“First, I’m going to try to save your life.
Then I’m going to try to save your arm.
Then I’m going to try to save your career.”
Jeff Hanneman, guitarist and main songwriter for Slayer, lies on a stretcher. His wife Kathryn stands beside him.
They listen together to the doctor’s words.
The doctor – a Slayer fan, Jeff would later remember – had just listed out the three potential “deaths” the guitarist was facing.
His death.
The death of his arm.
And the death of his career.
The doctor was able to keep Jeff alive. Neither was his arm amputated.
But nobody – not even Jeff – would ever bring his career back to life.
Lifetimes in the abyss
Jeff Hanneman was the “quiet one” in Slayer. Kerry King was the one with the leather and the image.
Hanneman preferred to stand to the side and raise hell. Then go back to the bus.
But Hanneman wrote “Raining Blood”, “Angel of Death”, “War Ensemble” and “Seasons in the Abyss”. The songs that made Slayer, “Slayer”.
Tom Araya put it simply:
“By all accounts, he was the band.”
But he didn't do interviews or socialise. And if he didn't like you, he wouldn't acknowledge your existence.
On tour, while his bandmates mingled and drank together, he’d sit alone on the bus watching the History Channel or reading about World War II.
This wasn’t an act.
At home, war was the family dinner table conversation. Hanneman's father had fought at Normandy and came home with medals stripped from dead German soldiers, which he gave to his son. His brothers served in Vietnam.
That darkness followed Hanneman into every band rehearsal, every recording session, every tour bus… and every song.
He collected Nazi memorabilia obsessively – action figures, insignia, memorabilia. He named his pets after figures from the Third Reich. His wedding ring was a replica of the skull-emblazoned band worn by senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich.
Not because he was a Nazi, but because he was drawn to the darkest corners of human history.
And from the day Kathryn met him as a teenager, drinking was a constant. Kerry King admitted he never saw him without a beer in his hand.
This is the man who wrote Seasons in the Abyss.
A man who spent his life sinking further into it.
“The Sport is War”
On Seasons in the Abyss, the shock-and-awe gory horrors of early Slayer albums are replaced by a deeper fixation on the evils of war:
The album's opening track, “War Ensemble”, makes it plain:
“The sport is war, total war
When victory's really massacre
The final swing is not a drill
It′s how many people I can kill”
These war themes are carried into the following songs, “Blood Red”, “Expendable Youth” and “Hallowed Point”.
Slayer – a band known for its ability to provoke and shock – was maturing in terms of their lyrical themes.
The Satanic and demonic imagery still persisted. But it was less for provocation, and more to expose the everyday evils of war.
Steve Huey writes that “Seasons in the Abyss paints Reagan-era America as a cesspool of corruption and cruelty, and the music is as devilishly effective as ever.”
“Lyrically, the band rarely turns to demonic visions of the afterlife anymore, preferring instead to find tangible horror in real life – war, murder, human weakness. There's even full-fledged social criticism, which should convince any doubters that Slayer aren't trying to promote the subjects they sing about.”
But Slayer were still, of course, Slayer.
“Dead Skin Mask” is famously about the murderer, and body snatcher, Ed Gein. And “Born of Fire” is a gleeful Satanic anthem about the antichrist, straight from the Reign in Blood playbook.
“Seasons in the Abyss”, however, might be the most obscure track on the album.
The person depicted in the song veers between insanity and death.
The mid-paced tempo gives the song an almost dreamlike quality. The chorus might be one of the closest examples we can find of an anthemic “singalong” in Slayer’s early canon.
They had already played with slower tempos on the preceding album, South of Heaven. The song’s doomy, tension building opening is more evocative of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” than, say, Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy.”
The Abyss Looks Back
On the surface, “Seasons in the Abyss” reads like standard Slayer fare. Violence. Death. Insanity.
But listen to the chorus:
"Close your eyes
Look deep in your soul
Step outside yourself
And let your mind go
Frozen eyes stare deep in your mind as you die"
That's dissociation, not a horror lyric.
The internal experience of a man who spent his downtime alone on a tour bus, drinking antisocially, watching documentaries about the worst atrocities in human history. "Step outside yourself and let your mind go" represents what it feels like when your own head is the most dangerous place you know.
Hanneman wrote the music. Araya worked on the words. But they described their creative partnership as connecting on "ideas and themes." Araya wasn't writing about someone else's darkness. He was translating Hanneman’s. The lyrics are a portrait of the man who handed him the riff.
There is an almost gleeful lust for death in the song:
"Razor's edge outlines the dead
Incisions in my head
Anticipation, the stimulation
To kill the exhilaration"
This is a song about a mind that has been staring into darkness for so long that the darkness has become familiar. Maybe even comfortable.
Operation Desert Porn
In December 1990, just weeks after the release of Seasons, Slayer flew from Los Angeles to Japan for a run of shows. Then on to Cairo.
Rick Rubin had an idea.
Slayer would shoot their first ever music video beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza. One of the Seven Wonders of the World… In the middle of a geopolitical powder keg.
Four months earlier, Iraq had invaded Kuwait. American troops were already massing in Saudi Arabia under Operation Desert Shield.
