Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (21 page)

But released it was, via Geffen, which was affiliated with Warner Bros. And the Wehrmacht were treated to a horror anthology: songs about serial killers. A witch trial. Black magic. An obliterating disease. Vengeance from the grave. A power struggle for the underworld. And a rain of blood.

The album’s first and final songs are Slayer’s most frequently played tunes. In concert, the band has performed them both well over 1,300 times
^15-4
. And while “Angel of Death” is seminal, “Raining Blood” is inimitable.

Decibel
readers ranked the song #1 by a landslide in the magazine’s Top 50 Greatest Extreme Metal Riffs of All Time. Wrote Kory Grow, “The opening riff… is undeniably the most monumental moment in extreme music’s history.”

The 
Decibel
piece also recounts Hanneman’s memories of writing the seismic riff. True to form, he didn’t have much to say about it. “I went, ‘This is kind of special. This is pretty good…. And Kerry was like, ‘So?’ And I’m like, [laughs], ‘Dude, ‘C’mon, this is cool!” Araya and Lombardo loved it, creating a 3-1 majority
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.

Some great songs are not just catchy tunes. Some songs tap something so deep and elemental, you can feel them reverberating through the universe, like they’re channeling something that has always existed and always will. Possibly the most galvanizing moment in the history of heavy metal, "Raining Blood" is one of those all-time great compositions, its unforgettable hook deceptively simple. Like a Mozart melody, the music of “Raining Blood” is a striking look at the world from a unique soul’s perspective. They make some part of nature suddenly apparent to listeners, the new scene forever resonant, undiminished by the passage of time.

 “Angel of Death” may close the sets and signal the five-minute warning until JägerTime begins. But “Raining Blood” is King’s favorite track from the album. And based on decades of visceral reactions, the fans agree.

“Wherever ‘Raining Blood’ comes in the set, it just electrifies the crowd,” said King. “People just shit when you hit the first few notes. Like, Jesus Christ, it’s just guitar – settle down!”

“Angel” is unforgettable for several reasons. Like Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White,” the song forever linked the band inextricably with whispers of white supremacy. And despite the subsequent 25 years of clarifications, the group’s visuals and the title of its fan club didn’t help the accusations stop.

Some fans interpret Slayer's fixation on Nazi imagery, history and personalities as a tacit endorsement of the evil empire and its lingering ideologies — but the band are ethnically diverse, and their social circles even moreso. The recurring themes are no juvenile obsession with a forbidden aesthetic; rather, they give Slayer's work a sociological, political, and historical subtext that is utterly absent in whatever erudite bands headlined last summer’s hot-ticket music festivals.

To outside observers,
Reign
stands as a thematically unified examination of the darkest corners of inhuman history. To the band, it wasn’t a grand statement. Witness this 2007 exchange between me and Kerry King, who wrote half the album:

Ferris:
Hell Awaits
is a big, scary album. But to me,
Reign in Blood
says something about the world.

King:
We just got better.

Ferris:
But, to you, is [
Reign
]
about
something?

King:
No. None of our albums have been.

Ferris:
You just look at it as: You wrote ten songs, and that’s what it is?

King:
Yeah.

End of conversation.

I did manage to coax some great nuggets out of the band about the album, its inception, the recording, and the aftermath. But that quick back-and-forth demonstrates how Slayer work — and, just as importantly, how they don’t work.

Slayer did not create
Reign in Blood
by skipping around
tra-la-la
, sipping lattes, and discussing how to best disseminate dangerous ideas, reinvent the conversation about extreme music, and forge a bold new paradigm.

As artists working in a popular, performance-based arena, Slayer are athletes. They don’t conceptualize and agonize about what it all means. They practice. They play hard. When they have ideas, they carry them out by instinct. When they’re ready, they execute.

While it would be fascinating to discuss the band’s creative process in more detail, their core creativity doesn’t manifest through a process. Ideas for songs and riffs come to them. In earlier years, the songs arrived in something close to their final form. But as the years have gone on, it happens with less and less frequency. Craftsmanship certainly enters into it: If a song is just lying around in parts, they hammer the pieces together in the studio. And when an album’s worth of material is done, the band is done. Unless Slayer have a secret vault of unreleased material, the group have written and recorded with an efficiency comparable to Led Zeppelin, who had famously few leftover tracks.

For
Reign in Blood
, King sat in his room at his parents’ house, wrote, and jammed, with a cassette recorder rolling to capture the keepers. Hanneman read history books. Inspired, he recorded multitrack home demos on a cassette deck. Lombardo took basic rhythm outlines the guitarists came up with, and he embellished them into intricate tapestries.

Araya didn’t write lyrics for that album. The guitarists not only put words in his mouth, but dictated their delivery: Hanneman and King coached Araya in the studio, describing cadences for his vocals. At Hit City, Rubin would settle into a seat and absorb the music. He encouraged wilder leads, vetoed all reverb — or tried to — and gave a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on individual moments in a calm, firm, deep voice, declaring, “That is not cool.”

On
Reign in Blood
, Slayer’s creative workload balances nearly even between Hanneman and King. The axemen collaborated on three sets of lyrics: “Criminally Insane,” “Necrophobic,” and “Raining Blood.”

King wrote lyrics for five songs solo: “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Epidemic,” “Jesus Saves,” “Piece by Piece,” and “Reborn.” And Hanneman penned two by himself: “Angel of Death” and “Postmortem.”

They collaborated on music for four tracks: “Criminally Insane,” “Epidemic,” “Jesus Saves,” and “Necrophobic.” King wrote music for one by himself, “Piece by Piece.” And Hanneman wrote five: “Angel of Death,” “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Postmortem,” “Reborn,” and “Raining Blood.”

