It’s important to know your audience when you write. It’ll keep you from making an embarrassing mistake. It can be tricky to find that sweet spot of being just clear enough to make sense while also not being excruciatingly boring. You know—hope—that your writing will be read by someone else who draws meaning or inspiration or humor from it. If you can’t be a sage, maybe at least you won’t be a fool.
Take this blog as an example. I have a clear idea of who reads it because I have told a few friends about it directly and they’ve commented or texted or emailed me about it. I also post about these entries on Bluesky each week, which means I have a general sense of who out of my followers might have noticed it and clicked through. The stats I can see on my side of the screen reveal that there’s not a lot of people who read the posts each week. That’s fine by me because even when a post doesn’t get a lot of attention, I still look on it with pride. Having kept to this weekly writing regimen has made me consider more deeply what I’m reading, hearing, and watching. Being in better touch with my taste and shaping it along the way is its own reward.
I bring all this up because I read a pair of books about the almighty SLAYER over the past week and it stuck out to me how the author of the books positioned SLAYER relative to someone who is not familiar with them but wants to learn more. The books are an accidental duology. The first is part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series and focuses on 1986’s poser-conquering “Reign in Blood.” The second is from 2013 and is by the same author; it’s titled SLAYER 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years [A Metal Band Biography]. See how nicely the implied 666 of the second book fits in with the title of the original Bloomsbury series to make these two books 100% about SLAYER? It’s clever! The second book is written as a response to the first in that Ferris felt there was more to say about SLAYER than the relatively limited focus on their third album would allow.
That first book suffers a bit from its inclusion in the 33 1/3 series because of that need to consider a wider audience. There’s a sense of needing to make SLAYER matter to the imagined average music fan. I find that kind of framing unnecessary, especially for a band as blunt as SLAYER. You either get them or you don’t. There’s no way to win someone over with words when you could just play them the record, right? It’s making me think of the quip (often attributed to ELVIS COSTELLO) that writing about music makes as much sense as dancing about architecture. In this case, anyone’s writing really fails to capture the power, the insanity of that record. The book begins with epigraphs from Drew Gilpin Faust and Cormac McCarthy. I don’t know if either of them has ever heard “Reign in Blood,” so I don’t really need to have SLAYER “elevated” by their thoughtful comments here. I also don’t need validation in the quality of the SLAYER catalog in the form of a GRAMMY nomination or win. The essential of SLAYER has nothing to do with awards or meditations on life and death. As I said above, if you don’t get it, it’s not for you to get.
OK, now I’m in the pig-headed frame of mind to write about SLAYER for real. I’m maybe close to the mindset I was in during the winter of 2004-2005, when I listened to nothing but the cassette of “Reign in Blood” whenever I was in my car. As Ferris notes, the album is short enough that it fits on a single side of the tape. It’s made for endless playback. That winter led me to write about SLAYER in my first zine, Thunder Theft, which was all about ‘80s metal. Of the opening track of “Reign in Blood,” I wrote “the mid-paced riff in ‘Angel of Death’ is the most punishing thing a human could possibly convey with instruments. Every time Dave Lombardo hits the snare, I lose 50 brain cells.” I will stand by that comment. I also like what I wrote about “Postmortem,” which was “the loose swagger of the drums makes it simultaneously delightful and debilitating.” Don’t worry, I wrote about the lyrics and riffs, too. Reading Ferris’ book about this album makes me glad that past me had noticed the drumming. He argues a few times that technically precise drummers like Paul Bostaph or John Dette, each of whom would later sit behind the kit with SLAYER, don’t quite hit the same way that Lombardo did. Basically, Ferris correctly claims that it’s not just Lombardo’s use of double-bass kicks in “Angel of Death” that made him a legend; his feel for the beat made him impossible to replace.
That song is infamous for reasons beyond its pummeling attack; the lyrics are about Josef Mengele’s monstrous and immoral experiments on Jewish adults and children in Nazi death camps. The typical defense of this song is that the listener knows Mengele is evil and does not need to be told that. Of course. The bigger issue is that using a topic of such grotesque violence as the source of imagery for a song is more than a bit gauche. Yes, as Ferris notes, the lyrics eventually call Mengele “rancid,” which implies that lyricist Jeff Hanneman disapproves of all of the horrors cataloged in the song. I’m certain he did. All the same, the band’s defensiveness about this song’s content never sat right with me and there’s nothing in these books that changes that. (It should be noted that tracing Tom Araya’s and Dave Lombardo’s ancestry to Chile and Cuba, respectively, is irrelevant to absolving the band of writing a song that uses Jewish suffering for shock value.) There’s really nothing else new to be said about this song at this point, so I will add that Hanneman’s use of abacinate has always intrigued me and I wish there were a more interesting story to how he came to use it (other than that he likely found it in a thesaurus).
If nothing else, I was hoping for some kind of explanation for how Hanneman came up with the solo on “Necrophobic,” which is my all-time favorite SLAYER solo. Excuse me, they don’t have solos, they have leads. It’s incredible no matter what you call it. For all the mutilate-the-fretboard pyrotechnics he (and Kerry King) have thrown down throughout their careers, I don’t know why this one stands out. There’s something special about the way he deploys the whammy bar, I guess. Given Hanneman’s stubbornness, it makes sense that he never went on the record about how he played guitar. In Ferris’ 2013 book, he shares a story about Hanneman flaking on a promotional obligation for the company that makes his guitars. The band’s manager called him up and he said something along the lines of “I like playing guitars but I don’t like talking about them.” So I guess we’ll never know. Years ago, the second-floor apartment where I lived was near an intersection, so I would hear plenty of car stereos when there were red lights. Once, as if from a dream, a car pulled up blasting “Necrophobic” right as Hanneman’s lead started… before I could get to my window to yell SLAAAAYYYYEEERRRR! the light changed, the lead ended, and the driver left. It was a perfect moment.
Other cool moments pop up throughout the 2013 text. One that stands out because it made me put the book down from laughing so hard was the story of SLAYER opening for JUDAS PRIEST in 1988. Kerry King apparently kept this story to himself for years, only revealing it at Hanneman’s memorial service. King didn’t drink until he was 21, so he didn’t have much of a tolerance. He and Hanneman were out with some of the road crew from the band they idolized. King wasn’t feeling well and said he wanted to be in the front seat. The driver was having none of it and told King he’d be fine. He wasn’t—he puked all over himself because the child-resistant safety window didn’t go down far enough for him to stick his head fully out the window. Hanneman laughed mercilessly at him, so King wiped some of the vomit onto Hanneman, who only laughed louder and harder at the spectacle (Ferris, 2013, p. 136). It’s disgusting but it’s also humanizing. The very end of the book gets to a similar place, where Ferris has listed a few brief tributes to Hanneman after he died. It’s Ian Christe’s from Bazillion Points that has stuck with me the most. I could read a book of cool little stories about Jeff Hanneman from his friends and fans forever.
I still dig SLAYER. I haven’t thought about them this much in years. I am still uninterested in “South of Heaven” or anything after it. (The title track is good, though.) Although I learned plenty of the ins and outs of the band’s career (and lots more about Dave Lombardo’s personal life) from the 6623 book, I still can’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t the intended audience for the 33 1/3 book. That’s the tricky thing about that book series—you are signaling to the reader that you are passionate and informed enough to write a full book on an album, yet by being part of a book series that has to have some kind of consistency of voice, your own is lost. Better then to double down and take things into your own hands with your own publishing press to make a sort-of sequel that is pure fandom, editorial oversight be damned.
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