Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (25 page)

            The meeting was a qualified success: Lombardo agreed to remain in the group. And quit being a prick.

“Everything was ironed out,” said Araya.

Or so they thought.

The truce didn’t last long. Slayer returned home for the holidays. In California, their first meeting almost turned violent.

Lombardo called the group and requested a meet at Slayer Central, the Araya garage, where the band still practiced.

Lombardo thought it would get bad, and he was ready. He brought a knife with him, but left it in the car
^19-3
.

Adrenalin pumping, the high-strung drummer met the band in Araya’s driveway, and got right down to business: He was out. He quit.

The rest of the band had seen it coming. Holding their poker faces, they decided to let him go without a fight.

“It was like, ‘I thought we discussed this in New York,’” recalled Araya. “For me, it was more of a confusing moment. That was about it.”

 “They were like, ‘Oh, really, OK,’” Lombardo later told
Metal Maniacs
’ Borivoj Krgin. “It was like it didn’t even hurt them. They didn’t even say anything about it. They just went on with their lives. So that kind of, like, got to me.”
^19-4

King, never a repository of Christian patience, had been pushed to the brink over the previous month. He was still furious about the Aardschok incident. After the painful negotiations in New York, Lombardo’s sudden resignation sent King over the edge. He decided living without Lombardo would be easier than having the same conversations every week.

King and Hanneman started talking about where they were going to find a new drummer. Lombardo sat there, in stunned disbelief, listening to them talk, surprised to be outside the circle so quickly.

After a couple minutes, he spoke: “You know what, you guys? This was easier than I expected. It was great. See ya.”

“He got in the car and drove off,” remembered Araya. “And we just looked at each other like, ‘We need to find a drummer.’”

With Lombardo gone, the rest of band were pissed, but mostly relieved. It had been a bloodless bloodletting.

“It was a relief to us,” said King. “Like,
ahhh
. That’s over. Cool.”

The Lombardo-versus-the-rest-of-Slayer conflict was a personal grievance with some business to fuel the fire. Lombardo would later admit the timing for his exit was bad. In fact, it was intentionally bad. Without cutting anybody, he got in a last stab.

“That’s the way I believe anybody should work,” Lombardo explained to
Metal Maniacs
’ Borivoj Krgin in 1991, shortly before another split. “If you feel like anybody is taking advantage of you or doing the wrong thing, do anything you can to fuck them, and then let them sit there and realize what they did.”
^19-5

Back at home and ready to relax, the band decided to let its new corporate backers handle this headache.

“We called every drummer we could think of,” says Georges Sulmers, one of Rubin’s rock staffers at Def Jam. “And the list of people we auditioned is smaller than the list we called. The first question was always, ‘Who can play ‘Angel of Death’? And you went from there. And now, you can think of 40 people immediately. But [at the time]…”

Def Jam’s three-man rock squad mobilized, making a list of every possible candidate they could think of. John Tempesta — the Anthrax drum tech and future Exodus/White Zombie drummer — didn’t bite. In New York City, Nuclear Assault’s Glenn Evans and Anthrax’s Charlie Benante were busy.

 Word got out quickly, and the team collected some audition tapes from both coasts. Sales recalled holding auditions in L.A. practice facility S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals). The cattle call wasn’t encouraging.

“We had a room full of drummers,” recalled Sales. “It ran the gamut — people who heard what was going on, and they were bullshit. All they wanted to do was come in and jam, so they were horrible. They knew they were horrible. They knew they never had a chance of getting in the band. But they wanted to come in, jam a few songs with Slayer, and for the rest of their lives, they could walk around going, ‘I auditioned for the band.’”

Between Slayer and Def Jam’s efforts, the best candidate was Tony “T.J.” Scaglione, the drummer from Whiplash, the band Slayer had seen open for Overkill at L’Amour that October.

 At the time, Whiplash was still pushing 1985’s
Power and Pain
, an early Roadrunner release with a cover that would have earned an A in a high school art class. Like Exodus’s
Bonded by Blood
, it’s a metal album about metal itself. The platter opens with  “Stage Dive” and moves on to chunky tunes like “Power Thrashing Death” between some real cult classics like the brutal “I Spit on Your Grave.”

