Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (33 page)

“Slayer sound like they want to kill you,” declared
Metal Hammer
. “This is not only the metal album of the year, but probably of the next few years to come as well.”
^28-10

It didn’t age so well.

“It was a lot of people’s least favourite [sic] record,” King told the UK music magazine
Metal Hammer
in 1999. “Looking back now, I listened to that record, and I’m like, ‘This mix really sucks!... Where’s the guitar?... But I think it’s a great record.”
^28-11

At the time, the general knock on
Divine Intervention
was that it was a formulaic album, Slayer by the numbers: thrash riff, mechanical drum roll, throaty screams about an overrated God and overachieving serial killers, repeat.

And while that assessment generally holds true for the album’s first half, it darts off into a dark sky in its second half. Tunes like the title track sound like an artistically successful sequel to the “South of Heaven” style, winding clean guitar lines around gearwork double-bass drumming, machine-gun riffing, and howling-soul solos.

Slayer bang out some hooky grooves and riffery that prefigured nü metal. It’s an uneven effort at best: Songs like “Serenity in Murder” wobble from steady, crawling sludge to the frenetic lack of focus that marked “Chaos.” Bostaph plays like a metronome set to “murder,” but his steady double-bass work never quite achieves the menacing quality of Lombardo’s barely-controlled beast.

While Slayer had proudly boasted that
South of Heaven
wouldn’t be
Reign in Blood
part II, King repeatedly said D
ivine Intervention
was a continuation of that style.

“The fact that a lot of people will probably refer to Divine Intervention as
Reign in Blood II
doesn’t bother me at all,” King told
Guitar World
in 1995. “Because [
Reign
] is my proudest moment.”
^28-12

Speaking to Borivoj Krgin, now writing for
Metal Maniacs
, King said fast material came easiest to him: “This is what I do best, so it’s kind of like getting back to basics, I guess.”
^28-13

Even if it’s not among the better collections of Slayer songs, the album is admirable for what it
doesn’t
do. Slayer had two golden opportunities to change their sound.

First, Slayer did not chase Metallica’s phenomenal success and try to cash in with a slick, hooky, spit-shined single.

“A lot of  people were probably expecting us to do a Metallica thing and change directions, but we couldn’t do that,” King told
Guitar World
. “Our fans wouldn’t dig it.”
^28-14

Second, as many reviews noted, the band didn’t pursue a grunge-inspired redirection either.

“We do what we do, and we were going to keep doing it,” Araya told
RIP
’s Daina Darzin. “We’ll change and grow, but at our own pace.  We’re not going to take a 10-step jump just so we can flood the market with our records and sell millions. We’re going to sell them on our own merit, not somebody else’s. People say Pantera and Sepultura, that they’ve gone above us because we’ve been away for so long. To me, it’s like, ‘Who the fuck cares?’ These bands are doing what we used to do.”
^28-15

There
had
been discussions about Slayer cashing in — but not ones that involved the actual band. The idea had been batted around the offices of the record company, which was now called simply “American Recordings.”

(Rubin
hosted a funeral service for the once-hip term “Def,”
with Al Sharpton presiding and lamenting the co-opted street lingo
^28-16
.)

The discussions about a radio-ready Slayer were the last conversations of their kind.

"
Divine Intervention
, this was the last conference we ever had with a record label where they sat us down and sold us the idea of how they wanted to do
Divine
and how they were going to do this with the cover and all these different ideas for the album,” Araya told The Quietus in 2009. “Then one guy looked at us and said, ‘But we need a hit song.’ And we said, ‘But you've got eleven songs, and if you can't find a hit in one of them, then you're shit out of luck, because that's what we're giving you.’ So we're like saying to them, ‘Right, you write the fucking hit song and we'll record it.’ That shut the guy up and that was the last time we had any kind of meetings like that!”
^28-17

Divine Intervention
contributed an unforgettable element to Slayer iconography: The CD and interior artwork present a picture of a fan who has carved SLAYER into his arm in pointy, angular letters.

Released the following year, the
Live Intrusion
home video captures the cutting. Wearing a Metallica
Ride the Lightning
T-shirt, the fan has written SLAYER onto his interior left forearm. A long, angled blade the size of a box cutter in his right hand, he slices along the lines, opening up letter-shaped cuts in his skin. When the wounds don’t flow to his satisfaction, he pokes the sharp blade into a dozen points in the red lines, making blood well up in crimson beads.

Carving SLAYER became part of the band’s legend, some of it suspect, some real. The
“Serenity In Murder” EP
cover art features a shirtless longhair with the band’s name sliced in eight-inch letters between his shoulder blades, blood trickling freely.

The “Serenity” single picture is fake, but the concept became a reality.

At the August 2006 Reading Festival in England, Day19 photographers Jeremy and Claire Weiss snapped an unforgettable picture of a fan with a real, even larger SLAYER carving from shoulder to shoulder.
The image ran in full gory glory
across two color pages in
Spin
magazine’s November 2006 issue. (The Weisses didn’t get the guy’s name, but assure us it’s real — unlike the popular
image of a bald man with a bloody SLAYER Photoshopped across his rear scalp
^28-18
.)

“Our fans are psycho, devoted fucks,” King told
Spin
. “But it’s hard to relate to that level of devotion. I mean, I wouldn’t do that for my wife!”
^28-19

In 2011, the theme became a meme when an image went viral. Inside the restroom of L.A. metal label based Southern Lord Records, a sign declared,
“NOTICE: Employees Must Carve Slayer Into Forearm Before Returning to Work.”
After the label tweeted a photo, several
variations of the design popped up as stickers
. Eventually, Slayer itself began selling not only stickers, but a metal road sign with the phrase.

