“Everyone was afraid”: The album Rick Rubin called the most extreme of his career
Any album that Rick Rubin worked on didn’t come together by accident.
As much as he loved the idea of making the best music he could, there was always a lot of patience involved before he found the right magic in the studio, where every single band member was playing perfectly all at once. But even with a resume that is as stacked as his, there tended to be a few records where even he had to look back and realise how fierce he was whenever he walked into the studio.
Then again, Rubin doesn’t strike most people as the kind of person to be balls-to-the-wall every single time he records. He seems more like a Zen Buddhist than an actual producer half the time, but that level of patience is half the reason why all of his greatest records work. No one would have had the time to say that they thought one of Tom Petty’s songs wasn’t working on any given day, but when Rubin spoke, it was up to everyone else to listen or get the hell out of the way.
That was easier said than done when Rubin was still working on his first records, but it’s not like he didn’t know what he was talking about. His work with Beastie Boys and Run-DMC and still some of the finest hip-hop production to ever come out of the 1980s, but being just the king of rap production wasn’t enough. He saw himself as a champion of the outsiders of the world, and every single one of his records had that same kind of underdog spirit behind it.
No one would have guessed that Rubin could have turned Johnny Cash into a living legend all over again, but when it comes to any artist, it was about speaking their language whenever they walked in with a new song. ‘The Man in Black’ might be a lot different from what Linkin Park might have wanted, but Rubin was willing to sit within the music whenever he walked in and give his input about what was moving him in the right way.
Granted, most people would have had a hard time not moving when they heard Slayer for the first time. The metal scene had been going strong for years before Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman got together, but when Reign in Blood, you would have sworn they created the personal soundtrack to hell. They were raining hellfire across every one of their songs, and to this day, Rubin still feels that the energy created there was something they could have never made again.
The album may have been criminally short for a metal record, but that didn’t matter so long as the listener was being treated like a punching bag, saying, “Everyone was afraid they were going to sell out. So we purposely made the most extreme album that we possibly could. With Slayer there’s never been a nod towards anything commercial. It’s always been about being as pure as possible, being extreme as possible.”
And when a band hits the ceiling like that, even Slayer felt the need to move on from what they had been doing. They weren’t about to go for mainstream success like Metallica or anything, but if you listen to Seasons in the Abyss, there’s a pretty noticeable downshift from being the most aggro metal band of all time. But for Rubin, making that kind of record once was enough for his whole career.
He didn’t want to get stuck in the same genre for too long, but even if he only spent a few weeks getting Slayer together to make that record, he was more than willing to let them do whatever they wanted for their future. There was no point in him or them to be a one-trick pony, so when they already made songs that could peel skin from bone, why the hell would they want to go back for seconds?
