Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (15 page)

The band already had the title
Live Undead
, and they needed the artwork to match it. In the end, the art concept and layout came from the band: They wanted a graveyard. They wanted upside-down crosses. They wanted zombies. The
Live Undead
project was conceived as a 12” vinyl picture-disc. Hanneman took Cuellar’s marking pen, leaned in, and provided the roughest of sketches for the design he envisioned. He drew the cover in stick figures: inside a circle, himself at the 9 o’clock position on the left, Lombardo at noon, King on the right, Araya at the bottom.

They kicked around the idea of presenting the “Live” part of
Live Undead
in stenciled capital letters, which was a common convention in metal art at the time. But the band quickly decided against it.

The album cover would take some work, but the first meeting ended with another iconic Slayer image set in stone. After his diagram, Hanneman had another idea for a different graphic.

Deep and slow, Hanneman said, “I want a skull with a German helmet on it. I want it to say ‘Wehrmacht’ on the side.”

Cuellar thought of
Weird War Tales
, a DC anthology comic that told supernatural tales from World War II, presenting monthly images of ghouls, mutants and shape-shifters in Nazi garb. He sketched three variations of a wild-eyed skull in a Third Reich battle helmet, two adorned with the Slayer pentagram.

Hanneman liked them. Cuellar sketched a more refined — but still rough — version of the left-profile and let Hanneman keep the page. Cuellar assumed he’d have a chance to develop the Wehrmacht skeleton further. But the next time he saw the picture, it was a year later, exactly as he had drawn it, on a fan club recruitment flyer inside
Hell Awaits
. (In future years, other artists created more detailed, elaborate versions of the Slaytanic skull for band merchandise.)

By meeting’s end, the musicians and the illustrator were on the same page. Cuellar got the assignment.

Working in a little studio in his Alhambra apartment, Cuellar penciled a first draft of the
Live Undead
cover. Half-finished, the early version was a monstrous sketch of a wide-mouthed zombie slouching in the darkness, bones exposed, as another followed behind him, lurking out of an open crypt.

Albert pondered Slayer’s suggested scene and decided the darkness was a problem: If it were midnight, then realistically, how could the image be anything but darkness? A solution occurred to  him: A full moon would light the cemetery. Cuellar penciled in an exposed ribcage and some decaying flesh, with an incomplete swath of black night behind the zombie’s shoulders, like oversized wings.

Cuellar presented that rough draft to the band. The unfinished sketch was dynamic and ambitious, but the anonymous zombie wasn’t what they wanted. Slayer wanted the creatures on their album cover to be
them
. The band collected a series of live photos that captured the players in stage gear. And Cuellar went back to work.

In subsequent drafts, Cuellar’s next brood of undead had the right details: the leather costumes, the tattoo from Araya’s right arm, the long hair — the hairspray, apparently, had been applied in enough volume that it outlasted their flesh.

A couple meetings later, Cuellar had it down. Drawn in pencil and ink, the final
Live Undead
illustration depicts the band as zombies, apparently buried and resurrected in their stage gear, playing a midnight gig in a misty cemetery, under a full moon. The red SLAYER logo and a bloody LIVE UNDEAD were added on a vinyl overlay so the letters would pop and not desecrate the original. It’s wicked and inspired.

Artist, blogger, and metal-art historian Dennis Dread identified Cueller’s inspiration in 2011
: Key elements of the cover are based on a pictures by Bernie Wrightson, a horror-oriented illustrator best known for his work on the graphic-fiction magazine
Heavy Metal
, the original run of DC comic
Swamp Thing
, and the cover of Meat Loaf’s
Dead Ringer
.

