Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (13 page)

“They were nice kids,” Simmons says of Slayer. “They looked fun. I didn’t know. I wasn’t even [interested] because they didn’t rap. Me and all the hip-hop kids that were part of my group, they looked up and said, ‘Wow, I don’t know what the fuck this is. This is Rick Rubin’s shit.’”

Once Slayer had product in the pipeline, Rubin fired up some synergy. While the metal group were in New York to put the finishing touches on
Reign
, Rubin had King cut a screeching solo for the Beasties Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The guest appearance would inadvertently give the thrash kings a small role in the genesis of the most universally vilified form of metal: rap metal. King would also appear in the video, pushing a gorilla out of the way to perform his solo. The cameo was Rubin’s idea; to Koenig’s recollection, neither Slayer nor the Beasties were happy about it.

“The Slayer guys did not want him in that video,” says Koenig. “The Beastie Boys guys wanted him in the monkey suit the whole time, which was not going to happen. [The Beasties] looked at
the Slayer dude
as totally ridiculous and funny. They were people who see themselves as a little more … upscale. They like Zeppelin, stuff with a little more substance.”

Slayer’s first album for Def Jam would find the band besieged by indignant strangers who accused them of being white supremacists without taking the time to read their lyrics or learn that the band had a Chilean frontman and a Cuban drummer. Def Jam’s tight, demographically mixed circles were the one place that Slayer’s ethnic diversity earned the band some latitude—especially Araya’s slightly darker skin and the angular Spanish undertones of his Chilean accent.

“Araya’s not white,” says former Def Jam staffer Georges Sulmers, a black Jew who met Rubin at an AC/DC concert
when Rubin noticed his Plasmatics shirt. “It’s a different thing.”

Slayer found some unlikely boosters at the label: members of 3rd Bass, a rap group fronted by two white rhymers. When the Beasties left Def Jam, 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice and MC Serch would become a priority. They eventually went gold taking potshots at Vanilla Ice in “Pop Goes the Weasel.” But in 1987, they were just two more junior-varsity Def Jam artists who would hang around the office, waiting for Simmons to notice them. The mail kept them busy.

“I read Slick Rick’s mail, and I read P.E.’s fan mail, and I read some Beasties fan mail,” says Serch. “Slayer had a lot of mail coming to Elizabeth Street. Like,
a lot
. Literally a crate full, on a regular basis. We found this one girl. She sent tons of letters. She lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to make this girl’s life. I’m going to pretend to be Tom Araya, and I’m going to call her. And she’s going to flip out.’”

Serch called and found himself on the line with an excited teenager. The emcee introduced himself as Tom
a-RAY-a
from Slayer, burying his Brooklyn accent and rap lingo as best he could.

“I’m looking at your letter right here, at our management office,” he told her. “I just wanted to tell you how touched I was and thank you for sending a letter.”

Initially dumbfounded, she regained her composure and began chatting up Serch-as-Araya. Then she realized that no one would believe Araya had called her. Quickly, she thought of a way to overcome the humiliating choruses of “
yeah right
”: Could he please call her back next Thursday at 3 o’clock? Mindful that he was playing with Slayer’s reputation, the pseudo-singer said he sure would. A week later, Serch called
Ohio again, and found himself talking to a room of shrieking teenage metalheads.
⁴⁰

“They were going
apeshit
,” says Serch. “Like, ‘Oh, you guys rule! You
fuckin’
rule!’ And she was real cool. And then she was like, ‘I love you.’ And I was like, ‘I love you too, baby.’ And that was it.”

Serch says metal fans would send long letters. Slick Rick fans would write, “I love you Rick. You’re the best.” Slayer fans would dissect lyrics, break down riffs, and quiz the band on the minutiae of their creative process. Slayer would later become famous for fans who carved the band’s name into their skin, but Serch didn’t see any bizarre offerings.

“There was never anything nutty, but you could tell that the fans they had were kind of bonkers,” says Serch. “Not in a bad way. They were just a little off-center. It was really interesting. You could definitely tell the difference between a hip-hop fan and a rock fan. Slayer fans, the letters were always a full page, a page and half, they always had so much to say. I think it’s amazing how their music spoke volumes to their fans.”

