Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (23 page)

Lombardo was receiving an even split of road revenue — merchandise and their take from the gate. But when checks did start arriving from Def Jam, his were smaller.

Lombardo hadn’t written lyrics, and he wasn’t receiving a cut of publishing royalties, which constitute the real money from record deals.

“At that time, we were signed to a record label,” recalled Lombardo. “And I was noticing: I’m not getting paid here. Here they are, they’re signing all these publishing deals, and — that lead me to leave.”

On the road, the aggravation from business was compounded by stress of the social variety.

The Lombardos weren’t exactly a unified front. Sometimes it was them against the world; sometimes, it was them against each other. Teresa was under Dave’s skin, and she could do different things while she was down there.

“She knows how to push Dave’s buttons,” said King. “And for all the times Dave wants her there, it’s torture. She’d be the one like, ‘That guy’s looking at me’ – stupid, trivial, grade-school bullshit. It was always something with those two. And I don’t want to make it seem like she was some bad person, because she’s not.”

On the road, the band couldn’t retreat from each other and disappear into their own social circles, as they did at home in L.A. Stuffed into a tour bus and moving at 200 beats a minute, the band’s personalities came into play.

White Zombie bassist Sean Yseult, who toured with Slayer in the 1990s, offers a quick characterization of the members as their personas manifested in the day-to-day grind of road life:

“Tom — good cop,” says Yseult. “Jeff — bad cop. Dave — good cop. Kerry — bad cop.”

Telling Officer Lombardo to relax and have fun didn’t help.

“He was being a prick,” said Hanneman, the charter member of the group’s O.A. Club, short for “obnoxious asshole.” “And once he was being a prick, we started being a prick to him – I mean,
bad
. So nothing good was going to come out of it.”

Playing live let everyone blow off some steam. But shows often ratcheted the tension even further.

Chapter 18:

Blood on the Road

In the mid 80s, rock and roll was about to rip free from its moorings. Arena-sized metal bands routinely played ten-minute solos. Iron Maiden performed the entire, plodding, 15-minute “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” two tours in a row.

Bands like Slayer were rewriting the parameters of extreme metal – how to play it, and how to react to it. They had help. Some surprisingly diverse bills saw metal and hardcore merging into one bigger, badder subculture.

With
Reign in Blood
wrapped, the band had played an April hometown show at Los Angeles’ Olympic Auditorium, a boxing arena with a capacity near 10,000. November 7, after the album was out, Slayer returned.

Opening the concert were bands from opposite ends of the spectrum: their hardcore friends in D.R.I. Major-label heshers Metal Church. SST junior-varsity hardcore band BL’AST, which briefly featured future Alice in Chains replacement singer William DuVall. And Overkill, another major-label act that straddled traditional metal and thrash. Each band brought its own constituency, and the floor became a general-admission massacre. In those days, Mohawks and mullets didn’t mix much. Or well.

In recent months, Bon Jovi had shot the famous video for “Livin’ on a Prayer” at the venue. When Slayer played, bodies went flying, too — no wires necessary.

“The pit that night was insanity at its finest,” D.R.I. frontman Kurt Brecht wrote in the memoir
Notes from the Nest
. “Skinheads and long-haired metalheads thrashed together with the punks in a frenzy of sour-smelling, sweaty head-walking, stage-diving, chicken-fighting mayhem… Tattooed, shirtless skin[head]s walked the circle, waiting for someone to bump into one of them so they could break their jaw… The floor of the pit was sweaty grey cement made slicker even by spilled beer. Now and then, some unfortunate soul fell in the muck, usually causing a pile-up.”
^18-1

Now, with
Reign in Blood
on the streets, Slayer were ready to bring that California brand of crazy to the rest of the country. Overkill — Jersey veterans with roots in punk, but currently teetering between metal’s A and B squads – stayed on as Slayer’s support through a monthlong headlining fall campaign.

