Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (39 page)

The Cremaster narrative isn’t linear or even apparent, but the piece is a remarkable, from the music to its context. Just as Slayer's "Raining Blood" demonstrates new potential for metal within the genre's traditional framework, Lombardo and Tucker's collaboration stands as a high-water mark for metal as art — and metal
in
the larger world of art.

In 1998, Lombardo joined the top-seven thrash band Testament and recorded
The Gathering
as part of a short-lived, stellar, yet star-crossed supergroup lineup. (Testament’s distinction as a thrash band was that they were the only band to become significantly heavier as the years went on.)

Testament’s Lombardo record is the band’s hookiest album since their debut, 1987’s
The Legacy
. Compared to that predecessor, it’s more head-down, straight-ahead thrash — but with plenty of Lombardo’s power crashing and relentless rolls.

“Lombardo did one of our best records,
The Gathering
,” offers Testament guitarist Eric Peterson. “That record really seemed like Testament getting more modern and evolving into more of the thrash-death-melodic style.”

By the YouTube era, Lombardo occupied the spotlight like few other percussionists.
The Lombardo Drum Cam
because a popular feature, capturing footage of entire shows centered on nothing but the drummer.

Years later, in 2009, to fill the unprecedented void in his adult life, Dave put new emphasis on his arty metal project Philm. In the metal/rock/hardcore hybrid, he plays a simple four-piece kit with a single bass drum. (In his later years with Slayer, he played a simple nine-piece set, having dropped two toms late in the band’s history.) On the band’s 2012 debut album,
Harmonic
, the band simply split all writing credits, musical and lyrical.

After all that time in — and out — of metal, Lombardo remained the plainest member of the Slayer crew, going about his day in jeans, with medium-length hair and simple tattoo of blue and red overlapping zig-zags around his right bicep.

But no matter how nuanced, diverse, or heavy Lombardo’s projects were, they weren’t Slayer.

“Bands like Led Zeppelin, human beings like Jimi Hendrix, without those integral people in the band, it’s almost like, yeah, you could make a phony attempt to try to replicate what you had,” reflects Lombardo when we talked about R
eign in Blood
. “But it doesn’t have the chemistry – there is chemistry – people, two human beings are soul mates; something brings them together.

“There’s something chemically, there’s something internally, spiritually, Zen, whatever your karma – not karma, but there’s something that brings people together,” he continues. “In bands, like any kind of relationship, there is chemistry. And in Slayer, there’s a chemistry, whether we want to believe it or not. Whether I want to believe I can move on and do something else, it will never be the same as what it is with Slayer.”

Chapter 37:

Return of the Drum King

December 2001. Christmas break. Midpoint for the
God Hates Us
All
tour cycle. Slayer have a 30-date run slated to start in less than a month. And the group doesn’t have a drummer.

The band need a ringer, and they need one quick.

Slayer’s fanbase has been vocal: Slayer should bring Lombardo back. That idea, while nice, seems idealistic, impossible, and flat-out unrealistic: Lombardo left the band a decade ago. He works steadily. As far as any civilians know, Lombardo and the others hate each other.

But Slayer manager Rick Sales has a surprising take on the suggestion: He agrees. And he sets out to see if he could make the impossible a reality.

Sales calls Lombardo. Lombardo listens.

The drummer’s expenses are rising. Now Lombardo has three children: two teenage sons and a year-old daughter. The paychecks, no doubt, will be a nice supplement for occasional Fantômas tours. After 9/11, the America economy went into the tank — especially non-essential industries like the concert business. And the idea of a limited reunion of the classic lineup seems like a golden opportunity to drum up some ticket sales.

Sales meets with the band. He reveals he had been talking to Lombardo. And Lombardo is in if they are.

The parties agree to meet and see if everybody could play together nicely. They meet, and they decide they can. Nearly a decade after the fight that replaced practice, Lombardo has calmed down. Mostly.

