Westword Online's Michael Roberts, who liked Intervention, later dubbed the record their "biggest mistake."31-11
Ivy League egghead Tyler Doggett wrote what might be the band’s most blissfully whiny review, for a student newspaper the Daily Princetonian.
“The vocals aren't mixed so prominently, lucky in that Tom Araya sings like a man with a mouthful of mashed potatoes,” Doggett griped. “Slayer sound — chumbawambawamba, ‘Aaaaargh, War, Aaaaargh’ chumbawambawamba — to songs by Minor Threat, TSOL, Verbal Abuse et al, ad-raw-zeum, head thumpingly hypnotic. This album, as with every other Slayer album I have heard, grants Beavis and Butthead [sic] credence in at least two ways: they are a cogent justification for heavy metal and they are absolutely as dumb as rocks.”31-12
Some supposedly educated people need art to follow certain rules. And when “sounding pretty” is your chief criterion, Slayer will always disappoint you. Even if you claim to like metal.
Attitude is one of the great covers albums, but due to the metal-hardcore disconnect, it isn’t widely considered a classic. Its initial reception was warm, though: American released it May 28, 1996, and it peaked at number 34 on the Billboard 200.
Promoting a record of thrash-velocity punk jams was tricky. The album had two singles. The band released a split 45 of “Abolish Government/Superficial Love.” Slayer’s version graced on one side. TSOL’s original got the other, with the punk band’s “Silent Majority” in the middle. Grunge quarry Sub Pop released the 7”.
The more visible single was the album’s second-worst song, a take on Verbal Abuse’s “I Hate You.” With a halfway hummable riff, the midtempo tune reads like one of King’s first-person songs from God Hates Us All. A token video captures the band playing the dull grind. Araya screams in the face of a mother figure who’s wearing pink curlers. “Institutionalized” it ain’t.
The album complete, Bostaph left to play original music in The Truth About Seafood, a funky alt-rock band with zero Slayer overlap.
“I’d been playing heavy music for a long time, and felt like I wanted to explore different elements of music,” Bostaph told Paul Gargano of Metal Edge. “It was just something that just kept gnawing at me. I just felt like it became a distraction in my head and it needed to be something I needed to explore and find out.”31-13
After Bostaph bailed, Slayer auditioned drummers including their old drum tech, Gene Hoglan31-14. But the winning candidate was the malleable John Dette, pronounced “Detty.” Though Dette didn’t play on the album, he appears in the “I Hate You” video31-15.
Dette had thrash cred: With a scant body of recorded work, he was best known as drummer for Evildead. The archetypal late-’80s/early ’90s California crossover thrash band featured speed metal veterans from Agent Steel and Abattoir. The group’s studio albums featured artwork by Edward J. Repka, the illustrator renowned for Megadeth and Death covers.
And, as all three Slayer drummers have, Dette had played in Testament. He joined in 1994, replacing Exodus/White Zombie drummer John Tempesta, who recorded the Low album after Bostaph left the band.
Testament guitarist Eric Peterson contrasts the drummers’ styles:
“They’re all pretty good,” says Peterson. “Dette’s a hard hitter and plays things a little bit fast, which is cool — it keeps you on your toes. Bostaph is really solid. Paul’s right in the middle there, not too swingy, but meat-and-potatoes. His tempo and the way he plays — Dette’s more spastic and fast. Lombardo is a little more jazzy and loose.”
Dette’s audition tape for Slayer was a performance of Reign in Blood. At the time, King told Toazted Dette was “a big guy, and he beats the shit of his kit….”31-16
Slayer needed a monster on the Undisputed tour, which was as speedy as the album. It began with a ferocious one-off show in Miami. Then, a month later, they played another one at L.A.’s Troubadour. In June, they spent three weeks playing European festivals like Dynamo. Then followed a monthlong US tour with Unsane.
Slayer made the Undisputed US tour a special affair, playing smaller clubs like Cleveland’s Odeon. In New York City, the band played a two-night stand at the 1,000-capacity Irving Plaza.
Drugs had been off the menu since the South of Heaven era, but Slayer still had a good time on tour. Hanneman’s drinking became heavier but less recreational. And Araya started to wind down for good.
“I honestly don't know how I did the first 15 years of Slayer,” Araya told UK newspaper The Guardian years later. “How did I get so fucking wasted then play every fucking night? Then, immediately after playing, do it all over again. How the fuck did we all do that?"31-17
On the road, the band mixed metal and hardcore songs, ripping up the room, taking a break, and blitzing it again. The stage set was a minimal affair, just two walls of black Marshall stacks with giant Slayer eagles hanging on the amps. The band took the stage in shorts, T-shirts, and tank tops. King banged his shaved head doubletime the whole set.
With the group playing exceptionally fast and furious, crowds got rowdy. Drew Schinzel’s show review recounts an Araya on the edge:
In Philadelphia, a shoe flew out of the crowd and cracked Araya in the head. He stopped playing and bitched at the crowd, “You guys are fucked up!”
Araya was still smarting from the blow to the head, and as the night went on, he refused to let it go.