“Opening for Slayer was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, playing-wise,” says Skates. “There was a standard that I never met. And I tried to meet their standard, that they’re the fastest, heaviest band. Overkill’s songs that were pretty fast, I found myself counting them off way faster, and it kind of ruined the songs. ‘In Union We Stand,’ that was a rough one in front of a Slayer crowd [in later shows]. Every time, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to get a beer bottle in the head if I don’t watch out.’ No one was ever afraid to go up to Overkill or any band who opened for Slayer and give ’em the finger and say ‘Fuck you, gimme Slayer.’ Because they were there to see Slayer.”

When Slayer hit the stage, the band achieved maximum velocity as quickly as possible, and never slowed down. They were out for blood, and the increasingly common mosh pits provided it. No warming up while the crowd watched. No long solos.

In Slayer’s sets, nothing was more emblematic of the new age of metal than the band’s rejection of one of rock’s most cherished conventions: the show-off spotlight guitar solo. King and Hanneman are iconic players, but they were never
that
kind of guitar hero.

“I don’t see me or Jeff as a focal point, for one,” explained King. “The way I look at us, the three front guys
are
Slayer… I don’t need the attention, for one thing. I don’t consider myself like [former Ozzy Osbourne axeman] Zakk Wylde. Like, I’d pay to go see Zakk Wylde solo for a half-hour. I’m a piece of the puzzle. I’m not the superstar. [Playing a long solo] seems weird to me.”

Slayer kicked off the set with songs they now save for the climax of the night. Some evenings, they’d open with “Raining Blood” and tear right into “Angel of Death” — the equivalent of Springsteen starting a show with “Thunder Road” and going straight into “Born to Run.”

Lombardo would often kick off shows with “Raining Blood” and the three floor-tom flam-taps that signaled the entry to headbanger heaven. When they could, they took the stage in a dense cloud of smoke, barely visible in a red-and-gray haze. Slowly, the cloud would dissipate, revealing the band, flanked by upside-down crosses made of blinding white lights, raging through what would soon be recognized as one of the great metal songs of all time.

“Dave is such a hyper, over-the-top drummer,” says Skates. “He was the only drummer I saw who visibly headbanged while playing drums. And that’s hard to do. He’s got a huge physical command over his coordination. I’ve got to keep equating these guys to athletes: They’re four Michael Jordans. That’s why they could never be surpassed. Four Michael Jordans on a team are always going to win the championship.”

Slayer’s physicality had limits. King’s famous armband and its hundreds of nails weighed around four pounds. Playing with the extra weight began making his forearm tendons  unbearably tight, and wore down his entire left arm. Around this time, he started taking if off after a few songs.

On headlining shows, Slayer would play 17 songs in 80 minutes. And the 1986 set lists were much like more recent shows. A nameless bootleg from Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom captures the November 14, 1986 set:

 1. ”Raining Blood”

 2. “Angel of Death”

 3. “Die by the Sword”

 4. “Praise of Death”

 5. “Criminally Insane”

 6. “Necrophiliac”

 7. “Necrophobic”

 8. “Captor of Sin”

 9. “Reborn”

10. “Black Magic”

11. “Post Mortem”

12. “Epidemic”

13. “Hell Awaits”

14. “Chemical Warfare”

15. “At Dawn They Sleep”

16. “Altar of Sacrifice”

17. “Jesus Saves”

Even on supporting shows, they played almost the entire
Reign
album, except for the chaotic “Piece by Piece,” a curious piece with an escalator riff that sounds less like Slayer and more like a Dark Angel tune.

The sets started with high energy and never flagged. Most metal bands can’t handle a set of pure speed. Once their youthful testosterone starts to wane, bands generally warm up with some slow songs, or they start with a couple blazing numbers, then catch their breath with some midtempo tunes. Not Slayer.

At that point in the tour, the band capped sets with “Jesus Saves,” closing the show with a ridiculously shredding solo, ending the set abruptly, like the close of
Reign
’s first side. Suddenly empty, the stages felt wrecked and desolate.

“Jesus Saves” didn’t always close the set. Earlier in the tour, it didn’t play so well.

