wiser presence. He was a really good engineer who knew how to get a sound.”
Wallace had been a good earner before, but the Def Jam records helped put him on the map.
“They certainly started selling some copies,” says Wallace. “It was right around the time that the sonic aspect of records started to become important. A mixer started to emerge as an occupation. And on records with Rick, kids were now more interested in reading the credits. And those records got my name in front of a lot of people—fans and industry people. They were instrumental in my career. I didn’t know it at the time, but I later read that the thing that interested Kurt Cobain was me mixing the Reign in Blood album. And my involvement with Nevermind…”
To put it mildly, quite a few people heard Nevermind. Wallace doesn’t hear sonic similarities between his eclectic clients—but he says they’re not unconnected.
“To me, there is something [in common], but it’s just a matter of whatever musical sensibility I have, and applying it to the project at hand,” says Wallace. “I don’t wear a different hat with Slayer than I do with Jeff Buckley. To me, it’s a common thread, but whether it’s apparent to anybody else, I couldn’t say. I don’t try to create an Andy Wallace sound, but there is something.”
Recruiting New Blood
In the fall of 1985, Slayer was Rick Rubin’s favorite bullshit. And you wanted to be Rick Rubin’s favorite bullshit. The NYU grad was about to enter the advanced mogul program, matriculating for CBS Records, on the Def Jam campus.
Rubin had graduated in May, with a bachelor of fine arts degree in film and video. He received last-minute independent-study credits for running Def Jam out of his dorm room—the makeshift recording studio, office, and clubhouse where the peer group’s alpha male stayed three steps ahead of the curve, finding hot music and describing it with phrases like “def” and “it’s your favorite bullshit.” In September, he and partner Russell Simmons had signed the CBS deal. Only then was he reluctantly leaving the NYU campus.22
With L.L. Cool J’s Radio wrapped and the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill in progress, Rubin had room for a new project. At that September’s New Music Seminar festival, the man the Village Voice would declare “The King of Rap” had discovered some molten metal. Rubin recalls attending a show with his friend Peter Daugherty. Daugherty, who worked for MTV, would also turn him on to another band: California’s Red Hot Chili Peppers. That night, though, it was time to check out the new style: thrash.
“Slayer headlined,” recalls Rubin. “Megadeth played before them, and either Exodus or Anthrax before that. I don’t recall much of anything that night before Slayer. They totally annihilated. Clearly, no other band mattered that night at the Ritz. I can’t imagine any other band in the world mattering that night.”23
George Drakoulias, Rubin’s friend since college, says Rubin, at that point, was “more a punk rocker. Speed metal definitely had more of a punk-rock aesthetic; more than it [had in common] with heavy metal. It spoke to him. He liked Black Flag, stuff like that. I think this was probably the extension of that. That was the next level of street-level heavy music.”
In November, Slayer was playing a two-night stand at Brookyn’s L’Amour. With Beastie Boy Adam Yauch in tow, Rubin did some last-minute cramming at record shop It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll. The producer bought Hell Awaits. The clerk, Scott Koenig, was a passing acquaintance of the Beasties. Rubin and Koenig started talking Slayer. Recalls Koenig:
“Did you ever hear of this band, Slayer?” asked Rubin.
“Yeah, they’re one of my favorite bands,” said Koenig, whose friends in bands helped him navigate backstage areas on the club circuit. “I party with them when they come to town. They’re going to play L’Amour next week.”
“Let’s go,” said Rubin. “I want to sign them to my label.”
“Sure,” said Koenig, then asked, “What label?“
The night of the show, the smell of blood was in the water, and Rubin wasn’t the only shark out. Elektra had signed Metallica the year before, and metal had a building buzz.
“There were people in the mix who were going to make something happen,” says Georges Sulmers, another future Def Jam employee, who was in the house as a friend of Brian Slagel, CEO of Metal Blade, Slayer’s California-based indie label.
By the end of 1986, both Sulmers and Koenig would be cashing Def Jam paychecks, alongside Dakoulias, as part of Rick Rubin’s informal four-man rock department.
Slayer had spent the summer touring Europe for the first time. The band was ripe for picking. The New York show had reps from a handful of major labels and one indie: Metal Blade still had Slayer under contract for three more albums, having extended their contract after the first album sold so well. Now, however, Slayer felt they were ready to move on. Fearing they’d be poached, Slagel flew to New York, hoping to keep his eyes and hands on his stars.
