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

by Ferris, D. X.

  It doesn’t take Jeff Hanneman’s expert touch to wind up Lombardo.

  Buzz Osborne, Lombardo’s bandmate in Fantômas for the better part of a decade, says the drummer’s hyper nature extends to his personality: “He's the exact opposite of mild. He's a high-stress-for-no-reason-at-all guy.”

  During the Reign era, Lombardo had some real reasons to stress out. King had never forgiven or forgotten Lombardo’s early transgressions. And by late ’86, they were adding up.

  Early on in the band’s run, when Lombardo called off for a gig because he was sick, he cast a permanent shadow on his commitment.

  More recently, before the band was big enough to pay roadies, he had taken to leaving gigs and letting the rest of the group pack up his kit.

  Around Reign in Blood, Lombardo took a night off to attend an AC/DC concert.

  Lombardo adopted a gruff, incredulous headbanger-dood voice to re-enact King’s reaction: “You missed practice to go to AC/DC?”

  Lombardo had another great interest the band didn’t share:

  “Things were going well,” said Lombardo. “I was in love.”

  Being in love made Dave happy. It made the rest of the band want to choke him. All the members were in their early-to-mid 20s, and they had different ideas about how to celebrate success.

  “I think I was growing up a little quicker than they were,” said Lombardo.

  Lombardo and Teresa had been together almost as long as the members of Slayer had been a band. And the couple were far closer than the drummer and his bandmates. They’d been inseparable since the group’s earliest shows.

  Tour manager Doug Goodman arrived in the Slayer camp early, in the first days of 1984. And the anti-Teresa sentiment was already in place.

  ““Everybody in the band disliked Teresa,” says Goodman. “I never really knew why.”

  She shook it off like a champ. As soon as Slayer signed the contract with Def Jam, Dave and Teresa became engaged.

  In the Lombardos’ divorce records, Teresa recalled the engagement talks, declaring that Dave “laid me down and put his arms around me and said, ‘When we get married I don’t want you to work and I want you to travel with me always.”17-1

  Over 20 years later, the wedding date was fresh in Lombardo’s mind: July 19, 1986.

  “Upon hearing that I was going to get signed to a major label, it was like, ‘Baby, all our dreams are going to come true,’” recalled Lombardo.

  The deal included some nightmares, too.

  By now, King had become the band’s unofficial captain and quality-control agent. In that capacity, he would make it his business to bristle at Lombardo’s working honeymoon.

  “We used to say [Teresa and Dave] were attached at the hip,” said King. “And they are. It’s what [made] the relationship work. ”

  And it almost brought the tour to a screeching halt.

  Rubin had become Slayer’s acting manager. But now that the band was on a major label, with a release and tour to promote it, they needed real, full-time support staff. As he rose through New York City’s music scene, Rubin had met Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch. That hall-of-fame duo had guided AC/DC – one of Rubin’s favorites — and Def Leppard to success. (Later, their Q Prime agency would handle Jimmy Page, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Black Keys.)

  Rubin talked Burnstein and Mensch into meeting with Slayer. The managers liked the band, but they were busy with Metallica, whose career was taking off.

  Still, Burnstein and Mensch helped: They recommended a tour manager who had done well for them: Rick Sales, a veteran who had worked for Herbie Hancock, INXS, Blue Oyster Cult, and Dokken. He still manages Slayer, and his Rick Sales Entertainment Group stable includes Mastodon, Bullet for My Valentine and Ghost.

  In the music business, good music will only get you so far.

  “Rick Sales had a very important effect on [Slayer’s] ascension, aside from the fact that they made great music.” says T.J. Scaglione, who was on hand for the Reign tour — more on him in a moment. “My favorite thrash band of all time is Exodus. And they just never got the break. The business side is very important, sometimes more important than music. Metallica, they got the right people behind them. You have to have people who know the right decisions to make. And some people are very good at that.”

  Sales made his bones on that tour. From the start, he encouraged the band to think big. If they were going to hop from Frisco’s Stone to Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom, then they could no longer simply stuff the gear, lights, and crew into Araya’s Camaro and a trailer. So, staring down a long trip, the band rented a Silver Eagle tour coach.

  That first taste of comfort created the tour’s first and worst problem. Lombardo realized a tour-bus bunk had room for two. And the newlywed wasn’t about to leave his new bride at home. This tour, as the band prepared to don the mantle of rock stardom, he wouldn’t have the opportunity to be unfaithful. True to his word, Lombardo was bringing Teresa on tour.

  But Slayer’s no-entourage policy was now official.

  “We had a rule,” explained King. “People didn’t go [on tour] with us. When everybody agrees to something, and one guy does whatever he wants, that’s never a healthy situation. None of us ever had anything against his wife. [The problem] was probably just that she was there all the time. As short-sighted as that sounds, when you’re 22 and you make your rules, it’s like a little brotherhood, and this is what you do. And three of us agree, and one doesn’t.”

  The drummer put his fast feet down: If Slayer took him on tour, they were getting two Lombardos.

  Teresa resigned from her union job and hit the road with her new husband. On tour, Araya, Hanneman, and King had one more thing to agree about: The Lombardos could be a pain in the ass.

