The weeks of the L.A. sessions were all work—no showing Rubin the nightlife, though Friedman took the teetotalling producer out. Rubin stayed on the Sunset Strip, at the Mondrian—a famous apartment building (and later motel) that shared a name with Piet Mondrian, one of Rubin’s favorite artists. Aside from the married Lombardo, the rest of the band still lived at home. Even Araya, one of the band’s most renowned partiers, recalls simply going home after the sessions, “just passing out, crashing out, getting up, doing it all over again.”
Though the band were recording their third LP, the singer had yet to score a songwriting credit. Hanneman, the album’s main songwriter, had ideas for vocal delivery when they entered the studio. Songs like the tightly metered “Altar of Sacrifice” had a beat built in. On other songs, the guitarist would mimic the vocals’ rhythms and melodies, simulating the steps for Araya to follow, demonstrating how to emphasize “AUSCH-witz, the meaning of PAIN” in grunts and da-DA-das.
Some performances were collaborations, and some last-minute ideas yielded classic moments. The famous “Angel of Death” introductory scream, the first vocal moment of the album, was a late addition.
Rubin and Hanneman knew that the intro needed something, so they huddled, mulling over what could be missing. Then Hanneman had an idea.
“Scream,” Hanneman told Araya. “You need to scream. You’ve got to scream right there.”
Rubin chimed in, “Yeah, yeah! Scream!”
So Araya stood behind the mic, listened to the sternum-bruising chord bursts, waited for his moment, and let loose a deep whraaaaah.
They played it back a few times. Rubin and Hanneman gave Araya a collective mehh and started talking amongst themselves. Araya decided it was the right idea, wrong execution; he could do better.
“Tell you what,” said Araya. “Let’s try it again.”
And take two is the unforgettable scream that launches the album.
Hanneman and Rubin heard the shriek and started high-fiving each other like two linebackers who just watched a kicker make a last-second field-goal for the win. They tried a few more takes, but the scream had been screamed on the second take.
“It was a magic moment,” says Araya. “As soon as I did it, they knew, and I knew, too: This is what it is, this is what it needed. I went for it.”
Rubin’s eyes would light up when the band nailed a moment, but you had to look closely—they were usually lit up. Whether the band were hitting a groove or a reckless speed run, the producer would nod his head and lean back and forth, feeling the vibe. And when it was really good, he’d let them know, in a rich, mild voice: “Yeah, that’s good. I like that.”
The beginning of the album’s end required some faith and infernal inspiration. One of the Reign’s most electrifying moments faced some resistance.
On the album, “Raining Blood” opens with the sound of rain, followed by squealing guitars that sound like a mix of screaming souls and whalesong, interrupted by a rapid succession of three echoing blows. Unlike the “Angel of Death” scream, Hanneman had planned this flourish. And unlike the renowned howl, it didn’t sound so cool. Tom hated the drum intro as it appeared on Hanneman’s tape.
“He thought it sounded like someone knocking on the door,” says King. “We still make fun of it.”
On the demo, the strikes sound like they’re heralding the arrival of a maid with fresh towels. On the album, it’s a sound like Lucifer himself pounding on the gates of Hell (which is how Lombardo interprets the beats). The dull triple-tap is gone. With the right skill, vision, and guidance, the three resounding blows announce imminent doom.
Part of the effect is execution. Lombardo doesn’t just pound the floor toms 1-2-3. He makes the beat with flam taps, striking the drums with both sticks. But rather than hitting at exactly the same time, the second impact arrives a split second after the first, lending a depth to the thuds.
“It gives me chills, just talking about it,” Lombardo says. “I guess it’s maybe something Jeff envisioned, or maybe it’s something that he stumbled upon. The genius of Rubin and Andy Wallace, not taking away from the guys in the band, [is] them putting it on record and making it sound how it’s supposed to sound.”
The band don’t recall much deliberation over the track order. They always knew they’d end with “Raining Blood,” even before they knew how the song itself would end.
