SLAYER Trivia — 60 Entries
60 sourced facts about SLAYER.
Trivia
Slayer closed LOUD PARK 09 at Makuhari Messe on 18 October 2009. Kerry King's account of the trip is that they had come straight from an Australian tour and so had no jet lag at all, which let them spend the Saturday before at the site watching Judas Priest and Arch Enemy as punters. For the set itself they opened with "World Painted Blood" — the title track of an album that had not yet been released. Starting with a song almost nobody in the room could have heard was, by his own description, a gamble; what surprised him was looking up mid-song to find an enormous pit had opened.
Slayer's first public performance was at a Battle of the Bands competition at the South Gate Park Auditorium in South Gate, California, on 31 October 1981. Admission cost one dollar. Hanneman's recollection of the night is that he was terrified right up until they started playing, and then enjoyed every second of it — he liked showing off, and once he was up there that was all that mattered.
The second album, Hell Awaits, came out in April 1985 on Metal Blade. Where most of Show No Mercy ran under four minutes a song, three of these seven tracks pass the six-minute mark. Kerry King's explanation is that he and Hanneman were still working out who they were as musicians, and that both of them were deep into Mercyful Fate's Melissa while writing it. Hence few songs, most of them long — and, as he puts it, the only time anything like that ever happened to this band.
The Hell Awaits tour opened on 15 March 1985 at Striders in Columbia, South Carolina, where Slayer played two 60-minute sets, at 7:30 and 11:00 in the evening. They took home $520, against a running tally of expenses — petrol, a night at a Howard Johnson, supplies from a 7-Eleven, and a mirror. All of this survives in the band's own tour notebook from that year, in which the night's setlist is written out in red ink.
Slayer's first UK show was at the Marquee Club in London on 24 June 1985. Five hundred people got in; the crowd left outside grew loud enough that club staff briefly chained the doors shut and came close to pulling the plug. At the peak of it the doors opened instead. Support came from Atomkraft, whose set was cut short by technical trouble and who signed off by sending a bass drum bouncing out into the audience. Slayer played fifteen songs.
Repentless entered the US Billboard 200 at No. 4 in 2015, moving 50,000 units in its first week — the highest chart debut of what was by then a 32-year recording career, ahead of the No. 5 that Christ Illusion managed in 2006. Elsewhere it went in at No. 1 in Germany and on the Japanese International Chart, No. 2 in Holland, No. 3 in Australia, No. 8 in New Zealand, No. 11 in the UK, and No. 10 on the Japanese chart.
Slayer came together in Los Angeles in 1981 — Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King on guitars, Dave Lombardo on drums, Tom Araya on bass and vocals. The foundation was orthodox heavy metal: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden. But Hanneman was also a hardcore punk listener, and of everything on that list, this is the part that ended up deciding which way the band went.
Recording for Reign in Blood began in June 1986 at Hit City West Studios in Los Angeles, with Rick Rubin producing and Andy Wallace engineering. Rubin's instruction was to strip everything back and catch the band close to how it sounded live, which meant no reverb on the guitars and none on the vocals — the opposite of what metal records were doing in 1986. Sessions started at ten or eleven at night and ran until the small hours. Lombardo says the band had rehearsed so thoroughly that his drum tracks were finished in three or four days.
The opening track, "Angel of Death," was written by Jeff Hanneman. Its subject is Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor whom prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau called the Angel of Death, and Hanneman wrote the lyric after working through several books about him. In a 2009 interview he mentioned where it was written: at the home of his girlfriend's parents. His own description of how his writing worked was that anger stopped the music coming, and that the evil arrived when he was in a good mood.
Once Reign in Blood was finished, the label refused it. Def Jam's records were distributed by Columbia, whose president Walter Yetnikoff read "Angel of Death" as antisemitic and would not put the album out unless the opening track came off. The band would not remove it, and the record reached shops through Geffen instead. Rubin's advice to the band was that the situation could be turned to their advantage. According to the American metal journalist Don Kaye, the only mainstream coverage Slayer got at the time was Rolling Stone reporting that Columbia had refused to distribute them.
