(Credit: Alamy)
Fri 16 May 2025 19:00, UK
Rick Rubin is one of the most important figures in modern pop music. Anyone with even a passing interest in the music industry understands that. What’s often brushed over is just how bizarre his journey to becoming one of the most recognisable, influential people in music is.
The man made his name by somehow being able to take the very fringes of pop music and make them vital and relevant. Despite being a devotee of punk and hardcore, the man made his name in the New York City hip-hop scene, more or less the ground zero for the entire genre. He co-founded Def Jam Recordings with Russell Simmons and discovered Public Enemy.
That would be enough to make most careers, but not for Rubin. You see, while he loved and understood hip-hop, the man was a rock kid at heart. He was the man who saw money in a collaboration between Run DMC and Aerosmith. Who all but invented rap-rock with The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill. When it comes to Rick Rubin and the heavy stuff, though, there’s only one band to talk about. In the mid-1980s, Rubin was told about this new band coming out of Huntington Park, California.
One that were taking the energy and pace of punk music, combining it with the aggression and tehnical chops of heavy metal and then hypercharging both to create an almost unrecognisable noise called thrash metal. Already one of the most exciting bands of their time after their second album Hell Awaits, Rubin took one listen to their live act and immediately decided that the next band Def Jam would add to its roster was Slayer.
What did Rick Rubin love about Slayer and their live act?
The two albums Slayer had released at the time Rubin offered them a contract were unmissable extreme metal records of the time. However, what captured Rubin’s imagination was their live act. The band truly came alive on stage, and what Rubin saw in them came from imagining what could happen if he was able to capture the spirit of their gigs in an album.
After all, those gigs were more than just a great rock show, they were experiences so intense that the very audience members were a risk to themselves and others. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a Slayer show, Rubin talks about in an interview with Revolver, all about the California thrash metal legends. In one of their many appearances at legendary Brooklyn metal venue L’Amour, Rubin watched the show from the safety of the mixing desk. Or so he thought.
He says “I was standing behind the sound board on the floor behind the audience against a back wall to the raised balcony. The band started the opening “tune” and the audience went so ballistic, heaving in every direction, that the 1970’s large, heavy mixing desk got pushed up and backwards. The soundman and I were pinned against the back wall with knobs of the desk pressed into the sides of our faces. We were trapped and suffocating. Luckily, we survived to encounter many, many more atypical events at Slayer gigs.”
No wonder that when Rick Rubin first sat behind the mixing desk to capture that feeling in a Slayer studio album, he helped the band create Reign In Blood. One of the most captivating, brutal and intense albums ever made.
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