In the first concerts following the album’s long-delayed release, Slayer played a new song, “Jesus Saves.”

“This is a track off our new album,” Araya tells a crowd on a bootleg. “It’s a phrase we’re all familiar with. I think it’s one that I think you guys can say very well, in a very
author-ative
voice. I want to hear everybody here say ‘Jesus saves.’”

The crowd boom back, with a deep rounds of boos, whistles, and catcalls.

“What, you guys don’t believe me?” responds Araya, unaccustomed to being booed, sounding a little tipsy. “I want to hear you say it: ‘Jesus Saves.’”

Some do; most just hoot.

“Listen,” continues Araya, like a pissed-off gym teacher calling his class a pack of sissies. “I want to get something straight here, right? ‘Jesus saves’ is a phrase of two words,
two words only
, words that have a meaning that you don’t have to accept,
OK
? So just say,
‘Jesus saves
.’”

A few fans do — but on the tape, they sound like a minority.

After some coaxing, the singer gets a half-hearted shout for Christ. Doubtless, some fans went home, worried that the new album was “gonna be all about God and shit.” The uninformed reception had some parallels to the “Angel of Death” controversy: Without the proper context, newcomers knew simply that Slayer were writing songs about Auschwitz and Jesus. If Anthrax or Wayne Campbell had written “Jesus Saves,” they’d have added “(Not)” at the end.

While in New York, Slayer hung around L’Amour several nights. One night, Overkill headlined, and Araya introduced the band. Before Overkill’s set, they watched the opening act, Whiplash, another Jersey band with a pretty good drummer.

Slayer’s all-killer-no-filler sets from ’86 even sound impressive on unmixed bootlegs. The band rushed from song to song like a train picking up momentum — never had the “Black Sabbath at 45 RPM” cliché been so appropriate.

But apparently, that diesel wasn’t running on all cylinders. As the tour moved East, miscues are buried in it all. King said Lombardo would regularly wander off point, which the rest of the band attributed to the drummer being distracted from fights with his wife.

“And it winds up to the point where he wouldn’t perform his gig correctly,” recalled King. “Anything less than perfect is a waste of my time. I think about it as perpetuating the brand, so to speak. If you come through and you suck, those kids may not come to see you next time.”

Hanneman and King roomed together, and would find themselves brewing and stewing, creating a drunken feedback loop of resentment toward the Lombardos. By the end of the first leg, the vat was boiling over.

If tensions were high within the camp, outside, some real hatred was developing. Sales recalled religious groups picketing outside most venues, inspired by Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music Resource Center.

Then, as Slayer’s Silver Eagle was cutting a swath through the country, Araya’s parents started receiving phone calls threatening Tom’s life. The calls kept coming. As December approached, the caller said he was going to kill Tom during Slayer’s two-night stand at New York City’s Ritz, a hall with a capacity around 1,500.  Annoyance turned to concern, and the Arayas called Sales, who took it as a credible threat.

Sales added extra security to the venue. Years before hand-held metal detectors were standard gear, security guards patted all audience members. They would report confiscating one gun.

Sales also changed the protocol for the band’s arrival. The Ritz had an unusual entrance; bands would normally enter through front, coming in past the line. The tour manager set up a diversion, arranging for an empty limo – the band never used limos — to arrive while the band entered, climbing in up fire escape on the other side of building.

Inside, extra plain-clothes security staff were positioned through venue, a Slaytanic Secret Service. Extra muscle was also onstage. With a hulking chief named Big Charlie front-and-center, a line of five burly bouncers dispatched stage-divers with ease, scooping them up and tossing them back into the lake of hair and leather.

Slayer thrashed through the sets in a demonic fog. The shows went off without incident.

As with the record company complications, management let the artists concentrate on their performance.

“I didn’t know about it,” said Araya. “I just thought it was odd that we had this extra security around us. And then finally Rick Sales told me what was up.”

The first leg of the
Reign
tour was done. But they weren’t home safe yet.