Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (32 page)

“Haselnüsse” is German for “hazelnut.” Hazelnuts are small. Like the size of your fingertip.

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Chapter 28:

Disorder and
Divine Intervention

Without Lombardo, Slayer finally stalled.

The band didn’t tour in 1993. And they wouldn’t hit the road until August 1994.

In 1993, nearly a full three years after
Seasons
, Slayer finally released some new material. It wasn’t great.

With grunge on the wane, rap-rock was rising.
The Judgment Night
soundtrack was a curated series of collaborations between rappers and rock bands of all stripes: The white-hot Pearl Jam collaborated with Cypress Hill. Teenage Fan Club chilled out with De La Soul. House of Pain raged alongside Helmet.

Some the crossover cuts were not so hot. Slayer manager Sales scored his band a slot on the record, but King was hesitant. He had never been a rap fan, and he wasn’t interested in crossing over — not for a minute, not for four.

But Sales kept pitching King ideas. The manager suggested Ice-T, a fellow Los Angeles veteran with unimpeachable street cred. King decided he could deal with the rapper.

Maybe King recognized a kindred spirit in Ice-T: Hanneman and Araya’s historic and metaphysical fixations made them the metal equivalent of deep thinkers like KRS-ONE or Nas. But King’s matter-of-fact opinions about daily life and how to live it put him somewhere closer to L.A. institutions like N.W.A. and Ice-T.

The Raider fans teamed up on a track called “Disorder.” The cut was a medley of three songs by U.K. hardcore icons the Exploited: "War", "UK ’82", and "Disorder.”

The Exploited medley is not good. It starts off promisingly with a whomping riff, then collapses into a mess. Ice-T’s presence is hardly discernable. King thought it worked, though.

“That was a cool song,” King told Rei Rishimoto of
Metal Hammer
. “If you listen to that song in the context of the record, it doesn’t sound like a metal band with a rap act. It sounds like Slayer, only with another singer. I’m pleased with the way that came out.”
^28-1

That collaboration lowered expectations for Slayer’s first album with a new bandmate.

As Paul Bostaph joined one of metal’s top institutions, his initial reception was a chilly one. Later, when Bostaph joined Slayer for the third time, he told
Metal Zone
’s Nikki Blakk about his first audition: Bostaph found Slayer’s Anaheim compound. Inside, he met the band. A smiling Lombardo welcomed him. King asked if he was ready to kick ass. When he met Hanneman, the guitarist was sitting on a couch, watching TV.

“Hi, Paul Bostaph, great to meet you,” the drummer said.

Hanneman looked in Bostaph’s general direction, grunted, and turned his attention back to the TV. The conversation was over.

“After I got to know Jeff, it became comedic to me, because he didn’t realize he did it,” Bostaph told Blakk. “Years later [I said] ‘Remember when you met me?’… When I told him, he couldn’t believe it.... It was really funny, and it was indicative of Jeff’s sense of humor, because back then they probably auditioned so many guys, I was just another drummer coming through, to him…. After that initial meeting, I thought, ‘That guy’s not really nice.’ But that was
so
not him.”

After the successful audition, Hanneman warmed up to the new guy. When the band arrived in Europe for their first shows together, they boarded a Polish airline’s plane. The decrepit jet looked like it had been built in the 1950s. Hanneman didn’t like flying. Neither did Bostaph. The old vehicle didn’t make put either of them at ease. Hanneman defused the tension and welcomed the new drummer into the inner circle by busting his chops.

The guitarist took a seat next to Bostaph.

“We’re going to die,” said Hanneman, a devilish, playful tone in his voice. “We’re going to die!”
^28-2

Two years after Bostaph — pronounced “BO-staff” — joined the band, the first of Slayer’s two true 1990s albums arrived.

Bostaph, a monster in his own right, lacks a certain subtlety on the record. But he immediately one-upped Lombardo by scoring a writing credit on the title track, which splits the lyrics credits between all four members.

For Slayer’s sixth full album, the trilogy team had broken up. Carroll did not return for artwork. Instead, Wes Benscoter composed a bony new variation on the Slayer pentagram of swords, incorporating parts of a humanoid skeleton and fanged skull that fall in a midground between H.R. Giger, H.P. Lovecraft, and standard-issue metal imagery.

Wallace was also out. He mixed Sepultura’s 1991 album
Arise
, and after he worked with competition, King didn’t want to share him.

Hit City West was also abandoned in favor of two California Studios: Oceanway in L.A. and the renowned Sound City in Van Nuys. In 1991, Rubin’s work on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’
BloodSugarSexMagic
had elevated him to a new, even higher level of superstardom. And since then, he hadn’t spent much time on the street level.

Since the previous Slayer album, the perception of Rubin as an absentee producer had begun to grow. Now Rubin had a growing roster of arena-marquee names like Mick Jagger and Tom Petty, and he could no longer spend every minute in the studio with every band on his label.

In 2000, Glenn Danzig would accuse Rubin of literally phoning in his work during the making of 1992’s
Danzig III: How the Gods Kill
. Danzig told Snap Pop!’s Doug Roemer: Late one night, Rubin called the studio, and said he wouldn’t be able to stop in, but asked the singer to play some songs over the phone
^28-3
.

Not that Rubin had lost his touch: Shortly after the Danzig debacle, Rubin recruited Johnny Cash and recorded the classic
American Recordings
, a smoldering, unplugged album that stripped away decades of studio gloss and reestablished Cash as an American icon. Rubin’s first production credit, La Rock and Jazzy Jay’s “It’s Yours,” read “reduced by Rick Rubin. ” And — as it had on
Reign in Blood
— the minimal approach still worked.

