Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (9 page)

Slayer had spent the summer touring Europe for the first time. The band was ripe for picking. The New York show had reps from a handful of major labels and one indie: Metal Blade still had Slayer under contract for three more albums, having extended their contract after the first album sold so well. Now, however, Slayer felt they were ready to move on. Fearing they’d be poached, Slagel flew to New York, hoping to keep his eyes and hands on his stars.

“The writing was on the wall that [Slayer] were not happy,” says Sulmers, recalling an exchange between Hanneman and Slagel. “They had tense words after the show. They were
backstage, and Brian was really trying to sort out how to convince them to stay.”

The show put the band—and Slagel—in Rubin’s crosshairs.

“We were both laughing in delight,” recalls Drakoulias. “It was incredible, like, ‘I can’t believe we’re watching this.’ I think it was a fascination that something could be so precise, so fast. I remember him being really super impressed with Lombardo [and] the soloing—‘How can anybody play that fast and still swing?’”

After Slayer played and slayed, introductions were made.

“Scott Koenig came in and said, ‘Hey, I want to introduce you to Rick Rubin,’” recalls Araya. “He’s a really big Slayer fan. He wants to sign you guys. And he came in, and we were introduced, and he was all excited.”

Oblivious to Slagel’s presence, Rubin chatted King up about his over-the-top wristband. King sported an ten-inch black-leather armband that he’d punched 250 two-and-a-half-inch nails through.

“It was like, ‘Wow, he’s a nice guy who really wants to sign us,’” recalls Lombardo. “And after that, ‘Cool. You need to get a hold of Brian.’”

Rubin left. Slagel stayed, trying to talk the band into remaining on Metal Blade. He’d be the first of many to ask the band what the hell a rap guy could possibly do for them.

In coming weeks, Rubin was hot to do the deal, but it wasn’t a deal that Slagel was hot to do.

“[Slagel] was our manager,” explains Araya. “And here’s somebody that’s making an offer for the band, a good offer. From what I remember, not only wasn’t he willing to give up the band, but he wanted to work out a deal with Rubin, more
than just a record deal with us. And the outcome was Rubin said, ‘No, I just want the band. I don’t want you.’”

Weeks after the Ritz show, Lombardo received a call from a prominent California music attorney. He told Lombardo Rubin had been trying to contact the band through Slagel, and had been
very
unsuccessful.

After some talks, recalls Araya, the lawyer suggested that Slagel’s representing both the label and band represented a conflict of interest. King appreciated Slagel’s support, but Araya had long resented the Metal Blade chief. Slagel’s indie shop adhered to certain time-honored music-business traditions: The label owned a cut of Slayer’s publishing royalties. And though King’s dad and Araya had financed Slayer’s recordings, Metal Blade owned the master tapes. The band agreed with the lawyer. And the attorney gave Metal Blade the axe.

Slagel kept the back catalog, retained ownership of the masters, and forfeited other future business connections. Slagel declines to provide more specific details, saying simply, “It all got sorted out. It was somewhat unconventional.”

And Slayer was free to move on. Hip-hop godfather Russell Simmons doesn’t recall signing the thrash band as a big deal. The imminent rap-rock rift between Rubin and Simmons had yet to manifest, and Simmons trusted Rubin’s judgment. Signing Slayer to a stable with L.L. Cool J and Oran “Juice” Jones was a smart business move, not an indulgence to keep his partner happy.

“I didn’t have to make Rick happy,” says Simmons. “Rick was a genius; whatever he said [went]. The groups he signed made
everybody
happy.”

And thrash’s hottest free agent was signed to the world’s most def rap label.

Reign in Blood
began in Hanneman’s nightmare. It started becoming a reality in Araya’s Camaro, a bronze warhorse with a broken driver-side door handle. The album starts with real-world horror. Hanneman’s father’s collection of Nazi war souvenirs had piqued his interest early. Lately, he’d been reading up about the Third Reich.

As 1985 wound down, Hanneman digested a few books about Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer who had overseen medical procedures at Auschwitz, a Polish death camp where the staff had crossed the line from research to deadly curiosity and torture. Hanneman contemplated Mengele, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in Araya’s car. The singer and guitarist would cruise from Downey to H.B., catching a buzz and shooting the shit.

