Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (28 page)

With ten songs, the album runs a hair under 37 minutes — 28% longer than
Reign
, which also had ten tunes.

Speaking to
Decibel
for that commemorative oral history of the record, Hanneman recalled, “I just remember after putting out
Reign in Blood
, we didn’t want to try to beat that album. It’d be kind of ridiculous, ‘cause that album’s so fast. So we all talked about it: slowing the record down a bit to freak everybody out.”
^21-6

Fans accepted the record.
Then
they freaked out.

Slayer spent most of that tour as headliners, albeit in small venues: jam-packed clubs, roller rinks, and other makeshift concert halls.  But in some key markets, they were selling out medium-sized venues.

In August 2013, Slayer announced two big shows with the ecstatic lead, “Slayer will headline concerts at two venues it hasn't played in 25 years!”
_21-7
The release didn’t mention why the band hadn’t played either since 1988. It was a good story. Two good stories.

An August 12 show at the Hollywood Palladium, with labelmates Danzig on the bill, was sold out — and then some. Fans didn’t take it well. After the Friday night concert, Slayer would be banned in their hometown for years.

“All-out carnage,” says Will Howell, who was inside the concert. “That tour, everyone comes out of the woodwork. It was frantic kids who wanted everything about Slayer. They weren’t banned from the Palladium based on who they were — it was the crowd they brought: It was us sick maniacs.”

As King recalled it, the 3,700-capacity venue was not just sold out, but oversold: According legend, fans with legitimate tickets were turned away.

“You can’t oversell it, have Slayer fans come up to the door, and not let them in,” King said. “And things were going to get broken. And things did get broken. And the police overreacted. And it was just chaos.”

Whether or not it’s the fact of the matter, “oversold” is the most common explanation for the debacle.

“You had a faction of kids saying, ‘I had a ticket, they wouldn’t let me in,” says Howell. “I was not in the box office doing a head count, so I can’t say for sure it was oversold. Also, don’t put it past scalpers to make fake tickets back in 1988.”

A
Real TV
report from the time
captures unbelievable video footage of the night
^21-8
.

“Music fans go wild when they can’t get in to see their favorite group in concert,” says the anchorman.

Producer Michael Brownlee narrates: “Hollywood California, the city of bright lights, movie stars, and — on this night — bad attitudes.”

Bad attitudes are swirling on every side of the affair.

“They’re
playing
, man,” a dejected concert goer says, beseeching a policeman in riot gear, after he’s been told to move along. That evening, fan complaints fell on many a deaf ear.

An estimated 200 fans mass outside the venue. Eventually, as the news narrator says, an active minority “go berserk.” When the screaming crowd in front of the doors won’t disperse, a bouncer the size of Lou Ferrigno shoos kids half his size, waving them off with a mean “Get OUT of here!”

They don’t go anywhere.

In classic fashion, a squad of a dozen armored riot police descend on Sunset and Argyle, jogging in in two parallel lines, in an scene much like
the classic Gary Leonard photo from the cover of Henry Rollins’ Black Flag journal
Get in the Van
, which was taken at the same venue four years earlier. In future years, some of the action captured on videotape will recall another infamous image of the LAPD in action.

Soon, a dozen fans start a circle pit in the street.

“It appears that show outside is far more intense than the one inside,” says the narrator, incorrectly. Inside, after Danzig are being booed. After the opening act, Slayer fans are throwing elbows, moshing, and tossing sucker punches in the name of good time.

“As tempers flare and emotions run high, mayhem breaks out on every street and every corner,” he continues, over scenes of police chasing off longhairs and providing medical care to people lying on sidewalks.

In the parking  lot, one hesher in jeans and a leather jacket kneels, still, next to a car. A policeman, one hand on the guy’s shoulder, beats him in the spine with a riot baton.

Back at the front doors, as the narrator says, “the fury reaches its boiling point.”

