Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography. (5 page)

Hanneman wasn’t the band’s most skilled musician; he was a helluva player, but unlike King, he wasn’t the kind of guy who could sit down, watch Dave Mustaine play a lead once, and shred it back. As Hanneman put it in Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman’s exhaustive metal oral history,
Louder Than Hell
: “I used to be totally into Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and other shredders, and I tried to emulate what they did and really grow as a guitarist. Then I said, ‘I don’t think I’m that talented, but more important, I don’t care.’”
^3-3

Hanneman also was the band’s second-best singer. No, he never sang on a Slayer album. But plenty of their classic tunes began as demos recorded in his bedroom, on which he sang embryonic versions of the lyrics. He was the frontman for Pap Smear, a short-lived side project with Dave Lombardo. If King never discovered Hanneman, he might have been a perfectly capable vocalist in a subterranean hardcore band like Dr. Know.

Hanneman made the difference between Slayer being underground heroes like, say, Mercyful Fate or Exodus, and Slayer being
Slayer
, a Grammy-winning, iconic metal band with some crossover appeal.

Hanneman’s punk ethos reshaped the Slayer sound early in the band’s career. Hanneman was the kind of guy who would bring a date to a party, then ditch her to watch the band and slamdance. As he told
Kerrang!
’s Steffan Chirazi in 1996, “[Hardcore] was true, honest, crazy, out of control, and I loved it.”
^3-4
 
And while Slayer’s punk influence waned over the years, Hanneman’s unconventional style formed a pillar that’s impossible to truly replace.

Hanneman made Slayer’s songs tight. Punk and hardcore, for all their ferocity, chewed a hole directly down to the elemental level of how — and where — music affects you. Whether it’s metal, polka, punk, folk, or crossover, music with the right rhythm and velocity provokes a response that’s more than a feeling: It’s a call to action. If you can handle its rough edges, hardcore has a mutant strain of pop appeal. King, the band’s other major writer, grew up on traditional metal like Judas Priest, and he hated hardcore. Slayer’s second album,
Hell Awaits
, features seven-minute songs about vampires and demons.

But Hanneman had a way of wearing down all who would resist him. After
Hell
, he convinced King that
punkrock
was good. Slayer’s next record,
Reign in Blood
, crammed ten songs into 29 minutes. Some people reasonably assume credit for that new sophistication belongs to producer Rick Rubin — a top-notch songsmith who later worked with Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other all-time greats. But that assumption is wrong:
Reign
’s music was written before Rubin arrived in California on a mission to sign Slayer.

Without Hanneman, maybe Slayer would have kept writing six-minute epics about necrophilia. Without his morbid mind and top-shelf talent, we definitely wouldn’t have “Angel of Death” (lyrics and music by Hanneman) and “Raining Blood” (concept and music by Hanneman, lyrics by Hanneman and King). [See the
Reign in Blood
book for those tunes’ amazing origin stories.]

Hanneman was an intuitive talent. Much of his unconventional technique was self-taught. A blond California longhair, he wasn’t the kind of guy who looked like he paid attention in English class. But he was the member of the band who used a thesaurus when he wrote. He’s the one who called bullshit on hokey, lame lyrics like “spit on your corpse.”

His songs were poetic, but they weren’t slavishly bent to some prescribed, classical rhyme scheme. As a writer, and as a musician, and as a professional, he did what worked, and he ignored the rules. He had a hand in writing nine of the ten songs on Slayer’s signature album, 1986’s
Reign in Blood
.

Hanneman even drummed. You can’t overstate Lombardo’s contributions to Slayer. But Hanneman would include skeletal drum structures when he delivered songs in demo form. (King sketches out drum parts too.) The unforgettable, mythic triple-thud knock that heralds “Raining Blood”? Hanneman wrote that.  The classic funky, cymbal-riding intro to “Criminally Insane”? Hanneman wrote that beat, then gave it to Lombardo to flesh out.