“We used to party together all the time, go to parties, hang out,” says Hanneman. “And next thing you know, we’re starting to write a record. That album came together pretty quick, because we were bored, and wanted to get something out.”

While Hanneman and Araya were partying, King was usually at home, taking care of his snakes and practicing. He wrote in his bedroom at his parents’ house. He worked—as he still prefers to—with no distractions. King jammed with an amp in the corner and a cheap cassette recorder rolling in front of it. The guitarist was coming up with some good stuff. “Piece by Piece” was his first solo composition for the record; the spiraling intro riff came first, and the lyrics followed.

Unlike Hanneman, King was never much of a reader. He preferred watching horror flicks. Freddy Kruger’s debut in
Nightmare on Elm Street
was a favorite at the time. He also
liked the rash of big-budget Stephen King adaptations like
Cujo
and
Christine
. The guitarist would watch the movies and let his mind wander.

Hanneman, fifteen minutes away, had new toys. He’d discovered rap, drawn to the fresh accounts of urban malaise and corrosive new noise. When he realized drum machines could make rock beats, he bought one and used it to flesh out the demos he was recording in his bedroom.
Reign
has clear themes, but Hanneman says it wasn’t designed as an exploration of evil or malevolence; it just came together that way.

“I know we didn’t talk about it, but that’s something I always wanted to write about: that bad stuff,” says Hanneman. “Don’t write about love, don’t write about happiness, don’t write about partying. Just write about bad stuff; it’s more interesting.”

The two axemen jammed in Araya’s garage, nicknamed “The Club Horizon.” While one guitarist would work out his latest riff, the other would sit at Dave’s drums, blocking out percussion parts. They quickly chopped up King’s songs and Hanneman’s instrumental ninety-minute demo into ten songs. Lombardo and Araya would join the guitarists in the garage and cut a thirty-three-minute instrumental version of the album onto a two-track cassette tape. That good start wasn’t far from the finish.

“The sound didn’t change much from what’s on the album,” recalls Araya. “We had actually played an entire tape of the songs to Brian [Slagel, owner of Metal Blade], and told him it was the next record. We wouldn’t play it for anybody else. And that’s when we got a call from Rick.”

When it was released in 1986,
Reign in Blood
would have ten tracks and clock in at twenty-nine minutes. 1985’s
Hell
Awaits
had three fewer songs and ran eight minutes longer. Writing the longer
Hell
, Hanneman and King had been hopped up on the epic tracks of Mercyful Fate, Danish black metal pioneers.

This time around, Hanneman and D.R.I. had worn down King’s resistance to punk. King also liked S.O.D.’s
Speak English or Die
, which represented a whole new strain of metal-hardcore fusion. Now, Slayer were also more confident in pursuing their own direction, and they drifted toward the undeniable appeal of the three-minute song. Rubin would help make
Reign
a benchmark, but Slayer had trimmed all the fat by the time he showed up at the garage, eager to sign the band, shepherded there by Friedman, who had produced the first Suicidal Tendencies album and had used Araya as an extra in the “Institutionalized” video.

Asked if Rubin made the songs shorter, Araya says, “No.
No. No. No. No. No. Reign in Blood
was something we had
done
. And Rubin wanted us on his label. And Rubin took our material, polished it up, and gave it a nice gold shine.”

As the band contemplated life on a major, they braced themselves for a different kind of nightmare scenario.

“We thought we’d get signed,” says Hanneman. “But we heard so many horror stories about everybody saying, ‘You’ve got to change, you’ve got to sell more records, you’ve got to be more pop. I thought [Rubin] was great. He wanted to sign us, but he didn’t want to change us. I think the first rehearsal he went to, we had
Reign in Blood
pretty much done. And he said, ‘Great.’ And I’m like, ‘
Yes
.’”

Slayer fans held their breath. The major label deal was equal parts triumph, challenge, and threat. As the band prepared to record, the fact that the group was working with the guy who put Aerosmith in that rap song didn’t inspire much confidence in skeptical fans. Rubin knew the Slaytanic Wehrmacht—the group’s ravenous fan club—was watching.

