POP MUSIC : Running With the Devil : Behind the scariest spectacle in rock is Slayer, the Rolling Stones of the new American metal

A concert by the thrash/speed/death-metal band Slayer can be the most compelling spectacle in rock ‘n’ roll. Or at least the scariest. Take their show at the Hollywood Palladium in 1987. Roadies dragged two huge metal crosses onto the stage--and you finally realized that the crew was not going to tilt them right-side up.

Four thousand straight-arm salutes greeted the band; five frenzied packs of slamming bodies spontaneously coalesced, each forming one corner of what looked eerily like a satanic pentagram pointing away from the stage.

Satanism has always seemed more a religion than a pose for Slayer (though, of course, it is a pose). When singer Tom Araya asked the crowd to make a sacrifice, it roared its assent, and lights on the inverted crosses onstage blinked their approval.

The music itself is a roar, a rough, guttural, minor-key roar, and as it envelops you it draws you into the dark, oddly comforting crowd energy. You might have thought about the rock ‘n’ roll fascination with the devil that stretches from Robert Johnson’s Delta blues through Jerry Lee Lewis, the Stones and Led Zeppelin.

As you filed out after the concert, you passed flickering lights of squad cars and ambulances, and the shroud-covered body of a young man, one of several hundred denied admission to the sold-out show, who had danced straight into the path of a speeding truck.

A couple of days before Christmas, 1990, late-afternoon light growing dim, Slayer’s Tom Araya, linebacker-huge, slumps into a couch in the living room of a Westside condominium, tossing an empty Coke can onto the coffee table and picking up a sheaf of fan letters. He runs his fingers through his thick, black mane.

“It scares me sometimes when I run into our fans,” he says softly. “There are so many nutty ones. We just got a letter from a kid whose best friend dies, hit by a car, who says that listening to us broke him out of the little shell he was in, uplifted him, brought him back to life. All I could think of was, Slayer ? He was listening to us ? We also get a lot of letters from kids who are institutionalized, and I’m talking criminal.”

“Or they’ll see me across a crowded store and yell out the name of the band: ‘ SLAYER ! ‘ It doesn’t matter where they are; they never just just say it, they yell it. Or they’ll come up and say ‘Hail Satan,’ and I’ll shake their hands and try to calm them down, explain that Satan is a pretty poor solution for whatever they think their problems are--satanism is not a very safe thing to do. It’s hard to talk to those particular kids, because they never believe that you’re trying to help them.”

Araya opens a book, an old worn one about famous murderers, and pulls out an envelope that he had hidden in its pages. From Saudi Arabia, from a soldier in the Desert Shield operation, the envelope is decorated with elaborately inked-in drawings of pentagrams and grinning skulls, emblazoned with the legend “Slatanic Wehrmacht” drawn in slashing strokes, and with a hand-drawn skeleton stamp in the upper right-hand corner that reads “Free Mail.” You wonder how it got by the government censors in the Gulf.

“Check it out,” he says. “From Saudi. I’m going to have to answer this one.

“Anyway, I’m pretty much a devout Catholic. People tell me you have to be either all one thing or all another, but I’m like this guy who walks the line between good and evil, looking around, enjoying the scenery, humming ‘dum-de-dum-dum’ . . . I haven’t decided yet.

“This girl I knew in high school came up to me a while ago and told me she was worrying about me, that she was praying for me every night. I wasn’t who she thought I was but that’s cool. Who can’t use an extra prayer?”

It was inevitable that metal become the real American punk. Punk had everything a rebellious kid could ever want out of a rock ‘n’ roll movement. The uniform and the music were loud, easy to duplicate and deeply offensive to parents, clergymen and probation officers; punk lyrics raised adolescent whining to the level of an art form.

But punk in the United States always had the feel of an English import: American punk, even at its height, appealed mostly to suburban college students, while working-class kids continued to listen to heavy metal, the old Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath records they’d grown up on.

By 1983, hard-core punk and the thrash metal inspired by British guys like Venom and Diamondhead had evolved to the same place: hard, fast, almost tuneless songs completely divorced from the blues. Both camps sang about mass death and nuclear winter and beer, except the metal bands had longer hair and sold a jillion more records.

In the beginning, there were Metallica and Slayer, and only Metallica and Slayer, the two giants of new American metal. If Metallica were the Beatles of the genre, the guys who made heavy rock respectable again, Slayer was the Rolling Stones: dark, violent and nasty, fascinated with evil, the favorite group of every bad kid in suburbia. (That was Slayer blasting out of everybody’s tape deck in the movie “River’s Edge.”)

While the standard rock-critic adjectives-- dark and compelling , provocative and unpredictable --fit Slayer like a custom patent-leather body suit, Slayer has always scared the bejeezus out of precisely the right people.

The band--bassist/singer Araya, guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King and drummer Dave Lombardo--started out in Huntington Park in 1982, thrashing out versions of Iron Maiden tunes and Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” at about the same time Metallica was coalescing in a garage in nearby Norwalk.

