by Scott Ian
My friend Dominick (who you may remember from such stories in this book like “Everybody Hurts”) and I knew Joe from when he worked the door at Spy Bar, which was Moomba’s predecessor in the canon of New York City lounge culture, catering to celebrities, models, trust-fund kids, starving artists, jerk-offs, and Wall Street types. On any given night we’d be drinking with the most eclectic range of characters. From Derek Jeter and Mariah Carey to Prince to Jerry Seinfeld (who told me he always thought Anthrax was the best name for a heavy metal band) to Salman Rushdie. Yes, Salman Rushdie, fresh on the Ayatollah’s hit list, hanging out with us at Spy Bar, telling us about how he stays under the radar. As I sat there with Salman I couldn’t help but think of how ironic it would be if I were to kill him and then the whole extremist Muslim world would have a Jew as a hero.
I was drunk.
Joe was a metalhead and skater and so were Dom and I, so we hit it off immediately. Most nights at Spy Bar I would hang outside with Joe and watch while he worked his magic at the door. I would stand back in the shadows of the doorway and observe this absurd sociological theater unfold as people would say or do anything to scam their way in. The nightly ritual was more fascinating than being in the actual bar. It was on one of those nights that Joe told me he was leaving Spy to work at the soon-to-open Moomba. Joe said, “It’s going to be the spot, even more exclusive than Spy. Smaller, cooler, and you guys are always welcome.” It was hard for me to imagine a place more fancy-pants than Spy Bar, and I asked Joe, “Really? How can you top this place?” Joe gave me his serious you’re-not-getting-in-here-tonight-or-any-night look and said coyly, “You’ll see.”
Moomba opened in November of 1997, and the third floor VIP lounge, the mecca of New York City nightlife, quickly became our private clubhouse. It became the go-to spot for the A-list because nobody bothered them once they were inside. There were rules: no pictures, no autographs. It was a place to hang where your privacy mattered. And then there was Dom and me: “We were in that joint twenty-four hours a day. I mean another fucking few minutes, we could be stools, that’s how often we were in there,” to quote Sonny Bunz from Goodfellas. A typical night would go until 4 a.m., and then they’d kick everyone out, and Dom and I would hang after hours with Joe and his crew. Around six in the morning one of the cooks would make breakfast for everyone, and then I’d go back to my apartment and sleep until 4 p.m. and then start all over.
On most nights at Moomba I’d spend some time outside, hanging behind Joe, watching the tragicomic play unfold. Sometimes that’s all I’d do, just come hang outside and then take off. The door scene was so much better than it was at Spy Bar. Moomba was smaller, and even more people wanted in. Oh the drama! The depths that people would mine for entry knew no bottom. Everybody had a story, everybody knew someone, everybody had a publicist who was supposed to get them in, everybody spoke to the owner and he put them on the list (the owner was Joe’s brother Jeff, and no, he didn’t), everybody was full of shit. So much talking and talking and talking and begging and pleading and even genuflecting at Joe and he would stand there aloof, filtering all the garbage being spewed at him. His quietly polite mantra of “You’re not on the list. No, sorry, you’re not on the list” falling on the deaf ears of the hopefully hopeless.
I noticed that the talkers rarely got in. If you approached the rope and started into some story, it wasn’t going to happen. It was the people who didn’t say anything who would get the nod from Joe, and the sea would part and the bells would chime and the gates of Valhalla would open and they’d be swept into paradise. Sometimes people would see me lurking in the background and start pleading their case to me, as if I had any power over the gates of Valhalla. I’d just slowly shake my head no, shrug my shoulders, and deflect them back to Joe.
The door of Moomba wasn’t like Studio 54 in the seventies, with a coke-addled Steve Rubell creating a scene every night. Joe wasn’t selecting people, and he was never a dick about turning people away. You were either on his radar or you weren’t. He knew what and who worked in that room, and he curated it perfectly.
“You want to go work the door for a few?” Joe asked me late one night.
“Hell yeah! You know I’ve always wanted to do that,” I happily replied. We were eating dinner at a table that had a view of the door (if you pulled back the curtain) so Joe would be able to peek out and keep an eye on me in case anything went awry. I’d also be able to look to him in case I wasn’t sure about letting someone in. Joe told me to “just use your gut and have fun.”