  Teresa tried to steer clear of the other members. Unlike groupies and obnoxious rock girlfriends, she didn’t think she was part of the production; she wouldn’t curl her hair in their dressing room. But for the rest of the band, the stone was in the shoe.

  “For some reason, they didn’t want her around,” Lombardo later told Metal Maniacs’ Borivoj Krgin. “It was like, ‘Why? You’ve known her for years. You’ll bring the sluts and the scumbags on the bus, or whatever… and I have my person I wanna be with every night. What’s the difference?”17-2

  “It was very uncomfortable for Dave and for her,” says Overkill drummer Rat Skates, who was on hand for the Reign in Pain leg of the tour, from November through December 1986. “And the other guys were uncomfortable, because the other guys wanted to bring girls into the hotel rooms and get blowjobs and have beer-drinkin’ fun. And Dave had a solid girl who wasn’t walking around with a barbed-wire bra.”

  The rest of the band thought that Lombardo wanted special treatment.

  “At that time, we all had girlfriends, and they stayed home,” said Hanneman. “And [Lombardo] wouldn’t let it go. We couldn’t figure that out.”

  In that heightened atmosphere, routine issues became big problems.

  While the rest of the band were glad to have expenses taken care of, Lombardo started to wonder where his checks were. And it wouldn’t be the last time.

  Lombardo was receiving an even split of road revenue — merchandise and their take from the gate. But when checks did start arriving from Def Jam, his were smaller.

  Lombardo hadn’t written lyrics, and he wasn’t receiving a cut of publishing royalties, which constitute the real money from record deals.

  “At that time, we were signed to a record label,” recalled Lombardo. “And I was noticing: I’m not getting paid here. Here they are, they’re signing all these publishing deals, and — that lead me to leave.”

  On the road, the aggravation from business was compounded by stress of the social variety.

  The Lombardos weren’t exactly a unified front. Sometimes it was them against the world; sometimes, it was them against each other. Teresa was under Dave’s skin, and she could do different things while she was down there.

>   “She knows how to push Dave’s buttons,” said King. “And for all the times Dave wants her there, it’s torture. She’d be the one like, ‘That guy’s looking at me’ – stupid, trivial, grade-school bullshit. It was always something with those two. And I don’t want to make it seem like she was some bad person, because she’s not.”

  On the road, the band couldn’t retreat from each other and disappear into their own social circles, as they did at home in L.A. Stuffed into a tour bus and moving at 200 beats a minute, the band’s personalities came into play.

  White Zombie bassist Sean Yseult, who toured with Slayer in the 1990s, offers a quick characterization of the members as their personas manifested in the day-to-day grind of road life:

  “Tom — good cop,” says Yseult. “Jeff — bad cop. Dave — good cop. Kerry — bad cop.”

  Telling Officer Lombardo to relax and have fun didn’t help.

  “He was being a prick,” said Hanneman, the charter member of the group’s O.A. Club, short for “obnoxious asshole.” “And once he was being a prick, we started being a prick to him – I mean, bad. So nothing good was going to come out of it.”

  Playing live let everyone blow off some steam. But shows often ratcheted the tension even further.

  Chapter 18:

  Blood on the Road

  In the mid 80s, rock and roll was about to rip free from its moorings. Arena-sized metal bands routinely played ten-minute solos. Iron Maiden performed the entire, plodding, 15-minute “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” two tours in a row.

  Bands like Slayer were rewriting the parameters of extreme metal – how to play it, and how to react to it. They had help. Some surprisingly diverse bills saw metal and hardcore merging into one bigger, badder subculture.

  With Reign in Blood wrapped, the band had played an April hometown show at Los Angeles’ Olympic Auditorium, a boxing arena with a capacity near 10,000. November 7, after the album was out, Slayer returned.

  Opening the concert were bands from opposite ends of the spectrum: their hardcore friends in D.R.I. Major-label heshers Metal Church. SST junior-varsity hardcore band BL’AST, which briefly featured future Alice in Chains replacement singer William DuVall. And Overkill, another major-label act that straddled traditional metal and thrash. Each band brought its own constituency, and the floor became a general-admission massacre. In those days, Mohawks and mullets didn’t mix much. Or well.

  In recent months, Bon Jovi had shot the famous video for “Livin’ on a Prayer” at the venue. When Slayer played, bodies went flying, too — no wires necessary.

  “The pit that night was insanity at its finest,” D.R.I. frontman Kurt Brecht wrote in the memoir Notes from the Nest. “Skinheads and long-haired metalheads thrashed together with the punks in a frenzy of sour-smelling, sweaty head-walking, stage-diving, chicken-fighting mayhem… Tattooed, shirtless skin[head]s walked the circle, waiting for someone to bump into one of them so they could break their jaw… The floor of the pit was sweaty grey cement made slicker even by spilled beer. Now and then, some unfortunate soul fell in the muck, usually causing a pile-up.”18-1

  Now, with Reign in Blood on the streets, Slayer were ready to bring that California brand of crazy to the rest of the country. Overkill — Jersey veterans with roots in punk, but currently teetering between metal’s A and B squads – stayed on as Slayer’s support through a monthlong headlining fall campaign.

