The metal band Rick Rubin was blown away by: “I’d never seen anything like it”
If you look at the past 30 years of recorded music, Rick Rubin practically has a piece of any genre of music on the charts. Outside of his habit of working with nearly every superstar who wanted to get to the essence of their craft, few are able to master the beginnings of hip-hop with Run-DMC and Public Enemy and then immediately work the same magic for Johnny Cash during the waning years of his life. That’s all in the studio, but Rubin is still a fan of the live show, and he knew he was in for a hell of a ride once he saw Slayer.
Granted, pretty much anyone who sees the thrash metal icons knows what they’re getting themselves into when they venture into the pit. There might be a handful of people there who just want to enjoy the show, but frankly, that’s just too damn bad once the circle pits start during some of their heaviest songs.
In fact, Slayer may have been one of the few metal shows that felt safer for the people onstage than those in the crowds. Sure, the lights might be all on them, but if you decided to go into the main event without proper precautions, you weren’t coming out of there without getting heavily bruised or nursing a bloody nose.
For all of the damage that you could put on your body at a Slayer gig, Rubin was blown away by what he heard, recalling, “The first time I saw them, I’d never heard of them. This was at the time they were playing so fast that you couldn’t even tell what they were playing, it was such a blur…the command they had over the audience, I’d never seen anything like it. There was something there I’d never heard of.”
While Slayer represented balls-to-the-wall heavy metal, Rubin probably couldn’t help but notice elements of punk in there as well. Remember, Rubin came up at a time when hardcore punk dominated the underground, and that kind of intensity was something that Slayer was all about, even pumping out the album Undisputed Attitude of their favourite hardcore songs.
By the time Rubin actually got around to producing them, a lot of Reign in Blood ended up sounding like the kind of no-frills hardcore albums of a few years before. The songs were still metal to their core, but it’s insane to think that in a genre that housed metal juggernauts like Metallica and Megadeth playing insanely fast songs that lasted eight minutes a piece, Slayer could pump out their masterpiece in just under a half hour.
Fans could feel ripped off if they wanted to, but when you spent a little over 20 minutes being thrashed to pieces, it’s hard to really complain. Rubin has that uncanny ability to squeeze the best out of any artist he works with, but it takes a certain group to be able to use their audience as a virtual punching bag across an entire record and then have them wanting more by the time it’s over.