The whole region was holding its breath.
Getting access to the Sphinx required negotiation with Egyptian officials who were eager to demonstrate their “goodwill” toward the West. Kerry King remembers how the crew sealed the deal on the ground:
“We bribed everybody with porn and cigarettes. It's amazing the doors those open.”
The video was filmed and Slayer flew home. And within six weeks, Operation Desert Storm had begun.
As bombs fell on Baghdad, Rubin issued a press release on February 13, 1991, that captured just how strange the timing was:
“Military exercises were taking place, diplomatic talks were being arranged, bomb shelters were being built and Slayer was shooting a video in the midst of it all.”
The press release also noted that a quarter of the band's fan mail was now coming from US troops stationed in the Middle East.
Some of those letters described soldiers blasting Slayer in the middle of the Saudi desert to psyche themselves up for combat.
Tom Araya confirmed it when asked:
“Yeah, they play them over the loudspeaker.”
Meanwhile, back in the US, Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) had spent the previous five years trying to protect American children from bands like Slayer.
The PMRC had published literature criticising Slayer specifically for "rejecting Judeo-Christian religion". This was the time when Christian groups were playing rock records backwards hunting for hidden Satanic messages. But Slayer were putting the Satanic messages right there in the track listing.
Gore herself had named Slayer in a 1988 Washington Post interview as an example of the threat facing parents.
So while America's moral guardians were trying to protect children from Slayer, the US Army was using the same records to psyche up kids for war.
And just to add to the chaos of the time, the same director who filmed Slayer at the Sphinx, Markus Blunder, would later take Shania Twain to the same location to shoot the video for "The Woman in Me."
Kerry King's reaction when he found out:
“I'm like, ‘Come on, dude.’”
“...to watch you bleed…”
The “Seasons in the Abyss” video director, Markus Blunder, didn't film the band doing horror-movie theatrics. Instead he filmed them in front of the Sphinx and the pyramids – in a context that makes them look small against thousands of years of human history.
The video made its mark. Jeff Hanneman tapping out his solo Van Halen-style with the pyramids as a backdrop is an iconic scene for an entire generation of metal fans. The band headbang and shred in the desert as horses and their riders pass by, seemingly oblivious.
Slayer in front of the pyramids
The lines between perception and reality have always been blurry when it comes to Slayer.
Rick Rubin – who produced the album and came up with the Egypt idea – also shaped its visual identity. He asked Hanneman to bring in his book of Nazi war medals, leafed through it, and picked out an eagle. That eagle became the band's logo during the Seasons in the Abyss tour.
Rubin also designed the stage banners for the Seasons tour using the same source material.
Everyone assumed both were Nazi gestures.
They weren't looking closely enough.
"Of course, everyone got the wrong impression – they didn't realize that the banners were actually huge upside-down crosses. They saw everything that they wanted to see, except for what it really was. Rubin helped come up with those ideas – and he's Jewish."
A Jewish producer picked symbols from a Nazi war medal book and turned them into an upside-down cross.
Everyone assumed it was a Nazi gesture. Nobody looked closely enough to see what they actually were.
Everyone saw what they wanted to see.
The army saw a combat motivator. The Parents Music Resource Center saw a Satanic threat. The protesters saw devil worshippers. Critics saw nihilism. The fans just wanted to bang their heads.
Nobody paid attention to the quiet, alcoholic man from Long Beach who hummed riffs into a pocket recorder at restaurants and spent his nights alone watching the History Channel.
Not until it was too late.
The Final Swing
By the 2010s, Hanneman had spent decades in the abyss.
His father died in 2008 – the soldier who had come home from Normandy with medals stripped from dead Germans, who handed them to his son and sparked a lifelong obsession with the worst of human history.
Another tether to reality, gone.
In January 2011 he was relaxing in a friend's hot tub in LA. He barely noticed when something bit him on the arm.
When Kathryn saw his arm, she freaked out. It had tripled in size.
By the time he got in front of a doctor, he was on death’s door.
After four days in an induced coma he survived. And after multiple skin grafts and weeks of surgeries, he came home.
Then in April 2011, he walked onstage at the Big 4 festival in Indio, California to play two songs, "Angel of Death" and "South of Heaven". The crowd lost its mind.
Jeff was back.
Except… he wasn't.
Tom Araya watched it happen up close:
“He would come in to rehearse and he would jam out some parts and then he'd stop and just kind of fiddle with his guitar. He did that a few times, but then he just stopped coming to rehearsal.”
He couldn't play the guitar – the thing he'd built his entire identity around – at the speed he was used to.
He couldn't play like Jeff Hanneman.
Kathryn watched the realisation set in:
“I think that really hit him hard, and he started to lose hope.”
He didn't go to rehab or therapy.
Instead he did what Jeff did. He drank.
Kerry King had identified the problem years earlier, long before any of this:
“Jeff didn't know how not to drink.”
The abyss he'd been writing about for twenty years finally closed over him.
On May 2, 2013, Jeff Hanneman died of alcohol-related liver failure.
He was 49.
It wasn't the bite that killed him.
Neither was it the infection.
It was the loss of the only ladder he had out of the dark.
Slayer.
Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-chief
The Chug Media