When Hanneman wrote the song, he envisioned a scene from a dark street or bloody back alley. The way the record was shaping up, he decided he needed a bigger backdrop for the final number. “Trapped in Purgatory,” he wrote, then described a banished soul awakened and hungry for vengeance.
King wrote the second verse, picking up on Hanneman’s title and his new direction: “Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears / Abolish their rules made of stone.”
And, as Araya recorded vocals for the first two verses, they still needed a third.
Head steaming, King sat in the Hit City lobby, playing Galaga and meditating on the first verse. He tried to get into Hanneman’s mind, wondering where the song could go from there.
“Pierced from below,” he thought. And the conclusion flowed like an open artery, spewing images that would shape the album’s visceral cover art: “Souls of my treacherous past / Betrayed by many, now ornaments dripping above.”
“Raining blood,” screams Araya at the beginning of verse four—unless you want to split hairs, the song doesn’t have a real chorus. Thirteen words later, the singer utters, “Now I shall reign in blood,” like Mad Ahab threatening to strike the sun. Following a guitar frenzy, Reign in Blood closes with the pattering sounds of hellstorm. And so ended the recording of the basic tracks.
For good measure, the band had also re-recorded their first recording, “Aggressive Perfector.” The cleaner, speedier version would turn up on singles and as a bonus track on later pressings of the CD—to Slagel’s surprise.
“We didn’t even know what we were going to do with it,” explains King. “But we played so much faster at that point, we wanted to see what it sounded like.”
Aside from some larval riffs, the ten songs on the album are the only songs written for Reign in Blood.
“We had those ten,” says Hanneman. “We listened to it, we said, ‘This is perfect.’”
In early March, Slayer, Rubin, and Wallace reconvened at New York City’s New Fresh Studios—better known as Soundtrack—to finish the record.
Rubin had an idea for an experimental remix of “Criminally Insane.” The producer cut back the guitars and kept the tempo at the introduction’s slower pace for the entire song. Hanneman cut a new solo for the version. The percussion on that mix sounds like a drum machine and Lombardo. It’s both.
“They sampled sounds onto a drum machine, and I played it on a drum machine,” explains Lombardo. “Which was a brilliant idea. I like all that stuff—remixing, changing stuff around.”
“Criminally Insane (Remix)” was also Slayer’s last remix.
“I didn’t not like it,” says King. “But I liked it the way we did it [originally] better.”
King still wasn’t happy with the album’s solos, so he and Hanneman took another crack at the axework. Rubin still wanted more solos. The guitarists buffed them and added overdubs. King still wouldn’t be happy with the end result, but Rubin had a grand time. Watching the duo trade licks, the producer would push them to go for more: faster, harder.
After a take, Rubin would give a low “Perfect” or “Make this a little squealier.” Hanneman and King were practically giving off sparks at that point, and Rubin would sit behind the board, cracking up, laughing with the kind of glee he’d experience when he saw a pro wrestler split open another grappler’s head with a steel chair.
The mixing process wasn’t as smooth. After an early mix, they suddenly realized how much—or, more precisely, how little—they had on their hands. They’d written and rehearsed a thirty-three-minute album, which wasn’t unusual in the pre-CD era. Most Van Halen alb
ums just broke the thirty-minute mark. But now the ten songs—each a full song with solos, verses, choruses, or enough verses to offset the lack of choruses—had a combined running time of twenty-nine minutes and change. By punk standards, it was long. On a major-label scale, it seemed awfully short. Maybe, they feared, unacceptably so. Araya was the first to notice the number twenty-nine on a studio chart.
Nervous, Araya looked at Wallace.
“Andy, is that the total time for all the songs?” the singer asked. “What is that? What does that represent?’
“That’s ten songs,” said Wallace.
“We all looked at each other like, fuck,” Hanneman notes.
“That’s what we have,” observed Rubin, followed by an early flash of Zen. “You guys have ten songs.”
“We don’t need any more songs?” Hanneman asked.
“No,” said Rubin. “I think it’s good the way it is.”