The finished Reign in Blood ran 28 minutes across ten songs. The band's contract defined an album as at least 45 minutes of music, so Araya went to Rubin to check whether this was going to be a problem. Rubin's position was that ten songs with verses, leads and choruses constitutes an album. Years later Araya said he still could not explain why the record worked, and offered its 28-minute length as one of the possible reasons.
Lombardo remembers the moment Hanneman went over to hardcore punk as a single scene: Hanneman turned up to rehearsal with his head shaved, announced he was punk now, and had brought records — Black Flag, TSOL, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks. In 1984 he and Lombardo started a punk band of their own. They called it Pap Smear, brought in Rocky George of Suicidal Tendencies on guitar, and Hanneman moved off guitar to play bass. The singer was a kid named Joey Fuchs who hung around the rehearsal room; blond and, by Lombardo's account, a passable match for Hanneman, he took the name Joey Hanneman and pretended to be Jeff's brother. They wrote five or six songs and never played a show.
The doubled, overlapping vocal on "Temptation," the eighth track of Seasons in the Abyss, is there by accident. Araya sang it once the way he thought the song wanted; King had a different idea, so Araya sang it again to King's suggestions. They took both takes to Rubin to arbitrate — and when he played them back, both tracks came up at once. It sounded better than either. King says Rubin simply nodded, and everyone agreed to keep it.
God Hates Us All is where Slayer and Rick Rubin parted. When the band were ready to record in 2000, Rubin told them he did not want to work on another violent, aggressive album, and pointed them at producer Matt Hyde instead. They tested Hyde on "Bloodline," a track that went to the film Dracula 2000; it went well enough that he got the album. Recording took place in spring 2001 at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, the studio owned by Bryan Adams. Hanneman and King had started writing in spring 1999, and the work was repeatedly interrupted by touring — Ozzfest 1999, then Tattoo the Earth.
God Hates Us All was released on 11 September 2001. The band had no way of knowing what that date would become; they had been home in Los Angeles the day before. In the weeks that followed, when a great many musicians were reluctant to board commercial flights, Slayer began touring the album on 18 September in Leuven, Belgium. Their American dates resumed on 29 October in New Orleans.
The band assembled through a run of coincidences. Kerry King, then 16, met Tom Araya in 1981 when both were in a covers band called Quits. Jeff Hanneman he simply found: King came across him auditioning for some other band in a warehouse, asked whether he was in a band, and was told he wasn't. The group that resulted played its first show on Halloween 1981, at the South Gate Park Auditorium in South Gate, California.
The debut, Show No Mercy, was cut in ten days at Track Studios in Los Angeles in October 1983, with Bill Metoyer engineering and Brian Slagel producing. It cost $3,000, and most of that money came from Tom Araya — he was the one member with a job, working as a respiratory therapist. The sessions ran on a graveyard shift, midnight to six each night, because that was when studio time was cheap.
In 1984 Kerry King played live with the newly formed Megadeth. Dave Mustaine's band made its live debut on 17 February 1984 at Ruthie's Inn in Berkeley, headlining with a 14-song set, and King was on stage for that and the handful that followed, finishing at The Stone in San Francisco on 18 April — five shows in all. The introduction between the two camps came through a shared contact at the guitar maker B.C. Rich.
On South of Heaven, Slayer slowed down on purpose. Hanneman's explanation is that whatever they did next was going to be measured against Reign in Blood, so they sat down and actually discussed slowing it — and they had just come off a year on the road with nothing left physically. Araya explained the title track on the BBC documentary Arena: Heavy Metal in 1989 as being about hell on earth: not a claim that there is no hope, he said, but a description of how the world looks to him.
