Listen: 1.5 Hours of Slayer Stage Banter from the ’80s
Between-song banter is an art form unto itself. With metal in particular, a vocalist’s address to the audience can be wildly entertaining, ranging from the earnestly ridiculous (Suffocation’s Frank Mullen) and the patently absurd (Blood Incantation’s Paul Riedl) to mocking the audience (The Red Chord’s Guy Kozywyk) and inviting them to be part of a motivational sermon (Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself), to the twisted and deranged (Phil Anselmo).
Slayer’s Tom Araya isn’t typically in that conversation — his song intros are usually short and sweet — but you might’ve thought differently if you were around in the band’s earliest days.
A Soundcloud page called Plantweed has posted over an hour and a half of Araya’s stage banter, recorded at 24 shows between 1984 and 1987 and clipped together with all the music cut out for your enjoyment. Dubbed Slayer: Do You Dig Older Women? after one of Araya’s quotes (“the kind you dig out of a grave,” he adds), the collection has two 45-minute sides in a nod to its origins in the tape-trading community.
Pop these on in the background while you work today and let Araya’s demonic taunts haunt your dreams.
[via Metal Injection]