I zipped up my leather, pulled my hat down low, and headed out to the front line. I had a clipboard in hand with the guest list on it. It made for a nice prop—there was no list. It was pretty late, and things had already quieted down outside (but were raging inside), so I wouldn’t be in the thick of it. After about ten minutes of nothing a limo rolled up and a guy—well dressed, early twenties, ubiquitous Patrick Bateman hairdo—gets out of the limo. He’s obviously drunk and is talking loudly and very rudely to a woman who is still in the car. “Get out of the car. Will you just get the fuck out of the car!? What the fuck is your problem? Get out of the car,” he whined. The woman eventually gets out of the car, and Mr. Manners grabs her by the upper arm and pulls her with him toward me, saying, “C’mon, COME ON, would you? Jesus Christ!” I pretend not to notice.
“I’m on the list,” he says without breaking stride as if I’m going to unhook the rope and let him pass. I stand there silently staring at the traffic wheeling down 7th Avenue, and I definitely don’t make any move to let them in. Annoyed, he repeats himself, “I’m ON the list.” I slowly turn my head and deliberately lock eyes with the guy. He immediately averts his eyes, which tells me he’s full of shit and I’ve won the battle. I’m going with my gut: this guy is not getting in. In my peripheral vision I could see the curtain move by the table where Joe was inside sitting and watching.
Again the guy says, “I’m on the list,” but slightly less arrogant this time. I give his lady a smile that says, You seem nice—you should make better choices, and then I look at him and quietly speak the sacred words: “I’m sorry. You’re not on the list.” Gutpunched by the denial and embarrassed in front of the lady, he attempts to up his game by dropping a name. “Do you know who I am? Do you? I’m Paul Michaels, Lorne Michaels’s son.” He stands there, triumphant, waiting for me to let him in, apologize, do something, but I don’t. I’m back to silently staring out at the cars on 7th Avenue, not a care in the world. Infuriated, he yells, “Hey asshole! Did you hear me? I’m Lorne Michaels’s son. I come here all the time, and you’d better let me in!” I very slowly lift the clipboard up and give it a once over. I even turn a page, making it look like I’m actually looking for his name on the list. Again, there is no list. This is me having fun now because he called me an asshole. While I’m doing my slo-mo list check he’s talking angrily under his breath to the woman loud enough for me to hear: “I’ll call my father right now. This guy has no idea who he’s dealing with. One call and this guy is fired.” Then in his best pissy voice he says to me, “Are you finished checking? Did you find my name? I know it’s on there. Jeff and Joe always have me on the list.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re not on the list,” I quietly reiterated, and I walked back a few steps away from him, signaling I was done engaging. This drove him fucking crazy and he yelled, “DON’T YOU FUCKING IGNORE ME! THAT’S IT! I’M CALLING MY DAD. YOU’RE IN DEEP SHIT NOW, ASSHOLE!”
It was hard for me to stifle the giggles trying to escape. I stood there stone-faced, no reaction to his outburst at all, which made him even angrier. “WHAT THE FUCK? ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO MAKE ME CALL MY FATHER?” he yelled, shaking his phone at me.
I calmly replied, “Do what you need to do,” as I let someone else in who I knew had walked up during his last attempt at yelling his way in. That was the last straw for him: “You let that guy in? Who the fuck was that guy? How does that guy just get in?” And then, ramping up: “Maybe you didn’
t hear me: I’M LORNE MICHAELS’S SON. HE’S MY DAD. DO YOU KNOW WHO LORNE MICHAELS IS?!”
I waited a beat, and then another, and then I smiled and said, “Yes, I know who Lorne Michaels is. And if he were here, I’d let him in”—dramatic pause—“You will never get in.” And then I turned and walked back inside the bar, leaving LORNE MICHAELS’S SON to his own devices.
Joe was standing there with a huge smile on his face and yelled, “Yeahhhh, Scott Ian! That was the shit!” And we shook hands with a loud clap. “I was watching you through the curtain. You handled that guy perfectly.”