The real-world criminals that keep turning up in Slayer's lyrics come out of Tom Araya's reading. It started with a book about the 1930s murderer Albert Fish, lent to him by his younger brother Johnny. From there he moved on to Deviant, on Ed Gein, which became "Dead Skin Mask." What lay behind "213" on Divine Intervention was a book about the British killer Dennis Nilsen; Araya was struck by how closely that case ran parallel to Jeffrey Dahmer's, and says that when Dahmer hit the news he realised he already had plenty to work with.
The phrase God Hates Us All came to Kerry King in Los Angeles traffic. Stuck, getting angrier by the minute, he looked up at a large billboard that read "God loves you all" — and the thought that God very obviously did not love him at that moment stayed with him. "Disciple," the song that carries the line, was also the last one he and Hanneman built the way they always had, with King writing the words and Hanneman the music.
World Painted Blood did not follow the usual order of writing first and recording after. Kerry King's explanation is that between producer Greg Fidelman's schedule and the way the studio time had been booked, there was no room to prepare, so the songs were written inside the studio. Fidelman had been recommended by Rick Rubin, and the first session, in October 2008, was explicitly a trial to see whether he was the right man. King knew him only as an engineer on Metallica and Slipknot records, and the band were prepared to hire someone else if it did not work.
Jeff Hanneman died at about 11 a.m. on 2 May 2013, near his home in Southern California. He was 49. The statement Slayer issued that day said he had been in an area hospital when he suffered liver failure. A week later the band made the cause public: alcohol-related cirrhosis. They were clear about what that did and did not mean — the necrotizing fasciitis infection had genuinely devastated his health, but neither Hanneman nor those close to him had understood how far his liver condition had gone until the last days of his life. The band also stated that, contrary to what had been reported, he had never been on a transplant list.
Repentless was recorded at Henson Studios in Hollywood with Terry Date producing, which ended a 23-year recording relationship with Rick Rubin. Most of the writing was Kerry King's. His explanation is that when Hanneman fell ill in 2010 he had no idea how much Jeff would be able to contribute, or whether he would contribute at all, so he started stockpiling material immediately. Of the title track he says simply that he wrote it for Jeff, and that he calls it the Hannemanthem.
On 22 January 2018 Slayer announced that they would finish with one last world tour, breaking the news with a video assembled from press clippings, early posters and press photographs spanning their whole career. The tour ran from 10 May 2018 to 30 November 2019 — eighteen months in seven legs, more than 140 shows across 30 countries and 40 US states. The last leg was called The Final Campaign, with Primus, Ministry and Philip H. Anselmo & the Illegals in support throughout. The final concert took place on 30 November 2019 at the Forum in Inglewood, California; the twenty-song set opened with "South of Heaven" and ended with "Angel of Death."
The 2015 Japanese visit was built around headlining the first day of LOUD PARK 15 on 10 October, with two headline club shows either side of it: Namba Hatch in Osaka on 6 October and Shinkiba STUDIO COAST in Tokyo on 8 October. Support came from Gojira, signed to the same management and making their genuine first-ever trip to Japan. Slayer played over ninety minutes at STUDIO COAST. The following afternoon Araya met the press in Tokyo and said Japanese audiences are no different from audiences anywhere in that they go completely crazy — if anything, he thought, more freely than before. He also noted how many young faces he now sees, some of whom tell him they inherited the band's entire CD collection from their parents.
On 28 January 1984, just after the debut album appeared, Slayer left Los Angeles, headed north and played Ruthie's Inn in Berkeley for the first time. It went well enough that when they came back a few months later, the local editor Ron Quintana wrote that Slayer were returning to Ruthie's that night — minus the eyeliner of their first visit. One line, and it records both that the early band painted their eyes black and that they stopped doing it quickly.
The debut, Show No Mercy, was released on 3 December 1983 by Metal Blade Records. The label states the date itself in its 40th-anniversary announcement, and lists the line-up on the record as Tom Araya (vocals, bass), Kerry King (guitars), Jeff Hanneman (guitars) and Dave Lombardo (drums).
