Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (44 page)

Four years later, when Dave wanted new terms for the divorce, Teresa made detailed new claims. In a sworn response, she recapped incidents from her time with Dave. Claiming he subjected her to “terror,” Teresa said Dave had repeatedly physically and verbally abused her, over the course of the years. “He even slugged me in my stomach while I was pregnant when I was going out to the mailbox,” she claimed in the court records. “When our son, Jeremy, was approximately three months old, Petitioner [Dave] punched our little baby in the stomach while we were in the car.”
^42-9

“I was definitely a victim of domestic violence, and the last arrest in 2009 verifies this fact,” Teresa continues in the divorce records. “I foolishly did not have him arrested, but I was afraid he would lose his job as his contract with Slayer could be cancelled if he was arrested. These are just a few of the incidents.”
^42-10

In a previous court document, Dave responded to Teresa’s earlier abuse claims, citing a 1994 incident in which both of the couple were arrested: “The true fact of the matter is that the Respondent [Teresa] and I have, in the past, engaged in arguments with each other and, in fact, the Respondent has physically abused me. The Respondent was once arrested for her physical conduct toward me. Thus, if there was any abuse at all, it was, at most, mutual and not as the Respondent’s attorney has described it in the Judgment.”
^42-11

Dave declined the opportunity to address Teresa’s individual claims, but offered this comprehensive denial, in which he refers to his ex-wife by her maiden name, though she still appears as “Teresa Lombardo” in court records. Writes Dave, “Regarding Ms. Chavez's claims: I will not entertain Ms. Chavez's asinine courtroom babble, as it was laughable then, and it is laughable now. It is simply the pathetic blubbering of one seeking excessive alimony and attention. Reading these allegations, the only truth I see is: We are divorced. That is accurate. Period.”

Personal complications aside, Lombardo blew off some steam recording Slayer’s tenth original full-length studio album,
World Painted Blood
.

Advance copies of Slayer’s final album with Hanneman came in a biohazard bag. It was that good.

By 2009, the shrinking record industry had long since discarded the model of releasing an album every year or two.
World Painted Blood
arrived on pace for Slayer, on November 3, 2009 — three years after its predecessor.

Since
Reign, South
,
and
Seasons
, every new Slayer album has been initially hailed as the band’s best since the unholy trilogy. After
Seasons
,
World Painted Blood
truly is the best of the bunch.

“It seems like since
God Hates
, we’ve been on a severe upturn,” King told
Decibel
before the disc was finished. “It just keeps getting better. This one has a retro-Slayer vibe to it, and the only thing I can attribute that to is the way we put it together. Jeff’s had some of his songs for awhile, but I didn’t start writing any songs until like four months ago.”
^42-12

At the helm for
World Painted Blood
was producer Greg Fidelman, who had helped Rubin light a fire under Metallica’s ass for their purported return to metal form, 2008’s
Death Magnetic
. They got the good stuff out of Slayer, too. Or Fidelman did. Witness this 2009 exchange between Vice writer Rockwell and Araya.

Rockwell: By the way, you still in touch with Rick Rubin? 

Tom: [
Grins
] Not like I would like to, no, no. I mean we did
those
three albums [
Reign In Blood
,
Season in the Abyss
and
South of Heaven
] and that was it. He's got his own thing, producing other people. He does good but he doesn't really do a lot... but he manages to get what he needs out of people. He did amazing stuff with Johnny Cash, same with Neil Diamond – that album is really great
^42-13.

As Rubin once had, Fidelman camped with the band during rehearsal and stayed with them in the studio, helping finish the second half of the tunes on the fly.

World Painted Blood
has a weak title, but the music delivers. The band tuned back to E and turned in another respectable set of songs about war, serial killers, and religion. It doesn’t have an IMAX-worthy anthem like “Raining Blood” or “South of Heaven,” but it’s a solid listen from start to finish. There’s nothing wrong with the album that wasn’t wrong with music in general in the era: From indie artists to major-label sensations like Lady Gaga, groups could summon a general vibe, but neglected to write memorable hooks.

The leadoff track, the album’s title song, briefly borrows a hook from Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes.” Then it dives back into Slayer’s own ocean of red.

Released as a Record Store Day single long before the album, Hanneman’s frantic “Psychopathy Red” is the obligatory song about a serial killer. It’s a speedy song that Lombardo described as “punk,” though it’s not. Hanneman wrote the rager about Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper, who slew over 50 children. Araya squeals like he’s being tortured, and it’s his most unbridled performance in years. On the equally morbid “Playing With Dolls,” his escalating vocals sound more menacing than he has since “Dead Skin Mask.”

Slowly drifting, the hypnotic “Beauty Through Order” takes the band’s downtempo game to a new level. “Hate Worldwide” is the album’s only Kerry King song whose lyrics can be paraphrased as “fuck you and your God.” The rhyme “I’m a godless heretic / Not a God-fearing lunatic” is one of its more adventurous lyrics.

King, for once, looked at the album and saw a theme: “It’s about what I think the rest of the world thinks of America,” he said in the official
Blood
press release. “We may not be big on a lot of people’s lists, but I don’t care what you think of my government, of my economy, of whatever. I live here, and this is one of the best places that I’ve ever found to live. So fuck you if you don’t like it.”

“Not of This God” closes the album. It’s a curious, compelling, and almost playful entry in the band’s songbook. For its first minute and a half, it’s a standard-issue Slayer groove: speedy, but not a whiplash inducer. Then the track slows down, Lombardo drops a funky beat, and Araya spits out a long, rhyming verse. The song climaxes with alternating King and Hanneman solos, everything building momentum as the four players race toward the song’s end. For the first time in their career, the band sound like they’re having
fun
.

