Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (10 page)

“He was pretty mellow,” says Hanneman. “One thing he always used to say to me that sticks in my mind: He’d come up with a little idea, like ‘Maybe you should change this, make this part longer or shorter.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not going to work.’ And he’d go, ‘Okay. It’s your career.’”

Rubin and Wallace didn’t have to twist Slayer’s arms often. Slayer felt good about their new guides, especially after Slagel’s hit-and-miss experimentation with their previous releases: During the
Show No Mercy
sessions, their old label head had Lombardo record drums and cymbals separately.

“We would just take their advice,” says Lombardo. “We knew they knew what they were doing.”

With Rubin looking on, Lombardo would power through as many as twenty takes at a time while Araya, Hanneman, King played along.

“The four of us set up, and we played, and that’s about it,” says Araya. “And we just kept playing until Rick Rubin was happy with the drum tracks.”

At first, Wallace would record just the drums, seated next to a growing pile of two-inch tape reels.

“I was amazed that they could play that fast and that accurately,” says Wallace. “Dave was absolutely on top of his game. Those fast double-bass drums, he was a monster. He was very capable and very focused.”

When the drummer’s energy flagged, Rubin would pump him up with Gatorade and candy. Unlike many a session for metal one-third the speed, King and Rubin’s temperance set the tone for the sessions. Contrary to a popular assumption, the studio was not a blizzard of cocaine or crank.

“I was twenty-one years old,” says Lombardo. “So energy levels, testosterone levels were high. We were all on fire at the time. ‘Come, let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s get some food. Ok,
do it
.’”

Lombardo was the first in and first out, and was done tracking by the end of the first week. The studio was surrounded by restaurants, and the band usually got take-out to eat in the studio. Chopped-garlic pizza from the nearby Domiano’s was a staple of their studio diet. For all Rubin’s preternatural aptitude in the studio, Lombardo says dinner with the producer wasn’t like eating with Yoda; it was more like a meal with a cool boss.

The
Reign in Blood
credits list Wallace as engineer. Rubin and the band share “coproduced by” credits. Wallace was initially supposed to be listed as a coproducer, as well.

“I was, technically, on board as coproducer,” says Wallace. “I don’t know if they ever corrected it. As far as I remember, I was supposed to be listed as engineer and coproducer. Engineer was my function.”

Araya says Rubin was the brains and the ears, and Wallace was his hands. Wallace, though capable and respected, wasn’t a shaping creative force on the album.

“Rubin told him what to do, and he did that,” recalls Araya. “Rubin would sit there and listen, and [say in a deep, slow, but forceful voice], ‘I need to hear
this
. I need to hear
that
.’ And Rubin would walk out and come back in and listen to it.”

Rubin had a simple idea for the sound of
Reign in Blood
: good to his word, he truly liked what he’d heard in Araya’s garage.

“Rick Rubin wanted to capture the sound that we had
in practice and put it on the record,” says Hanneman. “You walked into practice, and all you’d hear is these Marshalls in your face. He wanted to get that sound, which, before, I don’t think we’d achieved that well. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

From songs to sound,
Reign
would not be a big-budget retread of
Hell Awaits’
echoing seven-minute tracks. Two songs were approaching five minutes. The rest were closer to three, all of them lean, mean, and getting leaner.

“They didn’t want to jump from the style of their early records to something Def Leppard-ish,” says Wallace. “I love dry, in-your-face aggressive rock, without tons of reverb, all this stuff that was going on in the 80s. So it was a natural for me. I think that’s why Rick liked using me for a collaborator on those albums, because my first instinct for what it should sound like was generally what he liked. So we recorded it: close miking of the drums, no echoing. The idea was to kind of let you feel like you were in a boxing match and just kept getting punched in the face. We were all on the same page, and there wasn’t going to be much discussion of it.”

The stark sound didn’t win over everybody.

“Talk about sucking the life out of a band,” says Gene Hoglan, Slayer’s former drum technician. “The drums sound okay, but are they serious about those guitars? 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.”

Thrash was a divisive development in the evolution of metal. Bands like Slayer didn’t bother with the spit-shined formality that Iron Maiden fans expected.

