Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (9 page)

In a red haze, the band explode into “Evil Has No Boundaries,” the giant upside-down pentagram glowing in the fog. The band burned through its pyro quickly.

Compared to his later onstage persona, Araya is downright hyper during this show, and he pumps up the crowd from the first seconds. The frontman is wound up and moves as much as he ever would, racing behind Hanneman on stage right, climbing onto the drum riser, and raising his fist in a commanding manner.

“WE ARE SLAYER!” he barks after “Evil.” “And you shan’t escape us! Because Hell knows no bounds!”

A song latter, the singer has a succinct, similarly powerful intro: “WE ARE SLAYER! AND WE SHOW NOBODY NO FUCKIN’ MERCY!”

Soon, Slayer would give the world the songs on wax. That fall, as the holidays approached, Slayer hit the studio.

At that point, Slayer was a box-office draw, which was good: Even with the Metal Blade deal in place, the money hadn’t started rolling in. In fact, to start, Slayer sank deeper into the financial red.

King’s dad and Araya — the only member with a full-time job — put up the money for Slayer to record the band’s debut,
Show No Mercy
. Slayer cut the album at Track Records in Hollywood, with engineer Bill Metoyer (W.A.S.P., Armored Saint, Lizzy Borden) behind the boards. Slayer self-produced, taking responsibility for the songs’ shape and content. Slagel claimed credit as executive producer.

“Musically, I had never worked with a band like Slayer before,” recalls Metoyer. “They were the fastest band I had ever recorded. As a recording engineer, working with a band this fast is the most difficult to make sound good! When a band is slower, it is easier to make every instrument distinct and give them their own sound. Slayer was so fast, it was difficult to capture their sound. The good thing is in the long run, people care much more about the songs than they do about how a record sounds.”

When the group recorded its debut, most of the people in the room didn’t have much studio experience, so Slayer deferred to Slagel. Slagel, still a rookie, didn’t have much of a playbook to work from. When recording drum tracks, the rookie crew encountered some fundamental problems: The cymbals were bleeding into the other mics. Slagel had a solution: Just record the initial drum tracks without the cymbals, then add cymbals later.

Gene Hoglan – the future Dark Angel/Death/Dethklok/Anthrax drummer and all-around percussion icon — was Lombardo’s drum tech at the time. He remembers watched Lombardo smashing away at the kit, air-drumming the cymbal crashes. It must have felt like playing with a missing limb, but Lombardo handled it well.

“That’s got to be mentally taxing,” recalled Hoglan. “Like, ‘Welcome to your first album — here’s some boxing gloves to play drums with.’ Dave was such a fun guy, and I’m sure by the end of the first track, it stopped being fun.”

Araya would later characterize the no-cymbal drum tracking as “one of Brian’s stupid ideas.”
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But the unusual solution worked.

In its conception, Slayer’s first album was a near-even balance of contributions from Hanneman and King. For lyrics, they worked together on four songs, with Hanneman penning another four solo and King writing two others.

They split musical credits on six songs, with Hanneman writing two by himself, and King another two.

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

Slayer’s debut launches with a full-frontal attack of power-drill riffs and squealing hot licks. In a half-formed version of his deep demon voice, Araya declares the young band more powerful than Lucifer, and he welcomes listeners to Slayer and its mission: “Blasting our way through the boundaries of Hell / No one can stop us tonight.”

The record’s Satanic 1-2 salvo continues with “The Antichrist,” which was an incredibly edgy title by the era’s standards. Still playing a single-bass kit, Lombardo pushes along a mathematic riff. The guitar work is more adventurous but derivative in the Iron Maiden-indebted “Crionics,” a half-hearted bid for crossover that Araya came to hate. (“The Final Command” plays like a rewrite of Maiden’s “Transylvania.)

“I was always a big Priest fan,” said King. “And at that point, probably a Maiden fan too. And it was up until
Number of the Beast
– that was the last one I really liked. The other ones, there’s some songs here and there… I think you see the influence so on the first album. ‘Crionics,’ that’s got a Maiden riff in it. But that was the first record, and you’re emulating your heroes. But after that first record, we were our own thing, period.”

Hailing Satan’s might and underscoring it with baroque guitar flourishes, the band play like a cleaner version of Venom. The reverb-heavy production is dated, but “Die by the Sword” is still in the band’s set list, and “Metalstorm” kicked off shows on the band’s 2007 tour nearly 25 years later. The ten songs whiz by in just over half an hour.

By modern standards, it’s also hard to appreciate how
evil
the album artwork seemed at the time. Craig, now billing himself as part of Platinum Management/Direction, took photos of the band and designed its pentagram-of-swords logo.

The original cover art was a 3’ x 3’ painting by Lawrence R. Reed, also known as Larry Rydzewski, a former Marine who went on to paint cosmic spacescapes and posthumous portraits of John Wayne. Reed was the dad of Kevin Reed, a friend of the band who is listed among Slayer’s road crew in
Show No Mercy
. (A 2010 blog post by the elder Reed admonishes readers, “Rise Up Rise Up! against all evil on the Earth, and take back our Earth from all evil!”)
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The original artwork vanished into King’s extensive Slayer archive, as have several pieces of original album art. Technically, it’s a collectible item, but it’s not exactly a masterpiece. Many a headbanger drew a better tableau on his high-school algebra notebook. On the cover, a humanoid figure with a flaming goat’s head, cloven hooves, and steel-studded wristbands wields a longsword, guarding the band’s pentagram logo. And though it looks hokey now, at the time, it was completely badass — as was the music.

In 2001, King told
Metal Hammer
he looked back on the band’s debut fondly: “I listened to
Show No Mercy
the other day,” he said, “and it fucking rules.”

It does.
Show No Mercy
was an instant landmark.