Reign was all but done, but they hadn’t crossed the finish line. Araya and Hanneman stayed in the studio to oversee the mixing process, which slowly went nowhere. After three days of “fucking around,” four songs were mixed to nobody’s satisfaction. The Reign in Blood team was a race car in the red, and they needed to cool down for the final laps.
Araya told Metal Mania’s Beth Nussbaum that Wallace called everything to a halt, and said, “Listen, guys, this just isn’t working. We’re not doing what we had planned to do. Let’s just stop here. We’ll take a break. Tomorrow we’ll come in fresh. We’ll take a day off, come in Sunday, and see what happens.”25
And on one black Sabbath, the recording gods smiled on the album, and the final mix was underway. The band had the idea to add thunder and rain sound effects to the mix. Rubin and Wallace found the sounds in the effects library, and Reign’s run time stretched to 29:01, with the addition of a thunderclap and the fading sounds of red rain. Twenty-nine minutes was enough. Reign was short enough that the cassette version featured the entire album on each side.
“The big joke was if we played it at half speed, it would be like putting two Black Sabbath records out,” says Drakoulias.
Illustrating Blood
“Larry Carroll has a brilliant artistic style, and his artwork represents Slayer’s music precisely.”
—Dwid Hellion, Integrity
Tom Dillon did a little favor for Larry Carroll. For his troubles, Carroll pinned him to a wall in the underworld. And he’s still hanging there today: The painter can be seen on Reign in Blood’s black-brown-bronze-and-blood cover, impaled with a spear, hanging limp above a score of souls mouth-deep in a river of fire and gore.
In New York City’s tight-knit community of struggling painters and illustrators, artists would pose for each other’s work. Larry Carroll—then known as Larry W. Carroll, though he’s since dropped the W—didn’t like using models, anyhow. He thought they were “boring and plastic.” And he didn’t want pretty for his latest assignment: an album cover for some heavy metal band.
Then twenty-eight, Carroll had moved from Los Angeles to New York City in 1984, with his two young daughters and (now ex-) wife.
“New York was a better chance to get more of the work I wanted to get,” recalls Carroll. “L.A. was very slick, illustratively speaking. It had a lot of advertising work, which I wasn’t very interested in. I wanted to do more political work. And the whole art world of New York was attractive to me.”
For work, Carroll found a windowless one-room studio on Broadway in SoHo. He wasn’t exactly a mild-mannered dad. He once sold a painting, only to steal it back, skeptical of the owner’s plans for it.26 He’d log a short stay in jail for his convictions. Carroll had settled down by the time his family arrived in NYC. Soon, they were part of a community of artists like Dillon—on the Reign in Blood cover, Dillon is the impaled gentleman in a white cloth shirt, by the fingertips of the central figure, a humanoid with a goat’s head. Seated on a spare wooden sedan throne, the monster is borne by four demons, and has a severed head on a spike at his left hand.
Looking for work, Carroll would go door to door, showing his portfolio. On one of those stops, he met Def Jam art director Stephen Byram, who kept him in mind. Carroll would start contributing bleak illustrations to the New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Progressive. He was also teaching drawing and illustration at Brooklyn’s School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute when Def Jam called and said Rick Rubin wanted to meet him.
As spring 1986 approached, the producer and the artist met at MacDougal & Bleecker Street, a Greenwich Village intersection with a café or coffee shop on each corner. They had a seat outside Café Figaro, on the southeast corner. The two found each other agreeable and began discussing the project. Rubin said Slayer wanted a goat’s head on the cover. He gave Carroll a cassette of Reign in Blood (without a lyric sheet) and left his direction at that.
Carroll went to work. He’s not a metal fan, but he listened to the album and digested the lyrics, which triggered ideas for the cover. For additional inspiration, he rummaged through a reference file that was arranged by themes like religion. He visited libraries, photocopying pictures he thought he could put to use.
“Their lyrics are quite visual,” says Carroll, who would provide art for three more Slayer discs: 1998’s South of Heaven, 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss, and 2006’s Christ Illusion. “They’re always quite provocative, always touching on subjects that a lot of people shy away from. They certainly don’t hold back. So it was suited for the kind of work that I do.”