Slayer's first show outside the United States was at the Heavy Sound Festival in Poperinge, Belgium, on 26 May 1985. It was the largest audience they had played to, and the size of it took the band aback. Their tour manager Doug Goodman's account of the day is that when the band on before them finished and moved to take an encore, the crowd simply started chanting for Slayer — and chanted them off the stage.
The World Sacrifice Tour behind South of Heaven, running from August 1988 to January 1989, is remembered for riot police, helicopters, arrests and fights breaking out between factions of the audience. At New York's Felt Forum the band had to leave the stage early to bring the situation under control, and Araya's parting words to the room were that they had ruined it for themselves.
The video for "Seasons in the Abyss" was filmed in 1990 at the Great Pyramids of Giza. It was directed by Markus Blunder, who also shot behind-the-scenes stills out on the desert set. Those photographs went missing for years and were only recently rediscovered in the band's own archive.
Slayer played the very first Ozzfest in 1996, when it was still just two stops — Phoenix, Arizona and San Bernardino, California. As the festival grew they kept being invited back, appearing in 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004 and 2016. Of the 1999 appearance, the Washington Post wrote that they were the heaviest and fastest act on the bill, and for purists the best thing on the day.
The first two albums, Show No Mercy and Hell Awaits, came out on Metal Blade, an American underground label. Its owner Brian Slagel is matter-of-fact about what happened next: his was a small company, the band was outgrowing it fast, and a move to a major made sense. Capitol and Warner Brothers both took meetings. The one who chased hardest was Rick Rubin of Def Jam, and he is the one they went with.
Rick Rubin first saw Slayer at The Ritz in New York. By his own account he went in knowing nothing whatsoever about them and came out floored. The label he was running at the time, Def Jam, was a hip-hop operation with Run-DMC on its books — not an obvious destination for a thrash metal band. Tom Araya's read on it is that they got lucky twice over: the man with the major-label money behind him also happened to be a fan.
"Raining Blood" went into the studio without a lyric. Araya says the band always ended up finishing something while recording, and on this album that something was this song. Kerry King's account is that he wrote it in the studio lobby while Hanneman was inside cutting tracks — Hanneman had no ideas for that particular part, so King took it over and finished it.
In the run-up to Reign in Blood the band's writing method changed. Until then everyone had hammered songs out together in a room; now Hanneman bought recording equipment and started turning up with cassettes of his own demos, complete with basic drum patterns, riffs and rough arrangements. Lombardo's view is that it gave the rest of them a clear picture of where he was heading. Beyond a decision that the next record would be faster than the last one, nothing else about it had been settled.
Reign in Blood peaked at No. 94 on the US Billboard chart. For a record this extreme that is a respectable showing, though it was nothing like the commercial event that Metallica's Master of Puppets was in the same period. Brian Slagel of Metal Blade frames its significance differently: as the most extreme record ever to achieve mass commercial success, and the one that carried genuinely heavy music out to a general audience.
The Reign in Blood tour opened on Halloween 1986 at the Moore Theater in Seattle, with New Jersey's Overkill supporting. Overkill singer Bobby 'Blitz' Ellsworth remembers walking out to a hail of wet paper towels, Zippo lighters and coins. His point about those crowds is that the violence did not build — it was there from the first second. Lombardo's memory is of walking the emptied venue afterwards and finding pools of blood on the floor.
Lombardo left partway through that tour. His explanation is financial: the band was on a major label and out on expensive tours, and he was coming home unable to cover basic bills. Tony Scaglione of the New York band Whiplash drummed the remainder of the W.A.S.P. dates. According to Lombardo, Rubin phoned him roughly every other day throughout, and when he finally agreed to talk it out, Rubin drove down himself, collected him, took him to rehearsal and reintroduced him to the band.
