Unlike Hanneman, King was never much of a reader. He preferred watching horror flicks. Freddy Kruger’s debut in Nightmare on Elm Street was a favorite at the time. He also liked the rash of big-budget Stephen King adaptations like Cujo and Christine. The guitarist would watch the movies and let his mind wander.
Hanneman, fifteen minutes away, had new toys. He’d discovered rap, drawn to the fresh accounts of urban malaise and corrosive new noise. When he realized drum machines could make rock beats, he bought one and used it to flesh out the demos he was recording in his bedroom. Reign has clear themes, but Hanneman says it wasn’t designed as an exploration of evil or malevolence; it just came together that way.
“I know we didn’t talk about it, but that’s something I always wanted to write about: that bad stuff,” says Hanneman. “Don’t write about love, don’t write about happiness, don’t write about partying. Just write about bad stuff; it’s more interesting.”
The two axemen jammed in Araya’s garage, nicknamed “The Club Horizon.” While one guitarist would work out his latest riff, the other would sit at Dave’s drums, blocking out percussion parts. They quickly chopped up King’s songs and Hanneman’s instrumental ninety-minute demo into ten songs. Lombardo and Araya would join the guitarists in the garage and cut a thirty-three-minute instrumental version of the album onto a two-track cassette tape. That good start wasn’t far from the finish.
“The sound didn’t change much from what’s on the album,” recalls Araya. “We had actually played an entire tape of the songs to Brian [Slagel, owner of Metal Blade], and told him it was the next record. We wouldn’t play it for anybody else. And that’s when we got a call from Rick.”
When it was released in 1986, Reign in Blood would have ten tracks and clock in at twenty-nine minutes. 1985’s Hell Awaits had three fewer songs and ran eight minutes longer. Writing the longer Hell, Hanneman and King had been hopped up on the epic tracks of Mercyful Fate, Danish black metal pioneers.
This time around, Hanneman and D.R.I. had worn down King’s resistance to punk. King also liked S.O.D.’s Speak English or Die, which represented a whole new strain of metal-hardcore fusion. Now, Slayer were also more confident in pursuing their own direction, and they drifted toward the undeniable appeal of the three-minute song. Rubin would help make Reign a benchmark, but Slayer had trimmed all the fat by the time he showed up at the garage, eager to sign the band, shepherded there by Friedman, who had produced the first Suicidal Tendencies album and had used Araya as an extra in the “Institutionalized” video.
Asked if Rubin made the songs shorter, Araya says, “No. No. No. No. No. No. Reign in Blood was something we had done. And Rubin wanted us on his label. And Rubin took our material, polished it up, and gave it a nice gold shine.”
As the band contemplated life on a major, they braced themselves for a different kind of nightmare scenario.
“We thought we’d get signed,” says Hanneman. “But we heard so many horror stories about everybody saying, ‘You’ve got to change, you’ve got to sell more records, you’ve got to be more pop. I thought [Rubin] was great. He wanted to sign us, but he didn’t want to change us. I think the first rehearsal he went to, we had Reign in Blood pretty much done. And he said, ‘Great.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes.’”
Recording Blood
Slayer fans held their breath. The major label deal was equal parts triumph, challenge, and threat. As the band prepared to record, the fact that the group was working with the guy who put Aerosmith in that rap song didn’t inspire much confidence in skeptical fans. Rubin knew the Slaytanic Wehrmacht—the group’s ravenous fan club—was watching.
“When they signed with us—a major—the underground metal community was concerned they were going to make a sellout album,” says Rubin. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Our goal was to make the most serious, hardcore, extreme, and pure Slayer album we possibly could.”
Dave Tobocman was Andy Wallace’s assistant engineer on Reign in Blood’s follow-up, 1998’s South of Heaven. Recalling the South sessions, he says, “It was like being in the pit at Indy. The band would finish a take, and I had to, as quick as humanly possible, spin off the current reel, get it back to its proper box, crack a new reel of tape, splice on some leader, spool it onto the machine, and locate it to the top of the reel. I remember being blown away by the music, which was powerful and tight as anything.”