For
Live Undead
’s central Araya zombie, notes Dread, “Cuellar very conservatively referenced the central image from this very early panel by the master of macabre himself, [Bernie] Wrightson! This drawing originally appeared in an EC horror spoof called
Ghastly Horror Comix
in 1969, but it was reprinted and made more widely available in the 1980 Wrightson collection
The Mutants
…. It's a perfectly archetypal zombie… Wrightson himself was aping the great comic artist Graham ‘Ghastly’ Ingels when he drew this for an underground fanzine in the late 60's.”
^12-4

Zombie Hanneman shambles onto the scene, guitar in hand, looking like Eddie from Iron Maiden. King stands, soloing, behind a tombstone bearing the Slayer pentagram.

Dread also identifies an analogue for the drummer image in
The Mutants
: a silhouette of a long-haired man-beast standing on the edge of an abyss, shaking his fists at the sky. Cuellar kept the torso, removed its legs, copied the outline, and added some drumsticks. Then he drew an intricately detailed, decomposing Undead Lombardo. The late Lombardo’s torso is floating in the mist, the power of darkness keeping it in the air. The drummer wasn’t satisfied with his zombie avatar.

“He didn’t like that at all,” recalled Cuellar. “He felt that it was too skeleton-y.”

Unlike Hanneman, the drummer didn’t have the power to veto the art and commission a new draft. Cuellar added some muscles, but it still went to press with Dave as the least prominent figure.

In future years, Cuellar worked on the Melvins’ “Bar-X The Rocking M” video. Frontman Buzz Osborne, Lombardo’s longtime bandmate in Fantômas, brought the artist and the drummer back into the same orbit. Cuellar’s work in the Slayer machine gave him brief but revealing look at the relationship between Lombardo and the rest of the group.

“I never really saw the dynamic with them, but the fact that [Dave] left the band was telling,” says Cuellar. “He seemed friendlier than the other two I didn’t know — but it creates some camaraderie, wearing the K-Mart vest. He seemed like a force that they had harnessed — as opposed to [merely] another dude.”

Cuellar freely acknowledges that he modeled the
Live Undead
cover around Wrightson’s images. He was a fan and had Wrightson’s comics in his library. But Cuellar notes that he wasn’t merely tracing: The background surrounding the zombies was all his, not to mention the details beyond the basic poses.

“I was 19 years old,” explains Cuellar. “I was taking an art history class. And if you look at Renoir and all these artists, they use similar poses and similar images. I can flip through an art history book and show you artists who have done the same things: There is a thing called River God. There is a third century sculpture. And then you look at a drawing called
Judgment of Paris
that was done in 1520, and it’s got the same layout. And you look at Manet’s
Luncheon in the Grass
, and it uses exactly the same pose. Those are influences I saw. And I figured: This is what artists do; they emulate what is great. I’m not trying to defend my ignorance and my immaturity at the time, but… I know all about plagiarism and copying; this is more an homage.

“The choices I made would have probably been different, had I been a little more mature,” continues Cuellar. “But unfortunately, that’s that. There’s a book called
Fucked Up + Photocopied
, which essentially people [taking] other people’s work and Xeroxing it. That was happening at the time, the idea of sampling.”

If he recalled correctly, Metal Blade paid Cuellar a one-time fee of $600 for the cover. For an independent label and novice artist, it was a respectable payday.

“It was more money than I’d ever made in my life, so that was awesome, just the satisfaction of having something in print,” says Cuellar. “I was extremely excited, A) because I got to do a cover, B) because it was a picture disc. That was huge for me.”

At the time, Cuellar was married to a conservative born-again Christian. She wasn’t so happy about his biggest assignment to date. She didn’t mind taking the money, though.

Recalled Cuellar: “I wanted them to make it $666 and see if she’d cash the check.”

Slayer were happy with the artwork, too. Cuellar would return the next time Slayer needed a cover illustration.

Regardless, Slayer’s first live release captures the group’s unstoppable steamroller force far better than 1991’s thin-sounding
Decade of Aggression
double LP. The live cuts improve on their studio counterparts. And the album was a compelling invitation to listeners who would face the decision whether to buy concert tickets.