“The day he showed up and hung out was, the feeling like it was the very next day after he left,” Araya tells me during the
Christ Illusion
tour. “And that’s how it’s been.”

The comment contains an incidental ominous note: A decade earlier, following the fight, hard feelings had not dissipated by the next day.

Lombardo agrees to sit in the scheduled tour while Slayer look for a full-time replacement.

In some ways, Lombardo has always been a part of the band, even when he wasn’t there.

“It comes down to one rule, one rule of law that we all know and understand,” Araya tells KNAC.com later, “that without the other, this wouldn’t exist.”
^37-1

Lombardo finally has to listen to the albums the band made without him. He skims them. Lombardo doesn’t like what he hears. So he rewrites the percussion parts to match his sensibilities.

“I wasn't a fan of [the Bostaph records],” Lombardo tells Geeks of Doom years later. “I listened to them a little bit, not like listen to a complete song or anything, I just like skipped over the songs, listened to the mix, listened to the drums and it told me the whole story. I didn't have to listen to the whole record for me to get the gist of the whole project. So it was pretty good, but I just wasn't a fan…. Paul really tried to complicate it, tried to get creative which was great. But still, just for me personally, it wasn't the Slayer that I knew.”

Three weeks after Christmas, Slayer are back on the road, their classic lineup restored. Lombardo is billed as a “guest star” in the lineup
^37-3
.

But they don’t ditch all the material they had recorded with Bostaph. With Lombardo back on his throne, Slayer sets feature five songs from the two original records with Bostaph:

1. “Disciple”

2. “War Ensemble”

3. “At Dawn They Sleep”

4. “Stain Of Mind”

5. “Postmortem”

6. “Raining Blood”

7. “Hell Awaits”

8. “Die By The Sword”

9. “Born Of Fire”

10. “Bloodline”

11. “God Send Death”

12. “Captor Of Sin”

13. “Dead Skin Mask”

14. “Seasons In the Abyss”

15. “Payback”

16. “Mandatory Suicide”

17. “Chemical Warfare”

18. “South Of Heaven”

19. “Angel Of Death”

The shows are electric. Lombardo routinely leaves the stage and tells his bandmates, “That was euphoric!”
^37-3

Crowds, as always, are manic and ready to self-destruct. But Lombardo’s presence evokes extra madness. After some warmups, the tour officially opens January 24. Slayer plays Toad’s Place, a 750-capacity club in New Haven, Connecticut. And the mob almost bring the house down.

Hometown heroes Hatebreed leave the general-admission pit charged up. After an endless tease of a soundcheck, the lights go down, and the blackness gives way to a flood of white spots and strobes as the band launched into “Disciple,” the tense opener from
God Hates Us All
.

Blogger Crimson Man captures the chaos in a review:

“The intensity, anticipation, anger, and sheer desire for aggression of the audience was at its highest level when the first verse kicked in,” Crimson Man writes. “After that it was smooth thrashing, moshing, climbing, and well… sailing into the rest of the set. Dave Lombardo was sounding amazing on the new songs as well as the old classics. The band conquered the crowd as Tom Araya screamed the intro to the second song: "WAR ENSEMBLE!"

Three songs in, the crowd tear down a barrier. The show stops for ten minutes while the staff readjust the stage barricade.

The frenzied mob don’t want to give an inch. So Araya, as always, is put in the agitating position of pleading for sanity and safety.

“All you guys up here near the fence,” he intones. “I want you to just back away. Come on, come on, back
away
from the fence so the guys can get it out of here and give you some more room."

The crowd won’t cooperate, and they egg on the madness, shouting "Drop the fence! Drop the fence!" Lombardo starts pounding along, giving a beat to the chant. Tom continues playing good cop, patiently telling the crowd, “It's FUN to play safe!"

The barricade is back up. During “At Dawn They Sleep,” the crowd shout along with an extended take of the refrain, “Kill / KILL /
KIIILLL
!” Then “Dead Skin Mask” turns into a different kind of spectacle, a true rarity even for the band’s unrestrained constituency.

