The Bloody Reign of Slayer

Woollard.

Chapter One

Before 1983

Like all the best horror stories, the tale of Slayer begins under a storm cloud.

Although most of the events in this book take place in sunny California – the home of the terminally laid-back – the roots of one of the most uncompromising bands the world has ever seen lie 5,000 miles away in Chile.

In 1961, Tomas Enrique Araya’s family were preparing to follow in the footsteps of many of their fellow countrymen by emigrating to the United States in order to escape the coming storm: a political revolution that eventually reshaped life in Chile permanently. Born on June 6 that year, Tom was the fourth child in a family of nine. The first four years of his life were spent in the coastal city of Viña del Mar, bordering the port of Valparaiso, before his parents uprooted him and his siblings to the suburb of South Gate, a working-class neighbourhood just outside Los Angeles.

Unsurprisingly, Tom doesn’t have many memories of his early childhood in Chile, although his parents carried elements of their homeland with them to the USA – music in particular. You know a true Chilean if he recognises a song and starts singing to it, because it’s such a national thing. I guess it’s a part of my culture, he recalled many years later. But my memories of that are here in the States – my parents playing music from the period when they left.

For decades it was supposed that the Araya family left Chile once the revolution was under way, but Tom dismisses this, saying: That happened in ’71 and we were already in the United States by that time. In fact, the overthrow of Chile’s socialist government, headed by Salvador Allende, took place in 1973, at the beginning of an infamous period in the country’s history. The family no doubt viewed their move to North America just before General Pinochet began his reign of torture and assassination as a wise decision, to say the least.

A musical child in a family of other musicians, Tom was born at a fortuitous time for popular music, with the mid-to-late Sixties witnessing an explosion of musical experimentation and achievement that dazzled him throughout his childhood and into his teenage years. Although South Gate was hardly a hotbed of cultural activity, with most of its residents concentrating on getting through the daily grind of life in a rundown district, Los Angeles, then as now, was at the centre of the world’s entertainment.

The contrast between the freedoms taken for granted in the States and the new, post-revolution regime in Chile must have made quite an impact on the eight-year-old when his family flew to South America to visit relatives in the late Sixties. As Araya recalled, We went back there around the time right after [the revolution] happened, like two or three years later. We flew out to go as a family, and it wasn’t bad. It was under a kind of dictatorship, I guess, but I didn’t witness anything stupid going on. Everybody obeyed the laws, and that’s about it. They have police; they’ve got riot police just like they do here [in the US]. And at shows in areas outside the US, sometimes the kids get crazy outside the venue, so different countries use different types of force to discipline people. You know, different countries do different things. I saw some of it but it was like, ‘OK, that’s how they do stuff here. I don’t want to get involved and be in the middle of something I know no business of.’

Despite this initial reluctance to discuss the violent upheavals that had scarred the country of his birth, Araya later became the most outspoken of any of his Slayer bandmates on political subjects. Although it might be taking things too far to conclude that Araya’s eloquence on political matters in later life stemmed from the troubles that swept Chile during his childhood, it’s an interesting point nonetheless. What happens to the creative urges of a boy who leaves his homeland for a very different environment, where he grows up and watches his old country burn?

The Hanneman family, who lived in Long Beach, California, also knew more than most about violent conflict, with two sons fighting in Vietnam and Hanneman Senior a veteran of combat in France in World War II. The younger son, Jeff, was born on January 31, 1964, just as the Araya family were preparing to emigrate. Unsurprisingly, Jeff’s memories of his childhood include dinner-table conversations about warfare and building models of tanks and aircraft. There’s no doubt that the subject matter in which he later specialised within Slayer – war and aggression – was fuelled by these early experiences.

Just over four months later, on June 3, Kerry King was born. Along with his two sisters, Karen and Kathie (note the all-K initials in the family), Kerry was given a firm grounding in the principles of life by his parents – an aeroplane inspector and a telecommunications worker – and this included music. As King told the author in 2004, I wasn’t really interested in learning to play an instrument, but my dad had a guitar around the house and it was one of his options for keeping me out of trouble. So I took that one. The first clean riff I ever learned was ‘Children Of The Sea’ by Black Sabbath. I can still remember it today.

