Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (40 page)

Which wasn’t to say that past problems are gone and forgotten.

In 2007, I ask Araya how things are different now that Lombardo is reinstated. He laughs. For a long time.

So I ask if things
are
different.

He laughs more, showing a full mouth of pearly whites.

“Things haven’t really changed,” says Araya. “The only thing that’s different between then and now is that we’re older. We probably have different coping skills.”

Now reunited, Slayer’s four founding members still had the same musical skills. And they could still put on a brutal show. Now they set out to prove it to the world, by revisiting their most heralded achievement.

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 2003”

Chapter 38:

Raining Theatre Blood

Slayer’s most vivid nightmare became a reality. The day came when it rained blood. A
ton
of blood. Literally. And more would follow.

Lombardo continued working on the side. He recorded with Apocalyptica. He worked on the new Fantômas disc and announced another Grip Inc. album.

 Then, in 2003, Lombardo’s return to the band was officially announced as permanent. It was official. The band’s handlers drew up a contract that would pay Lombardo a percentage of the band’s take. The drummer had surrendered his ownership stake in the band during the 1992 split. Now, he wasn’t a full-fledged member of the organization with an equal cut of revenue and full voting rights. Lombardo was an employee, not a partner. But back he was.

“Not to put down Bostaph, but Lombardo coming back is just amazing because he just brings such an intensity to the band," Hanneman told the Chicago
Sun-Times
^38-1
.

“Having Dave back in the band is one of the highlights of my whole time in,” King told
Metal Hammer
in 2005. “There are kids that could've been into us for over 10 years that never got to see us the way we are meant to be.”
^38-2

The band isn’t given to sentimentality – they were on the road in 2006/7, but didn’t celebrate it as their 25
^th
anniversary. But they decided to commemorate the Lombardo reunion.

“The idea to play
Reign in Blood
as a piece came years before that,” said King. “ I think John Jackson, a promoter in England, ran it by us. And I’m like, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’ And then, timing comes around.”

Slayer jammed
Reign
and decided it worked.

In October 2003, the band set out on the road, headlining a Jägermeister-sponsored tour with openers Hatebreed, the kings of the first hardcore generation that had unambivalently accepted metal.

For months, rumors had swirled that Slayer would be playing all of
Reign
, but the band didn’t even officially announce their special plans for their set. Then, at the last minute,  Jägermeister publicists confirmed it: Slayer would be playing all of
Reign in Blood
, like Roger Waters performing
Dark Side of the Moon
or the Who touring
Quadrophenia
.

But once the tour had begun, toward the end of Slayer’s show, the rumors still sounded like rumors.

After a full set, Slayer played “Angel of Death,” which has long marked the end of the show. The band thanked the crowd and left the stage. Apparently the internet rumors, published reports, and reliable sources had combined to serve up a crock.

Then the band returned to stage, launching into an old favorite that even the biggest diehards in the audience hadn’t heard live before:
Reign in Blood
, side one, track two: “Piece by Piece.”

“That was the first time we’d ever played ‘Piece by Piece’ live, if I remember right,” said King. “That beginning is really hard to play. I have to really look at Dave to lock in and play it. I find myself doing that more on these last [few] tours.”

And, then, in order, followed the other eight songs from the album.

The tour was booked in big clubs, theaters, and arenas. Some pits were pure pandemonium, and the men’s bathroom at shows — as always — looked like a triage area, full of fans with red-gushing noses and gashed-open foreheads.

Some of the shows were more subdued – many old-school fans braving the pit at 11 p.m. had worked a full day. But a raging nucleus always whipped up a swirling vortex of muscle and bone, experiencing a long-gestating fantasy come true: The best thrash album, live, in its entirety.

The live rendition of
Reign
turned the shows into Slayer’s longest sets, tied with the
Attitude
shows in a count of songs played, but running longer, usually:

1. “Darkness of Christ”

2. “Disciple”

3. “War Ensemble”

4. “At Dawn They Sleep”

5. “Necrophiliac”

6. “Captor of Sin”

7. “Stain of Mind”

8. “Payback”

9. “Mandatory Suicide”

10. “Fight Till Death”

11. “Dead Skin Mask”

12. “Hell Awaits”

12. “South of Heaven”

14. “Reign in Blood”

15. “Angel of Death”

16. “Piece by Piece”

17. “Necrophobic”

18. “Altar of Sacrifice”

19. “Jesus Saves”

20. “Criminally Insane”

21. “Reborn”

22. “Epidemic”

23. “Postmortem”

24. “Raining Blood”

“For us, it was for the fans, because the fans have given us so much support, [and said] the album is legendary,” said Hanneman. “So we just wanted to do it for them.”

The band played
Reign
in full about 40 times, until King was sick of it. The tour wrapped in late November at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheater. It had been a good year, 2003, but a light one, with a mere 50 shows.

Too late, the band decided they should have documented the
Reign
set. Then they thought of the one way they could possibly top metal’s massive encore: Do it again, once more — with blood.

In 1986, the band had toyed with the idea of somehow raining blood during their set. Smoke and red lights were all they could afford. Now they had more money to play with. In 2004, the let the blood pour.

Before JägerTour, King and his wife had seen Cavalia, a new-age circus comparable to Cirque-du-Soleil. Watching glistening white sand rain down on the contorting acrobats and gallivanting horses, King had an idea:
Red
sand might look like blood. King pictured a hellstorm, and his mind grapes started making crimson juice. Slayer, he decided, would make it rain blood.

(As of 2008, King wasn’t included in Cavalia’s list of celebrities who have seen the show, which included Larry King, Wayne Newton, Stevie Nicks, and Adam Sandler. The only figure on the list with any metal cred was Kiss’ Paul Stanley.)

