Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (16 page)

Slagel stepped in for production credit. The album was recorded at Track Records with engineer Metoyer and Hollywood’s Eldorado with Ron Fair, then best known for producing Armored Saint, and later a president of Geffen Records.

Hell Awaits
is slathered in reverb, and even a 1993 digital remaster — a loose application of the term “remaster” — sounds like the album is playing over a cheap turntable with a tin tone arm.

Slayer’s early albums might not sound great, but that’s how they sound, and that’s how they will remain. King has balked at the idea of re-recording new studio versions of the early material.

And a true remastering is impossible: Much of the Metal Blade archives were destroyed in a 1994 North Ridge earthquake that devastated the label’s storage facility. Slayer fans may consider it a loss, but even non-believers must admit: It’s cool that Slayer master recordings were annihilated in an event that is legally recognized as an Act of God.

A mere seven tracks over 37 minutes,
Hell Awaits
is practically prog metal. (
Show
had ten tracks and ran 35 minutes, and later,
Reign
’s ten songs would barely last 28 full minutes.) The early musical influence from Venom and Iron Maiden has waned, and now the band are hopped up on Mercyful Fate. The Danish black-metal pioneers inspired Slayer to spill more blood and write longer songs.

The album begins with backward-masked messages that, when played in reverse, feature demonic voices hissing, “Join us, join us.” Volume gradually builds, as does a chugging guitar riff.

The songs are long, complex and tight — but the band is still in Venom’s black sway. The album’s nasty narratives are a graphic progression of violations. Track no. 2,  “Kill Again,” follows a prolific, schizophrenic killer whose extensive body count includes a preacher’s only son.

Araya sings as fast as Lombardo plays. During his most frantic blurting, the singer’s voice still pops into a higher register, an Araya convention that wouldn’t survive this second disc. On
Reign
, he would settle into a growl and improve his diction. Here, his lyrics blur together, and the first verse is entirely unintelligible until the chorus — a demonic, echoing roar of “HELL
AWAITS
!” The album’s leadoff vocals present inadvertent symbolism: in the thrashing chaos, only one thing is certain: eternal damnation.

“Praise of Death” revisits the themes from “Kill Again,” graphically depicting a crank binge. Between two finger-shredding solos, Araya spits a metal verse for the ages: “Running and hunting and slashing and crushing and searching and seeing and stabbing and shooting and thrashing and smashing and burning, destroying and killing and bleeding and pleading then death.”

Before Araya can catch his breath, he delivers a two-second bass solo, his instrument’s most prominent moment in the Slayer catalog. The instrument is usually lost in the mix.

The bass guitar has never been a prominent part of the Slayer sound. In fact, in 30+ years of Slayer articles, the term “rhythm section” almost never appears. The music’s overall drive has always been rooted in the guitar and drums’ groove. The bass is not an inconsequential presence on the records — whether in early years, when Araya played on the albums, or in later years,  when King recorded all bass. But regardless of how audible it is, delivering the bass for Slayer isn’t easy.

Playing bass while singing, and — for most of his career — conducting circular headbanging is an impressive physical feat, regardless. Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson calls Araya “the Geddy Lee of thrash.”

The material was complex, but getting it on tape was easy.

        
“When I worked with Slayer we were all still pretty young,” recalls Metoyer. “Tom was close to my age. The rest of the guys were still kids. There was one session that the band all brought water pistols to the studio and they were running around squirting each other with water around all the very expensive equipment in the studio. As much as they would act like children with water fights and fart contests, when the record button was pushed, they were all business and never needed more than two takes to get anything right.”

Hell Awaits
is a drastically different album than
Reign in Blood
— but in some ways, it sounds like a dry run for their masterpiece, like they were overtraining for a fight. At the end of “At Dawn They Sleep,” Lombardo rolls a seven-second double-bass break that stands as an early attempt at the famous burst in “Angel of Death.”

As with many a memorable moment, it began as a throwaway gesture, but other members of the band picked up on it. Lombardo double-kicked, and the guitarists thought it was worth repeating.

“I used to do drum solos at that time,” said Lombardo. “And anything that stuck in Kerry or Jeff’s mind, [they’d say] ‘Why don’t you put that in the record? Why don’t you try that there?’ So they would feed off of my ideas, and pick off pieces like vultures.”

Writing the album, the players very much worked as a team. Hanneman and King collaborated on one set of lyrics. Araya had contributed to
Show Now Mercy
. But here, he scored his first writing credits, having collaborated in with the guitarists on “At Dawn They Sleep” and “Crypts of Eternity.” King penned two songs by himself, as did Hanneman. The guitarists co-wrote the music for two songs. King wrote music for two, and Hanneman edged him out with three.