Your favorite Slayer songs probably started in Jeff’s bedroom. Hanneman recorded the first
Reign in Blood
demos at home, where he filled in the percussion parts with a drum machine. Not many metal dudes owned a drum machine in 1986. But they were standard issue for hip-hop musicians. And Hanneman was a rap fan.

King is exactly the kind of metalhead who hated rap on general principle in the 1980s, when it was breaking big. Without Hanneman to vouch for the guy’s work, when Rubin showed up at Slayer’s practice spot, maybe the famously insular crew wouldn’t have felt so good about the stranger. And maybe Slayer wouldn’t have signed to Def Jam — which was strictly a hip-hop label at the time. Maybe they would have signed to Capitol and ended up a cult sensation like Testament or Death Angel.

Reign in Blood
was engineered by Andy Wallace, who mixed
Nevermind
, produced Jeff Buckley's
Grace
, and mixed Guns N’ Roses’
Chinese Democracy
. According to Wallace, Kurt Cobain picked him because of his work on
Reign in Blood
.

If Slayer wasn’t on Def Jam, they never would have connected with Wallace. And then maybe
Nevermind
wouldn’t have been quite so perfectly calibrated. So maybe the 1990s’ alternative revolution wouldn’t have happened.

Hanneman wrote the music and lyrics for “Angel of Death” — maybe the most infamous metal song of all time. “Angel of Death” was a disapproving account of atrocities committed by Nazi surgeon Josef Mengele. Its point of view was largely objective, but it includes negative adjectives that tip the scales: “
sickening
ways to achieve the Holocaust” and “
rancid
Angel of Death flying free.” Historically, most people have overlooked those subtle qualifiers, even when they had a financial incentive not to.

At the time, CBS-Columbia distributed Def Jam. Scared and offended by “Angel,” CBS refused to release the album. So Geffen Records distributed the disc instead. Now Def Jam owed CBS another album. So the label signed Public Enemy, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2013.

Without Hanneman’s controversial song, Def Jam would not have needed to sign Public Enemy. Maybe PE would have signed to a label like Jive/RCA or 4
^th
& B’way. KRS-ONE and Eric B & Rakim are all-time greats, but they’re not in the Rock Hall. Who you know — that makes a difference.

Without Hanneman, there’s no "Raining Blood," which began in one of his nightmares. Rick Rubin, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Axl Rose, Andy Wallace. Hanneman made ripples that reverberated through the whole rock community. And beyond. Play Six (Six Six) Degrees of Jeff Hanneman, and you can connect to pretty much anybody. (Two moves will get you to Robert De Niro, three to Mario Puzo, four to Superman, four to F. Scott Fitzergerald.)

Hanneman was not a social guy, and he wasn’t a self-promoter. So he wasn’t the most visible member of the band.

But Jeff Hanneman is the reason we’re talking about Slayer.

May he rest in peace.

Chapter 4:

Aggressive Perfectionist

Slayer was Kerry King's idea. The guitarist could have done other things with his life. He had options. After
Show No Mercy
, King’s dad offered him a union job as an X-ray technician at Hitco, a company that made airplane parts. And given his eye for detail, he would have been good at it. But when he was a teenager, being in a successful rock group was the only idea that held his interest. And he made it happen.

King had been a competent baseball player, but his talents only took him so far. He had been an award-winning math student, but when the game transitioned from trigonometry to calculus, he was left in the dust. He had been a star sergeant in South Gate’s junior ROTC program. But he decided he didn't like hard-assed military leadership, and he quit. Then he called his shot. King wanted to be in a band. His musical taste was all but set in steel by 1980.

Heavy metal had been hanging in the air in California for years, waiting to be summoned by the right adepts. In 1966, when Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson had wanted to channel the elemental sound of fire, he produced the power chords and crushing beats of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” (later recorded as “Fire”). Metal manifested in John Densmore’s heavier drum rolls. And make no mistake: Van Halen was never a metal band, but metal as we know it wouldn’t exist without the godlike kings of guitars and groupies. (Van Halen’s debut is on King’s short list of near-perfect albums, alongside Sabbath’s
Sabotage
, Judas Priest’s
Stained Class
, and early Iron Maiden
^4-1
.) As the 1980s crested, the members of Slayer fully tapped that artistic ether, and it flowed freely.

