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

“
Hell Awaits
just holds the entire
thing
,” Anselmo explained. “Every bit of everything to do with heavy music. They are gods, the best metal band from California, for sure.”

A year later, the metal mags said Slayer had a new album due. The July release date came and went. No Slayer record. There was some kind of controversy about it. It was too
something
for their new major label. Details were scarce. This was before the Internet, before Blabbermouth. If you wanted metal information, you got it from magazines that had been written a month or two ago. But the pain-in-the-ass news confirmed my teen paranoia: it was us metalheads against the world.

Reign in Blood
snuck up on me a couple months later, on a school bus. Some kid walked down the aisle and handed the bus driver a tape. Then began
Reign in Blood
.

A throat-ripping scream cut through the collective din of sixty yapping kids. Heads turned. Conversations stopped. It was like a scene from a fantasy novel, where the sky turns black, lightning splits the heavens open, and a giant glowing hand of doom floats in the darkness, summoning all the faithful, letting them know the dark lord has returned to finish his savage business. Slayer was back.
Reign in Blood
was here.

That said, once
Reign in Blood
was in my hands, it disappointed too. I didn’t like it. It was different. It could have been the best metal album ever—as it turned out, it was. I didn’t care. It wasn’t the same as
Hell Awaits
. To my teenage mind, different was bad.

I didn’t know at the time, but Slayer liked D.R.I. too. After
growing up listening to Deep Purple and Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin, Slayer had embraced hardcore. On
Reign
, the seven-minute vampire songs were gone, replaced with three-minute rippers. It took some getting used to. And again, it wasn’t just me. Across the country, even some of Slayer’s friends were disappointed.

“It’s a pretty severe, stormy record,” says Dark Angel drummer Gene Hoglan, grudgingly acknowledging
Reign
’s superlative spot in the metal canon. “I thought
Hell Awaits
was better. I thought [Slayer’s pre-
Hell
EP]
Haunting the Chapel
was a
real
exciting turning point, where they went from an Iron Maiden–type band, a very Metallica-esque band, into something larger. But
Reign in Blood
was the one album for everybody. Every song was an exciting song, and they definitely captured the essence of everything that thrash was about.”

Slayer kept me signed up for the metal militia. Still, I straddled hardcore and metal—as it became increasingly fashionable to do so. D.R.I. was the only thing I could find that was more switchblade-fast than Slayer, so they were worth a trip into the city, where their tours would stop at the Electric Banana, Pittsburgh’s dingy punk stronghold. I’d seen them the summer of ’86, on tour for the thirty-three-minute, twenty-five-song
Dealing With It
. Summer ’87, they came back.

Things were changing in ’87. A few fellow longhairs in denim had been at the ’86 show. Mostly, though, the crowd were punks in rattier clothes, with shorter hair, wearing bootleg Corrosion of Conformity
EYE FOR AN EYE
T-shirts. A year later, the turnout was bigger and way more diverse. While my ears and body took a beating in the pit, my bony teenage ass was knocked halfway across the club, sent flying by a kid with a crew cut-devilock combo, who was wearing a
Reign in
Blood
T-shirt, which was sliced open under the sleeves, presumably to show off lats that he’d been sculpting at football practice earlier that afternoon. As I sailed from one side of the pit to the other, a thought occurred to me: a year earlier, you never would have seen that kind of guy at a punk show, in a Slayer shirt.

Metal and punk, once warring tribes, were now beginning to merge into a single movement. And they’d continue to do so. United and strong, both were slugging their way out of the underground. Thrash was metal that hardcore kids could no longer completely discount. And it was intense enough to make metal kids quit headbanging and start moshing. Today, metal and hardcore are often indistinguishable. Groups themselves can’t tell the difference. After the millennial metalcore (metal + hardcore = “metalcore”) generation, how you label your band says more about your friends than your music.

Soon after
Reign
, Slayer’s
South of Heaven
arrived. By then, I’d come around, and the double gutpunch of “Postmortem” and “Raining Blood” was more stimulating than most of my favorite horror movies. Again, not just me: Slayer was now too big for clubs. This tour, they packed City Limits, a roller rink that hosted big shows like the final Black Flag tour, which pulled the crossover crowd of punks, jocks, metalheads, and college kids.