Something had changed in Slayer’s visual presentation, too: When Slayer resurfaced for
Divine
, King’s head was shaved. And his ink collection was spreading; eventually, he would add tribal tattoos the length of his arm, plus a full-sized demon face on the back of his head. Along with Pantera’s Phil Anselmo and Anthrax’s Scott Ian, King’s new image pioneered a metal look for the next century: shaved head in the place of long hair, extreme beard optional.

“I shaved it, for no reason apart from wanting to do something different,” King told
Metal Hammer
’s Kirk Blows. “The tattoos… I thought about it for a couple months, because if you do it you’re stuck with it.”
^28-20

In the anemic mid-90s musical landscape, fans clamored for Slayer’s long-awaited return. The band finally crashed the
Billboard
top ten, debuting at no. 8
^28-21

Released September 27, it was certified gold December 6, which made it the band’s fastest-moving album. Slayer’s future video releases would achieve gold & platinum status (which is lower for videos than albums). But as of this writing,
Divine
was the last Slayer album to receive
Billboard
metallurgical certification.

Slayer had a new drummer, and the family was growing. King has already married and divorced, but he would settle down eventually. Now Araya, the group’s final bachelor, married. The speed metal kings’ life in the fast lane was ending. The group weren’t throwing raging parties any more, but not all of them were living, clean, either. Hanneman in particular had his reasons.

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1994”

Chapter 29:

Hanneman’s World of Hurt

Hanneman had a good reason for making meager contributions to the album. The former athlete was suffering through some real physical problems. And playing hurt wasn’t easy. His arms ached. By tour’s end, it was agonizing.

Slayer’s Divine Intourvention ran between November 1994 and March 1995. The trek was booked in theaters and arenas worldwide, from Paris’ 6,700-capacity Zenith to Philadelphia’s 18,000-seat Forum. In New York, the band played a two-night stand at the 3,000-seat Roseland. After spring 1995 gigs in Australia and New Zealand, Slayer hit Tokyo and Honolulu on the way home. Aside from two European shows in August, Slayer’s year ended in April, after almost nine months on the road. The group had played around 45 shows in late 1994, followed by another 50 or so in early April.

By the time the relatively long tour wrapped, Hanneman’s arms were shot. An impressive 15 years into their career, Slayer still weren’t slowing down and — unlike many a metal band — they weren’t saving fast songs for strategic points in the set. For the band, performing was as demanding as ever. The set lists generally ran something like:

1. “Hell Awaits”

2. “The Antichrist” 


3. “Spirit in Black”

4. “Mind Control”

5. “Die by the Sword 


6. “Postmortem”

7. “Raining Blood”

8. “Altar of Sacrifice” 


9. “Jesus Saves”

10. “213”

11. “Sex. Murder. Art.”

12. “Captor of Sin”

13. “Dead Skin Mask” 


14. “Seasons in the Abyss” 


15. “Mandatory Suicide “

16. “War Ensemble”

Encore:

17. “South of Heaven”


18. “Angel of Death”

Midway through the sets, after a sustained sprint, Hanneman needed to take a breather.

Something was off. When the new “Sex. Murder. Art.” was in the lineup, Hanneman had been stepping offstage, and Slayer had been playing it as a trio.

Hanneman’s stoic nature hid the fact that he was more fragile than any fans could have guessed. The most poignant account of Hanneman during the
Divine Intervention
period arrived after Hanneman’s death, from Machine Head frontman Rob Flynn (formerly of killer second-wave thrash band Vio-lence). Flynn witnessed something only those closest to the band knew: At the young age of 31, Hanneman was already suffering from arthritis.

For the last leg of the American tour, Machine Head and Biohazard opening shows. Flynn was a huge fan, but he wasn’t friends with the band. In fact, Machine Head had been on the receiving end of some criticism by King. King, who had once been an outspoken fan, had taken to slagging them as sellouts, accusing them of deliberately softening their sound. After some lively verbal exchanges, Hanneman mediated a truce between the bands. And one night, the guitarist let Flynn get a look inside the Slayer machine.

Recalled Flynn, “He had been sitting out some of the new songs from
Divine
[
Intervention
], which was odd to me.”

Finally, Flynn’s curiosity got the better of him. Before a show, Flynn found himself in Hanneman’s dressing room. Nervous, steeling his resolve, Flynn decided to ask Hanneman why he had been benching himself during the new material.

Hanneman laughed it off and told Flynn he “didn't feel like learning them, didn't like 'em, Kerry wrote them.’”

Then Hanneman quit chuckling. He looked at the ground, and the conversation turned serious.

“He said he'd been having a lot of pain in his wrists,” Flynn recalled. “His hands and wrists were going numb all the time, and would go numb during those songs because they were really fast.”

Then the unthinkable: Hanneman started crying.

“It was a startling confession,” Flynn recalled.

Flynn tried to come up with some kind of comment to make his hero feel better. It didn’t work.

Hanneman kept crying.

Flynn decided to respect the moment, and he remained in the room. The crying stopped, and a minute of silence meandered past as Hanneman regrouped.

Re-composed and surprised by the sudden sharing, Hanneman hugged Flynn and said "Whoa!”

Hanneman ended the episode and headed off toward the stage. Before he disappeared from Flynn’s sight, he turned back and said, "Thanks, dude.”

“It was an intense moment,” reflected Flynn. “One of those rare, intense moments you have with someone, let alone with someone from another band. It made me really respect the dude.  That’s the Jeff I’m gonna remember.”
^29-1

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1995”