[Click here for album's full songwriting credits in Appendix B]

Metoyer recalls the band being a partnership at the time — with the guitarists as first among equals.

“Kerry and Jeff wrote the songs,” says Metoyer. “Therefore, I would rely on their opinions heavily when it came to everything. But I can’t say that anyone in the band stood out as the leader.

After the gory onslaughts, the second song on side II, “Necrophiliac” dragged metal to infernal new lows. The lyrics read like a twisted, anarchic cinquain stretched between points of a lopsided pentagram. The song’s narrator manages to offend Satan himself.

“Virgin child, now drained of life / Your soul cannot be free, not given the chance to rot in hell,” sneers Araya in one of the tamer passages. The narrator not only copulates with an underage corpse, but
impregnates
it. The damnable act instantly spawns a demon, attracting the notice of Lucifer himself. Then the First of the Fallen drags the defiler to Hell’s fiery depths. The Venom school of black metal may have plumbed darker, more graphic material over the years, but “Necrophiliac” stands as the era’s apex. “Over the top” or “O.T.T.” was a common positive descriptive term in the early days of thrash, and “Necrophiliac” is as O.T.T. as it got.

“To me,
Haunting the Chapel
,
Hell Awaits
, they were the ultimate Slayer records,” says Pantera/Down singer Phil Anselmo. “And second,
Reign in Blood
. Early Slayer is the ultimate satanic band.”

Over 25 years later, neither Slayer nor Venom is considered “black metal” by contemporary standards. At the time, Slayer could accurately be described as thrash-, speed-, black-, or death metal. Not that the group cared about the emerging subgenres.

“There’s no competition between us and Venom or anyone else,” King told Metal Forces in 1985. “We don’t want to be black metal gods or anything stupid like that.”
^13-3

A
Kick Ass
review of a June Slayer-Destruction show in Ludwigsburg, West Germany by Fred Ruttinger and Bob Muldowney praises that band as “US Masters of Death.”
^13-4

Formed in 1983, California band Possessed coined the term “death metal.” As death split from thrash, it emerged as technically intricate, breakneck music that was preoccupied with mortality and the macabre.
Hell Awaits
did as much as any album to spark the genre.

“One of their peaks for me was
Hell Awaits
,” Schuldiner — mastermind of Death and arguably the greatest death metal pioneer — told
Sentinel Stee
l in 1997. “They were in their prime…. That was a pretty complex album. There were some trippy things going on for back then rhythm-wise definitely.”
^13-5

Metoyer agreed: Slayer were entering uncharted territory.

“In my opinion, every time Slayer recorded new material, they outshined what came before,” says the engineer. “Personally, I think
Hell Awaits
blew away everything that they had done.”

Hanneman had the idea for a skeleton in a German war helmet. During the
Live Undead
brainstorming sessions, cover artist Albert Cuellar sketched these first versions of the Slaytanic Wehrmacht mascot. He also drew a more refined version that didn’t surface until
Hell Awaits
. Reproduced courtesy of Cuellar.

Detail from Cuellar’s
Hell Awaits
cover. If the artist had final say on the
Hell
cover, it might have looked like this enlarged snippet from the actual album: just flames, no demons, no logo, no forms, all subliminal dread.

After the band voted down Albert Cuellar’s idea for an all-flames
Hell Awaits
cover, the artist drew some demons and cut them out on this art board; note the size of the horns in contrast to his hand. Reproduced courtesy of Cuellar.

Live Undead
cover artist Albert Cuellar returned for the band’s second full album. He had a visionary idea for the cover art. But after a compromise with Hanneman, he finished the job with an unauthorized assist from one of the age’s greatest graphic artists.

As with
Show No Mercy
, the
Hell Awaits
cover may seem cartoony now. But spread across a 12-inch record, the Stygian scene is a convincing vision of hell: Floating in fiery abyss, howling horned demons decapitate one doomed soul, claw another’s face, and pull the guts out of a third. At the time, the illustration was more striking than most horror movies.

Like a rap song, it contained elements from other work.

In 2011, Billoney of electric fanzine
Bang Your Head or I’ll Rip It Off identified the piece’s roots: Key images are sourced from the illustrated short story “Approaching Centauri,” written by Philippe Druillet, with pictures by Jean Giraud, the iconic artist better known as Moebius,
who contributed elements to
Alien
,
The Empire Strikes Back
, and
Torn
.