Hanneman intended to record a full Pap Smear album and was talked out of it by Rick Rubin, who by then was starting work with Slayer on Reign in Blood. Lombardo says he shared the concern — the side project was pulling their attention away. The Pap Smear demo has never been released, but two of its songs, "D.D.A.M.M." and "Can't Stand You," were re-cut by Slayer for their 1996 punk covers album Undisputed Attitude.
"Dead Skin Mask" is built on a book — Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Original Psycho. The small child's voice heard around 4:13 belongs to a friend of the band, Matt Polish. Araya directed him to play a kid who has been told to stop what he is doing and come straight home, and the recording was then pitch-shifted upwards until it read as a child. Hanneman named this as his favourite song on the album; what he singled out was the riff, which he found simply haunting.
Slayer's writing had been led by Hanneman and King; on Seasons in the Abyss, Araya moved to the centre of it. He wrote four of the ten songs outright and co-wrote two more with Hanneman. In a 2008 interview he described it as the last album the four of them sat down and built together, rather than one where finished songs were handed to him — the last time, in his words, that he felt part of the writing rather than a recipient of it. Hanneman and Araya were also sharing a place during the recording.
Seasons in the Abyss outperformed both of the albums before it, and did so without radio play. In the US it reached No. 40 — the first Slayer album to break the Top 40 at all — and in the UK it reached No. 18. It was their third album to be certified gold, and it got there faster than either of its two predecessors.
Slayer took Seasons in the Abyss out on the Clash of the Titans tour with Megadeth. Testament and Suicidal Tendencies opened the European leg from September; Anthrax and Alice in Chains joined for the American run the following spring. The initial run closed with a Wembley Arena show on 14 October 1990, and Slayer used footage shot that night for the "War Ensemble" video. The tour also produced a friendship between Araya and Alice in Chains' Jerry Cantrell, which led to Araya guesting on "Iron Gland" on that band's 1992 album Dirt.
In the American series Californication, the novelist at its centre, Hank Moody, names his books after Slayer albums: his first is South of Heaven, his second Seasons in the Abyss, his third God Hates Us All. The joke did not stop on screen — Simon & Schuster actually published God Hates Us All as a real book, so a novel that exists only inside the show also exists on a shelf.
Lombardo has given different reasons at different times for leaving in 1992. In 2014 he said he left to be at home for the birth of his son, and that this was the whole of it. Speaking to Decibel in 2008, he had described something else: that on a trip to Egypt, seeing the pyramids and riding horses through the sand outside Cairo, he realised his heart was no longer in the band — and he was explicit that this time it was not about money but about lost interest. He returned for a second spell beginning with 2006's Christ Illusion, and left again in 2013.
The drummer on God Hates Us All was Paul Bostaph. He injured his elbow late in 2001 and left the band on 7 December, after nine years. The press release Slayer put out at the time gave a chronic elbow injury as the reason; Bostaph later said the real reason was musical. The arm problem, by his account, was an old softball injury that he had re-aggravated lifting a laptop at an airport.
From Reign in Blood onwards Slayer stayed with Rick Rubin's American Recordings and its predecessor for a very long time, and only left in 2015, when it was announced that their eleventh studio album, Repentless, would come out on Nuclear Blast. Kerry King's assessment of Seasons in the Abyss is that it was probably the last record Rubin had any real influence over; after it, in King's description, Rubin became the kind of producer who turns up for drums, vocals and the mix and not much else.
Slayer's first appearance on a record was not their own. Brian Slagel of Metal Blade caught them in July 1983 in Anaheim, opening for Bitch: a short set, half of it covers, but heavy and intense enough that he went backstage afterwards and spoke to their manager about his Metal Massacre compilations. The result was "Aggressive Perfector," which opened Metal Massacre III when it appeared in the autumn of 1983.
