Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (12 page)

“I probably just didn’t think it seemed metal,” says King. “Turned out, it redefined metal artwork.”

Carroll says King probably wasn’t kidding.

“I remember when the cover first went to the band,”
Carroll recalls. “Someone in the band didn’t like it so much. But someone else in the band had shown it to their mother, and the mother thought it was disgusting and vile. And then the band was impressed. So I have someone in the band’s mother to thank for them running with it.”
²⁸

Even though the
Reign in Blood
cover was an instant rock-art hallmark, it didn’t bring more work in for Carroll. Aside from his Slayer albums, he wouldn’t accept another music commission until 2007, when rapper Ill Bill asked him to create the cover for
The Hour of Reprisal
, which borrows its title from the “Raining Blood” lyrics. Like
Reign
’s music, Carroll’s postcard from the netherworld set a standard.

“What makes a good cover is how effectively it reflects the music which it dresses,” says Romano. “
Reign in Blood
marvelously hits this mark. The palette and the spiraling composition drop us into a dark, nauseating dream ripe with demons and body-horrors that haunt the collective unconscious.
Reign in Blood
holds references to Bosch and Bruegel, updating them and giving them pertinence for our time, but more importantly endowing it with a sense of history; this painting always was and always will be. This is the mark of a great cover: being timeless.”

Photographer Charly Rinne shot the rear cover’s famous full-color picture of the band backstage at Belgium’s Heavy Sounds Festival in 1985, where Slayer were second on the bill to UFO, heroes whom they’d covered at their first practice. King, Hanneman, Araya, and Lombardo flash their pearly whites, making their best metal faces, scowling and growling. Lombardo looks less crazed, as if he’s having fun, but growing weary.

Reign in Blood
’s credits are a stripped-down as its production.

Different pressings of the album list different details, but none have many. Hit City West, the studio where the band recorded in L.A., isn’t listed; the credits read simply, “Recorded in L.A.” Rubin, at that crucial junction in his career, was mindful of appearances: His previous records had been recorded at the famous Chung King House of Metal, a studio set up in an old restaurant. It was actually called Secret Society at the time, but Rubin didn’t want the industry to know his golden rock-box sounds were made in a seedy Chinatown basement.
²⁹
Similarly, Soundtrack is listed as New Fresh.

Essentially, the credits list who recorded
Reign
, and where. No shoutouts appear. Hanneman has a clear-cut recollection about that matter: “We were sick of looking at albums like people thanking your mom, dad, brother, and my best friend Pete and my girlfriend,” says Hanneman. “‘We’ve already done that, let’s leave it all out.’ It was like, ‘Fuck everybody.’”

Reign in Blood
faced some stiff resistance between the end of recording and the record’s arrival on the shelves.

Led by Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore, the Parents’ Music Resource Center—the indignant group of parents you can thank for the
PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS
sticker on CDs—was at the peak of its influence in 1986.
³⁰
Slayer was in their sights: The next year, Gore would name-check the band in her book,
Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society
. As the band toured
Reign in Blood
, religious groups
would picket most shows. Wal-Mart and Kmart wouldn’t carry the record. But
Reign
’s biggest opposition came from its own record company.

The content at issue was “Angel of Death,” a song about one of the more infamous figures from Nazi death camp Auschwitz, where nearly a million Jews were killed, tortured, and experimented upon.

As summer 1986 arrived,
Reign in Blood
was ready to go. Then an early lead led to major setback.
Circus
magazine, one of the leading newsstand metal journals of the day, got an early tape and started the buzz in the metal community. Then an advance reached
Spin
. A curious review ensured the album would miss its July release date.

Spin
critic Rich Stim’s well-informed 500-word review damned
Reign
with backhanded praise. Stim found the disc dopey and juvenile, a good album he didn’t seem to like.