Slayer got more mail, but Rubin’s rap records dramatically outsold his rock. Released in late ’86, the Beasties’
Licensed to Ill
quickly built steam. It would be the first rap album to hit number one on
Billboard
’s album charts, and would ultimately sell nine million copies.
Reign
would ship 100,000 copies to start, but barely cracked
Billboard
’s top 100, and wasn’t certified gold until 1992. It didn’t move anywhere near the gold and platinum numbers of Rubin-produced LPs by the Beasties, L.L. Cool J, and Run-DMC (who recorded for Profile Records). Rubin didn’t chase sales.

Def Jam, despite its big numbers, was still a small label, with a staff of around a dozen. After adding Koenig and
Sulmers to Drakoulias, Rubin now had three foot soldiers who spoke his native language. At first, the rap majority were indifferent to what Def Jam publicist Bill Adler calls “Rick’s rock adventures.” By 1988, Rubin’s return to his metal roots would create irreconcilable differences at Def Jam. In 1986, before the numbers were in, everyone rolled with it.

“Internally, it was just like ‘Rick’s doing his thing,’” explains Sulmers. “
Licensed to Ill
was finished. Rick and L.L. were not going to make another record together. And Rick brought in these two metal dudes to do metal shit.”

The Def Jam guys got the messengers, if not the message.

“They were like, ‘I don’t understand that devil shit,’” says Summers, explaining the rappers’ take on their metal mates. “That’s exactly what they thought of it. The first line says it all—‘Auschwitz, the meaning of pain / The way that I want you to die.’ There’s nothing that speaks to a bunch of black and white dudes that are into being out in a club and drinking 40s of O.E. ‘We’re talking about being fly, and they’re talking about some shit like being dead. I’m trying to get a fat chain and fuck some chicks.’”

Slayer did have some fans on the other side of the widening Def Jam rock/urban divide. The year after
Reign
was released, Hank Shocklee was producing
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
, a soon-to-be-classic by militant hip-hop group Public Enemy. In the song, future reality TV star Flavor Flav blasts a woman for watching too much boob tube.

Seeking sounds to match Flav and Chuck D’s vitriol, Shocklee decided he needed a rock track. He sampled “Re-Ignition” by Bad Brains, a reggae-punk-Rastafarian fusion that had been one of hardcore’s biggest sparks. That version didn’t quite work. Then Bill Stephney, Def Jam’s production
supervisor for the album, suggested sourcing Rubin’s Slayer album. Shocklee—a longtime rock fan who knew about Slayer before Rubin did
⁴¹
—took a listen, decided the darker “Angel of Death” guitar break was louder than a bomb, and looped it.

Improbably, metal’s gnarliest band found kindred spirits in the underdogs-turned-stars crammed into a little office at 298 Elizabeth Street.

“Nothing like being in an office with Kerry King and Tom Araya in one corner, DMC of Run-DMC in another, and Flavor Flav in another spot,” says Stephney. “No wonder we didn’t get any work done.”

When
Reign in Blood
arrived, people of wealth and taste hated the album. Naturally, the metal community loved it. It’s still a perennial choice for every metal-must-haves list, underground or mainstream.

“Slayer is the greatest metal band on the planet right now,”
Creem Close-Up
’s Don Kaye would declare within the year.
⁴²

The Slaytanic legion was growing. The band bumrushed the
Billboard
chart November 15, 1986, landing at #127. It would stay there eighteen weeks, peaking at #94 December 20—a distinction that
Metal Mania
’s Fabio Testa keenly noted made the disc “one of the most publicly accepted underground statements in music history.”
⁴³
(Metallica’s
Master
reached #29.) Slayer and Rubin have switched distributors so many times that the band doesn’t have an accurate tally of the album’s sales, but manager Rick Sales says it’s at least double platinum (2 million sold).

After years of slagging the band, Britain’s
Kerrang!
did an about-face and gave
Reign
a perfect five
K
’s (“Kolossal!”), calling it “an agonizing, yet at the same time breathtakingly brilliant 28 minutes of the best frash [
sic
]/death/hate/speed metal you’re likely to hear this year…. Their third and easily most accessible outing to date….
Reign in Blood
is a far superior work to
Master of Puppets
…. The tones that Hanneman and King get out of their guitars on this ’un has to be heard to be believed.”
⁴⁴
Now on the bandwagon,
Kerrang!
would soon declare it the top thrash album of all time.