“Wow, that fucking guy. What a dick,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t believe the shit he was saying. Did he really think that calling me an asshole was going to get him in?” And then I asked the million-dollar question: “Was he really Lorne Michaels’s son?”
Joe said, “Hell no. That guy always comes around trying to get in here. He’s a jerk-off. Fuck him.”
I sat back down at the table where a celebratory drink was waiting for me. I had passed the test. I peeked out the curtain to see if the guy was still standing there fulminating, but he was gone. There was just Joe, sentinel-like, keeping the naked city safe, one night at a time.
MARRIED WITH CHILDREN
“Did you have sex with Kelly Bundy?”
Over the last twenty-five years that question is easily in the top five questions I get asked. What’s number-one, you ask? C’mon, that’s easy. Have you been paying attention at all? Number one is, “Aren’t you the lead singer of Anthrax?”
Duh.
Back to Kelly Bundy and whether or not I slept with her. You’d think that would be an easy question to answer, it’s direct, no bullshit, straight to the point, right? On paper, yes, but in reality this question has many, many levels to it.
Let’s break it down.
What this question proposes is that, first off, I had the balls to ask Christina Applegate on a date. Yes, like every other dude watching that show in 1992 I had a crush on her based on her looks, but in no way does that enable me to somehow ask her out as we made casual conversation around the craft service table while Anthrax was on set that week. Can you imagine? “Uhhh hi, Christina. Umm sooo yeah, uh… you like celery sticks too?” Nope, not going to happen. Take David Faustino to a Metallica show and get him wasted and watch the crowd chant, “BUD BUD BUD!” at him and then get admonished the next day by one of the producers because David was late to set and we’d better not do that again? Yes, I could do that. But ask Christina out? No fucking way.
But this is Hollywood, right? Where dreams are made reality and fantasies come to life (cough bullshit cough). Let’s just say for the purpose of analyzing this question that I did ask her out and we had a really nice time at the La Brea Tar Pits—we “hit it off,” as they say—and we decided to see each other again. We go out again and have another great time together at the Magic Castle, and after a few more dates we finally kiss. She’s been wondering if I was ever going to kiss her, but I am such the gentleman. And then we start to see each other every day and really enjoy each other’s company and talk on the phone when we’re not together and go out every night, and then on one of those nights we end up back at my hotel room and are all over each other before I can even get the door open. We stumble into the room, pulling at each other’s clothes, falling onto the bed mentally and physically locked in this intense moment of lust and right at the point of no return I stop and ask her if she’d fuck me as Kelly Bundy.
That’s what that question proposes, that I asked Christina Applegate to fuck me in character, and by proposing that it is saying that I am an asshole and a creepy weirdo jerk, and if I did that, I would be. Because how else could I have had sex with Kelly Bundy? Sure, if she had initiated the whole thing in character, I would’ve went with it—who wouldn’t?
But she didn’t and I didn’t and this whole Hollywood scenario I just made up is because people ask stupid questions and I stupidly can’t simply answer the question with a no because the whole idea is ridiculous. People, there is no Kelly Bundy. She is a character Christina Applegate played on TV. So from now on the question should be: Did you have sex with Christina Applegate?
Now here is where the lines really start to blur.
When we first got the script for the episode “My Dinner with Anthrax,” there was a scene where we were all hanging out in the Bundy living room, stuck inside because of a blizzard, and at some point after we had eaten from the “mystery pack” (if you’ve seen the episode, you know what I am talking about; if not, look it up on YouTube), Kelly takes my hand and walks me upstairs to her bedroom. She wants to hook up with a band guy. It turns out that band guy was me, and I was stoked.
I was the guy who would get to have sex with Kelly Bundy! Fake, make-believe sitcom sex! There wasn’t even really a bedroom. The stairs that they would walk up to go to the second floor of their house didn’t go anywhere. There was no second floor. Just some other stairs on the other side of the fake wall to walk back down. Even though everything about it was fake, I was still happy to be the guy.