(Discussing Slayer’s sophisticated lyrics, Hanneman would cite the phrase “spit on your corpse” as “bullshit” writing.)

While it’s a good listen, it lacks the finesse and accessibility of varsity metal bands like, say, Overkill. At
Metal Forces
, Bernard Doe ranked it as his no. 18 album of the year. Mike Oxley placed it at no. 15 and eventually listed it as his no. 20 favorite for the decade
^19-6
.

Power and Pain
is the kind of dirty thrash album that diehards will swear is two letter grades better than it actually is. A generous 2010 Encyclopaedia Metallum review written with a healthy dose of retrospect praises it as, “Dirty, distinct, and unforgiving. As far as East Coast thrash, Whiplash were certainly one of the best we had, blitzing alongside the better works of Anthrax, Nuclear Assault and Overkill, and leaving most of the rest completely in the dust.”
^19-7

One evening, Scaglione got a call from a Def Jam staffer with a job offer. Scaglione couldn’t believe he was getting an invitation to the big show.

“My initial thought was that one of my friends was playing a joke on me,” recalled Scaglione, who was just 18 at the time. “I said ‘Yeah right! If this is true then have one of the guys in the band call me directly.’”

Five minutes later, Hanneman called, told him to learn all the Slayer catalog, and said they’d see him in L.A. in two weeks.

After Christmas, Scaglione flew to L.A. King picked him up at the airport, took him to a hotel, and left him there.

Scaglione waited for two days, watching TV and cramming. Practicing the material, he sat in front of the bed, pounding pillows with his sticks while the Slayer albums played on a tape recorder.

Eventually, King picked Scaglione up and took him to the Araya garage.

The band jammed an acapella version of the set. The auditioning drummer fumbled without vocal cues, but not too badly. Araya took Scaglione back to the hotel and let him sit for another day. They jammed again. This time, Scaglione held his own.

“They said, ‘We’ve got this tour booked. Would you like to go on the road?’” says Scaglione. “I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, that would be great.” 

Scaglione says learning the most demanding body of work in metal over just two weeks wasn’t easy. To him, it wasn’t as involved as, say, Rush’s intricate, elaborate rhythms. Once he was in major-label metal’s most extreme band, playing 45-minute sets was, in many ways, easy than his time in lesser bands, who headlined bars and played three hours a night.

“It’s not difficult drumming patterns, per se,” says Scaglione. “I think the key to it is the stamina aspect of it. Slayer was pretty much the fastest thing going at that point. The speed… The execution of it was probably the main hurdle. You can play a drum pattern or any rhythmic pattern slow, but to speed it up and play it accurately is a challenge.”

As the tour went on, Slayer began to wonder whether their young replacement drummer was up to the challenge.

Chapter 20:

S.L.A.Y.E.R. vs. W.A.S.P.

Slayer’s new drummer spent New Year’s Eve with the band, headed home, and packed, preparing for a busy January and February. Slayer were booked to spend two months opening for W.A.S.P., an L.A. metal band that was at its commercial apex. Its frontman had done his share to make the pentagram a part of metal iconography.

Acronyized to represent “We Are Sexual Perverts,” W.A.S.P. was led by Blackie Lawless. Born in Staten Island in 1956, he briefly played with the late-era New York Dolls in 1975, filling in for Johnny Thunders while the band was managed by Sex Pistols hype-
macher
Malcolm McLaren. Lawless followed the Dolls’ Arthur Kane to Los Angeles, fronting the Killer Kane band as Blackie Goozeman.

When Kane left, Lawless stayed in the city and formed Sister, a hard rock group credited as the first L.A. band to use of the inverted pentagram as a logo. Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx would do a stint in Sister, where Lawless would teach him how to set his leggings on fire. By 1982, permutations of Sister would gel into W.A.S.P. The awesome single was “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)” became a collectible sensation, thought it was omitted from the band’s self-titled 1984 debut, which positioned the band as an edgier alternative to Crüe.