The Reign sessions were much the same, though Wallace and Rubin didn’t have assistants yet. The record was made by the band, Rubin, and Wallace—six rising stars with different degrees of experience in different kinds of music, combining their efforts to push heavy metal to new extremes. Recorded with a speed and efficiency comparable to the album itself, Reign in Blood came together quickly in between January and March 1986, over five weeks in Los Angeles and New York.
Recording in Los Angeles was cheaper and more convenient than putting the boys up in New York, where all of Rubin’s other sessions had taken place. Wallace had faith in Rubin, but didn’t know what he’d signed on to. The engineer had heard Metallica, so he knew a little about the latest metallurgical developments. But he was entirely unfamiliar with Rubin’s new band. Just before flying to L.A. for the Reign in Blood sessions, Wallace bought Show No Mercy and Hell Awaits, and listened to them on the plane.
“I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, what did I get myself into?’” says Wallace. “The lyrical content, I thought lightning was going to his the plane.”
At the time, Hit City West was just a little storefront studio on the corner of Pico and La Cienega, west of Hollywood, below Beverly Hills, in a retail zone surrounded by a residential neighborhood. Future pop-metal kings Mötley Crüe had recorded their first album, 1981’s Too Fast for Love, there. Now it was time for Slayer to shout at the devil.
In a brick building, the small studio had a fair-sized control room with a twenty-four-track analog board. Bands played live in a medium-sized room with a fifteen-foot-high ceiling. Solo performances were captured in a big isolation booth and a small vocal booth. In an entrance/office-lounge area, a tabletop Galaga videogame kept musicians occupied while the rest of the band took their turn. The rooms were nicer than the outside suggested, decorated with red wood and light-colored earth tones, the walls covered in dispersion patterns and rock surfaces.
Wallace may have expected the band to be knights in Satan’s service, but he was pleasantly surprised.
“I liked the personality of the band,” Wallace says. “As happens so often, the band has a public image, and then you get to know them, and it’s something else entirely. Tom Araya was an intelligent, very nice guy. Jeff struck me as a laidback Southern California guy. And Kerry always seemed kind of wild to me, very excited and enthusiastic about things. And I liked the energy of the music. So I got into them.”
The principle sessions in L.A. took three weeks, and they began with the beats as their foundation.
As demand for Rubin increased, he would earn a reputation as an absentee executive producer who only stops in occasionally. “The band call him the Phantom Producer because he’s never around,” says King. But for this crucial record’s sessions, Rubin was present and singularly focused.
Lombardo and Rubin would come in daily, around two o’clock. They’d set up and get going. Looking back, Lombardo is surprised how locked in he was—which isn’t to say he was playing perfectly. When the manic drummer would flub a take, Rubin would chime in with simple “That’s good, but you can do better.”
Rubin had already settled into a work mode that he still uses to this day, and has remained the same from Araya’s garage to sessions for the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way, as captured in the documentary Shut Up and Sing. With a couch as his desk, Rubin would sit, leaning back, hands folded on his stomach, taking in each performance, often with his eyes closed. Then he’d calmly—but firmly—dispense suggestions.
In a few months, a Village Voice profile would compare Rubin to Phil Spector. But Rub
in was no tyrant in the studio. The band could disagree with him without fear of him pulling a gun or starting a shouting match. If Rubin was a dick in 1986, he wasn’t that kind of dick. The disagreements weren’t heated, but they still tested everyone’s will. Rubin’s vision was unshakable.
“He was pretty mellow,” says Hanneman. “One thing he always used to say to me that sticks in my mind: He’d come up with a little idea, like ‘Maybe you should change this, make this part longer or shorter.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not going to work.’ And he’d go, ‘Okay. It’s your career.’”
Rubin and Wallace didn’t have to twist Slayer’s arms often. Slayer felt good about their new guides, especially after Slagel’s hit-and-miss experimentation with their previous releases: During the Show No Mercy sessions, their old label head had Lombardo record drums and cymbals separately.