In a field overpopulated with demons, baphomets, pentagrams, and innovatively mutilated victims, the Reign in Blood cover tops them all. To everyone from artists to fans, Reign’s art is supreme.
“I remember staring at the cover while riding the train home, being super excited to put the needle down to it as soon as possible,” says Paul Romano, the artist best known for his Mastodon album covers. “The cover was chaotic, and I couldn’t make sense of it, which I find very engaging to this day. It is completely eerie, with an art brut dangerousness.”
Carroll’s mixed-media piece has enough details, photorealistic and otherwise, that it begs some explanation—which Carroll politely declines, denying more than he’ll confirm. Rumors have swirled for years that the cover features Hitler, Paul McCartney, and Pope John Paul II. Carroll seems genuinely surprised when asked about those alleged details, and he denies them all.
“I don’t like to talk too much about the specifics of an image,” Carroll says. “It kills it in a way.”
According to Carroll, the central goat’s-head figure is no particular demon. The cover’s three figures in mitres—the tall, pointy ceremonial cloth hats worn by popes—are not specific historical figures. Certain details evoke Saints Sebastian and Thomas Moore, but Wallace says the images are archetypes, not historical references. In the upper right-hand corner, a man with long hair sits on a ledge, arms wide open. He sure as hell looks like Jesus.
“One of my favorite things about Carroll’s work is the attention to detail,” says tattoo artist Kat Von D. “Most of which you might not catch at first glance, but then later, taking a good look, you can discover all the layers among layers in each piece.”
The only details the creator will firm up are fairly obvious: The dark servants in the forefront have burnt angel wings and giant erections. In his left hand, the center-bottom figure holds a dismembered penis.
“It’s open for interpretation,” Carroll says. “People can fill in the images themselves, try to figure it out. That’s what I most enjoy about making images: they’re not so conclusive; they’re open-ended.”
The original art was a three-foot-square collage on heavyweight illustration board. Carroll painted and drew it. The photo-quality images are illustrations and tracings. When painting, Carroll used oil paints over acrylics, then washed and glazed it. The Slayer logo—a pentagram made of swords—and gray sans-serif REIGN IN BLOOD were not part of the original piece. The Def Jam art department placed the graphics over a cop
y of the original. Carroll’s snapshot from the abyss is one of the few extreme-music covers that wouldn’t look utterly ridiculous next to a William Blake watercolor.
“I think Carroll’s art is definitely more sophisticated than most heavy metal art,” says Kat Von D. “It’s not cheesy, nor dated in any way. It is true art at its finest—just different subject matter than what some might consider art. Although I could never get sick of some of the classic stereotypical heavy metal art out there, it’s refreshing to see a different approach.”
The original Reign in Blood art might look at home in a museum somewhere—if Carroll could find it. His associates in the art world weren’t always swell family guys.
“When I was in New York, I had a young illustrator guy that really liked the cover a lot, and was begging me for it,” says Carroll. “And I gave it to him, which was a big mistake. He was BSing me, I later found out, and he sold it to somebody. So I have no idea where the original is. It’s just a shitty thing to do. I think his intention all along was to sell it. Just a shmuck, you know?”
Carroll’s vision of the afterlife is recognized as a classic now, but it almost didn’t make the cut.
“Nobody in the band wanted that cover,” King told Metal Hammer. “We were stuck with it. Some warped demented freak came up with the cover.”27
It’s not clear whether King was serious at the time—coming from the man who wrote the lyrics “Enter to the realm of Sa-taaan,” it seems like wiseass remark. Today, he doesn’t recall the context. King has since started collecting art, but he says he may have meant it.
“I probably just didn’t think it seemed metal,” says King. “Turned out, it redefined metal artwork.”
Carroll says King probably wasn’t kidding.
“I remember when the cover first went to the band,” Carroll recalls. “Someone in the band didn’t like it so much. But someone else in the band had shown it to their mother, and the mother thought it was disgusting and vile. And then the band was impressed. So I have someone in the band’s mother to thank for them running with it.”28
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