Right when Crüe went soft, W.AS.P. might have eclipsed the popular band in metal circles. But after 1985’s
The Final Command
went platinum, Lawless also went the glam route with 1986’s
Inside the Electric Circus
, which found the singer on the cover, painted up like an extra from
Cats
.

Lawless, one of rock’s most infamous headstrong pricks, was convinced this tour would break his band into the bigtime. His team booked medium-sized theaters and small arenas. Slayer, still working from the standard play book, did what successful rising bands did: They signed on to support a bigger act, even if the fit was questionable.

“I liked W.A.S.P.,” said King. “Their first album’s some heavy shit; I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, ‘Fuck Like A Beast!’ But that [tour’s] album, [Lawless] decided he wanted to be [Kiss frontman] Paul Stanley. W.A.S.P. went considerably softer, and we went considerably harder, and it was just strange. We fuckin’ kicked their teeth in every night.”

Slayer slayed, but the tour was a bust. Theaters were half full at best, with crowds often south of 2,000. NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) veterans Raven rounded out the bill, but their set-trashing show didn’t wow the crowds. It was W.A.S.P.’s shot, and they were missing. Lawless was paying for two semi trucks full of lights and sets, and the band was hemorrhaging money. The trek’s chief longhair grew despondent and salty. Venues started to empty out after Slayer played.

Lawless brooded in private, but the rest of his band mingled with the openers after shows. King still wasn’t drinking much. WASP’s Chris Holmes – the guy best remembered for chugging Smirnoff in a swimming pool in
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
— made up the difference.

Tour manager Rick Sales brought a sense of professionalism that was usually welcome, but sometimes not. King disliked authority more than he disliked booze. Sales ran as tight a ship as he could. Now that Slayer had a road crew, Sales tried to lay down the law for the roving rogues’ gallery of crew members.

“He said, ‘When you’re working, there’s no drinking or no drugs,’” recalled King. “And we laughed at him and told him to fuck off. He was trying to micromanage stuff that had nothing to do with him.”

Sales had been to the big show many times before, but he had never seen anything quite like Slayer fans.

“The difference is that the kids that came out to see Slayer loved Slayer to the exclusion of almost everyone else,” commented Sales. “The kids would chant
Slay-er, Slay-er
from the time the doors opened to the time that Blackie Lawless finished. Some fans stuck around to torture Lawless.”

Concertgoers started showing up with “WASP SUCKS” banners. Lawless, not amused, took it out on the opening bands.

“I learned things from a lot of people [over the years],” said King. “Probably the most that sticks with me is playing with W.A.S.P. and learning how not to be a dick. Blackie Lawless treated us like
shit
. He shat on us every chance he got. Can we have [sound]check?
No
. Can we have lights?
No
. Can we have smoke?
No
.”

If McLaren knew how to set a better example, maybe King wouldn’t be such a down-to-earth figure.

Slayer usually took the stage in black jeans and sleeveless T-shirts. King still had his wristband and leather shinguards, but the last remnants of the Judas Priest look were on their way out. Their stage set consisted of simple lights and a three-by-three cube of Marshall stacks on either side of the drum riser, both decorated with an inverted cross.

January 27, the tour briefly invaded Toronto, Canada. They brought some fire to Massey Hall. The show had barely begun, and Araya was already keyed up after the opening combination: “Reborn” and “Criminally Insane.”
A heckler interrupted one of Araya’s bait-and-switch stage raps and caught Hell
.

“What’s the matter, man? Is it too cold? Are things heating up?” Araya asked the Canuck crowd. “Yeah,
we’re
the heat in this house! You know what, it don’t matter where you live. It’s
how
you live, how sweet and innocent you are. No matter where you are in this world—“ [unintelligible heckle] “— Heaven or Hell  —“ [unintelligible heckle] “— YEAH, YOU: SUCK MY DICK, RIGHT?! Now, can we continue? It’s a song called ‘Chemical Warfare.’”
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