While the Hannemans and Kings worked their way through life in the LA suburbs and the Arayas departed Chile in the mid-Sixties, another Latino family were considering a move away from a troubled political system to an easier life in North America. David Lombardo was born in Havana, Cuba, on February 16, 1965, although his family emigrated when he was only two years old.

My parents put me in a Catholic private school where we lived in South Gate, California, Lombardo recalled. When I was in Third Grade, my class had a show and tell day, and bashful as I was I brought a set of bongos and a Santana record and played along to a song.

For a bunch of musicians who went on to make music of such renowned violence, it’s fascinating to note that the first songs that attracted Slayer’s rhythm section into picking up their instruments were far from aggressive. Araya and Lombardo, who, from today’s perspective, form one of the most uncompromising and precise bass and drums partnerships in modern rock music, were surrounded by the loose swing and laid-back vibes of Latin music from an early age. South Gate was and remains a primarily Hispanic and Latino town, with 95 per cent of its 100,000 residents of Latin origin, and on any given night its nightlife revolves around nightclubs and bars specialising in Mexican, South American and Cuban music.

In 1969, Araya picked up a bass guitar for the first time, as he later recalled: My older brother was teaching himself how to play guitar and I figured I’d learn how to play bass to accompany him. That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together… We would just be learning to play Beatles songs and Rolling Stones songs of that time – of the Sixties. That’s kinda what inspired me to play… any of the Sixties music. Whatever had been on the radio in the Sixties; I mean, we were always listening to the radio.

Although Araya’s beloved radio, broadcasting in crystal-clear FM by the middle of the decade, was mainly transmitting the sounds of white guitar music, by 1976, Tom had taken his playing in a different direction. Lombardo recalled the astonishing sight of the young bassist on stage, long before either of them had dreamed of playing heavy metal, in an interview with Decibel: What’s amazing is that when I was [11] years old, I saw Tom play in a band at this Cuban club where my parents used to go. He was 15 at the time. They have these Sunday matinees at three or four in the afternoon, and they’d have these bands play for the kids. I remember asking him about that when we first met.

The seeds were sown, not just for Tom’s career as a performer, but also for his wide and somewhat eclectic taste in music. The singer of such songs as ‘Necrophiliac’ and ‘Sex. Murder. Art’ has always maintained an interest in subtler, gentler forms of music, as he told the author in 1999: I’ve written a few slow, ballad-style songs with some basic chords – just for myself. I’m still singing about murder and death, but in a country style, you know? The songs probably won’t get released – the other guys would have to say it was cool, and this band is a democracy…

As Araya jammed on his Latino set-list and Lombardo banged bongo drums at high school, Kerry King was making progress on the guitar. By the time he reached the age of 13 in summer 1977, he was playing an unlikely instrument for an extreme metal pioneer, as he recalled: It was [my dad’s] Gibson ES-175, a blond one with a big fat fuckin’ body.

Gibson’s ES-175 model, a fine if unwieldy instrument, is popular with jazz and blues players, but it served King Jr well enough until something more appropriate came along – in Kerry’s case the first in a long line of BC Rich guitars, the instruments which continue to define him. I got the first BC Rich Mockingbird I had when [I] traded a 1963 L Series Strat, which I guess is something special, King recalled. I saw that the BC Rich had lots of switches on it and I thought, ‘I can get up to all sorts of shit with that’. Sure as hell, I broke the neck off it the first day.

The first rock song he ever learned to play was ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ by Ted Nugent, followed in quick succession by songs from up-and-coming metal bands of the day such as Judas Priest, who became a huge influence on King.

Buoyed by the success of his bongo-playing at Pius X High School, Lombardo soon graduated to playing drums in the school marching band. The instrument rapidly became his passion, as he later recalled: You started at home, driving your parents crazy, banging on trash cans, playing along with the stereo and turning it up real loud, using pots and pans.

Two near-simultaneous events determined Dave’s way forward from that point: his father’s gift of a five-piece Maxwin drum kit, and his discovery of the seminal live album Alive! by cartoon monsters Kiss. This 1975 LP marked a monumental leap forward for Kiss, whose career was on the brink of faltering. The New York band’s visual live show translated onto vinyl remarkably well, and the impact on the young Lombardo was profound. Alerted to the possibility that lewd rock songs delivered at ear-bleeding volume could be a transcendental experience, Lombardo quickly mastered the song ‘100,000 Years’ and began applying his athleticism to the kit with a passionate level of commitment.