The Reign in Blood sleeve was painted by Larry W. Carroll, who delivered two separate canvases; the band asked him to merge them into one image. Its final form came from designer Steve Byram, who had just done the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill sleeve that same year. The band's own reaction at the time was cold — King told Metal Hammer in 1987 that nobody in the band had wanted that cover and that they were stuck with it. His verdict much later runs the other way: that the impact of the cover is one of the reasons the album became a classic.
When Hanneman wrote "Angel of Death" he had recently picked up a couple of books about Mengele. There was family background too: his father had served in the Second World War and come home with medals taken from dead German soldiers. As for the scream that opens the recording, Araya's account is that they cut it three or four times in all and then stopped, because the second take had already given them what they were after.
"Raining Blood" was covered by Tori Amos on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls. The route there ran through Beck's bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who suggested she try a metal song and played her Reign in Blood, one of his own favourites. Hanneman, asked about it in a 2011 interview, granted that hers was the most original version of the song anyone had done. King's response was blunter: if she had not told them, they would never have recognised it as theirs.
The video for "Seasons in the Abyss" was shot in Egypt, and the idea was entirely Rick Rubin's — he simply told the band he wanted to fly them there and film it. The shoot took place as the first Gulf War was building. Rubin's own recollection of the moment is that military exercises were under way, diplomatic talks were being arranged and bomb shelters were going up, and in the middle of all of it Slayer were making a music video.
Paul Bostaph did not walk straight into the band. Kerry King had heard his playing on the Forbidden albums and written him off — nothing out of the ordinary, as he puts it. What changed his mind was a guitar tech telling him he needed to go back and listen properly. Bostaph auditioned ahead of Divine Intervention and got the job on the spot.
Diabolus in Musica takes its name from a piece of musical terminology. Tom Araya's account of it is that this was a scale the church outlawed in the 1400s, on the grounds that it would draw the devil out of people. The album itself was meant to appear in 1997 and slipped, because the band's label American Recordings was bought by Columbia; it finally came out on 9 June 1998. It sold around 46,000 copies in its first week and entered at No. 31 in the US and No. 27 in the UK.
Diabolus in Musica was written almost entirely by Hanneman. By his own account, on the album before it — Divine Intervention — he had been stuck, unable to come up with riffs he liked, and by the time he noticed, King had written most of the record. So on this one he worked at it. King's own verdict on the result is that it is probably his least favourite album in the band's history.
Christ Illusion entered the US Billboard album chart at No. 5 in 2006. Kerry King, interviewed that year, treated the number as evidence rather than triumph: the band had certainly left a mark, he said, had made a sizeable blip on the radar, and a placing like that suggested somebody was paying attention. It was also the first album of Dave Lombardo's second spell in the band.
In January 2011 Jeff Hanneman contracted necrotizing fasciitis, thought to have followed a spider bite. Surgeries, skin grafts and rehabilitation followed, and he was never able to return to touring. Kerry King says that from roughly seven months after the injury they brought Hanneman to rehearsal before every tour, trying to work him back in; he was trying, but he was not there, and King describes having to tell him he was not ready as the hardest thing he ever had to say. Through this period the guitar seat on tour was filled by Gary Holt of Exodus.
Gary Holt became Slayer's touring guitarist in January 2011, at the point Hanneman fell ill. A member of Exodus in his own right, he had no hand in writing Repentless, but he played the guitar solos on most of that album's twelve tracks. In the farewell message he posted the day after the final show, he wrote that he had never wanted the job and that the man who should have been standing there was Jeff. He then listed what it had cost him to keep going — three epidurals, seven cortisone injections, trigger point injections — and said every second of the pain had been worth it.
A little over four years after that last concert, on 21 February 2024, Slayer announced they were returning to the stage — Tom Araya, Kerry King, Gary Holt and Paul Bostaph. What was announced was two festival headline slots that September: Riot Fest in Chicago on the 22nd and Louder Than Life in Louisville on the 27th. At Riot Fest, the first show back, they played twenty songs, half of them drawn from Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss. "Reborn" had not been played since 2014, and "213" not since 1998.