Slayer live was pure chaos, a mad crush. A sea of bodies pressed into each other, screaming along to “South of Heaven,” so frantic to push to the front that there wasn’t much of a pit. You could lift your feet off the ground and not fall. Metalheads leapt atop the crowd, surfing waves of arms, adrenaline, and testosterone, kicking careless concertgoers with high-top sneakers. At hardcore shows, the mosh was a form of
dancing. At metal shows, kids just went nuts. It was
on
.

Over the next few years, my favorite bands dropped like flies. Hardcore acts went metal and slowed down. Metal groups changed lineups, slowed down, and wrote softer songs. Metallica wrote ballads and followed one with a sequel. Disappointed by his heroes, this metal kid moved on. By ’92, almost every band from ’86 was missing some crucial element that once made them great. Except Slayer. (No wonder grunge cleaned house.)

Slayer held it together. Slayer kept their fans in the game. A Slayer album arrived every few years, no matter what you were doing in life, no matter what you’d been listening to. And they were all, at least, pretty darned good. 1998’s
Diabolus in Musica
is criminally underrated. 2001’s
God Hates Us All
was a very different kind of piece than
Reign
, but at least Araya wasn’t rapping.

Fall 2003, metal was making a comeback, and Slayer were still at the head of the pack. That tour made a metal fantasy come true: Slayer played the entire
Reign in Blood
album. The band had still never scored a big single, and they hadn’t played full-sized arenas for a while. But it was still a monumental show, a musical event on par with Roger Waters playing
Dark Side of the Moon
in its entirety, the Who touring
Quadrophenia
, or Sonic Youth busting out all of
Daydream Nation
at Lollapalooza. The pit wasn’t quite the pure pandemonium you’d expect—it was a Friday night, and most of us old-school guys had worked all day. Some shirtless young bucks stirred the mosh, shouting “
Fuckin’ Slayer!
” when the spirit moved them. Old and young metalheads alike felt
Reign in Blood
was worth getting some bruises.

When your favorite bands jump the shark, they kill you a
little. When you’re sixteen, music might be the most important thing in your life. You love two, maybe five,
maybe
seven bands. By the time you’re twenty, half have broken up. By the time you’re twenty-two, their new albums are just a formality so they can tour and play their old hits—which aren’t holding up well. The show sucks, and you don’t even bother getting their next record.

Next thing you know, you graduated college four years ago, and you don’t even really care about music any more. Now you spend your weekends like
Old School
’s Frank the Tank, double-timing from Home Depot to the Olive Garden. You could care less about which band is coming to town when; you have other things to do. But bands like Slayer keep you coming back to your favorite music. And if you’re a metal fan, you find the culture’s traditional values are much the same. For Slayer fans,
Reign in Blood
goes on and on.

“Even now, a Slayer show is a happening,” says Mike Schnapp, who helped assemble the band’s famous
Ultimate Revenge
video. “It’s a major thing. You see people that you’ve been seeing for twenty years. There’s a social scene there. There’s a common interest. You’re psyched to see each other. You’re psyched to see the band.”

If one metal album deserves a serious look, it’s Slayer’s
Reign in Blood
.

See the band. See Slayer. Backstage in a locker room at Augusta, Maine’s Civic Center, soaked from a rain of blood, slathered in thick, red syrup. Twenty-some years into an unparalleled career, singer-bassist Tom Araya, guitarist Jeff Hanneman, and drummer Dave Lombardo still bang their heads in a fury, lost behind their long hair. Guitarist Kerry King is shaved bald, a demon’s face tattooed into the back of his head. Flecked with gray, they’re in fighting shape, like aging champion gladiators triumphant yet again, playing fast music with the rage of young men.

Unlike the Grand Guignol tradition of gory theater, some of this evening’s bloodshed is real, though it took place offstage: in a flesh tornado of a mosh pit, fans careened into each other until the restrooms looked like a triage area, scalps split open, foreheads gashed, noses running crimson.

