Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (29 page)

Recalled Abrams, “It looked like it was snowing.”

Rather than milk the tension for an inevitable encore, Araya takes the stage and pleads with the crowd to settle down.

“Listen, man,” he says, chuckling. Under inadvertent assault by loyal fans, he issues some directions to the light crew: “Can we drop the spots, cuz I can’t see shit flying at me?!”

Alone in front of the pulsing crowd, the frontman continues: “Listen! I’ve been asked to inform you guys: Stop throwing these fuckin’ cushions around! You guys came here to have a good time, and you’re fuckin’ blowin’ it, bigtime, man!

“Listen, this isn’t
me
talking,” he continues. “This is common sense here, dudes! Fuckin’ A, come on! I know you’re here to have a good time — you’re having a good time. But fuck, man, why don’t you give us a break? Do me a favor? Leave the fuckin’ spots off. I can’t see shit flying! We can probably never play here again because of all this shit!”

And, after a killer “Angel of Death,” they never did play there again. Not that century. When they returned to New York in October, they were back in L’Amour, for a two-night stand.

Araya plays the final song with a bouncer stationed on his left, who spends the tune trying to catch or deflect flying foam. The studio version of the song runs 4:51,  but the band finish it in 4:36 tonight, about 5% faster.

“Thank you, fuckin’ New York!” Araya shouts after the song. “Good night, assholes!”

Chapter 23:

Priest and Puke

After the W.A.S.P. fiasco, Slayer’s days as an opening act were almost over. For that era. Almost.

South of Heaven
worked in some slower material, and Slayer’s lifestyle was decelerating, too. The band would be hard drinkers for years to come, but drugs exited the picture shortly after the band began making some money.

“Everybody reaches a crossroads,” said Araya. “And I remember looking at myself in the mirror one day and thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ And we faced that moment at an early point in this band. I just knew what I was doing wasn’t cool. Then I just stopped.”

In fall ’88, booze was still a fixture. In October, hair metal princes Cinderella dropped off a dozen shows opening up for Judas Priest. Slayer filled in on a run dubbed “The Mercenaries of Metal.” The arena concerts didn’t constitute an ideal match of bands, but King was excited to be on tour with his idols.

Slayer even got along with Priest’s crew. Uncharacteristically, the band had a little too much fun. At Hanneman’s public memorial service, King recalled an incident.

“I hold my liquor well,” King said. “I’m not usually a problem. This day, I was a problem”

King, Hanneman, and the band’s tour manager had been partying with the Priest crew. King, on this rare occasion, had too much to drink. Unable to drive, he and Hanneman piled into a the back seat of a rental car.

Before the drive even started, King felt queasy.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” he warned. “Don’t put me in the back seat.”

“No, you never throw up,” the driver said. “You’re fine.”

But if King says he’s going to do something, he does it.

A mile later, he still felt the uncontrollable urge. “Listen dude,” he said from the back. “I think there’s gonna be an episode here.”

“You’re fine,” the driver said. “You hold your liquor great.”

“I’m gonna tell you something,” said King. “I’m going to puke in this rent-a-car.”

At least he had a window seat.

King started to roll down his window. But child-resistant safety window only came down halfway. As the acidic puke surged forth, King tried to hurl out the window.

“It didn’t make it,” King recalled, laughing.

King rode along, puke on his chin, arm, and chest. At the time, he didn’t think it was funny. But Hanneman did.

Howling in the back seat, Hanneman looked at King and said, “Dude, that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen!”

King, pissed, didn’t agree: “Oh yeah?” he said and wiped it on him.

Hanneman just laughed more. And louder.

Smeared with King’s vomit, he looked at the his partner in crime and told King, “Dude, that’s the best thing
EVER
!”

Hanneman didn’t mind paying the price for a good time.

Concluded King, “He was stoked to have my puke on him because he had such a good time that day.”

King didn’t start drinking until he was 21. Drinking became a hobby for the late starter, but it became a habit for Hanneman.

Talking to
Guitar World
’s Jeff Kitts after Hanneman’s death, Lombardo remembered the guitarist as always having a can of Coors Light in his hand. So did King.

“Jeff and I always drank,” King told Kitts. “They called Steven Tyler and Joe Perry the Toxic Twins. We were the Drunk Brothers.”
^23-1

The mayhem didn’t end until the tour did. At the Dallas State Fair Coliseum, the triple bill of Slayer, Motörhead and Overkill drove the crowd into a frenzy the night after Thanksgiving. When fans started chucking heavy lengths of pipe onto the stage, Araya blew his cool and berated the crowd.

After the holidays, the band spent January 1989 in Europe headlining over Nuclear Assault and Overkill. Slayer were running hot, but the six-month tour ended abruptly, with 70 shows over 1988 — all of them in the fall — and under 20 in 1989. The band wouldn’t hit the road again for over a year.

Hanneman and Kathryn married that year, and the decade ended with one long, hard-earned vacation and  honeymoon.

“Slayer had been touring continuously since the release of Show No Mercy in 1983,” says Lombardo. “We had reached a point where we were exhausted. We were comfortable with the money we had made and simply needed some time off.”

When the warlocks did reappear, they still had that old black magic.

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1989”

Chapter 24:

Seasons in the Abyss

Slayer’s frontline — and back line — held for the band’s third consecutive classic album.
Season in the Abyss
came together over the first half of 1990, with old friends, in familiar terrain. As with
Reign
and
South
, some of the sessions took place at Hit City West.

Over the disjointed sessions, more recording took place at Hollywood Sound, a haunt on Selma Avenue that Rubin became fond of, which hosted sessions for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’
One Hot Minute
, the first System of a Down album, and Danzig’s debut. And it had welcomed the Jacksons, Belinda Carlisle, and Earth, Wind & Fire
^24-1
.