“When they signed with us—a major—the underground metal community was concerned they were going to make a sellout album,” says Rubin. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Our goal was to make the most serious, hardcore, extreme, and pure Slayer album we possibly could.”

Dave Tobocman was Andy Wallace’s assistant engineer on
Reign in Blood
’s follow-up, 1998’s
South of Heaven
. Recalling the
South
sessions, he says, “It was like being in the pit at Indy. The band would finish a take, and I had to, as quick as humanly possible, spin off the current reel, get it back to its proper box, crack a new reel of tape, splice on some leader, spool it onto the machine, and locate it to the top of the reel. I remember being blown away by the music, which was powerful and tight as anything.”

The
Reign
sessions were much the same, though Wallace and Rubin didn’t have assistants yet. The record was made by the band, Rubin, and Wallace—six rising stars with different degrees of experience in different kinds of music, combining their efforts to push heavy metal to new extremes. Recorded with a speed and efficiency comparable to the album itself,
Reign in Blood
came together quickly in between January and March 1986, over five weeks in Los Angeles and New York.

Recording in Los Angeles was cheaper and more convenient
than putting the boys up in New York, where all of Rubin’s other sessions had taken place. Wallace had faith in Rubin, but didn’t know what he’d signed on to. The engineer had heard Metallica, so he knew a little about the latest metallurgical developments. But he was entirely unfamiliar with Rubin’s new band. Just before flying to L.A. for the
Reign in Blood
sessions, Wallace bought
Show No Mercy
and
Hell Awaits
, and listened to them on the plane.

“I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, what did I get myself into?’” says Wallace. “The lyrical content, I thought lightning was going to his the plane.”

At the time, Hit City West was just a little storefront studio on the corner of Pico and La Cienega, west of Hollywood, below Beverly Hills, in a retail zone surrounded by a residential neighborhood. Future pop-metal kings Mötley Crüe had recorded their first album, 1981’s
Too Fast for Love
, there. Now it was time for Slayer to shout at the devil.

In a brick building, the small studio had a fair-sized control room with a twenty-four-track analog board. Bands played live in a medium-sized room with a fifteen-foot-high ceiling. Solo performances were captured in a big isolation booth and a small vocal booth. In an entrance/office-lounge area, a tabletop Galaga videogame kept musicians occupied while the rest of the band took their turn. The rooms were nicer than the outside suggested, decorated with red wood and light-colored earth tones, the walls covered in dispersion patterns and rock surfaces.

Wallace may have expected the band to be knights in Satan’s service, but he was pleasantly surprised.

“I liked the personality of the band,” Wallace says. “As happens so often, the band has a public image, and then you
get to know them, and it’s something else entirely. Tom Araya was an intelligent, very nice guy. Jeff struck me as a laidback Southern California guy. And Kerry always seemed kind of wild to me, very excited and enthusiastic about things. And I liked the energy of the music. So I got into them.”

The principle sessions in L.A. took three weeks, and they began with the beats as their foundation.

As demand for Rubin increased, he would earn a reputation as an absentee executive producer who only stops in occasionally. “The band call him the Phantom Producer because he’s never around,” says King. But for this crucial record’s sessions, Rubin was present and singularly focused.

Lombardo and Rubin would come in daily, around two o’clock. They’d set up and get going. Looking back, Lombardo is surprised how locked in he was—which isn’t to say he was playing perfectly. When the manic drummer would flub a take, Rubin would chime in with simple “That’s good, but you can do better.”

Rubin had already settled into a work mode that he still uses to this day, and has remained the same from Araya’s garage to sessions for the Dixie Chicks’
Taking the Long Way
, as captured in the documentary
Shut Up and Sing
. With a couch as his desk, Rubin would sit, leaning back, hands folded on his stomach, taking in each performance, often with his eyes closed. Then he’d calmly—but firmly—dispense suggestions.

In a few months, a
Village Voice
profile would compare Rubin to Phil Spector. But Rubin was no tyrant in the studio. The band could disagree with him without fear of him pulling a gun or starting a shouting match. If Rubin was a dick in 1986, he wasn’t
that
kind of dick. The disagreements weren’t
heated, but they still tested everyone’s will. Rubin’s vision was unshakable.