For the rest of the set, his between-song banter was a bunch of barbs at the crowd: "I want to dedicate this next song to this place, it's called ‘I Hate You.’”
Later, he followed with ‘Why don't you guys fucking shut up?"
At the evening’s end, he closed with, "Normally at this point in the show I have a few words of kindness, but not for you guys."31-18
The proper tour ran from late June through August. It wrapped with a special two-night stand at LA landmark the Whiskey a Go Go, which holds around 1,000. The small club witnessed a big set: With deep catalog cuts and double-shot covers, the shows tied for the band’s biggest set lists ever, with 24 songs:
1. “South of Heaven”
2. “War Ensemble”
3. “Abolish Government”
4. “Superficial Love”
5. “Captor of Sin”
6. “Filler”
7. “I Don't Want to Hear It”
8. “Gemini”
9. “Dittohead”
10. “Richard Hung Himself”
11. “Necrophiliac”
12. “Mr. Freeze”
13. “Hell Awaits”
14. “The Antichrist”
15. “Sex. Murder. Art.”
16. “Dead Skin Mask”
17. “Seasons in the Abyss”
18. “Die by the Sword”
Encore 1:
19. “I Hate You”
20. “Chemical Warfare”
21. “Raining Blood”
22. “Killing Fields”
Encore 2:
23. “Mandatory Suicide”
24. “Angel of Death”
The band closed the year with a couple West Coast appearances at Ozzfest, but no more major touring followed. The 1996 gig count was a low one, around 40, most of them between August and October. For all intents and purposes, the year began and ended with Undisputed Attitude.
“The whole thing… is like a second wind to us,” Hanneman told Kerrang!’s Steffan Chirazi. “There’s no doubt we were in a rut towards the end of the last tour, and that we needed to get motivated again.… After we’d finished this record [we said], “Wow, we still have it, don’t we?”31-19
Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 1996”
Drummer Jon Dette. 24 February 2013. Live with Slayer at the Soundwave festival in Sydney, Australia. Dette joined Slayer for the 1996 Undisputed Attitude tour, but didn’t gel with the band, and was dismissed before 1998’s Diabolus in Musica. In 2013, when the group suddenly faced a split with Lombardo, Dette was the solution to King’s immediate needs. Dette has also played with Anthrax, Test
ament, and others. Photo by Cameron Edney, www.Facebook.com/WickedPixPhotography.
Chapter 32:
Bostaph’s Back (I of II)
Things in the Slayer camp were tense when Dette arrived, and they remained so. After the Undisputed tour, Dette was gradually vibed out of the band.
Bostaph returned in short order. In 1998, the drummer and singer recounted the episode for Metal Edge’s Paul Gargano.
The former Forbidden drummer had enjoyed spreading his wings in The Truth About Seafood. Improvising and getting funky was fun, but he missed the all-encompassing physicality of bashing away at the kit, beating double-bass drums until his heart was racing and the crowd was thrashing.
“I felt like somebody cut off my left foot,” Bostaph told Gargano. “Fuck this, I need to go back and do what I enjoy.… Okay, I tried that, that’s not me.”
And Bostaph missed being in a band that some people had heard about. Hoping for a career boost, Bostaph called Slayer manager Rick Sales.
“Hey, I’ve got this project,” Bostaph said. “Can I send you some tapes?”
Sales kept him talking.
Bostaph shared his story. He told the manager he wanted to return to heavy music. Sales sensed a chance to restore harmony to the Slayer camp.
“Well, if you’re interested in getting back to heavy music,” said Sales, “what do you think about getting back together with the guys?”
Bostaph was confused. He asked, “Don’t they have a drummer?”
Sales played it coy and said, ‘Well, I don’t know.”
Sales returned to the band. Araya, Hanneman, and King were receptive to the notion of Bostaph returning. They told Sales Bostaph was welcome back if he was up for it. Attempts to write a new album were going slow without him.
“Things were stale,” Araya explained to Gargano. “They were working on [new material], but…. There was something missing.”32-1
Dette wasn’t around for long, but he would be back. He would return to Testament, and later played with Bay Area metal band Heathen.
Even Lombardo had expressed interest in returning. But the years of bad blood were still too thick. And King, once again, had musical reasons: He had heard Lombardo’s metal band, Grip Inc., and wasn’t impressed32-2.
So Bostaph was back.
Chapter 33:
Slayer’s Experimental Moment
Slayer’s reputation took more hits in the following years. The group never significantly deviated from its sound, but it wasn’t entirely trendproof.
At this point, true metal was on life support. MTV had shuttered the American Headbanger’s Ball in early ’95. Led by Korn and Marilyn Manson, nü metal and rap rock were now the new, popular forms of harder rock.
Slayer had two tangential rap-rock credits: King’s guitar solo in the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and 1993’s lackluster Ice-T collaboration. During the next few years, they would dabble in nü metal. And worse.
Slayer didn’t tour at all in 1997.
That year, the group released one song. And the tune officially qualified it as a lost year. Slayer participated in one of the 1990s’ great non-movements: a much-hyped imminent electronic music boom that never materialized (until well over a decade later, if you want to acknowledge the EDM movement).
