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

by Ferris, D. X.

  The story appeared in the July 1977 issue of Heavy Metal. (Young readers note: The magazine featured fantastic comics art, not stories about metal.) In the original art, the demons’ horns are longer, but the eviscerating trio and eye-gouger are reproduced almost verbatim on the album cover13-1.

  “The cover art is simply fucking awesome,” notes artist Dennis Dread, who observed Cueller’s similar debt for the Live Undead cover. “So primitive and strange and absolutely at war with the rules of composition, negative space and God.”13-2

  Cuellar was still friends with the Araya family. Now he was working at Louisiana Pacific. Before the era of computers and Photoshop, graphic artists and their skill sets were rare commodities. At his job, he reproduced images like the Sunkist orange soda graphic from samples, transferring them onto corrugated boxes. It was a steady gig, but Cuellar wanted work that was more stimulating. Since Live Undead, he and the band had crossed paths in clubs. Slayer invited him back for the band’s second full album and fourth release. He was glad to return.

  The brainstorming sessions spilled from the Araya house to Cuellar’s apartment again. Cuellar was still married to his born-again Christian wife.

  When the band showed up at the Cuellars’ apartment, they would pull up in Tom’s Camaro, pile out, and hang around outside or downstairs. The former Mrs. Cuellar wouldn’t allow the group into the inner sanctum of Cuellar’s studio. Recalled Cuellar, “My ‘devil-worshipping’ friends were not allowed in the house.”

  The illustrator was still itching to create some more work that was more conceptually adventurous than a soda logo, zombie, or hot rod. He made a pitch to the band: the Hell Awaits cover should be hellfire. Period.

  “When I wanted to sell them on a cover, I did not want to go with the Iron Maiden theatrics that everybody else was doing at the time,” says Cuellar. “I wanted to give them something bold, really frightening — which is the flames in the background. If it was up to me, that’s all that would have been on Hell Awaits: those flames.”

  The Hell Awaits art evolved on a white, 30” x 30” art board. Working in his home studio, Cuellar labored over it, creating a wash of flames, brushing layer after layer of paints — mostly vinyl ones — over the rough material.

  By themselves, the flames don’t look like much. But the tawny, swelling vertical streaks have a hypnotic quality. Cuellar subtly brushed in subliminal images, tapping a popular idea of the day. The theory behind subliminal messages says the mind can register and react to hidden messages — whether they’re words, pictures, or processed audio. And the brain processes them on a subconscious level, affecting the receiver’s thoughts, behavior, feelings, and action, while the conscious mind remains oblivious to the masked stimulus.

  Cuellar won’t reveal what his hidden messages are, but words and images are definitely visible in the final version of the ruddy inferno: In the bottom-left corner, hints of a word are visible by demon’s extended hand. Another might be hidden beneath the pentagram. Look carefully at the right corners, and the flames seem to depict burning souls howling eternally in the flames, hands raised by their faces.

  Some of Cuellar’s frightening images aren’t just obscure — they’re buried. He painted some scary pictures on the board, then completely covered them in more fire, leaving the lost horrors to lurk forever, unseen and all but forgotten. Again, the scene’s creator declines to say what we’ll never see.

  “A lot of stuff you can’t see, but I know it’s there,” Cuellar says. “Putting something underneath somehow adds a dimension of reality to that two-dimensional thing.”

  Proud of his abyss, Cuellar presented the band the Hell Awaits art with no pentagram, no title, and no demons hard at work.

  Araya appreciated the concept.

  Hanneman didn’t.

  Hanneman was adamant: He wanted figures of some sort.

  Cuellar pressed back hard. He showed them the flames, the texture, the hidden images. The band stared at it. They noted the details. They drank it in. It wasn’t enough. As with Live Undead, Jeff was the one who had the final vote. As usual, Hanneman won.