It’s July 11, 2004: Slayer has just performed their entire
1986 classic,
Reign in Blood
. The album defined the band—and, as much as any record, the genre of thrash metal. It’s the purest thrash album, recorded by the genre’s greatest, most universally respected group. With an odd mix of label and talent, the disc left deep marks on metal, punk, alternative, and arena rock. It’s the crowning achievement of a transcendent band.
Reign
survived fire from its own camp and emerged as a classic that’s still relevant to artists inside metal and out, young and not so young, the world over.

This celebration of
Reign
ended in a ton of blood—literally: 200 gallons of sticky theater gore, weighing nine pounds a gallon, poured on the band. Slayer’s most enduring nightmare had become a reality. And more red rain would follow. Three years later, backstage in Cleveland, the band reflect on the metal storm.

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

With the record, drummer Dave Lombardo set new standards for speed drumming. But the accomplishment wasn’t enough. He would quit the band during their victory-lap tour, only to return three months later. In 1992, he would depart again and remain gone for nearly a decade, the only member of the original quartet to leave the Slayer circle. Filmed for the
Still Reigning
DVD, the 2004 performance of the thrash titans’ most acclaimed album marked his official, permanent return to the fold—and their ongoing reign as metal’s most uncompromising force.

“It was fun,” says Lombardo, reflecting on the live
Reign in Blood
experience. “I think it was an affirmation that we could
still do it, that we haven’t slowed down a single bit. I’m forty-two. Tom is forty-six. So we’re still there. We’re still strong. There’s a lot of bands, a lot of musicians out there, they’ve reached their peak a long time ago, and can’t play worth a shit today. And we’re playing music that’s more demanding, physically, than anybody else can even imagine that guys at our age can do. So I think it’s an affirmation of who we are and what we’ve stood for all this time.”

Lombardo’s playing wasn’t the only storied execution from
Reign in Blood
. The record opens with one of heavy metal’s great screams. The word “Auschwitz” is next, followed by a series of seminal moments—bludgeoning drum rolls, drill-bit riffs, and morbid subjects in sinister songs. It concludes with a hair-raising tune called “Raining Blood,” ending in the sounds of a dirty downpour that marked heavy metal’s cyclical renewal.

Slayer isn’t the biggest band to emerge from the mid-80s thrash movement (Metallica is); better, they’re the standard-bearers of metal itself. They’re revered by groups you know, bands you’ve never heard of, and musicians you’d be surprised to hear weigh in on their behalf. Slayer has as many better-than-good albums as any band, but guitarist Kerry King says they wouldn’t play another full record live. They’re all longer, and none has an unbroken string of favorites. Explains the guitarist, “Everybody likes
Reign in Blood
.”

The controversial album remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal. It’s a seamless procession of ten blindingly fast songs in just twenty-nine minutes, delivered in furious bursts of instrumental precision. Its lyrics are so striking that Tori Amos was moved to record a cover. Its hooks are so monstrous that Public Enemy sampled a song.
Reign in Blood
saw the Los Angeles standouts permanently fuse classic rock’s technical proficiency, hardcore punk’s speed, and metal’s brute power—all captured with crystalline clarity.

“I think it was one of the first records of its genre that was recorded well, which makes a lot of difference,” says producer Jack Endino, who has worked with Nirvana, Soundgarden, and High on Fire. “And that’s why that record has such impact. It wasn’t just a shitty indie band any more. It’s clear, it’s crisp, it rips your head off. It’s the first one I took seriously, and I was not paying attention to metal or thrash much.”

Little wonder, considering the record’s pedigree.

At the time, the team behind
Reign in Blood
were unusual matches. Years later, the combinations only seem more odd:
Reign
was produced by Rick Rubin, then just some New York rap dude—albeit a successful one. Then, he was best known for creating hip-hop albums with groups such as Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. Now he’s a Grammy-winning Producer of the Year, renowned for his work with Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, the Dixie Chicks, and Justin Timberlake. When he’s not producing, he’s the co-head of Columbia Records.
Reign
was engineered by Andy Wallace, now the first name in rock mixing, producer of Jeff Buckley’s ethereal
Grace
, and engineer of Nirvana’s earth-shaking
Nevermind
. Not to mention Slayer themselves, a rock combo for the ages, with thrash’s most combustible onstage chemistry.