However, this wasn’t the end of Lombardo’s fascination with other musical styles – in the late Seventies, two forms of music ruled: disco and punk. Dave was introduced to the former by his friends at school, and he took to it with such enthusiasm that he was soon playing DJ sets at parties. He even adopted a DJ handle – A Touch Of Class.

Dave Lombardo: I would come home at 4am, and my parents would be pissed [angry] and threaten to put me in a military school. Underneath the no-collar shirt, pleated pants and Stacy Adams shoes was a still devoted rock fan. The music I was exposed to at that time showed me the effects of rhythm on the body. The differences [between] disco and rock were so great that it intrigued me, and I found that playing along to this music showed me groove. I felt this energy and it was amazing; it made people dance and not just listen, like what rock music was about.

While it might seem bemusing to some that a heavy metal drummer spent part of his mid-teens spinning LPs by Chic and Kool & The Gang, in fact, heavy metal and disco have much in common, in that both styles of music are intensely rhythmic, with the bass frequencies brought up front. Disco drummers rank among the best rhythm practitioners, retaining the acute timing of funk and R&B but stripping down those genres’ inherent flamboyance for a precision that a heavy metal aficionado would appreciate.

By the end of the decade, only Jeff Hanneman was yet to pick up an instrument. As Lombardo listened to disco, Hanneman, who had never been a high social achiever (I tried to surf. I was horrible at it. So I just hung out at the beach and looked for girls) had turned to punk and was swept away by its snotty attitude and relentless speed. Having gained prominence in New York and the UK in 1975 and ’76, the enraged, vibrant music that had transformed a stale rock scene sprung up in cities all over America, with a particularly healthy local movement in California – perhaps as a reaction against the placid vibes and easy living of the Golden State. The most prominent of the local bands were Black Flag, whose impact was felt nationally, Dead Kennedys and TSOL, all of whom specialised in violently fast music with breakneck drumming tempos and chord changes that came and went in an instant. Hanneman was sporting a shaved head by the end of the decade, at which point he began considering learning the guitar.

Meanwhile, in 1978, when asked by fellow musicians at school if he could play ‘Moby Dick’, John Bonham’s showcase off the second Led Zeppelin LP, Dave Lombardo tracked the album down and was immediately transfixed. "Exposing myself to Led Zeppelin II showed me a side of music that I wasn’t too familiar with – the blues. An amazing amount of feeling was what this band had, and not only as a whole, but the drummer John Bonham played with so much emotion that I felt I learned that element and took it with me through my career. Later I learned this was crescendos and decrescendos."

Bonham’s ebullient style and the seemingly effortless panache with which he executed his drum patterns hooked the 13-year-old Lombardo, who devoted even more time to learning the drums. He began jamming with guitarists at school on such cover staples as ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Johnny B Goode’; a performance of the latter at a Pius X talent show in a drum/guitar duo was apparently rapturously received. I’ll never forget the roar of the crowd during the drum solo, recalled Lombardo. We brought the house down.

It wasn’t long before music began to consume all of Lombardo’s time. Before he left Pius X to move to South Gate High, he recruited two guitarists (whose names are now sadly lost to history) and christened the trio Escape. Adding a singer from South Gate, they renamed themselves Sabotage and began to play shows. However, Dave’s parents noted that his performance at school was taking second place to his drumming, and suggested that he quit school and get a job. Accepting the wisdom of this advice, he did so, although this unfortunately meant leaving the band.

Dave Lombardo: The so-called manager [of Sabotage] went as far as to write a poem about me leaving the band in the school newspaper, saying, ‘We’ll see who makes it to the top – let’s place a bet’. I should’ve made that bet.