  “Jeff was kind of the boss,” explains Cuellar, “even though Tom was more artistically trained, a little more sophisticated. Everybody has their strength…. No one was anti- anything, more a preconception of what was wanted.”

  Back at the drawing board, the artist set out to craft a compromise. He couldn’t find anybody to pose for him. But the nightmare visions in Heavy Metal’s “Approaching Centauri” provided the inspiration he needed.

  “There was nobody greater than Moebius, the way he manipulated that ink, and his thought pattern,” says Cuellar. “To me, as a 19 year old, there was nothing greater.”

  Cuellar reproduced — but didn’t trace — Moebius’ demons line by line, using pen and ink to render the comic book-style art. He pruned the horns, added hair to the damned souls, and rearranged figures from different pictures into one malevolent work station.

  The figures complete, Cuellar cut them out and pasted the new images atop the flames. Stuck over the paints, the paper figures have hard edges — another reason they seem to float so convincingly atop the vinyl red, orange, brown, and blends thereof. Then he blacked out the upper right-hand corner and pasted over Slayer’s swords-pentagram logo, tucking it in the fresh void.

  Notes Cuellar, “All those demons are stuck on there like Colorforms, just to appease Jeff.”

  Cuellar hoped the demons would never make it to the stores. Mindful of the Christian groups that were watchdogging popular music, Cuellar hoped the infernal figures would be so provocative that the label would have to remove them and just go with the flames and the subliminal images of eternal, amorphous damnation. But it didn’t happen that way. The demons stayed, further obscuring the subtle horrors behind them. In retrospect, he regrets the visual sampling that was far less subtle than his homage from Live Undead.

  “It’s not something I would have done today,” says Cuellar. “But in the pressures getting this done and trying to appease the gods of rock…”

  Cuellar delivered Hell Awaits to the Metal Blade offices on a rainy day. En route to the office, he stopped at an arts supply store and bought some press-on letters. Sitting in the back seat of his car, he peeled off the serifed white letters, stuck them on the big multimedia slab, and scraped them up for dramatic effect — which wasn’t hard, working in a cramped area in the rain. Minutes later, he turned over the master artwork to Slagel.

  The payday, once again modest but respectable, helped Cuellar come to terms with the alterations to his original concept.

  “Everybody was happy,” says Cuellar.

  According to the artist, part of the deal never came to fruition: He was supposed to get the original artwork back. But he didn’t.

  It was Cuellar’s last work for Slayer and his final album cover. The next time Slayer needed an image for a record, they did go with something similar: a scene from hell, torture and dismemberment in progress.

  “What’s interesting,” notes Cuellar, “their next album was more in the direction I was trying to push them in, less the Iron Maiden anything, more ethereal.”

  Hell Awaits was his final album art, but not rock work. He moved on to the magazine CARtoons, a periodical love letter to car culture, with an aesthetic somewhere between Ed Roth’s Rat Fink and Mad Magazine.

  A few years later, Moebius was in Los Angeles, based in Santa Monica, working with Marvel Comics and its Epic imprint. Cuellar learned about a Moebius book signing at Santa Monica’s Hi De Ho comic shop. Still hungry for larger art opportunities, Cuellar smelled an opportunity. He brought some samples of his work. After Moebius signed his copy of La Complainte de l’Homme Programme, Cuellar chatted him up. Moebius needed a colorist for some upcoming work, and Cuellar’s stuff looked good. They set a meeting.

  The day of the meeting, Cueller brought along a more extensive portfolio that included the Hell Awaits cover. He had never lied about the homage to Moebiu
s’ twisted demons — nor had he acknowledged it. He had committed a flag-able artistic offense, for which he still felt guilty.

  “I knew what I was doing,” says Cuellar. “I was committing a sin and essentially using someone else’s forms.”

  At the interview, Cuellar didn’t get the job, but he did find a measure of absolution. After a showing some other work, Cuellar nervously presented the master with a copy of the Hell Awaits art, sweating the possibility of outraging his idol.

