Slayer 2
That is why Slayer demand the respect of every honest metal fan: their refusal to be anything but Slayer. Even when they slowed the tempo for South Of Heaven, Slayer never sacrificed heaviness. And when their counterparts in the “Big Four” (Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax) scored radio and MTV play in the mid ’90s with pedestrian versions of their trademark styles, Slayer didn’t succumb to the mainstream’s temptations, instead releasing one of their fiercest efforts, 1994’s Divine Intervention.
“I think umm, well I speak for American society because that’s what I know, I think there’s an unwritten rule or law that you reach a certain age and you can’t be a metal fan — you can’t make metal music anymore,” King says, trying to make sense of why so many bands lost grip of their roots. “It happens to a lot of fucking bands, like ‘Oh I can’t do that anymore.’
“I guess we have that gene that says ‘Fuck you; you ain’t talkin’ to me.’ Cause there’s a handful — not even a handful — there’s a few bands in every era that is like that. Sabbath is one. I’ve gotta say as big of fan as I am of [Judas] Priest, you know, they’ve done that a couple times. I can say for myself Sabbath has never done it; AC/DC has never done it — the people who are like, ‘This is what I like.’ Doesn’t matter if you tell me, what am I 40? Who cares? I’m making badass stuff, and I’m still proud of it.”
The sound isn’t the only thing that hasn’t changed. The men themselves, they claim, are the same guys who started the band in Huntington Beach, California in 1982.
“I’ve always been the same, even more so now. Things haven’t changed for me, people just change around me,” Araya says. The father of two (ages six and nine), Araya seems, not insulted, but slightly puzzled when asked about balancing his personal life with his life as the voice of one of the most famous, not to mention evil, rock bands in the world.
But nosy reporters aren’t the only people surprised by Araya’s normalcy. “I’ll be somewhere with my kids, with my family going shopping or whatever, and it’ll be like ‘[gasp] Dude, what are you doing here?’ ‘Uh . . . shopping.’ They can’t believe I’m out being a human being, being normal,” Araya says.
“I don’t see myself as this image,” he continues. “I’m Tom. I’m the singer and bass player in the band called Slayer. People sometimes tend to make a big stink about it, and it kind of embarrasses me because I don’t make a big stink about it, so you shouldn’t.”
“It’s funny ’cause I did some in-stores for my guitar company [B.C. Rich] during the last few months,” King says. “It’s much more hands on, hanging out with the kids. A couple times we did it at bars, and shots are flying. It’s just a damn good time, and that’s what I tell ’em at the beginning of those things: ‘I’m not here to show you I’m better than you; I’m not here to blow you away with this eight-finger tapping thing I just made up.’ I said, ‘I know how to have a good time, and that’s what we’re gonna fuckin’ do.’
“It’s just street, and that’s what the kids want. They don’t want no false fucking ‘Oh this is how you do this.’ They wanna hang and have a good time with somebody they admire.”
Maybe the lesson learned is the band who keep their egos in check keep their lineup intact. Compared to their ’80s-thrash peers, Slayer have been a model of stability. Anthrax were down to two original members before the “classic lineup” reunited last year; Gary Holt is the only founding member still playing in Exodus. The same goes for Dave Mustaine and Megadeth (which doesn’t surprise King: “Nobody really likes Mustaine, from people in his own band to people in other bands”). Even Metallica are on their third bass player since Kill ‘Em All.
Lack of turnover for Slayer, Araya says, is because of lack of rock-star attitudes and lack of wound-up personalities. Though plenty of fans still swear King burns goat hearts in his bathtub (he swears he doesn’t), Araya insists Slayer are just a bunch of laid-back dudes.
The band responsible for “Raining Blood,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Serenity In Murder” — cool, calm, collected, and as easygoing as a lazy-Sunday barbeque.
“As a band, the four us have always been that way. We’ve always just taken things as they come and not be overwhelmed by them. Everybody else seems to worry or get all frantic about things for us. It’s like, ‘Dude, mellow out. It’s no big deal. Chill. Take a chill pill, fuck,'” Araya says with a hearty laugh. “That’s the way we’ve been as a band, period. I think it’s just because early in our career shit happened, and we just kind of tried to figure it out without anybody going crazy. We’ve been mellow like that.
“Early in our career we realized the magic combination. We’ve all come to realize that without the other, this wouldn’t exist,” he continues. “You learn to live with each other. You learn to accept each other’s faults. You grow with that. It’s unconditional, you know what I mean?”
But Araya says that knowing it isn’t completely true. For more than a decade, Slayer not only existed outside of the magic combination, they thrived. When Lombardo was fired in 1992 (he also quit very briefly in 1987), Paul Bostaph stepped in and sat on the drummer’s stool until 2003.
Neither King nor Araya is especially eager to talk about Lombardo’s exit all those years ago (it was “more or less” on bad terms, King offers) but Araya, with some prodding, admits it came down to personality clashes. “The three of us, we understood our clashes and accepted them. I think Dave, at that point, couldn’t. You either accept this the way it is or you bow out, and we made the decision for him because we just didn’t want to deal with that anymore.”
But despite tense relations and the fact the band hadn’t been in contact with Lombardo in years, when Bostaph announced his intention to leave (he now plays in Exodus), it only seemed natural to at least extend an olive branch to Lombardo. “Everybody else was pretty keen with it. So was I, because there are really only two drummers for this band, and he was the other drummer,” Araya says about bringing Lombardo back. “It was just a question of whether he wanted to do it.”
“It was out of necessity,” King says bluntly. “We needed a drummer, and Dave was available so it just makes the most sense the guy that started it finish it if he’s into it and able to do it.”
It wasn’t quite as easy as King leads you to believe, though. At the time, Slayer had just been offered their second Jägermeister tour, so Lombardo agreed to help out, with the understanding Araya, King, and Hanneman would search for a new drummer. So during the tour, the trio would hold afternoon auditions in every city they stopped.
As the tour went on, though, it became evident the chemistry had never left — “Like putting on your favorite shoes,” King says — and by the end of the Jägermeister trek, Slayer officially stopped the auditions.
“[Lombardo] coming back into the picture, he’s learned a lot being by himself and doing stuff on his own,” Araya says. “He was a different person, personality wise. He’s learned the unconditional thing where that’s just how people are. You just have to work with them, you can’t fight with them; you can’t fight everybody all the time. You have to either accept it or move on, and I think he has learned that this time around.”
“When you hear us play,” King says, “it’s like, even though Paul did a fantastic job, this is the way Slayer should be heard, I think.”