When King speaks about the band’s relationship with Rubin, he usually creates the impression Rubin gradually lost interest in spending time with the band. But Araya told
Decibel
that Rubin actually wanted a greater role in the band’s creative process — and
that
created a rift.

“
Seasons
was the last time [Rubin] was in the studio with us,” Araya told Chris Dick. “He wanted more input on the music we wrote after
Seasons
. That’s when he started to butt heads with Kerry. That’s when things changed.”
^28-4

Rubin is still credited as executive producer on
Divine Intervention
, but the official production credit goes to Slayer.

The new name in these credits is Toby Wright, who is listed as co-producer, engineer, and mixer. Wright cut his teeth in a long discography including Dokken, Damn Yankees, and Tony! Toni! Tone! He had been an assistant engineer in the Metallica machine on
…And Justice for All
, the came into his own with Korn’s
Follow the Leader
and Alice in Chains’
Jar of Flies
. The sessions started, stopped, stalled, and restarted, but the album happened.

Divine Intervention
’s credit counts read more like
Seasons
than
Reign
, which was still acknowledged as the band’s high-water mark.

 Araya wrote four sets of lyrics by himself. The singer claimed a quarter-credit on the title track. And he collaborated with King on album closer “Mind Control.”

King pitched in on the title song and wrote another three sets of lyrics by himself.

After contributing to the title song, Hanneman wrote just one set of lyrics by himself: “SS-3,” a censuring career recap of Reinhard Heydrick, a Nazi official who was instrumental in the Holocaust. And on this album, that’s it for the author of “Angel of Death.”

Hanneman also wrote music for just one song by himself: “213,” named after an apartment number of prolific serial killer/necrophiliac/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.

King also dominates the musical credits, with five solo credits and four co-writes with Hanneman.

[Click here for album's full songwriting credits in Appendix B]

The
Divine
credits mark the first official appearance of the members’ individual publishing companies. King’s is Molosser Music, named after a breed of thick-necked, muscular dogs. Hanneman’s is Pennemunde, which shares a name with a North German village where the Third Reich developed rockets. Araya’s is SS810, a number that adorned the license plate of  his Jeep.  Bostaph’s is Retina.

The album’s big single was “Dittohead,” a reference to followers of right-wing talk-radio phenom Rush Limbaugh. The lyrics lean toward the conservative: “Anyone can be set free / On a technicality / Explain the law again to me…. Unimposing policy / No enforcing ministry / Gaping with judicial flaws / Watch a fading nation crawl.”

In the song’s video, footage alternates footage from two scenes: The band play a small room in an abandoned warehouse, with a batshit moshpit in progress. Outside, in scene reminiscent of the Palladium riot, fans run amok in the streets, arrive at the building, and knock holes in the wall to get inside.

Bostaph clicked with the band. King liked his attitude.

“He’s intricate, and he’s a perfectionist,” King told
Metal Maniacs
. “He goes out of his way to make sure every drum is in the right fuckin’ place, man. We’ll play a song 20 times because he heard one drum that was off or something…. We told him what we wanted, but he was always free to come up with something better.”
^28-5

“And he usually did,” added Araya.

Then and later, the rest of the lineup favorably compared Bostaph to Lombardo as contributing force within the unit.

“Paul had a lot to do with the albums he was on,” Araya told Peter Atkinson of KNAC.com, once Lombardo returned to the band. “He didn’t get much credit for anything, and he really had a lot to do with everything. When
Divine
was being put together, he helped a lot and didn’t get any real credit for any of that.”
^28-6

Reign
wasn’t far from finished long when the band hit the studio. Since that album, the band had been saving more of the creative process for the last minute. For
Divine
, the band hammered the songs into their final shape in the studio. The muses weren’t visiting Hanneman, and the band finished the album through record amounts of elbow grease.

“I had ideas, and we had to sit through and try to compromise on an idea that would work well,” Araya told
Metal Maniacs
. “There was a lot of work that was done once we got [in the studio], especially with the melody lines. We had to really sit down and decide how we wanted them sung. And then finally once we had decided on something, we’d go back and write the whole song.”

“Then we had a couple of fucked up rhythm sections that we couldn’t fit words in to save our goddamned lives, but we worked it out,” added King. “It came out really good. It’s just that we didn’t fuckin’ nail that for anything.”
^28-7

            On previous albums, Hanneman and Araya were the most talkative, followed by King, whose lethal armband made him the band's most visibly distinct member.

But when Slayer returned with
Divine Intervention
, King was doing more of the talking. After 1996’s punk covers album, Hanneman gradually faded out of the press itineraries. By 2001's
God Hates Us All
, even though Araya continued giving interviews, King was unofficially the group's spokesman.

This time out,
Rolling Stone
— then and still the rock magazine of record — felt better about Slayer. The venerable journal cozied up to the group with a four-star review of
Divine Intervention
that used words like “tropes” and connected it to the literary non-movement called splatter-punk.

“Musically,
Divine Intervention
is spectacular,” wrote Robert Palmer. “Guitarist Kerry King, perhaps the most distinctive guitar soloist in his chosen idiom, makes the instrument howl like the damned in his blitzkrieg feature spots and meshes with fellow guitarist Jeff Hanneman in a great, bracing clamor of sharply etched riffing, while bassist Tom Araya (also the group's hoarsely compelling vocalist) and drummer Paul Bostaph hammer the shifting metric and accent patterns with brutal finesse. Whatever else you may say about 'em, Slayer are one hell of a rock & roll band.”
^28-8

At the time, the metal press liked it, too.
RIP
’s Daina Darzin called it “classic Slayer — a punishing, eerie, transcendentally fast descent into the hell that is their willing subject matter.”
^28-9