Walking away from both school and band to take a job as a pizza delivery boy, Lombardo began looking around for a new group. His father loaned him the $1,100 to buy a new Tama Swingstar drum kit with Paiste cymbals. However, while Dave was looking for musicians, the last band he thought he might join was one he’d seen before he left South Gate High…

In the summer of 1980, Tom Araya was playing bass in a rock band called Tradewinds. Initially, their set-list comprised crowd-pleasing AOR songs from the singles charts, although a slighter harder direction came when they discovered Van Halen. From a modern vantage point, it’s easy to underestimate the impact this band had on the Californian rock scene, as veteran rock writer Sylvie Simmons told the author: The only metal band of note in LA [at the time] was Van Halen, who were almost like a one-off blip – they had come out of Pasadena with this thrust of power that knocked you sideways. It was absolutely fantastic. They were this completely ‘don’t-give-a-fuck’ band. And of course they toured with Black Sabbath on that last tour they did, and blew them out of the water.

One of Araya’s fellow musicians in Tradewinds (who soon renamed themselves Quits) was a guitar teacher, and one of his students, named Kerry King, was proving to be something of a prodigy. King knew that his teacher played in a band. I could tell that my guitar teacher was grooming me to be the other guitar player’s replacement, because he was teaching me all their songs. I was 16, thinking, ‘This is gonna be rad – I’m gonna be in a band that’s actually playing places!’ After I got in, I played a couple of gigs, and the band fell apart…

Before Quits went their separate ways, they played a show at the South Gate Park Auditorium, which Lombardo later recalled seeing. This took place in late 1980 and is the first reliable date for any live performance of two members of Slayer performing together.

Araya, who had fronted Quits on bass and vocals, had recently begun a college course studying respiratory therapy.

Tom Araya: My older sister suggested [the course]. She said she had friends who were respiratory therapists, and it was an easy course. My dad was like, ‘You either do that or you work’. So I chose to go to school. I went to school for about two years on a technical course, and I learned a lot. I learned about air mixture ratios and all that stuff; I learned how to draw blood. I was learning how to intubate people, where you put tubes in their throat.

However, his focus was still on music and, in his spare time, Araya was looking for another band to join in the wake of Quits.

King was occupied with a series of dead-end day jobs, one on a miniature golf course (I did that for about a month but they told me to cut my hair, so I told ’em to fuck off and quit!) and another in a pet shop (I used to rob them blind – I was too good a thief back then). Like Araya, he yearned to play in a band, and like so many fellow LA musicians, he would scan the Musicians Wanted column in the well-known local newspaper The Recycler.

Kerry King: Sometime in ’81 I went to audition for this band called Ledger, and man, they were fucking crappy – they were like Southern rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd-type shit. I can’t even remember what happened in there.

On such tiny hooks hang the vagaries of fate: Hanneman, who had finally got down to learning guitar, was also present at the Ledger audition. I was working as a telemarketer at the time, and I was just jamming with some guys from work in another room in that rehearsal space. After Kerry tried out for Ledger, he and I started jamming some Priest songs with the drummer, who was a lot younger than the other guys [in Ledger]. That’s when he goes, ‘Hey, you wanna start a band?’ and I was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’

Hanneman and King immediately bonded over their shared love of high-speed guitar playing, although their tastes lay in radically different camps. The former was still a punk, while King had graduated from Judas Priest to New Wave Of British Heavy Metal upstarts Iron Maiden and beyond.

Jeff Hanneman: The thing that tied me and Kerry together was that I was just getting out of stuff like Maiden and Priest, Zeppelin, whatever, and I was getting into punk. But I still knew all the Priest and Maiden stuff, so we started jamming with stuff like that.

Not that it was an even match: King was something of a speed demon on the guitar thanks to his three-year head start on Hanneman.

Jeff Hanneman: I just remember I was scared shitless. I had been playing the least amount of time, so I sucked. I’d only been playing for like a month by the time I met Kerry, and after I saw him play I was like, ‘Oh man – I gotta speed up this learning process.’

King, whose reputation as a guitar-slinger had extended to the rest of his immediate neighbourhood, was unaware that an equally hot young musician lived a mere five blocks away, until a pizza delivery car pulled up outside his house one afternoon.

Kerry King: "This kid pulls up in his car and goes, ‘Hey – are you the guy with all the guitars?’ I was like, ‘I’ve got some guitars – I don’t have ’em all’. He said he played drums and lived right down the road."

Dave Lombardo: Kerry gave me a list of songs that he knew on guitar, and I was impressed, because the list was really long. I knew a bunch of them, so he brought his amp over the next day, and we started playing. A few rehearsals later, he brought Jeff over.

