Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (19 page)

Slayer landed at Heathrow airport on May 25, 1985. From the get-go, the tour looked like it would be a bust. It started off bad, and things quickly got worse.

The band were picked up in a “splitter” — an airport shuttle-style van split between the passenger section and a rear hold for equipment. The squad were driven over to a gear rental place. Hired hands started loading the backline into the bus. The Slayer crew were confused. They expected a big tour bus. And they didn’t see one. The grunts continued lifting cases into the little shuttle bus.

Collectively, the group began asking where the bus was, unaware they had already been in it.

The rental company set Goodman straight: “This is your bus.”

By American standards, it was a big van. It wasn’t
half
a bus.

Bewildered, they asked about the driver.

 “You’re driving,” said the Brit. 

And he handed Goodman the keys. And a single photocopy of two pages from an atlas, with a big X to mark London and another X by Poperinge, Belgium, the site of the first show, the Heavy Sound Festival. The town itself was so small, it didn’t appear on the map.

The splitter’s cargo hold filled quickly. Add in the crew and the merch, and the bus didn’t have enough room for everyone and everything. Agitated, the band began removing  gear from damage cases and stacking it as carefully as possible, which seemed like a fool’s errand.

“Fuck this,” said King. “Let’s go home.”

“Fuck that,” said Hanneman. “We’re here. We’re playing.”

Araya and Lombardo agreed. King had been outvoted, and the overwhelmed guitarist didn’t feel like arguing the point.

The crew packed in all the gear they could. And they left London without a full backline. The absent equipment blew a major hole in the band’s confidence. Dejected and pissed, they hit the road.

The crew took turns driving on the stick-shift shuttle down the highway, struggling to use the left side of the road. White-knuckled, they navigated in the slowest lane, tension building. Goodman, tasked as chauffer, had never driven a manual transmission before. Another member of the crew had to usher the bus to cruising speed before the tour manager could jump in the driver’s seat and take the wheel.

Countless highways, pit stops, and a ferry later, Slayer arrived in the little Belgian town.

A day after their dejecting arrival, Slayer arrived at the Heavy Sounds grounds. Warlock — the old of band of Doro Pesch, then the hottest woman in metal — was onstage. Warlock’s set ended as the band hit the restrooms and began unpacking.

Now that Slayer had arrived at the venue, they didn’t feel much better. The bill was loaded with much bigger groups, the kind of acts that
Kerrang!
covered: Lee Aaron, Pretty Maids, Tokyo Blade — all headlined by a diluted lineup of UFO, ’70s classic rock heroes who were one of King’s favorites. Slayer’s expectations were low. Maybe, they figured, a thousand fans would turn out to watch the American indie band.
Maybe
two thousand, they hoped.

As Slayer stretched out, an announcement boomed over the PA system, and soon it replayed. In between some odd foreign words, the group could make out “Slayer.” Goodman found it curious it didn’t mention the other bands. Just “[something something something] Slayer [something something].”

Goodman was still disoriented from his whirlwind first trip to Europe. He started to worry. The unintelligible announcement felt like the principal was calling him to the office. The acting tour manager set out to talk to a festival representative.

Goodman finally found someone with the right badge who could speak some English. He introduced himself and got to business.

“What’s the announcement they’re making?” he asked. “They’re talking about Slayer.”

The rep answered him in stilted English: “We are telling the crowd: Slayer are playing. There is a rumor they are not… They
are
playing, right?”

Goodman noted a look of concern that was wrinkling the guy’s face.

“They are playing, correct?” he asked again. “Slayer are here?”

“Yeah,” said Goodman. “We’re here. We’re here.”

The festival rep’s body language relaxed.

“Oh, very good,” the European said.

“Why?” asked Goodman. “What’s the big deal?”

The rep waved his hand, gesturing toward the crowd.

“Twelve thousand people,” said the festival rep.

“Yeah,” said Goodman, still on the defensive. “That’s amazing.”

Looking at the crowd, the concert rep said, in a sharp accent, “
Eight
thousand for Slayer.”

“Get out of here,” said Goodman. “
UFO
is playing.”

The rep looked at him. “Eight thousand for Slayer.”

Variations of the thought “Wow” echoing through his head, Goodman made his way backstage. He headed to Slayer’s dressing room and told the band about his conversation with the promoter.

“Twelve thousand people, eight thousand for Slayer,” Goodman recounted, imitating the accent.

“Fuck you,” said Hanneman. “UFO’s playing.”

“I don’t know, man,” Goodman said. “The promoter tells me 8,000 are here for you guys.”

More bands played. Slayer sat backstage, unsure what to think. It was nice to think the story was true. But it seemed impossible. The biggest crowds Slayer had played to were just south of 5,000. And that was in their home country. And that was with
Venom
headlining.

As Slayer warmed up, Canadian singer Lee Aaron finished her set. The venue staff got ready for Aaron’s scheduled encore.

The music ended. A roar rose from the audience. Louder and louder, a repeating word was echoing over the crowd.

Ten thousand Europeans — give or take a thousand or two — weren’t shouting for more Lee Aaron. Backstage, the American thrash band could make out the unified, massive roar:

“SLAYER!”

“SLAYER!”

“SLAYER!”

“I get goosebumps, thinking about it now,” says Goodman. “We’re six American kids from California, one of us from Oregon. It’s always been club stuff. We’d played some pretty good sized venues lately. And here we are: It’s been a tough few days. None of us have flown that far before. We landed in England, drove to Holland so we could find this festival. We get there, people are talking these different languages. And now people are going
fuckin’ crazy
.”

Thousands of fans strong, the chant continued, with hint of a Germanic accent, growing faster and louder

“SLAYER!”

“SLAYER!”

“SLAYER!”