For fans worldwide who hadn’t witnessed Slayer’s live show yet,
Live Undead
introduced a staple of the concert experience: Araya’s between-song monologues and introductions. The singer was becoming renowned as a quotable onstage character. The Catholic former respiratory therapist was now a master of macabre ceremonies, a horror host like the Cryptkeeper. Fans memorized his between-song bits, quoted them, and shouted along in concert. Many of the raps wouldn’t change at all until well into the ’90s.

As on
Live Undead
, before “Die By the Sword,” Araya would intone, “Some say the pen is mightier than the sword, but I say
fuck
the pen – ‘cuz you can
diiiiie
by the sword.” Sometimes at shows, fans could catch Araya slip and say “fuck the sword, ‘cuz you can die by the –
fuck
!” or “I say fuck the sword, ‘cuz you can die by the sword!”
^12-5

And later, before “Necrophiliac,” Araya would extoll, in graphic detail, the joys of older women.

“You know, the best part about
ooooolder
women is eating them out,” Araya would say, bringing every word up from his gut. “You can hear the maggots crunching between your teeth.”

Over the years, the singer’s stage banter has mellowed.

“It just seemed creative, trying to come up with things that will gross people out, something wicked and demonic to say,” explained Araya. “I’ve gone from conjuring demonic tales to ‘Thank you very much. We wrote a song about it; it goes something like this.’ Now it’s more down-to-earth stuff. People come up to me and tell me these quotes, like ‘You said that! That was so cool!’”

King reserved the rights to veto the raps if they were slowing down the show.

Over the course of 1984, Slayer played 60 shows all over North America. The band was getting around, and so were the records. All over the country, people were starting to take notice. Slayer’s early releases were respected, popular, and influential.

In San Francisco, future High on Fire frontman Matt Pike bought
Haunting the Chapel
because, he figured, anything by a band called
Slayer
had to be good. He figured correctly.

In Florida,
Haunting the Chapel
inspired a major player to make metal more extreme. Death mainman
Chuck Schuldiner
would tell
Sentinel Steel
’s Dennis Gulbe the EP was "life changing… That was some of the early stuff that gave me that push."
^12-6

In Ohio, a  young Brian Warner – who would later be achieve fame as Marilyn Manson and tour with Slayer in 2007 – bought the
Live Undead
picture disc at Quonset Hut record store, when he was still attending a Christian school. Once he had it home, the illustration of the undead band scared Manson so badly that he had his mother try to return it.

“I’m not a big fan of a lot of heavy stuff,” Manson told Revolver’s Dan Epstein later, echoing a refrain that many a non-metal Slayer fan lets slip: “For me, it’s Slayer and Slayer only.”
^12-7

And back in California, Slayer’s earliest diehard fans were growing into an excitable new breed. Even some of the band’s biggest supporters were surprised at the enthusiasm on display from the early Slaytanic Wehrmacht — the band’s fan club, whose title mashed up “Slayer” and “Satanic,” plus a nod to the
Wehrmacht
, the Third Reich armed forces.

The Wehrmacht started developing its own rumors for the growing cult, such as the KISS-like whisper that SLAYER secretly stood for Satan Laughs As You Eternally Rot. That acronym became an official part of Slayer lore, finding its way into album art including
Divine Intervention
.

“A band is just a band,” says Hoglan. “Even the Beatles. I think a lot of fans got more into the myth of Slayer more than the music itself. They just got into the whole, ‘What’s the heaviest thing on the planet? I’m going to like it and go to shows and be a complete mutant [and shout] ‘
Slayyyyerrr
!’ They like to tear their shirts off. To Slayer fans, nobody existed but Slayer.”

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1985”

Chapter 13:

Hell Awaits
, and Hell Arrives

Slayer’s mania-inducing momentum carried into the
Hell Awaits
period. Metal Blade unleashed the band’s second proper album in March 1985. This time around, a growing number of chefs made a more complicated mélange.