With the two guitarists and drummer in place, all that was needed was a singer and bass player: King immediately thought of his old Quits bandmate.

Tom Araya: Right around the time Kerry was looking to put something together I had already tried out for a couple of bands as a lead vocalist. When Kerry called, I asked him what songs they were doing, and he gave me a list. I knew all of them except for Maiden, so I went out and bought the record. The hardest I went at that time was Van Halen, but I had friends that played Priest and Sabbath, [so] I knew all that stuff. I took a week to learn the Maiden songs, and then they all showed up at my place for our first practice. We went through all the songs with no problem, so I just looked at these guys and said, ‘I’m in’.

Few bands have enjoyed so smooth a genesis – and it says much for the nature of Araya, and to a certain extent that of Slayer in general, that he could later muse: I tend to just believe that destiny will take its course and not to worry about it. It seems that everything falls into place all the time; in the end it’s always been OK and that’s the way I view life. It was even that way with the band coming together: Kerry called me, they showed up. They weren’t a bunch of guys just getting together to jam and party, they had an idea and a focal point, which we all shared. We were all reaching for that same vanishing point.

While that vanishing point was as yet unknown, the band’s first steps were to rehearse and play some shows: by late 1981 they had cobbled together enough cover songs in Araya’s garage to play a set, although they had yet to settle on a name. Once Slayer had been hit upon, Dave came up with a suitably metallic logo, as he explained: We were sitting around in Tom’s living room, thinking about what we could do for our logo. I’d put a tablet of paper on the floor and stood above it with a pen and made slash marks as if with a knife – you’ll notice it’s all single strokes – so it’s as if a killer was slicing the word ‘Slayer’.

A popular myth that lasted decades was that Slayer’s first name was in fact Dragonslayer, which they later shortened because they felt it was too corny. While an entertaining premise, in fact this didn’t happen: the misunderstanding arose after one of the band told the press that their band name was Slayer, as in Dragonslayer, a comment that was wrongly understood or transcribed.

Slayer’s first show, played at South Gate Park Auditorium on Halloween 1981, passed without much attention, as debut gigs tend to do. Their second performance, taking place at Huntingdon Park High School, was an improvement, with covers of UFO’s ‘Lights Out’, Iron Maiden’s ‘Wrathchild’, Montrose’s ‘Rock The Nation’ and a version of Van Halen’s ‘Somebody Get Me A Doctor’ that King, who recorded the show on a portable cassette player and still has the tape, later described as fuckin’ horrible.

Slayer then embarked on what Araya laughingly referred to as the high school lunch tour, a process that many fledgling metal bands endured at the time to raise some kind of profile. Just one of many covers bands playing around the LA suburbs, the musicians immediately tried to make themselves stand out from the pack. Initially, their look centred on the standard black leather garb that typifies rock and metal, but as the school dates at Warren, South Gate and Bell high schools passed, the band realised that something more was needed.

King was the first to carve out his own visual niche, literally in this case. With a fistful of six-inch nails and some leather bought from a local store, he sat at his kitchen table and fashioned a porcupine-like armband that looked frankly terrifying. As he recalled, I started making my spiked armbands early on. The only way to be unique was to make something yourself, I always figured… so I went to a leather store and got some brown leather, cut it out, dyed it black. Then I’d put whatever I wanted into it.

The resulting stage gear – a band that covered King’s entire forearm with a huge, spiked riff of metal points – rapidly became his trademark device.*

Dave Lombardo: We did everything in our power to promote ourselves when we were first starting out. Check this out: we would go to high schools, jump the fence and stick flyers in every single locker at the school. For our light show, we would bring our own lights because we were Slayer. We brought in our smoke and pyro, and for our lights we would go and steal light bulbs from in front of houses – you know, those coloured lights – and go and make our own light show with those things. We were determined.

Kerry King elaborates on Slayer’s embryonic lighting: We’d run by all the apartment complexes that had floodlights outside – usually we’d have gloves or something, because those fuckers were hot – unscrew ’em and take ’em home. The first thing we made was this big A-frame that we put behind Dave. Later, we made two upside-down crosses out of floodlights and stuck ’em between the Marshalls.