Slayer was a natural fit for the soundtrack album to Spawn, a live-action adaptation of the comic book about an avenging demon. This disc had another crossover theme.
Happy Walters, the executive who oversaw the Judgment Night Soundtrack, was also at the helm for the Spawn album. The gimmicky soundtrack featured collaborations between rock and electronic acts. King liked Nine Inch Nails, so this collaboration didn’t require too much arm-twisting.
Slayer paired with Atari Teenage Riot, a German digital hardcore act that was hot for a minute. (In that context, the term “digital hardcore” refers to aggressive electronic music, not punk.) ATR was killer. The collaboration was not.
On “No Remorse (I Wanna Die)," King, Hanneman and Araya shared a writing credit with Riot mainman Alec Empire. The song consists of aimless loops, with Slayer riffage and Araya vocals filtered through studio electronics. Slayer’s presence is all but unrecognizable.
“I didn’t know anything about [ATR’s] music,” King told Metal Hammer. “They sent me some CDs. It kinda sounded like techno Slayer. That combines quite a bit more. We sent them some riffs, and they went to down doing their thing.”
Without question, it is Slayer’s most experimental moment — and the band’s least memorable recording. Given the nature of its creation, you can reasonably exclude the track from the Slayer discography.
Walters’ chemistry with the rest of the team was more volatile. According to an account in industry journal Hits Daily Double, at the BMG label’s 2004 Grammy party at the Hollywood Avalon, Walters reportedly headbutted Prem Akkaraju, vice president of operations for Sanctuary Management, the company that Sales was attached to at the time. Sales and Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood were just behind the fray32-3.
As described in the Hits Daily Double story, Smallwood stepped in to restrain Walters, and Sales was among the parties who were sucked into the melee. According to Smallwood’s subsequent account sent to Hits Daily Double, he stepped in to break up the tussle. Walters was ejected from the event. And the Sanctuary crew stayed33-3.
Bad blood ran between Sanctuary and Walters, who felt Akkaraju had poached executive Carl Stubner, who left Walters’ Immortal to head up Sanctuary’s management wing, prompting a lawsuit from Walters33-4. Walters is currently an NBA agent and co-chief operating officer of Relativity Media, a movie and television studio connected to movies like The Social Network, The Fighter, and The Bourne Legacy33-5.
After a formulaic album and two cross-genre collaborations that turned into farts, Slayer appeared creatively bankrupt. At that moment, it seemed the group was subject to the same gravity that lures most great artistic forces down to earth. But the next album proved Slayer could still compete in the modern metal scene.
Chapter 34:
Diabolus in Musica
Slayer’s next album didn’t smooth things over with fans who felt burnt by the punk set and the subsequent techno track.
Released in 1998, Diabolus in Musica is the band’s most divisive original album from the Hanneman era.
Slayer’s seventh LP came together under the working title Violent by Design. But when it appeared, the title had a more highbrow ring: Diabolus in Musica. The disc is named for one of the key elements in Slayer’s sound, a discordant musical interval whose Latin name translates to “the Devil in Music.” The ominous sounds were banned in church music from medieval times through the Renaissance.
“Play a C and an F sharp together,” musicologist Paul Baker explains on his website, Diabolus.org. “To the modern ear, it's not a nice sound. OK to produce a passing scrunch in jazz, but not something you'd want to hear repeatedly unless you were watching a horror film.”34-1
To make this album, Slayer stayed in California. In late ’97 and early 1998, the band returned to Hollywood Sound and did the rest of the work at L.A.’s Oceanway, formerly Ocean Way, the self-declared “world’s most awarded studio complex.” Its various locations had hosted sessions by Neil Diamond, Frank Zappa, Toto, and Linda Ronstadt34-2.
Divine engineer Gordon returned. And Rubin spent more time in the studio. He’s once again credited as the album’s producer.
“Rick Rubin produced us one more time,” King told Daniel Oliveira of Hard Force Magazine. “I don't think that he [was involved to the degree he did was] on Seasons in the Abyss. He was only an executive producer in my opinion…. I think that this time he has worked more on the drum sounds, even when we were not recording. For the guitars, we played, and he came to inspect what we were doing. He has never intervened without a good reason.”34-3
The album was a departure for Slayer’s visual style, too. Diabolus’ photography-based artwork conveys the title’s theme with photos of
a masked monk. Photographer extraordinaire Alesia Exum, whose portfolio includes work on Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill, contributed the thoroughly creepy pictures.
Released on American June 9, it peaked at no. 31 on the Billboard album chart.
At the time, especially following a career low like “No Remorse (I Wanna Die),” Diabolus felt like a real breath of fresh air. It’s the band’s last consistently catchy album.
Rhythm and groove define Diabolus. Araya had wanted to incorporate Latin rhythms into it, but that notion never took root. By Slayer standards, though, “Love to Hate” is downright funky. Bostaph’s development from The Truth About Seafood is on display, though the disc’s overall rhythmic appeal owes as much Hanneman’s riffs as its drumming, which is far looser on than Bostaph’s work on Divine.
Bostaph earned his keep, working under a stern taskmaster who wasn’t easy to satisfy.
Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. Page 24