King’s self-described “pretty normal” family was a tight ship, and he learned to run one, too: His mother held together a household of two daughters and a son, the family’s youngest child. Mr. King worked swing shift as an aircraft-parts inspector. And for a spell, he held a part-time position as a sheriff. Officer King also dabbled in music. He passed down his Tobacco Sunburst Stratocaster to his son, and Kerry was on his way. After quitting ROTC, King began growing his hair and dedicated himself to the instrument. The former junior-military leader and athlete proved himself to be an apt talent scout and an uncompromising leader.

When King needed brothers in arms, he turned to
The Recycler
, a weekly classified-ads publication that helped connect members of Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Mötley Crüe over the years. The paper led him to an audition for heavy classic rock band called Ledger at a local rehearsal spot. The group didn’t impress King. But he discovered some talent at the audition.

On the way out, something caught King’s ear. He noticed the guy at the reception desk, a blond dude who was playing rough renditions of Def Leppard’s “Wasted” and tunes by AC/DC and Judas Priest — all songs that King liked
^4-2
.

"That's interesting," thought King.

The kid’s playing was far from polished. He had only been playing two months, but King smelled talent. He stopped and talked. The rookie was Jeff Hanneman. The conversation went somewhere.

The last of five children, Hanneman grew up with a hands-off parenting approach. A sister introduced him to Black Sabbath. And before long, he began to suspect music was his destiny. Even before he sung or played, he heard rock and roll calling his name. He couldn’t say why, but he knew he’d be in a band. So he headed down that path.

“I just started hanging around a guy I went to school with who had a guitar,” Hanneman told me. “And I just started playing around, whatever. And I met a guy, and we were going to form a punk band. And my uncle or someone got me an electric guitar. And this guy was a total flake. He never practiced, and didn’t want to do anything.”

Hanneman took his destiny into his own hands. He saved up $500 and bought a black Gibson Les Paul
^4-3
(which appears in early Slayer pictures).

And that’s what he was picking away at when King overheard him. Hanneman had jammed with the guys King had come to see. Those sessions never led to anything. But when he talked to King, they both felt a spark.

“I found out I had more in common with [King],” Hanneman recalled. “And he goes, ‘Want to start a band?’ And I’m like ‘Fuck
yeah
!”

“Me and Jeff would hang out and see bands,” King
recalled on the [Stone Cold]
Steve Austin Show
. “We saw Metallica at the Woodstock in Orange County…. We were blown away.… They were doing what we were doing, the way we wanted to do it…. Me and Jeff were six months apart in age. We were just like the same person.”

Hanneman was a quick study. Before long, he was installed as Slayer’s co-lead guitarist. Hanneman would spend the rest of his life trading wailing leads with King. In 2004,
Guitar World
ranked the team as number 10 on its list of the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time.

Drummer Dave Lombardo also wanted to be a rock star. Growing up, he was a member of the Kiss Army. After leaving Pius X Catholic high school, he began attending South Gate with King. After an ugly split with his band old band, Lombardo was a free agent. He delivered pizzas to pay for his growing drum kit. He had heard of Kerry King, a local kid who had both gear and skills. One day, he saw King in the yard, pulled over, and asked him about if he wanted to start a band.

Envisioning a metal assault squad, the former Sergeant King told Hanneman, “I’ve got guys. I think we could be pretty cool.”
^4-5

Slinging pies around the neighborhood, Lombardo frequently found himself at the Araya house. (It’s pronounced “ar-EYE-uh.”) It was home to seven siblings, and, thus, plenty of guests, including some musicians. Tom Araya, the middle kid, was a bassist and singer. His Top-40 cover band — Tradewinds, later called Quits — rehearsed in the family garage.