  “Opening for Slayer was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, playing-wise,” says Skates. “There was a standard that I never met. And I tried to meet their standard, that they’re the fastest, heaviest band. Overkill’s songs that were pretty fast, I found myself counting them off way faster, and it kind of ruined the songs. ‘In Union We Stand,’ that was a rough one in front of a Slayer crowd [in later shows]. Every time, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to get a beer bottle in the head if I don’t watch out.’ No one was ever afraid to go up to Overkill or any band who opened for Slayer and give ’em the finger and say ‘Fuck you, gimme Slayer.’ Because they were there to see Slayer.”

  When Slayer hit the stage, the band achieved maximum velocity as quickly as possible, and never slowed down. They were out for blood, and the increasingly common mosh pits provided it. No warming up while the crowd watched. No long solos.

  In Slayer’s sets, nothing was more emblematic of the new age of metal than the band’s rejection of one of rock’s most cherished conventions: the show-off spotlight guitar solo. King and Hanneman are iconic players, but they were never that kind of guitar hero.

  “I don’t see me or Jeff as a focal point, for one,” explained King. “The way I look at us, the three front guys are Slayer… I don’t need the attention, for one thing. I don’t consider myself like [former Ozzy Osbourne axeman] Zakk Wylde. Like, I’d pay to go see Zakk Wylde solo for a half-hour. I’m a piece of the puzzle. I’m not the superstar. [Playing a long solo] seems weird to me.”

  Slayer kicked off the set with songs they now save for the climax of the night. Some evenings, they’d open with “Raining Blood” and tear right into “Angel of Death” — the equivalent of Springsteen starting a show with “Thunder Road” and going straight into “Born to Run.”

  Lombardo would often kick off shows with “Raining Blood” and the three floor-tom flam-taps that signaled the entry to headbanger heaven. When they could, they took the stage in a dense cloud of smoke, barely visible in a red-and-gray haze. Slowly, the cloud would dissipate, revealing the band, flanked by upside-down crosses made of blinding white lights, raging through what would soon be recognized as one of the great metal songs of all time.

  “Dave is such a hyper, over-the-top drummer,” says Skates. “He was the only drummer I saw who visibly headbanged while playing drums. And that’s hard to do. He’s got a huge physical command over his coordination. I’ve got to keep equating these guys to athletes: They’re four Michael Jordans. That’s why they could never be surpassed. Four Michael Jordans on a team are always going to win the championship.”

  Slayer’s physicality had limits. King’s famous armband and its hundreds of nails weighed around four pounds. Playing with the extra weight began making his forearm tendons unbearably tight, and wore down his entire left arm. Around this time, he started taking if off after a few songs.

  On headlining shows, Slayer would play 17 songs in 80 minutes. And the 1986 set lists were much like more recent shows. A nameless bootleg from Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom captures the November 14, 1986 set:

  1. ”Raining Blood”

  2. “Angel of Death”

  3. “Die by the Sword”

  4. “Praise of Death”

  5. “Criminally Insane”

  6. “Necrophiliac”

  7. “Necrophobic”

  8. “Captor of Sin”

  9. “Reborn”

  10. “Black Magic”

  11. “Post Mortem”

  12. “Epidemic”

  13. “Hell Awaits”

  14. “Chemical Warfare”

  15. “At Dawn They Sleep”

  16. “Altar of Sacrifice”

  17. “Jesus Saves”

  Even on supporting shows, they played almost the entire Reign album, except for the chaotic “Piece by Piece,” a curious piece with an escalator riff that sounds less like Slayer and more like a Dark Angel tune.

  The sets started with high energy and never flagged. Most metal bands can’t handle a set of pure speed. Once their youthful testosterone starts to wane, bands generally warm up with some slow songs, or they start with a couple blazing numbers, then catch their breath with some midtempo tunes. Not Slayer.

  At that point in the tour, the band capped sets with “Jesus Saves,” closing the show with a ridiculously shredding solo, ending the set abruptly, like the close of Reign’s first side. Suddenly empty, the stages felt wrecked and desolate.

  “Jesus Saves” didn’t always close the set. Earlier in the tour, it didn’t play so well.

  In
the first concerts following the album’s long-delayed release, Slayer played a new song, “Jesus Saves.”

  “This is a track off our new album,” Araya tells a crowd on a bootleg. “It’s a phrase we’re all familiar with. I think it’s one that I think you guys can say very well, in a very author-ative voice. I want to hear everybody here say ‘Jesus saves.’”

  The crowd boom back, with a deep rounds of boos, whistles, and catcalls.

  “What, you guys don’t believe me?” responds Araya, unaccustomed to being booed, sounding a little tipsy. “I want to hear you say it: ‘Jesus Saves.’”

  Some do; most just hoot.

  “Listen,” continues Araya, like a pissed-off gym teacher calling his class a pack of sissies. “I want to get something straight here, right? ‘Jesus saves’ is a phrase of two words, two words only, words that have a meaning that you don’t have to accept, OK? So just say, ‘Jesus saves.’”

  A few fans do — but on the tape, they sound like a minority.