SLAYER

SLAYER
An interview with Dave Lombardo
by Jason Walsh
Photos by Charlie Hatfield

SLAYER is still reigning high from their 2009 release, “World Painted Blood,” and spent the majority of this year getting this new music and decades of classics to every corner of the globe. This summer saw the undisputed lords of death metal join forces with ANTHRAX, MEGADETH, and METALLICA for the Sonisphere Festival tour throughout Europe, which had all of the “Big 4” on tour for the first time ever. During their stop in Sofia, Bulgaria, the concert was streamed live to theatres worldwide and metalheads everywhere had a glimpse of the biggest concert of the year. During METALLICA’s set, members of ANTHRAX and MEGADETH took the stage as well for a rendition of DIAMOND HEAD’s “Am I Evil?” SLAYER drummer Dave Lombardo grabbed some sticks and jammed out alongside METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich, Shawn Drover of MEGADETH, and ANTHRAX’s percussionist Charlie Benante, while chaos erupted in Sofia.

Following the Sonisphere dates, SLAYER returned to the States to headline the Jägermeister Music Tour, with MEGADETH and ANTHRAX rounding out the bill. I had a chance to catch up with Lombardo as the tour wound its way to Hampton, Virginia. We had a chance to recap the Sonisphere shows, the future for SLAYER, and his new side project, PHILM.



JW: Tell me about this tour. You guys just started off, how are you guys doing?

LOMBARDO: Great. Everything is going really smooth. Everybody gets along. Shows are going well. Big crowds. It’s good.

JW: How does it feel to be on the road with all these guys? You just did the Sonisphere tours in Europe and now you’re back in the States with the three bands touring together. Does it feel pretty comfortable?

LOMBARDO: Yeah. Yeah, there’s nothing that would be different than any other tour with any other band that we would be with, so it’s, you know, not really much difference, but I mean of course we’ve known these guys for a long time so…

JW: And there’s something kind of special about keeping that metal legacy alive and having these three big bands come out and doing this.

LOMBARDO: Yeah, apparently so. It’s making a big impact so it’s good

JW: Tell me about the Sonisphere Festival. That was a pretty cool thing and all of us that were back here in the States, we obviously didn’t get to go over and see all that but we saw the video.

LOMBARDO: It was amazing. That day we flew in, I think we had about a half-hour drive to the venue and there was this helicopter doing tricks aside of the stage. I don’t know if you saw any of the pictures.

JW: Some of the video, yeah…

LOMBARDO: 81,000 people. It was amazing. It was exciting. The Poland show I think was bigger. That was the one that was 81,000. But that Sofia, Bulgaria, I think that was a little less.

JW: It still looked amazing on video.

LOMBARDO: Yeah. Phenomenal. It was really cool.

JW: So how did the Diamond Head song, “Am I Evil?” come about. I saw you out there banging on some drums with them.

LOMBARDO: Yeah. I think James (Hetfield of METALLICA) had an idea in the middle of the night. Yeah, he came up with some kind of idea, he called everybody up to see if they were into doing it. He thought it was a really good idea and I thought it was a great idea. So that’s why you saw me out there.

JW: Did you have fun out there?

LOMBARDO: Hell yeah.

JW: Looking around, seeing all these guys running around the stage.

LOMBARDO: Yeah. Beating on Lars’ drumset. It was great fun. Yeah.

JW: It looked like a good time. So, you are doing this tour. Where do you go from here? What happens next?

LOMBARDO: After this tour, I think we rest for about three months, well SLAYER rests for about three months, and then we go back out in early February to Australia. We do Soundwave with IRON MAIDEN, and I think we’re doing India as well, and probably do the Pacific Rim, which will probably be Singapore, hopefully Hong Kong and North Korea.

JW: Does all the traveling this far in your career, is it still fun for you or does in wear on you, or is it a combination of the two?

LOMBARDO: Well, after you do it for a long period of time, it does wear on you. You know, you get tired, little things get under your skin, but we’re at a point right now where we’re not feeling like that yet. We were feeling like that at the end of the European run. We were feeling a little burned out because we were flying a lot and doing international gigs and international gigs, you have to go through borders, customs, which delays the whole process (of) getting to your hotel and relaxing. It’s a bit stressful.