Dozens of fans are still standing in front of the opaque glass doors. And soon, they’re tired of standing and staring. A handful of them shatter a door, chucking objects through the frame. Shards of ebony glass cover the sidewalk. The kids jump for joy.

Uncontested, two fans run up to the doors, start grabbing pieces of glass, and hurling them into the lobby, shrieking. A fan in a white T-shirt, a flannel wrapped around his waist, invades the lobby and hurls a stick at the guards. Now the line has been crossed.

Outside, a fan stands by the broken door, taunting two more hulk bouncers in blue EVENT STAFF jackets. Seeing an oncoming object, the fan jumps to his left, just in time to avoid a flying folding table, hurled by security. Following the table, the bouncers race outside and try to grab the invader. On their tail, four more bulls in blue charge out. And the crowd begins to disperse.

When the scene dies down, paramedics cart out some concertgoers on gurneys. As far as riots go, it’s relatively small, and the score card is low: three arrests and three hospitalizations, no peace officers hurt. Slayer wouldn’t be welcome back to the venue for 25 years.

Whether they made it inside the concert, fans left the Palladium bleeding, concussed, and awestruck.

“The good old days in L.A.,” writes one YouTube commenter beneath the
Real TV
footage.

Writes another, “Awesome show.”

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1988”

Chapter 22:

The Cushion Riot Concert

The summer of ’88 ended with another bang. People who attended the band’s next big show describe it as a riot. It wasn’t quite one, and it certainly didn’t compare to the property damage and unrest at the Hollywood show. But it’s easy to understand why they recall it as a riot.

August 31, Slayer played New York City, the band’s home away from home. In the Big Apple, the group had graduated from multi-night stands in metal clubs. One of the tour’s bigger shows took place at New York City’s Felt Forum, a 5,000-capacity that’s part of the Madison Square Garden Complex. (It has since been renamed the Paramount, WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden, and the Theater at Madison Square Garden.)

The theater had a sprawling, general-admission floor area, with surrounding seating sections. The seats made it a memorable show for the ages.

Before the concert, radio ads featured a deep, exciting, monster-truck-event voice, who promised,
“SLAYER… YOU CAN ALREADY FEEL THE GROUND SHAKING!... This is no namby-pamby rock and roll — this is SLAYER!”

The announcer was not exaggerating by much.

Going into the show, venue management expect a madhouse. They marshal a security force that could have quelled a conventional riot. But in the presence of Slayer, a distinct form of mass madness manifested.

Once again, Danzig was roundly booed. The band is supporting a truly great album, but Slayer fans truly show no mercy.

An anonymous account from the time claims NYC police stood shoulder-to-shoulder between the barricade and the stage before the show. But on a video of the concert, no police are visible. Eyewitnesses who were there don’t recall that kind of police presence, just regular Garden bouncers.

“It was '88,” remembers Howie Abrams, co-author of
The Merciless Book of Metal Lists
and former A&R rep for Warner Bros. and Roadrunner. “So as far as the ‘bigger’ venues go, the type of crowd reaction Slayer got must have freaked them out. They were clearly not ready for it, and this particular crowd was above and beyond!”

Fans decided they couldn’t wait for headlining band to start, and they started the action early.

“The barricade collapsed multiple times, including before Slayer even came on,” recalled Abrams. “And verbal attempts to get the crowd to cooperate with its repair fell on angry, deaf ears.”

Farther back, one fan ripped open his seat, tore open the foam cushion, and whizzed it across the crowd like a massive Frisbee. The idea went viral, and the air filled with white foam squares, like seagulls zooming over a beach. Other fans hurled gutted folding chairs.

“Eventually, Slayer came out and told us that if we didn't mellow out, they wouldn't be allowed to play,” notes the show review. “After a while, they came out and played one of the best shows (outside of a L'Amour show) I've ever seen. The pit was so fierce that night that everyone who was in it left bleeding and battered.”
^22-1

On this point, the review and the eyewitness agree.