  To Cuellar’s relief, Moebius didn’t shout at him. After pondering the adaptation, the French artist decided he didn’t mind seeing his demons in a new home.

  “He didn’t seem displeased,” reports Cuellar. “He seemed almost flattered that someone would have done that. He wasn’t offended. He said ‘Oh, very good, you did a nice job’ — who knows what he really thought? But at least he was gracious enough. I think if anybody was really angry, they would have said so.”

  Years later, Cuellar befriended Burton and proved adept at helping translate Burton’s fanciful concepts into tangible reality. More work in videos and movies followed, from the Melvins to Bruce Springsteen. Looking back, he’s grateful for the chances Slayer extended — even if they misspelled his name as “Cueller” in Live Undead.

  “I never call myself an artist,” says Cuellar. “That is as obnoxious as calling oneself a genius. I am a worker who is grateful for the privilege — and sometimes honor — of helping someone creatively. My recompense has always been the amazing opportunities I have had. What I have chosen to do is a ‘want’ and far from a practical ‘need,’ so believe me: It is a joy to be busy.”

  In retrospect, King doesn’t think the album is one of the band’s better efforts. In 2001, he told Metal Hammer, “I'm not that keen on Hell Awaits.”13-6

  But the diehard fans liked it then, and they like it now.

  In 1987, Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal special ranked Hell as the no. 3 thrash album, above Exodus’ Bonded by Blood (no. 5) and Possessed’s Slayer-worshipping death metal landmark Seven Churches (no. 4), but behind Metallica’s Kill ’Em All (no. 2) and Slayer’s Reign in Blood (no. 1)13-7.

  (In the countdown, Slayer claimed three spots. Metallica only scored two, with Kill ‘Em All landing at no. 2 and Master of Puppets at no. 13; Ride the Lightning is an amazing album, but some diehards still can’t forgive the midtempo “Escape” and ballad “Fade to Black.”)

  And like its predecessors, rough as it may sound now, Hell Awaits was state-of-the-art at the time. Kick Ass writer Bob Muldowney called it “a brutal blast of lightning-speed violence.”

  “Well, the fucking bastards have done it again!” he raved. “Slayer is twice the band (both musically and power-wise) they were on their debut album, and there is no question this one will go down as a metal great.”13-8

  It’s a metal tour-de-force: chug riffs, epic song structures, primal double-bass roles, controversial content.

  “Hell Awaits just holds the entire thing,” Anselmo told me in 2003, during an interview for an article about why ’80s metal was still relevant. “Every bit of everything to do with heavy music. They are gods, the best metal band from California, for sure.”13-9

  Slayer attracted negative attention, too. Inspired by the Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center, concerned parents and self-appointed watchdog groups started sending letters to Metal Blade. The indie label just had a small distribution deal at the time, and wasn’t subject to any kind of corporate supervision. The list of must-avoid albums was just free publicity, and helped push sales toward the 10,000 mark. (The figure is often misreported as 100,000.)

  The PMRC’s great moment in the sun was the 1985 Senate hearings, in which senator Al Gore hosted the PMRC, listening to testimony that “certain sound recordings and suggestions that recording packages be labeled to provide a warning to prospective purchasers of sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content."13-10

  Technically, the PMRC won: “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS” stickers became a standard part of music packaging — and they also served as a stamp of excellence for young listeners who wanted risqué material. In the long run, the PMRC might have cost the Gores the world.

  In the year 2000, Gore ran for president of the United States, with vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. Part of Liberman’s platform was cracking down on explicit art. Election night, Gore was projected as winner, but he was later declared defeated when a recount delivered the state of Florida to his rival, by fewer than 600 votes. Given the state’s high population of metal fans, it’s worth wondering whether the PMRC ultimately determined the 43rd President of the United States.

  Chapter 14:

  Hell Hits the Road

  Now influential and acclaimed, Slayer took on the world alongside their heroes and peers.