“The album starts with the words ‘Auschwitz, the meaning of pain,’” wrote Stim. “For sheer numbness of purpose, nothing beats ‘Angel of Death,’ Slayer’s commentary on Nazi Joseph [
sic
] Mengele. Mengele was a ‘sadist of the noblest blood’ who ‘toiled to benefit the Aryan race’ by performing ‘surgery with no anesthesia.’ Jeez, if you ever wondered what effect
Hogan’s Heroes
had on our culture, this is it—a view of the Holocaust as comic-book drama, as removed from reality as the Black Plague or Darth Vader.”
³¹

It was a suspect interpretation: For what it was worth, Stim apparently misheard “destroying” as “toiling.”
Hogan’s Heroes
was a 60s sitcom that followed the wacky hijinks of prisoners at a Nazi P.O.W. camp. Stim’s review did set the precedent for discussion of the record: No look at
Reign
is complete without a note that its first lyric is “Auschwitz.”

The review only mentioned Def Jam, but word got out that CBS Records—Def Jam’s new corporate parent, where no one thought to look into the nuances of the matter—was going to release some too-extreme-for-the-PMRC record by a Satan-spawned band that allegedly goofed on a concentration camp like they were writing a hella gnarly sitcom. It didn’t help that inflammatory name of Slayer’s fan club, the Slaytanic Wehrmacht, borrowed it name from both the devil and Germany’s World War II special forces.

Word was also getting out to CBS firsthand. The label was already tender on matters of metal and Def Jam. After a camera went missing during a recent social function, the Beastie Boys had been banned from the corporate headquarters at 51 West 52nd Street, a gray monolith popularly known as Black Rock.
³²
Metal was also a touchy subject: Ozzy Osbourne had been banned from the Rock after biting a dove’s head off at a meeting. The label was locked in lawsuits alleging links between teenage suicides and lyrics by Ozzy and Judas Priest. Once the suits heard
Reign
, Slayer would slide from the label’s hope column to its headache list, then leave the CBS ledger entirely.

Preparing for
Reign
’s marketing push, Columbia brass met at the office of Al Teller, Columbia’s Jewish president, whose parents had died in the Holocaust. The first song from the label’s next slated Def Jam release was a Technicolor terror about one of the Third Reich’s most infamous war criminals. Neither the content nor the music was well received then—or as it traveled up the ladder.

“They heard the beginning of ‘Angel of Death,’ recalls George Drakoulias, Rubin’s college roommate, who was now a Def Jam intern. “And it starts, ‘Auschwitz, the meaning of
pain / The way that I want you to die.’ I remember people coming out of the meeting, being horrified. They thought it was a pro-Nazi record. Being Jews, Teller and [CBS President Walter] Yetnikoff thought it was offensive.”

With a taste for women, booze, and drugs, Yetnikoff was far from uptight, but he was an observant Jew and a successful businessman. Citing a “responsibility to shareholders” to sell records, he later stood behind popular Def Jam group Public Enemy when Professor Griff’s anti-Semitic remarks made news—though he personally felt like chucking Griff in the East River.
³³
Turning Auschwitz into a song, however, was a bridge too far. Stacy Gueraseva’s
Def Jam Inc.
relates Yetnikoff’s response: “My shareholders are all Jewish!”
³⁴

“The other thing that nobody will ever mention is that maybe [CBS] was not excited about Rick’s first foray into metal, outside of hip-hop,” notes Koenig. “On top of the fact that there was a questionable song.”

Def Jam’s lawyer, Paul Schindler, broke the bad news to Rubin: CBS would not release
Reign in Blood
.
³⁵

“They want the cutting edge,” Rubin fumed to the
Village Voice
. “But they’re afraid to get cut.”
³⁶

Rubin was aware
Reign
’s lyrics weren’t exactly sublime. “When I asked him for a lyric sheet,” reported the
Village Voice
’s Barry Walters, “Rubin replied, ‘You don’t want it. The lyrics are really dumb.’”
³⁷

Rubin was pissed; Teller was already on his shitlist over foreign promotion and distribution issues.

Def Jam needed a new label for
Reign
. All roads led to Geffen, a hot affiliate of Warner Brothers, Yetnikoff and CBS’s hated rival. Steve Ralbovsky, CBS’s liaison to Def Jam, had worked for Geffen’s Gary Gersh. Gersh now directed
A&R under the legendary John Kalodner.
³⁸
Kalodner had signed AC/DC and more recently worked with Aerosmith—whom Rubin had almost single-handedly returned to prominence with the Run-DMC collaboration “Walk This Way.” Kalodner and Rubin had yet to meet, but when they did, the scruffy Rubin looked like a golden boy.