“There was a sense of violence in the air from the minute I arrived at this show,” says Abrams. “It seemed as if half the crowd was on angel dust and just didn't give a fuck about their own safety, much less anyone else's. To this day, I don't recall seeing as many bloodied, passed-out and fucked-up kids in one building as I saw at this infamous show.”

Captured on a bootleg video, the concert is an unforgettable spectacle.

Slayer take the stage and rage in their longhaired glory. Nine-foot squares of Marshall amps flank Lombardo’s three-foot drum riser. Armless T-shirts expose wiry arms on Hanneman and King, and the guitarists shred in front of black walls.

Araya stays rooted, front and center, for the whole set. At either side of the stage, King and Hanneman headbang in place. Periodically, the guitarists casually stroll across the stage, switching places.

With a constant cluster of lights on Lombardo’s riser, the wafting special-effects smoke is a permanent cloud around the drummer, who looks like he’s playing atop a volcano.

And the crowd is a crater full of bubbling lava. By the third song, the pounding “Silent Scream,” the pit is spitting a constant flow of bodies onto the stage.

At the song’s climax, Araya screams, “Death / Is / Fucking you insane!” To his left, a shirtless longhair wearing fingerless gloves and leather vest leaps from the stage, onto the crowd. It’s so dense, he doesn’t go anywhere. He just crawls backward onto the stage, mashing heads and grinding his knees on surprised fans’ shoulders. When he reaches the stage, he jumps again. And this time, he swims away, torso buoyed by a tide of raised arms.

Deeper in the floor, four or five mosh pits break out in the convulsing mass of bodies.

Araya has to stop the show and plead with the crowd for a little respite. “I’m gonna ask you for your cooperation —  I KNOW I’M ASKING FOR A LOT! I’m going to ask you for your cooperation, just once, OK?”

At least half a dozen bouncers are stationed across the stage, clustered at strategic points. They’ll hardly get a moment’s rest through the show. And this point, they could have used another dozen.

“We’ve got to straighten some of the shit that’s down here in the front,” Araya says, gesturing to the rapidly disappearing space between the stage and the crowd. The frazzled bouncers shuffle some hardware around, and the crush continues.

Slayer kick into the slower “At Dawn the Sleep,” Hanneman and King both stage right, headbanging in unison, at either side of a giant, bedazzled, inverted crucifix mounted on the Marshall wall. The crowd has subsided for now, but it doesn’t last. By the time the song reaches a crescendo and Araya chants, “Kill/Kill/KILL!” the crowd-stage overflow has resumed.

“You guys have to be one of the fuckin’ wildest bunches we’ve played for yet, man!” the singer barks after the song. “I take it there’s no taming the New York hardcore influence!”

In about 75 minutes, Slayer plow through 17 songs, playing at their tightest:

1. “South of Heaven”

2. “Raining Blood”

3.  “Silent Scream”

4. “At Dawn They Sleep”

5.  “Read Between the Lies”

6. “Fight Till Death”

7. “Mandatory Suicide”

8. “Kill Again”

9.  “Behind the Crooked Cross”

10. “Postmortem”

11. “Reborn”

12. “Die By the Sword”

13. “Altar of Sacrifice”

14. “Jesus Saves”

15. “Chemical Warfare”

16. “Ghosts of War”

17. “Angel of Death”

Even on the bootleg, the performance and sound quality are more impressive than anything from the band’s official live album, 1991’s double-LP
Decade of Aggression
.

By the set’s penultimate song, “Chemical Warfare,” the entire floor area is a churning pit. The main set concludes with “Ghosts of War.”

For two tense minutes, the crowd surfing dies down. But deeper in the hall, the frenzy escalates.

“I began to see packs of kids with knives and other sharp objects running toward the back of the venue, where there were several rows of seats,” says Abrams.

The cushions keep coming. Once again, the air fills with whizzing white-foam squares.