Nearly a decade later, even backstage at one of their scariest arena dates, Slayer seems less satanic than like a goofy, good-natured bunch of Los Angeles skateheads.

Slayer (which headlines San Diego’s Golden Hall on Monday and the Los Angeles Sports Arena on Tuesday) played its early shows to about 25 people at the Troubadour. “We started at a time when Motley Crue had just become a big, hot item,” says Araya, “and our style of music was really nothing compared to the beauty of glam.”

Metal Blade Records czar Brian Slagel spotted Slayer at an early gig and offered the band a slot on one of his popular Metal Massacre compilations. They made the classic metal recording “Aggressive Perfector” the first time they ever set foot in a studio--and soon thereafter, “Show No Mercy,” which codified the gruesome conventions of death metal and became one of the most imitated albums ever made. Their second full Metal Blade album, “Hell Awaits” in 1985, sold more than 100,000 copies in its first months. They were signed by Rick Rubin as the first metal act on the red-hot rap label Def Jam Records.

“Kerry has a fascination with the devil,” Araya says, “so his songs are fantasies, like bloody fairy tales, and Jeff’s songs are usually about war. Me, I figured if I screamed loud enough, I might scare a few people. Back then they were writing all of the material, and it was very graphic, very intense.

“We write each song to capture a mood, to express an emotion . . . it’s just that the emotion always turns out to be anger.”

In 1986, Metallica recorded its mature opus “Master of Puppets,” considered the most fully realized metal record at least since the prime of Zep. The same year Slayer recorded its masterpiece: “Reign in Blood,” a death-metal record malevolent enough to cause CBS to sever its ties with both the group and its hot producer Rubin, who earned the company millions on his work with the Beastie Boys, L.L. Cool J and Run-DMC.

Its lead track, a Clive Barkeresque song about Josef Mengele called “Angel of Death,” was seen by some as not completely disapproving. The record was released by Geffen, which later picked up Rubin’s own label, Def American. (When the Def American triumvirate of the Geto Boys, Andrew Dice Clay and Slayer proved too hot for Geffen last year, Def American jumped to a distribution deal with WEA.)

“I don’t concern myself with censorship,” Araya says. “The fact that a lot of people won’t sell our records is nothing new to us. It’s surprising that so many people do sell them. But telling a major, major company what records they should release is like telling Oscar Mayer that they shouldn’t make hot dogs any more: ‘I’m sorry, we find those wieners distasteful.’ ”

Every song Slayer has ever recorded concerns death in one way or another; every song but one on the latest album contains the word blood . . . and the one that doesn’t is about mass-murderer Ed Gein. On a recent episode of “Geraldo” featuring kids who have killed, five out of five mentioned the band.

To the uninitiated, a Slayer set might sound something like a really rusty washing machine with the volume turned way up.

Slayer slowed things down on its last album, “South of Heaven,” and a lot of the other bands did too, but this sludge-metal had the feeling of an artistic dead end.

On the new one, “Seasons in the Abyss,” by far the most accessible Slayer work, the songs are riffy instead of drony, the vocals toned down from howls to snarls, the emphasis shifted from thrash to rock. Maybe they’ll finally sell more albums than T-shirts, still without betraying their core audience, still without radio play: Kerrang, Britain’s Rolling Stone of metal, named “Seasons” its album of the year for 1990.

To a lot of people, mostly the ones who don’t see the humor, Slayer seems morally indefensible, and in fact it might be.

But like rappers Ice Cube, Ice-T and N.W.A., sometimes Slayer passes on positive messages, but in very ugly ways. Araya’s lyrics, which dominated “South of Heaven” and are prominent on “Seasons in the Abyss,” are the more socially conscious ones. Such as they are.

Back at the apartment, Araya starts to fume: “We’re not here to preach to you; we’re not here to tell you how you should be living your life. We’re here to tell you what we see.

“When I describe what bullets do to the body in ‘Hallowed Point,’ I’m not glorifying it, I’m just telling what they can do. The only thing a gun is good for is killing. When I write about gang violence in ‘Expendable Youth,’ this is what goes on.” (Araya, a 1981 Bell High School graduate born in Peru, was brought up in a gang-infested area of Maywood.)

So would Slayer still be viable if it really veered toward the socially uplifting?

“We wouldn’t have the impact we have now,” he says. “Everybody else sees all the beauty. We just try to find ways to describe all the other things in the world. Maybe if people see how ugly the world is they’ll do something to change it. It’s kind of like reverse psychology.

“If we sang about peace and love,” Araya says, “that would be corny as hell.”

Four things Slayer will never do: 1--A love song. 2--A ballad. 3--An acoustic number. 4--Jam with Billy Idol at Spice. Four things Slayer has done: 1--Been sampled by Public Enemy; 2--Appeared in a Beastie Boys video; 3--Covered “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” for the “Less Than Zero” soundtrack; 4--Taped a video in Egypt, at the pyramids.