And he drank. CNN's Elizabeth Cohen has more. “Jeff was super intelligent about history—World War II became his thing,” says King.“For me it was really difficult to make the decision to go on without Jeff,” Araya says.
So there was nothing I could do that night. We need to get you to the ER.’ But all he wanted to do was go to bed and sleep, and I knew that I was trying to rationalize with a very intoxicated person. But we didn’t really act like that.
Wound-care suction devices were on hand to draw out the infection and help the skin grafts take. “They started naming names to take his place, and I’m like, How can you guys even think about this? He had a small Fender Twin and the black Les Paul that’s on the back ofIt was around this time—April-May 1983 to be exact, nine months before the release of the band’s debut album,As the years wore on, returning home from tour usually meant the rest of the band had seen the last of Hanneman for a while. You could hear it in the leads. If we were at a restaurant, he would ask me if I had the recorder with me, and I’d pull it out and he’d basically hum the riff or speak the lyric into the recorder. “I think we were probably the closest in the band, but never best friends. He just wanted to hibernate for a while, and I always respected that. I begged my father to let us go to the show, knowing that I would be home later than my 10 o’clock curfew, and he was okay with that. “He was over it—over the road, over people, over everything.
So we spent a lot of time in the car together, usually drinking beer. There are people who want to hang out just because it’s cool, but Jeff didn’t want to hang out with those people, so he would wait. And if we were home in the middle of watching TV, he’d get up and run down to the music room and start laying out the drums. So we had to make decisions because we were obligated to do these tours.”“When Jeff was home, Jeff liked to be home and stay home,” Kathryn says. No, I didn’t.”Hanneman’s reliance on alcohol was obvious to anyone who spent enough time with him. Hanneman almost lost his arm and was briefly placed in a medically-induced coma. This was his gig. “He always had a Coors Light tall can in his hand. That’s how many of his Slayer songs came about.”For those who had spent a lifetime in a perpetual state of whiplash from headbanging to such Hanneman-penned Slayer anthems as “Angel of Death,” “South of Heaven,” “Chemical Warfare” and “Raining Blood,” the reason he meant so much to so many was simple: because you could always count on Jeff to be Jeff, in the same way you could always count on Slayer to be Slayer.So while everyone else was able to get to and from rehearsal via their own wheels, Hanneman—who, depending on whom you ask, either never had a driver’s license or lost it early on after various DUI infractions—needed to be shuttled back and forth whenever the band got together.When it came to playing guitar and writing songs at home, Jeff never had any kind of set structure. I think I’m really going to miss that.“My girlfriend and I were getting tired of going to the movies every weekend, so we decided to go see this band called Slayer at a little club in Buena Park called the Woodstock,” says Kathryn, who is now 46, from her home in southern California.