JW: So coming home sometimes, is a good thing.

LOMBARDO: Yeah, yeah. It’s good. You have to recharge. You have to have somewhere where you can recharge.

JW: Now next year are you guys looking to record, are you trying to figure out what’s going on?

LOMBARDO: Next year, well we do the Soundwave Festival in Australia, the Pacific Rim. I know we’re doing South America, so we still have…

JW: I mean that might take the whole year?

LOMBARDO: It could very well go a whole year and then, you know, BIG 4 might be coming, so that’s the summer right there in the U.S. Maybe we’ll do some festivals in Europe. You never know, but it’s all very promising, it’s all very positive. We’re very grateful to be in this position, you know, that we still got momentum in our career, because a lot of bands don’t.

JW: And at the end of the day, it’s still got to be fun.

LOMBARDO: Yes. That hour, hour and ten minutes, that I play on stage is worth every bit of hardship, if you want to call it hardship, because nothing compares to other things that people go through, but in our own little world, it does get a little rough.

JW: So has there been any talk about recording in the future? Is that something that you guys will see when you get there?

LOMBARDO: No…yeah, we’re not there yet. Jeff (Hanneman) fiddles around with the guitar and comes up with some things every now and then. I don’t know if there’s actually anything in the works. I haven’t heard a single thing yet.

JW: Very cool. So do you still have any side projects going on?

LOMBARDO: Yeah. I have Fantômas, I mean where obviously Fantômas is still just on a hiatus, but I have this band, PHILM, which I’m going to be putting out, hopefully something, by the end of this year. It’s a trio. I’m kind of trying to bring back the kinda-the-sixties-kinda vibe. You know like Led Zeppelin was a trio, of course let’s say the music part of it: bass, drums, guitar, and Jim Hendrix, same thing: bass drums, guitar. There wasn’t that second guitar player, there wasn’t that keyboard…well, there was in Deep Purple…but also Black Sabbath. All these bands were really big influences on me so I scaled down my drum set, brought it down to four pieces, and brought a powerful bass player which is Pancho Tomaselli, he plays in the band WAR with Lonnie Jordan, you know all those famous songs, “Spill the Wine,” “Cisco Kid,” all that. He’s only 35. I know the band’s a lot older, but he’s been playing with them for the past six or seven years. And, Gerry Nestler, from a band called CIVIL DEFIANCE from like the late 90s. He was signed to Atlantic and I always thought he was a very unique musician and has very interesting sounds on his guitar. It’s very ambient, kind of groovy. It’s not metal. I don’t need to make another metal band. I’m totally going somewhere else.

JW: That’s the thing, and I’d read some of this, some of the side projects that you’ve done you had said that it makes you a better musician because you are doing different kinds of things. It’s not just metal, it’s not SLAYER, it’s just all these kinds of elements that make you a better musician all around.

LOMBARDO: Yeah, it does, because you learn the different methods of operation of other musicians, how they work, their process, and that only enlightens you and makes you just a better musician and you can’t buy that knowledge. It’s only knowledge that you gain from experience and so I absorb it, and try to seek it as much as I can because it’s really good.

JW: Now when you come back and you do this, SLAYER, does it help you out or sometimes can it be distracting?

LOMBARDO: No, not at all. It’s all inspiring. You know, this band inspires me in a certain way where another band will inspire me, and they will cross-inspire each other, or cross-pollinate or something like that(laughs). It does do that, but in ways that maybe nobody will notice. Just I do, that I notice that I’ve kind of enhanced, let’s say, a part of my playing because of that. But people really wouldn’t notice, they would probably just take it as that’s normal.

JW: But you do…and it makes you better.

LOMBARDO: I do. Yeah, I know it does.

JW: I think that’s all I got, man.

LOMBARDO: Awesome.

PHILM opened for HALLFORD with dates in December and will be releasing something in the not-so-distant future. As for a new release from SLAYER, well, as you heard in this interview, only SLAYER knows.



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