“You were either on the Metallica
Ride the Lightning
side of the fence, or you were on the
Reign in Blood
side of the fence,” says Devin Townsend. “And I was definitely on the Metallica side, maybe because it was safer or something. As a producer, in ’86, ’87, I was all about the production styles of Def Leppard. The Slayer thing was so dry and so raw, it didn’t hit me until later on, after going through some life shit, what Slayer was supposed to be.”

Reign
was recorded with almost no effects, and zero studio trickeration. King used a pedal as a filter, creating what he calls “pissed-off lead tones.” Once it was set up, he wouldn’t play with the settings on it, which he told
Guitar World
’s Nick Bowcott, “added life on that album.”
²⁴
Wallace used plain equalizer effects for Araya’s now-even-gruffer vocals, sweetening only a couple screams with minimal reverb.

The rest of the basic tracks went quickly. As much as they could, the band recorded guitars and bass live in the studio.

“What stood out the most to me was the band was very well prepared,” says Wallace. “They were pretty consistent from take to take. We usually used an early take. We might have used a second or third take, but the other takes were not that far off, either. It was not difficult getting good performances.”

Nobody recalls any creative tension in the process.
Reign in Blood
was Hanneman’s baby, but the guitarist was just a another team member in the studio.

“Jeff was definitely not quarterbacking in the process, as I recall,” says Wallace. “Everyone was equally involved. It was not like some other bands where somebody is very much in charge and the other people show up and listen. It
was pretty much a democratic process.”

The guitarists were creatures of the night. They wouldn’t start recording tracks until ten
PM
, still in the habit of recording while studio time was cheap. They’d trade licks back and forth until the sun came up. The late nights tested Wallace’s endurance; the band were nearly half his age.

“He got tired late at night when me and Kerry were doing solos,” says Hanneman. “He’d be all squinty, like, ‘It sounds good!’
‘You’re not even listening!
’”

King valued Wallace’s input, even when the engineer was groggy. The two didn’t know each other, but Rubin’s recommendation granted Wallace the benefit of the doubt. And Wallace’s relaxed manner clicked with King’s motivational needs.

“I trusted him,” says King. “Back then, I’d get lazy. I needed somebody to tell me, ‘Do it again, do it better.’ I didn’t need somebody [who was] just a jackass trying to push my buttons. If I don’t value your opinion, I’m not going to listen to you. I always deal with engineers more than I deal with producers, because they’re always there.”

Solos were the biggest source of disagreement between the band and the producer. Rubin wanted more solos. And more solos.

“If [Rubin] had his way, there’d be no rhythm guitars at all,” says Hanneman. “Say, [the guitar break in] ‘Angel of Death,’ there’d be a guitar solo over that. There’d be nothing but solos. And Tom singing. That’d be it.”

Occasionally, they would hit an impasse. Reverb was still a touchy subject. Recording the beginning of “Jesus Saves,” Hanneman decided his simple
chunk-chunk
rhythm at the break point would sound fatter with just a dash of reverb.
Rubin hated reverb, and hated what reverb did to
Hell Awaits
. He issued a firm “NO.” Hanneman recalls the exchange:

“No, just try it. It’ll work,” said Hanneman.

“No,” Rubin retorted. “I’ll show you why it doesn’t work.”

Rubin found a piece of paper, drew an amp, then made a series of wavy lines emanating from the box, to represent how sound travels. Then he made a series of negating lines to demonstrate how sound withers when you add reverb to it. Hanneman stared at Rubin’s diagram.

“Just try it,” Hanneman told Rubin.

Wallace added the reverb. The guitarist and the producer listened. Rubin crossed out the sketch, crumpled the drawing, and tossed it away. The reverb stayed.

At the time, Slayer didn’t sense they were working with people who were as good as it gets. But as the stack of tapes grew, they decided Rubin was usually right.

“Once we started hearing what we were doing compared to what we were doing before, he was right about the reverb thing,” says Hanneman. “Reverb’s almost all gone, and it sounds a lot better. He knew what he was doing.”