After establishing a regular gig routine, Slayer slowly began to get noticed on the suburban music scene. From their earliest days, gig-goers who saw the band perform noted the combination of power and precision that provided Slayer’s uniqueness. Metal fans had heard violent music, and they’d heard technically skilled music, but rarely had they heard the two types combined. It was the precocious drumming skills of Lombardo and the picking precision of King that stood out most: Araya was a functional rather than flamboyant bass player (although his vocal style on the earliest sessions was inventive), while Hanneman was still playing catch-up with his guitar playing, albeit at a tremendous pace.

Before long, the band’s youthful skill and enthusiasm lead to them penning original material, and it was Hanneman who first attempted to write. We started writing songs at our second practice, said Tom. I remember Jeff was like, ‘I’ve got this song… Kerry later recalled one number called ‘Simple Deception (Nowadays, it’s kind of rock’n’roll for Slayer, but there were some killer riffs), an instrumental with the typically epic (yet cheesy) title of ‘Delphic Oracle’ and another track called ‘Ice Titan’.

The new songs went down well with the high-school audiences and the occasional club and party that Slayer played, but songwriting progress was initially slow. When they weren’t rehearsing, the band members were devoting most of their energies to their unsatisfying day jobs and persuading venue owners to book them.

Tom Araya: We tried to play a few clubs… [but] at that time, if you didn’t have an audience, the club didn’t want you to play. You had to go out and advertise your show, so eventually we picked up on the idea of getting our own little hall, renting it ourselves and then making up these flyers and putting them around the neighbourhood [and] hitting the high schools, the areas where kids would be. For $5 you could come watch us play. Yeah, in order to get ourselves heard, that was an uphill struggle.

The trick of bypassing a promoter by booking their own shows worked perfectly for Slayer, though it required time and effort.

Dave Lombardo: Me and Kerry would go to buildings and say, ‘Hey, we would like to rent your building for a show and throw a rock concert,’ so we were our own promoters. We would go to arcades that would have a little room for bands and ask them if we could play. That’s how we were. It was always me and Kerry and this friend, and we had this big old megaphone, ‘See Slayer at this school, at this time,’ and drive up and down the streets.

The image of Slayer hailing pedestrians through a megaphone is a surreal one – but it wasn’t long before things would get even weirder.

Picture the scene. In 1982, Lombardo was 17; King and Hanneman both 18; while Araya was the eldest of the band at 21. Although all four had been rocking to the sounds of American hard rock since their childhood, a new sound had infiltrated the South Gate scene via LA. A faster, more dangerous variant of the NWOBHM sound had begun to make its presence felt. Venom, a trio from Newcastle, England, who played fast and shouted guttural, threatening lyrics about Satan, were about to release their second album, Black Metal, a title named by either singer Cronos or guitarist Mantas (both claim precedence) when asked what kind of music they played. Forced out of necessity to record with virtually no budget, Venom wrote songs that sounded raw and unfocused but were utterly malevolent by the standards of the day, and this filthy aggression made a huge impact on young metalheads worldwide.

Venom’s impact on Slayer in particular was immediate, long-lasting and profound. Stunned by the blasphemous rage of Black Metal and its predecessor, Welcome To Hell, the four kids from South Gate – a district not dissimilar in many ways from Newcastle – began to apply the formula to their own songs.

Dave Lombardo: We were going to call ourselves Slayer and be everything that’s not Hollywood. We’re not going to be pretty boys, we’re going to be ugly boys, and we’re not going to write about parties, we’re going to write about Satan… Kerry liked the whole satanic thing, Venom was a huge influence, and we started working on our own songs and developed it.

Dave was putting his all into Slayer, although it gave him time for little else, even his teenage girlfriend, Theresa. I was going to high school, I had a job and I was playing in Slayer! There was a time in my life when I didn’t have time to do anything but take a shower. I was in constant motion… After practice I’d try to see Theresa for a little while. And then some nights we actually had a gig!

Like Dave, Jeff balanced his rehearsal time with seeing his long-time girlfriend, Kathryn. Basically I’ve known her forever. We were teenage sweethearts, or whatever you want to call it. As long as she’s known me I’ve been in this band, so she knows what it’s about.

After six months, Slayer had 10 songs ready to play live, although they were still newly formed and a long way from their later incarnations.