“John Kalodner told them, ‘I’ll put this record out right now. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t care. The band’s brilliant,’” recalls Koenig. “And whether he meant it or not, he was saying that because he wanted to lure Rick. He figured that was a big problem for Rick.”

Geffen President David Geffen was also Jewish, of Polish-Ukrainian extraction. He’d founded Geffen Records in 1980, making a splash with John Lennon’s
Double Fantasy
. Later, he snapped up Donna Summer, Elton John, Cher, and Joni Mitchell. The Geffen label partnered with Warner Brothers/WEA for promotion. Technically,
Reign in Blood
became a Geffen product, though it was sold and promoted by Warner staff, and didn’t appear in Geffen catalogs at the time.

“Geffen was interested in establishing a relationship based on all of the success we were having at Def Jam,” says Rubin.

The Geffen-Rubin relationship would end in 1990, when David Geffen objected to graphically violent Geto Boys lyrics. For now, however, Geffen would release
Reign
in the States, in October, three months after its initial July release date. WEA International picked it up for Europe. London Records handled it in the UK.

Slayer, as with many parts of their story, still know next to nothing about the Columbia-Geffen episode. Rubin the boss hadn’t bothered the talent with situation.

“I can honestly tell you that nobody in this band knows
anything about what went on,” says Araya. “Because it had literally nothing to do with [us]. A lot of that stuff, we didn’t know. Rubin would know all the details.”

Reign
was released October 7, 1986. And Slayer marched on, in the odd company of the unstoppable Def Jam.

Slayer and L.L. Cool J never would have ended up at the same party, but Rubin made them labelmates. Decades later, it may seem presumptuous to assume that long-haired Cali metal
doodz
wouldn’t gel with a rap roster drawn from the Five Boroughs. At the time, it seemed ridiculous to think they would. Today, the Def Jam all-stars and Slayer aren’t pen pals, but the thrashers’ time at the label was not discordant.

As of spring 1986, any degree of rap-rock crossover was unheard of. Metal fans hated rap, and the
wiki-wiki
crap on the radio didn’t make a strong case that hip-hop could ring a rock fan’s bells.
³⁹
Michael Jackson and Prince had broken down some barriers between black artists and white fans in recent years, but America’s ever-present racial divides were far more pronounced at the time. For the general public, rap was black music, and rock was white music. And the two existed in different worlds.

“At that time, hip-hop and rock, especially heavy metal, were so far away from each other,” says Hank Shocklee, leader of the Def Jam production team the Bomb Squad. “Rick’s genius was taking rock and hip-hop and marrying them together.”

Slayer had interest from labels that would have been a more conventional fit. Elektra, Metallica’s new home, missed
a meeting with the band, which stoked their concerns about major labels. After the Elektra incident, they resolved to sign with whomever showed the most interest. Unlike their other suitors, Rubin didn’t just want to sign a token thrash band to cash in on the metal gold rush. Rubin genuinely loved the group. He didn’t want the label’s rap culture to affect their thrash sound at all. As Def Jam’s only rock band, they concluded, they would be a priority.

“Slayer, that was like
the dark side
,” explains Shocklee. “They were enigmas. But they were always cool. In a strange way, they did fit in. They were the extreme of the Beastie Boys. As far as I’m concerned, the whole Def Jam family was a very, very weird family anyway. It was more like the Addams Family than anything else.”

Araya says Slayer felt at home, but not that they were especially
of
Def Jam.

“We signed a record deal with Rick Rubin,” says Araya. “That’s what I’ve always known. That’s it. Def Jam [and distributing parent companies], Island, Columbia, all those…. Whatever deal was worked out, we’ve always been with Rubin, wherever Rubin went, because he was the one that signed the band; we were almost his property in a sense.”

When the time came to draw up the papers for that relationship, Russell Simmons trusted his partner’s instincts. Curious about the new recruits, Simmons and posse checked out a Slayer show at the Ritz. Representing the label, they were dressed up for a night on the town, wearing thick rope chains, Kangols, pressed Lee jeans, bright track suits, and Adidas sneakers. In a sea of denim, leather, and long hair, some of the rap crew wore black-and-gold Def Jam jackets, like varsity football players at a house party in a neighboring school district.