Slayer management sent out some feelers to theatre-effects companies. Eventually, they found North Hollywood’s Reel Efx. The company came though with the right idea and the right price. Technician Kevin Berve lobbied hard for the assignment — he’d been a Slayer fan since 1986, when he saw the
Reign in Blood
tour play Norman’s Place in Denver.

“They thought it was funny that I was so excited,” says Berve. “And they gave me the project.”

Berve got to work with his boss, Jim Gill. To make visible red rain, Kool-Aid and water weren’t going to get the job done. After pondering the logistics, they had two options:

Slayer Inc. could 1) fill a 1000-gallon tank with crimson goo, and use a pool pump to push it through a rain rig.

Or they could 2) fill a truck with water and attach a mixing manifold to add in red coloring before the liquid hit the rig.

They decided to go with option no. 2. Berve shipped the rig materials to Maine, along with 20 gallons of blood concentrate. (Just add water.)

In summer 2004, the band co-headlined Ozzfest. King was honored to be a marquee band beside two of his heroes: the reunited Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. True to character, King didn’t have much to say about what a monumental achievement of a lifelong dream it was.

“That was really cool for me," he said told Angela Yeager of Oregon’s Statesman Journal in 2006.

King saw it as more of an opportunity than an accomplishment. Satan knew the younger crop of bands weren’t impressing him.

“I'd find myself doing that [seeing younger bands] at home when we weren't touring and think, 'I'm better than that. I need to get out there and show them what s*** is all about,'" King told Yeager.
^38-3

The festival shows did, however, make King re-evaluate Slayer’s career. As he watched another great band age, King realized metal might not have an expiration date — and if it did, it wouldn’t arrive as soon as he had suspected.

“I was actually thinking a couple of years back about when I will retire,” King told Luxi Lahtinen of Metal Rules at the time. “‘Hmm... Let´s see, maybe a couple of records, six years, hanging up and....’ And then after the tour with Priest and seeing how good they were, I mean, they don´t thrash like we do, but they were the same band like they were 15 years ago. So they kind of inspired me, they just, y´know, leave it open. And when it comes to the point when you either one of  us wanna do it either as physically we can do it, hopefully that´s when we know to hang it up rather than stick around too long.”
^38-4

On Ozzfest’s off-dates, they opened shows for Slipknot. July 11 at the Augusta Civic Center, Slipknot let Slayer play last. That night, the band shot the
Still Reigning
concert video, which captures
Reign in Blood
live.

Staging Hell became a civic endeavor: The Augusta Fire Department loaned the Slayer crew a 5,000 gallon pumper truck and enough fire hose to push the blood from the back of the arena, through the backstage, to the manifold on the stage, and 35 feet up the effects rig, into a giant vat above stage, which was 40 feet long and 6 feet deep. Suspended above each band  member was a 20-gallon barrel of fake blood.

Before the show, Berve and his assistant constructed a 50-foot by 10-foot tank to be brought in between Slipknot and Slayer's sets. The tank consisted of a frame of 1-inch-by-four-inch boards covered with black plastic, and then lined with carpet,  so the band didn’t slip and become a real casualty.

In the afternoon, the band worked out the timing:  When Araya yelled "from the lacerated sky,” the arena would go black. The group would hit marks on stage. And Berve would open the flood gates, dumping barrels of blood on the band.

Then the lights would go up, revealing metal kings that suddenly looked like Carrie at her prom. As Slayer finished the song, the remaining 120 gallons of blood would rain down, backlit with white light, to make the dark downpour as visible as possible.

During the concert’s climax, as planned, the stage went black, and the group hit their marks — except for Hanneman. In two minutes, a ton – 200 gallons at nine pounds a gallon – of red liquid poured onto the band.

Without the benefit of a dress rehearsal, Hanneman missed his mark, and was barely been splashed. Araya, however, was exactly where he should have been.

“He looked like he just came crawling out of hell,” remembers King.

Backstage in locker room, Slayer posed for pictures with their longtime photographer Kevin Estrada, wiping blood out of their eyes like triumphant gladiators.

“The cleanup was the real nightmare,” notes Berve. “After the show, we began cleaning off the stage immediately, so the crew could pack up and get on the road for the next night's show,” continues Berve. “Easier said than done. I had managed to dump somewhere around 200 gallons of blood on the stage during the show, which made the carpet extremely difficult to remove.”

The band hadn’t considered one thing: After the blood hit, they had a minute left to play. Most of it didn’t require precision – in the
Reign in Blood
credits, the climactic guitar shredding is credited as “noise.” But their work wasn’t over.

“I felt the blood hit, like ‘This is probably a bad idea,’” said King. “I felt my guitar neck, and it felt like I’d sprayed WD-40 on it. It felt like I was playing all over the place, but it worked. When we listened to the tapes, I thought I was going do have to overdub a lot, but it was there.”

Lombardo wasn’t so lucky.

They ten-camera shoot went off without a hitch; sound was a big problem. The big red bedlam sounded and looked great in the live-in-concert chaos at the Civic Center. On tape, removed from the hall, the instruments covered with syrupy theatre blood sounded like shit. The downpour saturated the microphones, caked the drums and cymbals, and rendered some of the audio tracks unusable.

As it stood, the sound was unreleasable.

The band was adamantly opposed to overdubbing – 1991’s double-live album
Decade of Aggression
skipped the time-honored metal tradition of fixing up live flubs in the studio.

Instead of laying down new tracks, to salvage the recording, the band leaned on Kevin Shirley — a producer-engineer who has worked with Aerosmith, Iron Maiden, and the Black Crowes.