How The Slaytanic Era Started

In the late 70’s, early 80’s most bands weren’t playing songs that dealt with controversial material. Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper are most credited for playing darker content while other bands going in to the 80’s were singing about sex, drugs and well, rock and roll. Sure AC/DC was on the highway to hell but it wasn’t quite heavy enough for people that really wanted to be pushed over the edge. Sabbath had some dark songs and kept it extremely heavy without playing really fast. There really wasn’t any American bands brave enough to go that route…until Slayer.

The early 80’s marked the death of true punk era but a few bands picked up a part of that broken ball and ran with it. One of those highly influential bands that still carries that little piece of ball in their pocket is Slayer. They took that little piece of ball, mixed it with a pentagram and turned it in to a sound that parents feared, Metal with a punk influence! You can hear that mix in their new song Psychopathy Red. Slayer still has quite a following with fans ranging from their teens to over 50! When you’ve been around for close to 30 years, chances are you have quite a fan-base. They may not have changed much ion the last 20 years, but they’ve never compromised their sound, style and material in the name of record sales.

Filter-mag.com has an exclusive inside look at the birth of Slayer, straight from the source. Here is a small portion of their interview with Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo.

TOM ARAYA: This Top 40 band I was in was getting a new guitar player—a music teacher who Kerry 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.

DAVE LOMBARDO: 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.

There is a lot more to this interview at Filter-mag.com and they will publish more of it online later this week. If you want to read the full exclusive you’ll have to pick up Filter Magazine Issue #35.

Despite what people say about Slayer, I still love them. They haven’t “Sold out”, changed their sound much or started trying to be radio friendly. Sure they have videos, but what bands don’t have a video or plans of making one? They may not be technical in anything that they do, but what you see is what you get and that’s what I love about them.

Image: Rockabilia.com