In 1987, Don Kaye would rank the album as the no. 18 Thrash Metal Album of All Time (So Far) in the magazine special
Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal
’s. He wrote, “As crude and basic as
Show No Mercy
is compared to everything else Slayer has done, the album still packs a punch and was extreme at the time of its release.”
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Slayer’s first album
was a hybrid of the day’s extremes in style and content. And nothing on the Southern California scene could compete with it. At the time, Slayer seemed destined for their own little corner of the Abyss.

“We loved them for the fact that nobody was ever going to be into this band,” recalled Hoglan. “The state of heavy metal at the time was that there
was
no heavy metal. There was cock-rock. There was poseur L.A. rock, and that was heavy metal to most people. Mötley Crüe had their little record, and Quiet Riot had just put
Metal Health
out. [Fans thought] ‘Slayer rules because nobody’s ever going to hear of these guys, because they’re way too heavy. They’re heavier than Motörhead, heavier than Venom, and people are stupid.’ Metallica had their style, and Megadeth came out with their style. Nobody was evil and brutal like Slayer.”

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1983”

Chapter 9:

Metal Moonlighting: Kerry King Joins Megadeth

With one album under their studded belt, Slayer were feeling their way around — as a group, and as individuals. King strayed the furthest.

In late 1983 and early ‘84, King took time for a brief apprenticeship with an experienced metal master.

Late in ’83, King was honored to receive a call from Dave Mustaine, the show-stealing Metallica guitarist who had been unceremoniously fired. Metallica and Mustaine broke big in Northern California’s Bay Area scene, but they both had roots in the L.A. area.

When Metallica scored a record deal, they fired Mustaine on the East Coast and sent him home on a bus. On the west coast, he formed Megadeth and embarked on a blood vendetta to crush his former bandmates.

“I had the privilege of seeing Mustaine in Metallica, and he was an untouchable metal guitarist in the early days,” recalled King. “He
was
the show.”

For time, Mustaine was the guitarists’ guitarist. King was blown away by his ability to shred without so much as a glance at his fingers.

Mustaine and King both played B.C. Rich guitars. Mustaine told his Rich representative that his new squad needed a rhythm guitarist. The rep put the frontman in touch with King, who was a rising young prospect.

“I was flattered,” said King.

King — never one to idolize anybody lightly — saw it as a good learning opportunity and started moonlighting with the new band.

Mustaine and his crew would build a multi-level plywood stage and paint it black at King’s house, hammering away as King’s parents were inside, mom cooking dinner, dad relaxing in his recliner, watching TV.

“It was fun, and Kerry was so innocent,” Mustaine recalled for
 Guitar One
in 2001. “His dad was a cop, and I can remember I went to his house, and his dad would call everybody ‘asshole,’ because that was one of the epithets of the L.A. County Sherriff's Department: You don't have a name, you're an ‘asshole,’ until you've been proven innocent, then you're just an ‘asshole, sir.’”
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In early ’84, Megadeth were ready to make the eight-hour trek north to San Francisco. King did his part to plant the Megadeth flag deep in Metallica territory: He played the band’s first three shows February 15, 18, and 19, 1984
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.
The rest of the frontline took the stage shirtless, but King — big hair teased to the max — covered his belly in a leather getup
.

“Kerry’s one of the greatest rhythm guitar players I’ve ever played with,” says Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson. “We hoped that Kerry was going to stay in the band. Especially because he’d just walk in and watch Dave play the riffs a couple times, then he’d put his hands on the neck, and he’d basically play the lick note-for-note perfectly. Kerry just understood metal so well. I think he was just a big writer, and he understood it from a composition point of view. He just
got
it.”

Megadeth and Slayer crossed paths socially a few times over the years. Ellefson remembers King’s primary band as partiers, but not to the degree of some other locals, who fueled by cocaine and crank. Slayer kept their eyes on the prize, King especially. On the drive to San Francisco for the Megadeth shows, King had a headache, but refused to take aspirin.

Megadeth famously weren’t ones to abstain, but King wasn’t the type to speak out either.

“He wasn’t like, ‘You smoke pot, I hate you,’ “ recalled Ellefson. “He was just really focused on what he was doing.”

Ellefson recalled King as a quiet guy from a nuclear family.

“But obviously,” notes the bassist, “he had sick and deranged thoughts that worked pretty well in Slayer.”

In the documentary
Get Thrashed
, one of the definitive chronicles of the metal movement, Mustaine claims credit for directly influencing three of the Big Four thrash bands. The prickly Mustaine has claimed King borrowed his technique, but King said his time in that other band wasn’t the learning experience he thought it would be.

“I don’t know if there’s anything [in my style from Mustaine],” said King. “I learned that I wanted to be in Slayer more than I wanted to be with Dave Mustaine.”

King would return to the Bay with Slayer, with a new commitment to his band — and his band only.

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1984”

Chapter 10:

Haunting the Chapel
and the Lombardo Learning Curve

“When the band came to the studio to record
Haunting the Chapel
, I remember hearing Kerry and Jeff talk about a riff in one of the songs,” recalls engineer Bill Metoyer, who had recorded all the band’s material to date. “[They said] ‘It
is
fast, but not as fast as Metallica.’ Every time Slayer came into the studio, the goal was to outdo the previous recordings in speed and heaviness. I think
Haunting the Chapel
accomplished that goal.”

On the
Haunting the Chapel
, every aspect of the band’s performance improved, but the biggest breakthrough belonged to Lombardo. He was still learning. Over the next three years, he would steadily ascend from drummer hero to percussion god.

“
You could argue that the dude invented modern metal drumming,” wrote Metal Sucks’ Axl Rosenberg in 2012. “The fact that he’s still so vital three decades later is a total marvel.”
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