McIver - The Bloody Reign of Slayer

Copyright 2008 Omnibus Press
This edition 2009 Omnibus Press
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ISBN: 978-0-85712-038-0

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This book is dedicated to everyone who laughed at Slayer in the early days.
The joke is on them.

S layer captured my soul at a very young age. My older brother and I would blast Show No Mercy until the deck ate the cassette: we were the only kids in our junior high school to have Slayer T-shirts. The other students spread rumours that we were Satan worshippers, but they would never look us in the eye. I wore my ripped Root Of All Evil shirt almost every day.

I was drawn to Slayers traditional heavy metal influence combined with their hardcore punk aggression. Theyve had an obvious effect on my writing with Municipal Waste their quick-shredding tempos were too good not to bite off, piece by piece. I believe almost every solid thrash act is guilty of stealing from Slayer although no one has ever been able to remain as evil and dominant as they have through the years.

All hail the reigning kings of thrash metal or pose with the rest!

Ryan Waste, guitar

Slayer are hands-down the most influential thrash metal band ever. Theyve written so many immortal songs that its unbelievable: they have the kind of catalogue that only one per cent of bands out there will ever come close to achieving. I vividly remember the first time I heard them: when I was 16 and growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, me and my friends used to get stoned and go driving around in the woods at night, listening to metal bands. One night my friend said, You gotta hear this! and put on Reign In Blood. Its the perfect album, right from the first riff of Angel Of Death.

Slayers music somehow speaks: it has that magic dust on it that makes everyone love it. So many bands sound a bit like them, but theyll never match them because you cant mess with the best.

Land Phil, bass

When I got into metal and someone played Slayers Reign In Blood for me, it was the most over-the-top thing Id ever heard I couldnt stop listening. I was addicted. Being a drummer, as soon as I heard that double bass drum fill in Angel Of Death, life was never the same again. Slayer took every bar in thrash metal and raised them way higher than anyone. They summon the demon in us all! All hail

Dave Witte, drums

Slayer? Fuck, yeah!

Tony Foresta, vocals

W elcome to The Bloody Reign Of Slayer, and to those wanting to know about Slayer badly enough to have bought, borrowed or stolen this book, I hope you wont be disappointed.

In writing this biography, I deliberately avoided the mistake we drooling metal authors often make, which is to focus too much on a bands early years in an attempt to look like serious, old-school fans who were born wearing a sleeveless denim jacket. While Slayers roots are relatively well documented, Ive made a point of also digging deep into the middle and later parts of their career, when the extreme metal scene they helped to found was at its peak.

With most of my previous books (including Metallica and Black Sabbath), I didnt bother to ask for authorisation from the subjects in question, because I felt that having an official stamp of approval would prevent me from speaking freely about some of the lesser (i.e. crap) music in their catalogues. I had no such qualms with Slayer, who have usually made the right choices in my opinion. Therefore, I actively sought their involvement.

In January 2007, I contacted the bands manager, Rick Sales, informing him that I was intending to write a full-sized Slayer biography and inviting their official participation. He asked for a full proposal, which I sent, along with some of my previous work so that Tom, Kerry, Jeff and Dave could get some idea of what I was attempting.

Perhaps Slayers huge commitments that year (which included a co-headlining tour with Marilyn Manson) made it impossible for them to reach a decision, but things moved slowly from then on and communication between Rick and I eventually trickled to a halt, although he and his assistant Andrew Stuart were always polite and professional. Eight months after my initial contact (and just three months before the deadline to submit the text for publication) the band had still not reached a decision, so I informed Rick that the time had passed to make this book the official one, and thanked him for his efforts. My best wishes to them all: Im sure Slayer will write an official book one day, and I for one will be buying a copy.

The fact that no one has previously written an English-language biography of Slayer blows my mind. Writing about rock bands for a living means that I spend more time than is probably healthy thinking about which acts are worth documenting. I ask myself if a particular band have made good music, lived interesting lives or pushed boundaries in any notable way, and the answer is usually No to most or all of those questions. In Slayers case, however, its a massive Yes to all three.

Writing this book has been a blast from start to finish because Im a huge Slayer fan, and have been for 20 years, but that alone isnt why you should read it. What Ive tried to do with The Bloody Reign Of Slayer is to give the reader a unique insight into the subject, despite the ubiquity of information on the internet and a rainforest worth of articles that get printed on the band year-by-year. A host of eyewitnesses were contacted and their recollections are presented here for the first time. As well as the voices of Slayer themselves (told to the author in interviews over several years), youll find intimate details from tour managers, photographers, journalists and fellow musicians who have accompanied the band over their long and very strange career.

Listening to these people tell their stories made me feel as if I was there too in those sweaty clubs in San Francisco back in 1982, a decade later on stage in a huge stadium, and today as respected godfathers of the metal scene, still making brutal music and still some years from hanging up their guitars.

Hopefully you will feel the same way to know what it felt like when Kerry King showed me how to play Raining Blood minutes before going on stage in Cardiff in 2003, or when Tom burst out laughing after I told him that the title of