“The writing was on the wall that [Slayer] were not happy,” says Sulmers, recalling an exchange between Hanneman and Slagel. “They had tense words after the show. They were backstage, and Brian was really trying to sort out how to convince them to stay.”
The show put the band—and Slagel—in Rubin’s crosshairs.
“We were both laughing in delight,” recalls Drakoulias. “It was incredible, like, ‘I can’t believe we’re watching this.’ I think it was a fascination that something could be so precise, so fast. I remember him being really super impressed with Lombardo [and] the soloing—‘How can anybody play that fast and still swing?’”
After Slayer played and slayed, introductions were made.
“Scott Koenig came in and said, ‘Hey, I want to introduce you to Rick Rubin,’” recalls Araya. “He’s a really big Slayer fan. He wants to sign you guys. And he came in, and we were introduced, and he was all excited.”
Oblivious to Slagel’s presence, Rubin chatted King up about his over-the-top wristband. King sported an ten-inch black-leather armband that he’d punched 250 two-and-a-half-inch nails through.
“It was like, ‘Wow, he’s a nice guy who really wants to sign us,’” recalls Lombardo. “And after that, ‘Cool. You need to get a hold of Brian.’”
Rubin left. Slagel stayed, trying to talk the band into remaining on Metal Blade. He’d be the first of many to ask the band what the hell a rap guy could possibly do for them.
In coming weeks, Rubin was hot to do the deal, but it wasn’t a deal that Slagel was hot to do.
“[Slagel] was our manager,” explains Araya. “And here’s somebody that’s making an offer for the band, a good offer. From what I remember, not only wasn’t he willing to give up the band, but he wanted to work out a deal with Rubin, more than just a record deal with us. And the outcome was Rubin said, ‘No, I just want the band. I don’t want you.’”
Weeks after the Ritz show, Lombardo received a call from a prominent California music attorney. He told Lombardo Rubin had been trying to contact the band through Slagel, and had been very unsuccessful.
After some talks, recalls Araya, the lawyer suggested that Slagel’s representing both the label and band represented a conflict of interest. King appreciated Slagel’s support, but Araya had long resented the Metal Blade chief. Slagel’s indie shop adhered to certain time-honored music-business traditions: The label owned a cut of Slayer’s publishing royalties. And though King’s dad and Araya had financed Slayer’s recordings, Metal Blade owned the master tapes. The band agreed with the lawyer. And the attorney gave Metal Blade the axe.
Slagel kept the back catalog, retained ownership of the masters, and forfeited other future business connections. Slagel declines to provide more specific details, saying simply, “It all got sorted out. It was somewhat unconventional.”
And Slayer was free to move on. Hip-
hop godfather Russell Simmons doesn’t recall signing the thrash band as a big deal. The imminent rap-rock rift between Rubin and Simmons had yet to manifest, and Simmons trusted Rubin’s judgment. Signing Slayer to a stable with L.L. Cool J and Oran “Juice” Jones was a smart business move, not an indulgence to keep his partner happy.
“I didn’t have to make Rick happy,” says Simmons. “Rick was a genius; whatever he said [went]. The groups he signed made everybody happy.”
And thrash’s hottest free agent was signed to the world’s most def rap label.
Writing Blood
Reign in Blood began in Hanneman’s nightmare. It started becoming a reality in Araya’s Camaro, a bronze warhorse with a broken driver-side door handle. The album starts with real-world horror. Hanneman’s father’s collection of Nazi war souvenirs had piqued his interest early. Lately, he’d been reading up about the Third Reich.
As 1985 wound down, Hanneman digested a few books about Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer who had overseen medical procedures at Auschwitz, a Polish death camp where the staff had crossed the line from research to deadly curiosity and torture. Hanneman contemplated Mengele, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in Araya’s car. The singer and guitarist would cruise from Downey to H.B., catching a buzz and shooting the shit.
“We used to party together all the time, go to parties, hang out,” says Hanneman. “And next thing you know, we’re starting to write a record. That album came together pretty quick, because we were bored, and wanted to get something out.”
While Hanneman and Araya were partying, King was usually at home, taking care of his snakes and practicing. He wrote in his bedroom at his parents’ house. He worked—as he still prefers to—with no distractions. King jammed with an amp in the corner and a cheap cassette recorder rolling in front of it. The guitarist was coming up with some good stuff. “Piece by Piece” was his first solo composition for the record; the spiraling intro riff came first, and the lyrics followed.
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