“We would just take their advice,” says Lombardo. “We knew they knew what they were doing.”
With Rubin looking on, Lombardo would power through as many as twenty takes at a time while Araya, Hanneman, King played along.
“The four of us set up, and we played, and that’s about it,” says Araya. “And we just kept playing until Rick Rubin was happy with the drum tracks.”
At first, Wallace would record just the drums, seated next to a growing pile of two-inch tape reels.
“I was amazed that they could play that fast and that accurately,” says Wallace. “Dave was absolutely on top of his game. Those fast double-bass drums, he was a monster. He was very capable and very focused.”
When the drummer’s energy flagged, Rubin would pump him up with Gatorade and candy. Unlike many a session for metal one-third the speed, King and Rubin’s temperance set the tone for the sessions. Contrary to a popular assumption, the studio was not a blizzard of cocaine or crank.
“I was twenty-one years old,” says Lombardo. “So energy levels, testosterone levels were high. We were all on fire at the time. ‘Come, let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s get some food. Ok, do it.’”
Lombardo was the first in and first out, and was done tracking by the end of the first week. The studio was surrounded by restaurants, and the band usually got take-out to eat in the studio. Chopped-garlic pizza from the nearby Domiano’s was a staple of their studio diet. For all Rubin’s preternatural aptitude in the studio, Lombardo says dinner with the producer wasn’t like eating with Yoda; it was more like a meal with a cool boss.
The Reign in Blood credits list Wallace as engineer. Rubin and the band share “coproduced by” credits. Wallace was initially supposed to be listed as a coproducer, as well.
“I was, technically, on board as coproducer,” says Wallace. “I don’t know if they ever corrected it. As far as I remember, I was supposed to be listed as engineer and coproducer. Engineer was my function.”
Araya says Rubin was the brains and the ears, and Wallace was his hands. Wallace, though capable and respected, wasn’t a shaping creative force on the album.
“Rubin told him what to do, and he did that,” recalls Araya. “Rubin would sit there and listen, and [say in a deep, slow, but forceful voice], ‘I need to hear this. I need to hear that.’ And Rubin would walk out and come back in and listen to it.”
Rubin had a simple idea for the sound of Reign in Blood: good to his word, he truly liked what he’d heard in Araya’s garage.
“Rick Rubin wanted to capture the sound that we had in practice and put it on the record,” says Hanneman. “You walked into practice, and all you’d hear is these Marshalls in your face. He wanted to get that sound, which, before, I don’t think we’d achieved that well. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
From songs to sound, Reign would not be a big-budget retread of Hell Awaits’ echoing seven-minute tracks. Two songs were approaching five minutes. The rest were closer to three, all of them lean, mean, and getting leaner.
“They didn’t want to jump from the style of their early records to something Def Leppard-ish,” says Wallace. “I love dry, in-your-face aggressive rock, without tons of reverb, all this stuff that was going on in the 80s. So it was a natural for me. I think that’s why Rick liked using me for a collaborator on those albums, because my first instinct for what it should sound like was generally what he liked. So we recorded it: close miking of the drums, no echoing. The idea was to kind of let you feel like you were in a boxing match and just kept getting punched in the face. We were all on the same page, and there wasn’t going to be much discussion of it.”
The stark sound didn’t win over everybody.
“Talk about sucking the life out of a band,” says Gene Hoglan, Slayer’s former drum technician. “The drums sound okay, but are they serious about those guitars? That is some dry action. Here’s Metallica putting out Master of Puppets and even Exodus, the fantastic guitars on Bonded by Blood. [Reign doesn’t have] a lot of that really good crunch you’re looking for in a metal band. I don’t think Rick did them any favors.”
Thrash was a divisive development in the evolution of metal. Bands like Slayer didn’t bother with the spit-shined formality that Iron Maiden fans expected.