King and Hanneman co-penned some of the band’s signature lyrics, but their definitive collaboration wasn’t quite a co-write. The music was written before the band began recording, but the guitarists finished the lyrics at the last minute in the studio. Hanneman handed off the unfinished “Raining Blood” to King. King meditated on Hanneman’s authorial voice in the studio, thinking about the song’s supernatural scenario as he playing a tabletop Galaga game in the lobby. King dropped a quarter in, and the final verse began falling into place.

King supplied the album title. In a rare act of wordplay, he morphed “raining blood” to “reign in blood.” Araya passed out early cassettes of the album with “Raining Blood” handwritten on them.

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

Despite the album’s instant-classic status, the credits wouldn’t calibrate into a comparable Hanneman-King balance again until 2009’s
World Painted Blood
.

(In 1986, under their current deal,
Reign
’s lyrics & publishing were credited to Def Jam Music; later pressings saw the credits change to Death’s Head Music. As Araya recalled it, the band initially co-owned its master recordings with Def Jam, but later bought them back.)

Released earlier that year, Metallica’s
Master of Puppets
gets many of the votes for best mainstream thrash album. But those votes come from a different crowd who want to hear something different in their musical compositions. Compared to
Reign
,
Master
has two fewer songs and runs almost twice as long.

“At the time, we always listened to Metallica and Megadeth to see what they were doing,” Hanneman told
Decibel
’s J. Bennett in an in-depth account of the album’s creation. “But one thing about me and Kerry is we get bored of riffs really quick. We can’t drag the same thing over and over or do the same verses six times in a song. If we do a verse two or three times, we’re already bored with it.”
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While Metallica’s
Ride the Lightning
and
Master of Puppets
may be larger records in terms of their sonic diversity,
Reign in Blood
crystallized metal at its extreme point. It’s pure, uncut thrash. No ballads. No soft moments. No colorful stained-glass production. It’s all sharp steel and dripping blood, racing forward, barely under control. Groundbreaking guitar. Unforgettable vocal moments. Metal’s best lyric sheet. It was a game-changer. Metal musicianship would never be the same — especially percussion.

Lombardo’s greatest contribution to metal drumming is his pioneering deployment of the double-bass-drum roll. In “Angel of Death”’s seminal double-bass solo, Lombardo kicks his bass drums 28 times in two seconds. For a moment, the drummer’s feet are literally firing faster than an uzi
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.

Def Jam released
Reign in Blood
October 7, 1986.

Reign in Blood
didn’t singlehandedly accelerate speed metal.
But
it deserves a lot of credit for elevating the genre. Looking back, from the right perspective,
Reign
is one of the albums that divides the metal evolution timeline into before it and after.

“I think that album sticks out,” says Dan Lilker, a metal expert best known as bassist of Nuclear Assault, SOD, Anthrax, and numerous others. “If you had a chart, you’d see [speed metal] spike with that. It had more impact. It moved things along and kicked things up a notch. Dark Angel had come out with
Darkness Descends
in ’85 or ’86, and that was a tremendously intense album. Kreator had put out
Pleasure to Kill
, and that was a fast motherfuckin’ record. But by that time, Slayer had quite a following, so I think the popularity they had at the time made that record have more impact. When
Reign in Blood
came out, everybody bought it and went ‘Holy Fuck.’ Nuclear Assault, we were like, ‘Fuck, dude, we better speed the fuck up.’”

Reign
integrated hardcore punk’s ferocity with classic rock’s musical proficiency, meeting at their midpoint to create metal’s new extreme standard. Fans embraced it on either side of the metal/punk divide — and far beyond.

The metal press hailed
Reign
as an instant classic. And eventually, the rest of the music media caught up.

Kerrang!
gave it a perfect rating.
Metal Forces
scored it a 97 on a scale of 100. A year later,
Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal
would rank
Reign
as no. 1 on the Top 20 Thrash Metal Albums of All Time countdown. It remained part of the conversation. The August 2007 issue of
Q
would rank
Reign
as the no. 2 loudest album ever.
Spin
eventually ranked it at no. 67 on its list of
100 Greatest Albums, 1985-2005
.

The disc crashed the
Billboard
chart November 15 1986, landing at no. 127. It stayed there 18 weeks, peaking at no. 94 on December 20. It was certified gold in 1992. Rick Sales, the band’s manager, says it has sold at least two million copies, but has never been certified because the band’s label has changed distributors so many times.

The chart spots weren’t at the top of the mountain, though
Metal Mania
’s Fabio Testa noted the modest success qualified the album as “one of the most publicly accepted underground statements in music history.”
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Reign
was the work of a true dream team.

“Rick’s been totally great for us,” King told Gene Khoury in
Metal Mania
’s August 1987 issue. “And his guidance has given us a better position to deal with the business side of metal, which means the difference between success or failure.”
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Reign
is still iconic. In 2013 alone, Metal Injection ranked it as the no. 7 Most Influential Heavy Metal Album of All Time
^15-10
. (Note that the list is “influential,” not “greatest”; Slayer is harder to imitate than Sabbath or Pantera.)

L.A. Weekly
not only
dubbed it the Greatest L.A. Metal Album of All Time
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, but the Greatest Metal Album in History
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. And it’s an obligatory staple in pieces like
L.A. Weekly
and the Dallas
Observer
’s “Heavy Metal Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” (no. 1 and 4, respectively)
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.

And Hell was about to get hotter.