The Birth Of SLAYER

Sam Roudman of Filter magazine recently spoke to the four members of SLAYER for a lengthy interview which appears in its issue #35. An excerpt from the article on the band's formative years follows below.

Tom Araya (bass, vocals): "This Top 40 band I was in was getting a new guitar player — a music teacher who Kerry [King, guitar] was a student of. When that guitar player got booted and was replaced by Kerry, then I got booted. That was right out of high school, in '79. I was working at the hospital and going to school to become a respiratory therapist. I got in contact with Kerry like a year later; he said he wanted to put a new band together."

Jeff Hanneman (guitar): "In '81, we started playing covers, and then I got into punk and that changed my perspective. I don't remember the specific bands because they were just backyard bands at parties, but it was just the speed and anger of punk… I don't know how to describe it. I don't write music; I don't read notes. [The punks] played dark riffs — whereas metal was more melodic, there were heavy riffs, heavy chord patterns; but punk was just…angry. It was fast, and right then and there I thought, 'Fuck listening to metal, this stuff is more interesting, it's more energetic.'"

Dave Lombardo (drums): "In the early days, the greatest thing we came across was mixing metal and punk together to create the SLAYER style. We were being influenced by bands like IRON MAIDEN, VENOM, MERCYFUL FATE and a lot of punk stuff, so it all grew from what we were being exposed to at the time."

Kerry King: "We were from L.A., and everybody said the Bay Area was where all the thrash was. We never understood the L.A. thing; why guys wanted to dress like girls, and why girls liked that — POISON, RATT, L.A. GUNS. We didn't get it. And so us dressing up in leather and spikes and chains and nails and Alice Cooper makeup for the first record was our way of rebelling and being the anti-L.A. Their subject matter was so safe; that might be part of what pushed us over the edge to be the opposite."

Hanneman: "My dad was in World War II and my two older brothers were in Vietnam, and when I was young I would hear them talk about all that stuff. Even though they weren't sitting around telling war stories, it would spill into conversation, which made it darker for me. If they were bragging about how many people they killed it probably wouldn't have been as interesting, but they were trying to keep it from the rest of the family and so I started to get into it. It was just a natural thing to write about.

"Not too long after the band started, my dad was cleaning out his closet and he had a bunch of medals he had taken off of dead Nazis, and he goes, 'You can have these; I was just going to throw them out.' I started to research what these medals meant, and it just snowballed. In a way, it actually helped SLAYER out; it started a controversy because everybody thought we were Nazis. Anybody who knew us knew we weren't, so we played along with it a little bit."

Read more from www.filter-mag.com.