With Slayer, the music always came first. The band was playing tight, though one major part of the album was missing. The group had finished most of the tracks and solos before they started laying down vocals. Most lyrics were complete, too—though they were new to Araya.

“I hadn’t seen any lyrics until we started recording,” says Araya. “As soon as we started recording, Jeff had the words for ‘Angel of Death’ and a lot of the stuff. We sat there and worked them out. I’d sit there and listen to them, go [home], and listen to [the tracks] in my sleep, come back, and do them again.”

The weeks of the L.A. sessions were all work—no showing Rubin the nightlife, though Friedman took the teetotalling producer out. Rubin stayed on the Sunset Strip, at the Mondrian—a famous apartment building (and later motel) that shared a name with Piet Mondrian, one of Rubin’s favorite artists. Aside from the married Lombardo, the rest of the band still lived at home. Even Araya, one of the band’s most renowned partiers, recalls simply going home after the sessions, “just passing out, crashing out, getting up, doing it all over again.”

Though the band were recording their third LP, the singer had yet to score a songwriting credit. Hanneman, the album’s main songwriter, had ideas for vocal delivery when they entered the studio. Songs like the tightly metered “Altar of Sacrifice” had a beat built in. On other songs, the guitarist would mimic the vocals’ rhythms and melodies, simulating the steps for Araya to follow, demonstrating how to emphasize “AUSCH-witz, the meaning of PAIN” in grunts and
da-DA-das
.

Some performances were collaborations, and some last-minute ideas yielded classic moments. The famous “Angel of Death” introductory scream, the first vocal moment of the album, was a late addition.

Rubin and Hanneman knew that the intro needed something, so they huddled, mulling over what could be missing. Then Hanneman had an idea.

“Scream,” Hanneman told Araya. “You need to scream. You’ve got to scream right
there
.”

Rubin chimed in, “Yeah, yeah! Scream!”

So Araya stood behind the mic, listened to the sternum-bruising chord bursts, waited for his moment, and let loose a deep
whraaaaah
.

They played it back a few times. Rubin and Hanneman gave Araya a collective
mehh
and started talking amongst themselves. Araya decided it was the right idea, wrong execution; he could do better.

“Tell you what,” said Araya. “Let’s try it again.”

And take two is the unforgettable scream that launches the album.

Hanneman and Rubin heard the shriek and started high-fiving each other like two linebackers who just watched a kicker make a last-second field-goal for the win. They tried a few more takes, but the scream had been screamed on the second take.

“It was a magic moment,” says Araya. “As soon as I did it, they knew, and I knew, too: This is what it is, this is what it needed. I
went
for it.”

Rubin’s eyes would light up when the band nailed a moment, but you had to look closely—they were
usually
lit up. Whether the band were hitting a groove or a reckless speed run, the producer would nod his head and lean back and forth, feeling the vibe. And when it was really good, he’d let them know, in a rich, mild voice: “Yeah, that’s good. I like that.”

The beginning of the album’s end required some faith and infernal inspiration. One of the
Reign
’s most electrifying moments faced some resistance.

On the album, “Raining Blood” opens with the sound of rain, followed by squealing guitars that sound like a mix of screaming souls and whalesong, interrupted by a rapid succession of three echoing blows. Unlike the “Angel of Death” scream, Hanneman had planned this flourish. And unlike the renowned howl, it didn’t sound so cool. Tom hated the drum
intro as it appeared on Hanneman’s tape.

“He thought it sounded like someone knocking on the door,” says King. “We still make fun of it.”

On the demo, the strikes sound like they’re heralding the arrival of a maid with fresh towels. On the album, it’s a sound like Lucifer himself pounding on the gates of Hell (which is how Lombardo interprets the beats). The dull triple-tap is gone. With the right skill, vision, and guidance, the three resounding blows announce imminent doom.

Part of the effect is execution. Lombardo doesn’t just pound the floor toms
1-2-3
. He makes the beat with flam taps, striking the drums with both sticks. But rather than hitting at exactly the same time, the second impact arrives a split second after the first, lending a depth to the thuds.