Metal Forces
, which had been right about the band all along, noted: “
Reign in Blood
is just superb Slayer. They are the best at what they do…. At least two all-time classics in ‘Angel of Death’ and the epic ‘Raining Blood.’ ‘Post Mortem’—probably the heaviest Slayer track ever.”
⁴⁵

The Metal Forces
review scored
Reign
a 97 out of 100. Only Testament’s
The Legacy
, their debut and by far their strongest LP, would outscore it in that period, earning a 99. Death’s
Scream Bloody Gore
would tie it. Death Angel’s
The Ultra-Violence
and Raven’s
Life’s a Bitch
would land just short, with 96s. The magazine would later call
Reign
“without a doubt the most outstanding thrash album to be released to date.”
⁴⁶

In the States, rock journal of record
Rolling Stone
took no notice, though it would include
Master of Puppets
in its year-end top albums list.
⁴⁷
Again, the metal press knew what it had on its hands. A year after its release,
Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal
would rank
Reign
at the top of its Top 20 Thrash Metal Albums of All Time (So Far). “Not only did these four California beach bums top
Hell Awaits
,” wrote Kaye. “They topped every other damned album released under the banner of thrash metal since the
whole damned thing started. Twenty-nine minutes of near perfection in metal.”
⁴⁸

Over time,
Reign
’s immaculate bloodline and Metallica’s morphing into stadium-filling hard-rock giants made Slayer’s disc
the
metal album to namecheck. With no tender moments,
Reign in Blood
was pure and uncut. Thrash peaked in 1991—and when the whistle blew,
Reign in Blood
was the album everyone was still talking about.

“
Reign in Blood
is the album that murdered speed metal as we knew it,” declared M
etal Hammer
in 1994.
⁴⁹
“Ten songs in 28 minutes, each one as focused and volatile as could be, did not bear well for the Nuclear Assaults and Testaments of the world.
Reign in Blood
killed speed metal because no other band came close to touching it.”

The August 2007 issue of
Q
would rank
Reign
as the number two loudest album ever, above Public Enemy’s
Nation of Millions
, but beneath the Stooges’
Fun House
. (When you’re dealing with card-carrying music writers, there’s no beating the Stooges.)

Spin
, the first major magazine to get hip to
Reign in Blood
, would warm up to it.
Master of Puppets
edged
Reign
out in Spin’s list of
100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005
, landing at number 58 to Slayer’s 67.
⁵⁰
But
Reign
was still the second-highest ranked metal LP on the list otherwise filled with critical darlings like Radiohead, Public Enemy, and Nirvana. Two years later,
Spin
would pick
Reign
as one of its eight thrash essentials, alongside Metallica’s
Ride the Lightning
, Celtic Frost’s
To Mega Therion
, and Sepultura’s
Arise
.

“Sitcom-length when the genre was going all
Lord of the Rings
,
Reign
glossed over Mengele, Jesus, necrophilia, insanity, and, uh, ‘raining blood’ at mach speed,” wrote
Spin
’s
Joe Gross. “Probably responsible for more skateboarding accidents than
Jackass
.”
⁵¹

Decibel
editor Albert Mudrian would call the disc “metal’s Holy Grail,”
⁵²
and the album was the inaugural inductee to the metal magazine’s Hall of Fame, hailed as “The ultimate thrash album.” The journal’s J. Bennett wrote, “Nearly two decades later, hesher classics like ‘Angel of Death’ and ‘Raining Blood’ are still benchmarks for thrash brutality.”
⁵³

With
Reign in Blood
, the Slayer team had made their bones. Once signed to Def Jam, the band wouldn’t sit still until 1992—one of the reasons the members’ recollection of the time is often spare. The
Reign
sessions were Rubin’s first in California, which would soon become his home.

Rubin followed
Reign
with the
Less Than Zero
soundtrack and two under-heralded rock classics: the Cult’s
Electric
(with Wallace) and the first (self-titled) Danzig album. By 1988, Rubin wanted to pursue rock full time. At Def Jam, he was caught in a crossfire: Simmons was bent on developing R&B groups like Oran “Juice” Jones and the Black Flames. Increasingly, Rubin found himself competing with the hip-hop agenda of Lyor Cohen, Simmons’s other right-hand man, who was another white, Jewish college boy with a punk past. Frustrated but reasonable, Rubin walked away from Def Jam, moved to California, and started the Def American label, which later became simply American Recordings.