Free Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) by D.X. Ferris Page B

ninety-minute demo into ten songs. Lombardo and Araya would join the guitarists in the garage and cut a thirty-three-minute instrumental version of the album onto a two-track cassette tape. That good start wasn’t far from the finish.
    “The sound didn’t change much from what’s on the album,” recalls Araya. “We had actually played an entire tape of the songs to Brian [Slagel, owner of Metal Blade], and told him it was the next record. We wouldn’t play it for anybody else. And that’s when we got a call from Rick.”
    When it was released in 1986,
Reign in Blood
would have ten tracks and clock in at twenty-nine minutes. 1985’s
Hell
Awaits
had three fewer songs and ran eight minutes longer. Writing the longer
Hell
, Hanneman and King had been hopped up on the epic tracks of Mercyful Fate, Danish black metal pioneers.
    This time around, Hanneman and D.R.I. had worn down King’s resistance to punk. King also liked S.O.D.’s
Speak English or Die
, which represented a whole new strain of metal-hardcore fusion. Now, Slayer were also more confident in pursuing their own direction, and they drifted toward the undeniable appeal of the three-minute song. Rubin would help make
Reign
a benchmark, but Slayer had trimmed all the fat by the time he showed up at the garage, eager to sign the band, shepherded there by Friedman, who had produced the first Suicidal Tendencies album and had used Araya as an extra in the “Institutionalized” video.
    Asked if Rubin made the songs shorter, Araya says, “No.
No. No. No. No. No. Reign in Blood
was something we had
done
. And Rubin wanted us on his label. And Rubin took our material, polished it up, and gave it a nice gold shine.”
    As the band contemplated life on a major, they braced themselves for a different kind of nightmare scenario.
    “We thought we’d get signed,” says Hanneman. “But we heard so many horror stories about everybody saying, ‘You’ve got to change, you’ve got to sell more records, you’ve got to be more pop. I thought [Rubin] was great. He wanted to sign us, but he didn’t want to change us. I think the first rehearsal he went to, we had
Reign in Blood
pretty much done. And he said, ‘Great.’ And I’m like, ‘
Yes
.’”

Recording
Blood
    Slayer fans held their breath. The major label deal was equal parts triumph, challenge, and threat. As the band prepared to record, the fact that the group was working with the guy who put Aerosmith in that rap song didn’t inspire much confidence in skeptical fans. Rubin knew the Slaytanic Wehrmacht—the group’s ravenous fan club—was watching.
    “When they signed with us—a major—the underground metal community was concerned they were going to make a sellout album,” says Rubin. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Our goal was to make the most serious, hardcore, extreme, and pure Slayer album we possibly could.”
    Dave Tobocman was Andy Wallace’s assistant engineer on
Reign in Blood
’s follow-up, 1998’s
South of Heaven
. Recalling the
South
sessions, he says, “It was like being in the pit at Indy. The band would finish a take, and I had to, as quick as humanly possible, spin off the current reel, get it back to its proper box, crack a new reel of tape, splice on some leader, spool it onto the machine, and locate it to the top of the reel. I remember being blown away by the music, which was powerful and tight as anything.”
    The
Reign
sessions were much the same, though Wallace and Rubin didn’t have assistants yet. The record was made by the band, Rubin, and Wallace—six rising stars with different degrees of experience in different kinds of music, combining their efforts to push heavy metal to new extremes. Recorded with a speed and efficiency comparable to the album itself,
Reign in Blood
came together quickly in between January and March 1986, over five weeks in Los Angeles and New York.
    Recording in Los Angeles was cheaper and more convenientthan putting the boys up in