At the song’s chorus, Araya backs off the mic and screams along like the tune’s very victim. Then, halfway through the song’s slow, torturous groove, two blondes in tight pink dresses make their way to the stage. They begin go-go dancing, shaking their money-makers.

Araya dedicates “Payback” to the crowd, but he’s not mad. After the ripper is over, he compliments the seething, sweating mass of humanity on behaving themselves: "What I'm really impressed with is how you guys always find a way to enjoy yourselves,” he says. “That's what's important.”

As the road unfolds, the crowds remain hot. Tempers stay low. Nobody strands Lombardo, alone, waiting, in the practice spot. Lombardo doesn’t call anybody a moron. Teresa’s presence doesn’t stress out the family men — the rest of the band are married by now. Dave later tells me everyone is more “respectful” since he returned.

Content and enjoying himself, Lombardo signs on to play through September. It turns into one of Slayer’s busier years, with around 90 shows on the books for 2002.

Click here to Google search “Slayer photos 2002”

And Lombardo is back. It worked. The trek is not a replay of the Reign in Pain tour. Without everyone crammed into one bus, and with sizable steady checks coming in, the classic lineup peacefully coexist.

But Lombardo’s return is still penciled in as temporary. In some cities, the group hold auditions for new drummers, setting up a drum kit in empty rooms and playing with competent no-names and capable journeymen. Even though Lombardo is a staggering 37 years old, as always, none can  match his  combination of time, feeling, and power.

In February 2002, the band hit Chicago, their reliable middle-America staging ground, looking to pick up a permanent addition. The group hold auditions.

Lombardo himself has invited Soulfly drummer Joe Nunez to try out. Nunez nails the audition, mouthing along the vocals as he pounds away
^37-5
.

After the audition, the band think Nunez might be the guy. Weeks later, to everybody’s surprise, he backs out of the audition process. King changes his mind: He liked Nunez. Now he doesn’t like him. Blowback singes Lombardo, King’s perennial scapegoat.

“I was like, 'Dave, why ain't your boy fuckin' into this? What's going on?'” King later recalled to Martin Carlsson of Sweden’s Close-Up Magazine. “He's like: 'His family is giving him shit about Slayer.' You know, God complex. That's not me ditching his story, that's straight from Lombardo, who doesn't usually go out on a limb and say shit. I was like, 'Alright, whatever.'”
^37-6

As the group toured the country, they auditioned more drummers, from unknowns to Dying Fetus/Misery Index/Chimaira drummer Kevin Talley. Blink-182/Transplants drummer Travis Barker later claims Slayer offered him the job
^37-7
.

King, the band’s leader, develops a nagging hunch: Lombardo might be the solution for their drummer problem. He decides the original drummer is welcome back — if he can commit to the program.

Months later, Carlsson asks King if he
wanted
Lombardo back.  King says, “Yes and no. I have no reason for 'no,' other than it's really odd right now, 'cause we're two different camps. Not that we're at each other's throats or anything, but we're not a unit. If it was always gonna be like that, I'd say 'no.'… He's a hired gun, and he acts like it. I know he's got ties with Mike Patton, and I won't take a backseat to Mike Patton. Never.”
^37-8

As the tour goes on, the band plays fewer clubs and more theaters. Spring gives way to Summer. King puts aside hard feelings for the sake of business: Soulfly is direct support for the band in August and September.

By now, bigger venues are the rule, not the exception. Shows include another two-night stand in New York City’s 3,000-capacity Roseland.

And now, Lombardo has been around longer than he planned.

“So you go out on the road, and you talk some more,” says Araya. “And the conversation goes on to, ‘We not only need a drummer to do the tour, but to start recording.’ That’s when Dave spoke up and said, yeah, he had an interest in recording an album with us.”

Summer fades to fall, and that interest turns concrete. Slayer are ready for another album. And so is Lombardo.