Bullied by the cheering crowd, Lee Aaron never came out for her encore. The band surrendered the stage to Slayer.

Backstage, three days of escalating aggravation melted away. The fastest, heaviest, evilest band on the bill stood in the dressing room, smiles growing wider and wider.

“You start to realize: Maybe that guy was wrong,” says Goodman. “Maybe it’s
not
8,000 people there for Slayer. Maybe he’s wrong on the
low
end. At very least, the other 4,000 people are there for UFO,
they’re
into it.”

Lurking in the wings, Slayer waited to take the stage. Finally, they walked into the sunlight.

The scene that greeted them was everything it sounded like — and more. Hardly anything separated the stage and the crowd — just a thin gap and a chain-link fence. On either side of the venue, the fences were covered in homemade banners, most of them reading SLAYER. 

The band strutted onto the stage. Basking in the crowd noise, they performed a last-minute tune-up as the crowded chanted “SLAYER / SLAYER” faster and faster.

“HOW ARE YOU GUYS FEELING TODAY?” shouted Araya, grinning ear to ear. And followed a speedy rendition of the endless tease of the “Hell Awaits” intro.
When the song was over, King raised his right arm in a victory salute eight years in the making. 15 minutes into the set, “Captor of Sin” wrapped.  Between songs, Araya quizzed the crowd about the festival’s location in the hinterlands.

“Is this where they have to put metal?” he asked, with the fervor of an evangelist. “Can they put it in the arenas, in the cities, in the
major
cities? We’ve come a long way, and we have yet further to go!”

Feedback and whammy-bar noise bridged the brief moments between songs in the band’s adrenalized, full-sized, hour-long set, which comprised speedy versions of:

1. “Hell Awaits”

2. “Aggressive Perfector”

3. “Captor of Sin”

4. “The Final Command”

5. “The Antichrist”

6.” Necrophiliac”

7. “Fight Till Death”

8. “Black Magic”

9. “Die by the Sword”

10. “Praise of Death”

11. “At Dawn They Sleep”

12. Drum solo

13. “Show No Mercy”

14. “Evil Has No Boundaries”

15. “Chemical Warfare”

“It was, by far, the biggest show they’d ever played,” says Goodman. “At least double, probably triple the largest show they’d ever done. And even though they went over well with Venom, they went over as well on this weird continent they’d never been to.”

Backstage at that show, photographer Charly Rinne snapped the picture that would grace the rear cover of
Reign in Blood
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. The band are ecstatic, except for Lombardo, who looks tired. Pawing a six-pack of tiny beer cans, they look like manic giants in the photo, making metal faces, eyes narrow, teeth bared, wild hair sticking out in every direction. It was a good day.

It was a good tour. Slayer headlined over local hellions. The crowds weren’t always big, but they were all enthusiastic. For a month, the band ravaged venues in the Netherlands and Germany, wrecking Katwijk’s Scum Club and Munich’s Alabamahalle. The clubs generally held a few hundred people. They played seven shows in the Netherlands. Destruction opened nine German shows. Artillery opened a Danish show.

On the rare nights that the venues weren’t packed, they were close, and the crowds were completely rapt in the show. Before Europe had converted to the standard Euro, the band collected the equivalent of $250 or $500 a night in Deutschmarks and guilders.

Before Slayer’s last show for the European continent, the band met with Roadrunner boss Wessels, who had bankrolled the trek.

The band found Amsterdam’s Paradiso, a former church converted to a rock hall.  The crew unloaded. Inside, Araya, Goodman and Wessels pulled up seats to a table. Wessels was ready to talk business. That made one of them.

Wessels said, “I want to go over the numbers with you.”

Araya and Goodman looked at the label head and said, in tandem, “
What
numbers?”

Wessels asked for the band’s receipts from their month on the road.

They didn’t have any.

The band had gone spent a month in Europe without accumulating a single record of their business expenses — gas, food, lodging. Nothing.

Wessels politely shrugged it off. Good notices and a growing pile of good reviews had made it a worthwhile investment.

Slayer returned to London for a final show before departing for America, at the Marquee, a storied club on Wardour Street in Soho. Before the concert, the band drew up a fantasy guest list, filling it with the name of every UK rock writer they could think of from the magazines they read: names like
Kerrang!
’s Malcolm Dome, the journalist credited with coining “thrash” as an adjective. They had all RSVP’d, and they
all
showed up. Slayer hit the stage and didn’t disappoint them.

The next day, the band returned the splitter and rented gear. Exactly a month after they first set foot in Europe, a triumphant Slayer flew home from Heathrow.

Goodman had left with a couple hundred dollars in his pocket. He returned to America $30 poorer. It was money well spent. Says Goodman, “The best $30 ever.”

Back in America, Slayer received the sole negative review of the tour: One of the booking agents sent Slagel a Telex complaining about the “useless” tour manager and “childish” band.

Goodman laughs at it and doesn’t dispute the charges.

“We were kids,” he says. “We didn’t have a fuckin’ clue.”

They were developing a clue. Slayer began the tour as disappointed, displaced, skinny longhairs. Over the next month, they grew. A swagger developed.

“They comfortably started to wear the crown,” says Goodman. “They knew what they had, and they appreciated it. They didn’t turn into dickheads.”

Slayer were entering their prime. Their records had all been instant landmarks. But still: Before
Reign in Blood
, Slayer still had the dubious distinction of being a “…but you really have to see them live” band. Even fans agreed.

Writer Gene Khoury reviewed the Studio 54 for show for
Kick Ass
magazine, noting, “Slayer live is the real Slayer. The vinyl is great, but they are a live band that forces you to thrash by their incredible speed and power…. I’d seen Slayer about five times already, and I can honestly say they played at their best tonight.”
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