  Before Hell Awaits’ September 1985 release14-1, Slayer refined the material live, gigging up and down the West Coast. Gigs were sparse in January and February. But March launched a package tour that was pure power: Slayer supporting Venom during the British band’s six-week American Invasion, with thrash heavyweights Exodus as the lead-off band some of the shows. (This tour is commonly identified as taking place in 1984, though it didn’t.)

  That roadshow was immortalized April 3, 1985, with a concert filmed and released as the popular home video Combat Tour Live: The Ultimate Revenge. The title contained two references: “Combat” was the Metal Blade-affiliated Combat Records, an NYC-based indie powerhouse that released or distributed Megadeth and Mercyful Fate, not to mention dozens of underground A-listers, including Agnostic Front, Dark Angel and Corrosion of Conformity.

  “The Ultimate Revenge” was a shot at the club it was filmed at, Studio 54, which had been a hotbed of disco culture. The video opened with an image of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, going up in flames. (At the time, disco’s death was a mere five years removed, and the memory of the omnipresent dance music was still a fresh horror.)

  The metal bands’ vicious sets deconsecrated the site once and for all. Venom headlined, immediately preceded by Slayer, with Exodus warming up.

  At the time, Venom and Exodus were two strong candidates to occupy the role Slayer eventually earned as all-time metal icons.

  Exodus formed in 1980, before California rivals Metallica and Slayer plugged in for the first time.

  Like Venom, Exodus is a marquee metal name that non-metalheads might not know. When headbangers debate which band should be ranked next after thrash’s Big Four groups, Exodus and Testament generally get the most votes for the no. 5 slot14-2. Exodus haven’t had the prolific, continuous career Testament has. But for this writer’s money, Exodus’ highs have been higher — barring Testament’s amazing debut, The Legacy, which is vintage thrash’s most Dungeons-and-Dragons moment.

  In the musical mainstream, Exodus is best known as a footnote in the Metallica story. When Metallica decided to fire Mustaine, they poached Exodus guitarist Kirk Hammett. On the Venom tour, Exodus was supporting its debut album, Bonded by Blood. Though the platter remains an undisputed classic, it completely lacks the mass appeal of the Big Four’s early albums, for reasons good and bad. It’s pure thrash, but the hollow sound makes it another casualty of the reverb that was so trendy in ’80s production.

  Exodus addressed Bonded’s shortcomings by re-recording it with the band’s 2008 lineup, releasing the new version as Let There Be Blood. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the new version. But the deceased singer Paul Baloff is simply irreplaceable.

  Unlike Slayer, Exodus extensively mingled with fans. Offstage, Baloff was a John Belushi-like ringleader. Onstage, like Araya, he was known for quotable stage raps. But Baloff’s banter veered between the violent and the whimsical. He famously encouraged pogroms against poseurs lurking in the crowd: “I want to know how many of you people go out on the streets looking to kick someone’s fuckin’ ass!” And the Ultimate Revenge intro to “Piranha” found the singer name-checking different species of
fish: “It ain’t about no trout!”

  Exodus and its early masterwork might not offer much for casual metal fans, but for committed longhairs, Bonded was as good as it got:

  “I think Exodus is the one band that should have got bigger and never did,” King told me in 2007. “I’ve always dug that band…. Bonded by Blood, Jesus Christ, you can’t go wrong with that.”

  King gushing over Holt was uncharacteristic. And it might qualify as foreshadowing.

  Venom still manifests from time to time, staging fireball live shows and recording respectable albums. But the band’s classic lineup was already falling apart by 1985. King was honored to be part of the tour. But he was disappointed by the fill-in players’ execution… not that the original members were maestros in the first place.

  “To me, Venom was a really awesome band that couldn’t play their instruments,” said King. “The three of them together made killer songs – they couldn’t play in time. No matter how good the songs are, that first album, let’s say it’s not a metronome.”