The band also recorded at the L.A. location of the Record Plant, the site for sessions including Billy Joel’s
Piano Man
, Suicidal Tendencies’
Join the Army
, and the Eagles’
On the Border.
(King, a California native, is an Eagles fan
^24-2
.)

When Slayer reconvened, the band was still the same four guys. Rubin is credited as producer. Wallace was slated to serve as the project’s producer, but by the time the sessions were was over, he was credited as co-producer, alongside Slayer. Wallace also received engineer and mixing credits.

“Working with Andy was almost like a supervisor,” Araya told me in 2010. “Rubin was almost the same thing. I’d ask Andy, ‘How’d that sound?’ He’d say, ‘Try it again, but do
this
.’ He just basically let us do what we did.”
^24-3

Carroll returned, unassisted, for the album art. The
Seasons
cover is an earthtone collage, a graveyard of raining skulls, towering tombstones, and inverted crosses.

The budget was higher, and Wallace had extra helping hands: assistant engineers Chris Rich (Wet Wet Wet), Allan Abramson (who would later work with Dio, Richard Marx and Guns N’ Roses), and David Tobocman (a Cher and LL Cool J engineer-keyboardist who worked his way out of rock and into film & TV music and garnered an Emmy nomination for the Nickelodeon series
Robot and Monster
’s “The Forgiveness Song”).

“It was like being in the pit at Indy,” Tobocman told me. “The band would finish a take, and I had to, as quick as humanly possible, spin off the current reel, get it back to its proper box, crack a new reel of tape, splice on some leader, spool it onto the machine, and locate it to the top of the reel. “
^24-4

And by now, Sales was a permanent part of the Slayer machine. Collectively, the organization sat down with Rubin and decided to make a run at the big time. Sales, Rubin, and Slayer renegotiated the band’s contract a long-term deal that would carry the band through its tenth album, two decades later.
^24-5

Seasons
was Slayer’s first release for Def American. At the time, the songs’ lyric publishing was a split copyright between American Def Tune Inc. and the band’s Death’s Head Music. (Starting with this release, the band placed music first in the album credits, followed by lyrics.)

Hanneman and King, such cohesive collaborators on
Reign
, do not co-write any lyrics on
Seasons
. In retrospect, it’s odd that the “Drunk Brothers” didn’t work together more. But at this point, the band’s collective work didn’t suffer for it… much. The words to “Temptation” (lyrics by King) and “Hallowed Point” (lyrics by Araya and Hanneman) are unprecedented clunkers, but in the company of A-list songs like “War Ensemble” and “Seasons in the Abyss,” they didn’t seem like anything to worry about.

King contributes solo lyrics on four songs.

Hanneman didn’t compose any lyrics by himself, but wrote the music for five songs, and co-wrote music for another two with King.

In the Slayer discography,
Seasons
is the Tom Araya album, the LP with the singer’s most writing credits. Araya contributed lyrics to six of the album’s ten songs: four solo compositions, plus two co-writes with Hanneman: “Hallowed Point” and the prescient, far superior “War Ensemble.”

“I had a lot of ideas [previously],”Araya told me when the band was performing the album in its entirety. “This was the first time I took the initiative to try to write something.”
^24-6

“Expendable Youth” tapped a timely topic, gangland warfare — something that Araya knew a little bit about, though it was all secondhand.

“I grew up in a town called Maywood,” recalled Araya. “And I hung out with my brother quite a bit. He had some cholo friends. They were good friends to have,” he added with a dry laugh.

The album has another unique credit: King provides backing vocals on the postapocalyptic postcard “Skeletons of Society.”

With Araya penning lyrics, songs about serial-killer songs continued arriving. But now they were about real-life mass-murders. “Dead Skin Mask” trotted out the infamous Ed Gein, the inspiration for
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and Albert Hitchcock’s classic shocker
Psycho
. (The trend would continue on future releases, with “Gemini” [the Zodiac Killer], “Psychopathy Red” [Andrei Chikatilo], and “213” [Jeffrey Dahmer].) Araya and Hanneman liked to read about their pet morbid subjects; King preferred to watch movies and keep an eye on the world around him.

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

Other subject matter displayed an amazing element of timing: the United States military’s Operation Desert Shield, a campaign against Iraq, was in full swing when the album arrived. When that operation transitioned in Operation Desert Storm — and, thus, the first Gulf War — Slayer’s “War Ensemble” was in circulation as a perfect soundtrack for bombing runs.

Seasons
synthesizes the previous two albums’ disparate extremes. Like
Reign
, it starts at a full run, with “War Ensemble,” a full-throttle anthem with whiplash start-stop dynamics. With ten songs, it’s Slayer’s longest proper album, with a run time of 42:27 minutes. (Some expanded versions of other albums have bonus tracks and run longer; more on them later.) The album record closes with a 6.6-minute title track that represents the last new element of Slayer would ever incorporate into its congealing sound: deep sludge that flowed in a slow current.

While it’s a brutal record,
Seasons
has an arid tone. A certain strain of audiophile might agree with Gene Hoglan’s previous criticism of the Slayer sound as captured by Rubin and Wallace: “That is some
dry
action. Here’s Metallica putting out
Master of Puppets
and even Exodus, the fantastic guitars on
Bonded by Blood
. [
Reign
doesn’t have] a lot of that really good crunch you’re looking for in a metal band. I don’t think Rick did them any favors.”
^24-7

By that point, King wasn’t Rubin’s biggest fan, either. Talking to journalist Mark Day, King took exception to the record’s credits.