By the end of
World Painted Blood
, there was no question: When Slayer pulled together and pushed hard, the four players still had it.

“On this record, we worked a lot more collectively,” Lombardo explained in the press kit. “We were more attentive to each other’s ideas and willing to try them, which only benefitted the album…. That included Greg Fidelman, who brought the band out of its normalcy; he got a lot out of us.”

The 11-song album proper runs just under 40 minutes.

It was an even — yet divided — effort: King penned five solo tracks, writing both music and lyrics.

Hanneman wrote the music for the remaining six songs, penned two sets of lyrics by himself, and collaborated with Araya on three more.

Araya and King split lyrics on a bonus track “Atrocity Vendor,” with music by Hanneman.

On Hanneman’s last album as a physical presence, his only collaboration with King is the three-way split in the lyrics to “Playing With Dolls.”

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

Hanneman and King — the team who co-wrote the lyrics to “Raining Blood” — had collaborated as a duo on just one set of lyrics since: “Love to Hate” from 1998’s
Diabolus in Musica
.

After Hanneman died, Araya told Metal Rules’ Peter Atkinson about the band’s creative dynamic late in the Hanneman years: “Me and Jeff collaborated a lot. I collaborated with Kerry on a few songs, but that was not a big thing with Kerry. Kerry liked to do his own stuff, and liked to do it his way, and didn’t really care too much for collaborating; he wasn’t too hip on that.”
^42-14

As the band grew older, new songs required more work. The muses simply weren’t visiting Hanneman like they used to.

“He would never ever say, ‘I need to go and write a song,” Kathryn recalled for
Guitar World
. “It would just hit him out of nowhere.”
^42-15

The record did bring more statistical success. First-week sales of 41,000 landed it at no. 12 on the
Billboard
album chart.

The lingering set would score two more Grammy nominations over the next two award seasons. “Hate Worldwide” received a Best Metal Performance nod in 2009. (The band lost, but technically, a Slayer song won: Judas Priest took the award for a live version of “Dissident Aggressor,” which Slayer had covered on 1988’s
South of Heaven
.) And the title track followed with a nomination a year later, but lost to metal gods Iron Maiden.

Decibel
ranked
World Painted Blood
the no. 7 album of the year. Slayer was one of three legacy bands in the magazine’s top 40. (Napalm Death’s
Time Waits for No Slave
ranked at no. 4). The magazine — by then the true metal journal of record — called it “as vital, exhilarating and nasty as anything they’ve done in more than two decades.”
^42-16

Blabbermouth scored it the same as its predecessor,
Christ Illusion
: a 7.5 on a scale of 1-10. And the site’s readers scored it the same as the previous effort, with reviews averaging 7.7 (as of July 2013)
^42-17.

“You can have a long fruitful life if you don't piss anybody off,” Araya told
The Aquarian
. “That's the way the world works, you piss somebody off and they turn their back on you. That's why I think we have such a loyal fanbase. When the record comes out and they put it on, ‘Dude, it's Slayer.’ You don't put it on and go ‘Who's this?’ They don't question the band. The minute they start questioning the band, that's where they lose it. Judas Priest, I was a big Judas Priest fan, somewhere along they line they came out with a record that I was like, ‘Ugh’….You lose your longevity the minute you turn your back on your loyal fanbase.”
^42-18

World Painted Blood
didn’t exactly revive Slayer’s reputation as vital recording artists. It didn’t hurt, either. If you would go back in time and play Slayer’s post-
Seasons
albums for a thrash fan in 1988,
World Painted Blood
is probably the one they’d like best.

On the road, 2009 was a tame year, with just about 40 shows, most of them with old friends.

Hanneman’s physical ailments made every show a chore. A decade or more ago, he had been able to hide or downplay his decaying health. Now he had a full-blown arthritic condition that affected not only how he played fast songs, but how he walked. His doctors told him to drop three of his favorite foods from his diet: beer, red meat, and peanut butter. He kept eating them. Medications might have helped, but Hanneman didn’t like taking pills. When the pain was too hard to handle, he would take a single Aleve
^42-19(an over-the-counter non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug).

“His ability to play was slowly deteriorating,” Araya told Jeff Kitts of
Guitar World
. “But he didn’t let anybody know that. We could just tell that things were going wrong. It was becoming hard to get stuff out of him. He was very proud and didn’t want to make anything worry about anything.”
^42-20

Slayer patched things up with Megadeth and staged a quick run across Canada, named the Canadian Carnage tour. Despite the history of tension between the bands, no carnage ensued.

“Canadian promoters, they called us up and said, ‘We want to put this show together,” Araya told the Aquarian’s Patrick Slevin. “They were the ones that wanted us to do a show with Megadeth. I guess the Canadian promoters thought maybe we wouldn’t do it because I guess there’s supposed to be animosity between the bands, whatever [laughs]…. [Fans] want to see Megadeth and Slayer play.. I know that someone refreshed my memory as far as ‘You said you’d never tour with them again.’ And yeah, I did say that, but I’m also a smart businessman. And I let everybody know, I know I said that, but business is business, and business is good [laughs]. We would be dumb to say no.”
^42-21

As always, the package tour brought an abbreviated set, but a good one, usually a playlist like:

1. “Disciple”

2. “War Ensemble”

3. “Jihad”

4. “Chemical Warfare”

5. “Ghosts of War”

6.”Psychopathy Red”

7. “Live Undead”

8. “Dead Skin Mask”

9. “Hell Awaits”

10. “Mandatory Suicide

11. “Angel of Death