It was Monday, our first day on set, and when we did the read-through with the cast everything went really well and the scene where Kelly and I walk upstairs together got a big salacious “Oooooooohhhh” in the room. On Tuesday we did another table read, and I noticed there were some changes in the script but not for me. All my lines were the same. The cast members were really cool and supportive and would help us get our lines right. You’d think it’d be easy to play yourself. It’s not. It’s awkward saying lines that aren’t yours if you’re not an actor. I asked Ed O’Neill (Al Bundy) how he gets into character because it seemed so easy for him. One minute you’d be talking to Ed, and the next he’d be Al. In real life Ed is nothing like Al. You have to be very smart to play that dumb. Ed said, “Scott, as soon as I put on Al’s dirty white undershirt I become the character. That’s all I need.”
On Wednesday we did another read, with more changes in other people’s lines, but all my stuff was still intact. We rehearsed for the first time on the set, and I could see the show coming together. We also got to use the breakaway bottles for the first time. There’s something very satisfying about smashing a glass bottle over someone’s head. We went nuts with the breakaway stuff, throwing glasses at each other, smashing lamps with guitars, breaking bottles over our own heads until a producer told us to quit it because that stuff costs a lot to make. I want a whole house made of breakaway materials.
The production moved very quickly. They’d only started on Monday, and by Friday they would have a new episode done. We were surrounded by pros, and we were losing our minds over being a part of something so cool. We were all huge fans of Married with Children, and to be a part of it was surreal. We were actually in an episode. What an amazing mind-fuck that was. And it all happened because we asked Missi Callazzo from Megaforce Records to call Fox and try to get us on The Simpsons. We wanted Anthrax on that show, and Missi would call all the time. Eventually she got a call back from a producer telling her he had a script that needed a band, not from The Simpsons but from Married with Children, and would Anthrax be interested? Hell yes, we would.
We got to the studio Thursday, and the script guy handed me the new version. I started reading through to see if anything had changed, and the whole scene where Kelly takes my hand and walks me upstairs was gone. Damn. I found one of the producers we were dealing with and told him I had just read through the script and my big scene was cut. He told me that after we were finished reading on Wednesday Christina asked them to take that scene out. I was bummed and asked if he knew why. He told me Christina was uncomfortable with it and said, “I know my character is a slut. She’s just not that much of a slut.”
End scene.
I was bummed, but I got over it, as it was Friday now and we were going to be taping the show in front of a live audience. And I still had my, “Duh cuhliz, duh cuhliz” (take away my then thick NY accent and I was saying, “The
colors, the colors”) line after I ate from the mystery pack and was tripping. The taping went great, and we all got big laughs in the right places, especially at the end when we played “In My World” and destroyed their living room. Smashing up the Bundys’ house with Kelly, Bud, and Marcie is one of the best things I have ever done.
Oh, and the answer to the question is no.
And we still haven’t been on The Simpsons.
THE WRATH OF KIRK
“‘Only’ is a perfect song,” said James (Hetfield, for those of you who are reference challenged—there’s only one James). “It’s perfect. You guys were great tonight.” James was sitting on a road case in the downstairs catering area backstage at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, and we were chatting post-Anthrax show. To have James, the guy who wrote “Master of Puppets,” for fuck’s sake, say that a song we worked so hard on was perfect, well, that was awesome. “Only” was so important to the band at that time; it was the song that introduced John Bush as our new singer and became an anthem for us in 1993–1994 on the Sound of White Noise tour. James, Lars, and Kirk had come down to see the show and hang out with us, and they had just witnessed a rager of a gig.
I wholeheartedly thanked James over and over for the compliments, and talk of the show quickly turned into talk about what we were doing after the show. Lars and Kirk suggested we all go to the notorious landmark San Francisco strip club the O’Farrell Theatre. San Francisco is Metallica’s town, so we were in for whatever shenanigans they had planned. There was a well-oiled crew of us heading out into the Tenderloin: John, Charlie, Frankie, and I along with James, Lars, Kirk, Mark Osegueda from Death Angel, and Steve Wiig (who at the time worked for Lars and was the sober driver). We caravanned to the O’Farrell in Lars’s car and a taxi, all of us loud, buzzed, and ready for what felt like a night out in 1986 when we were a bunch of kids ignorant of the fact that the world was about to open its doors to our music. We were just having fun with old friends.