“You were either on the Metallica Ride the Lightning side of the fence, or you were on the Reign in Blood side of the fence,” says Devin Townsend. “And I was definitely on the Metallica side, maybe because it was safer or something. As a producer, in ’86, ’87, I was all about the production styles of Def Leppard. The Slayer thing was so dry and so raw, it didn’t hit me until later on, after going through some life shit, what Slayer was supposed to be.”
Reign was recorded with almost no effects, and zero studio trickeration. King used a pedal as a filter, creating what he calls “pissed-off lead tones.” Once it was set up, he wouldn’t play with the settings on it, which he told Guitar World’s Nick Bowcott, “added life on that album.”24 Wallace used plain equalizer effects for Araya’s now-even-gruffer vocals, sweetening only a couple screams with minimal reverb.
The rest of the basic tracks went quickly. As much as they could, the band recorded guitars and bass live in the studio.
“What stood out the most to me was the band was very well prepared,” says Wallace. “They were pretty consistent from take to take. We usually used an early take. We might have used a second or third take, but the other takes were not that far off, either. It was not difficult getting good performances.”
Nobody recalls any creative tension in the process. Reign in Blood was Hanneman’s baby, but the guitarist was just a another team member in the studio.
“Jeff was definitely not quarterbacking in the process, as I recall,” says Wallace. “Everyone was equally involved. It was not like some other bands where somebody is very much in charge and the other people show up and listen. It was pretty much a democratic process.”
The guitarists were creatures of the night. They wouldn’t start recording tracks until ten PM, still in the habit of recording while studio time was cheap. They’d trade licks back and forth until the sun came up. The late nights tested Wallace’s endurance; the band were nearly half his age.
“He got tired late at night when me and Kerry were doing solos,” says Hanneman. “He’d be all squinty, like, ‘It sounds good!’ ‘You’re not even listening!’”
King valued Wallace’s input, even when the engineer was groggy. The two didn’t know each other, but Rubin’s recommendation granted Wallace the benefit of the doubt. And Wallace’s relaxed manner clicked with King’s motivational needs.
“I trusted him,” says King. “Back then, I’d get lazy. I needed somebody to tell me, ‘Do it again, do it better.’ I didn’t need somebody [who was] just a jackass trying to push my buttons. If I don’t value your opinion, I’m not going to listen to you. I always deal with engineers more than I deal with producers, because they’re always there.”
Solos were the biggest source of disagreement between the band and the producer. Rubin wanted more solos. And more solos.
Occasionally, they would hit an impasse. Reverb was still a touchy subject. Recording the beginning of “Jesus Saves,” Hanneman decided his simple chunk-chunk rhythm at the break point would sound fatter with just a dash of reverb. Rubin hated reverb, and hated what reverb did to Hell Awaits. He issued a firm “NO.” Hanneman recalls the exchange:
“No, just try it. It’ll work,” said Hanneman.
“No,” Rubin retorted. “I’ll show you why it doesn’t work.”
Rubin found a piece of paper, drew an amp, then made a series of wavy lines emanating from the box, to represent how sound travels. Then he made a series of negating lines to demonstrate how sound withers when you add reverb to it. Hanneman stared at Rubin’s diagram.
“Just try it,” Hanneman told Rubin.
Wallace added the reverb. The guitarist and the producer listened. Rubin crossed out the sketch, crumpled the drawing, and tossed it away. The reverb stayed.
At the time, Slayer didn’t sense they were working with people who were as good as it gets. But as the stack of tapes grew, they decided Rubin was usually right.
“Once we started hearing what we were doing compared to what we were doing before, he was right about the reverb thing,” says Hanneman. “Reverb’s almost all gone, and it sounds a lot better. He knew what he was doing.”
With Slayer, the music always came first. The band was playing tight, though one major part of the album was missing. The group had finished most of the tracks and solos before they started laying down vocals. Most lyrics were complete, too—though they were new to Araya.
“I hadn’t seen any lyrics until we started recording,” says Araya. “As soon as we started recording, Jeff had the words for ‘Angel of Death’ and a lot of the stuff. We sat there and worked them out. I’d sit there and listen to them, go [home], and listen to [the tracks] in my sleep, come back, and do them again.”
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