I'm the Man: The Story of That Guy from Anthrax

by Scott Ian

  We bided our time until we could make good on that promise, which was hard at first because everything was taking off. People across the US and Europe were discovering thrash, and a movement was definitely forming around us. We were psyched, but it wasn’t something we felt responsible for. And I don’t think Metallica did, either. The funny thing about a movement or a scene is it seems to happen when a certain type of band just happens to tap into a certain sound at the right time and the public feeds off it like wild wolves. It’s nothing you create. Yes, you make the music, and when the fans get the scent of it they come flocking, but it’s definitely something that’s out of your control. Maybe you can mold what you do once you sense something happening, but we were writing these songs before anyone knew what thrash was. Critics called it power metal or speed metal at first. Then someone coined the term “thrash.”

  In March 1984 I went over to England to promote Fistful of Metal. The British press had taken to us, and I was doing one interview after another. While I was there, Metallica passed through London. They were scheduled to play some European shows with Exciter and the Rods as part of a break they were taking from recording Ride the Lightning in Denmark. But the tour was canceled because of—believe it or not—lack of ticket sales, so they were stuck in London for a while. The people who ran the studio they were using in Denmark thought they were going to be gone for a couple weeks, so they booked another band to record during that time. Metallica’s European label, Music for Nations, put the band up in an apartment on Gloucester Road with a lot of bedrooms and invited me to stay there as well, because we were on the same label. I was supposed to be there for a few days, but I ended up staying almost three weeks since it was my first time in the country and I had somewhere to stay.

  One Sunday afternoon Cliff wanted to buy a new Walkman, because his had broken, so we went to an area called Tottenham Court Road, where all the electronic shops are. We took the tube down there, which was usually pretty easy. Even though it was March, it was still cold, and all I had was a black leather jacket. Cliff had a big winter snorkel coat with a fur-lined hood. We walked to the station near Gloucester Road, paid our fare, and went into the station. We stood on the platform waiting for the train when two cops came up to us.

  “Can we help you?” I said.

  “Well, yes,” replied a cop with a moustache and a bent nose. “If you admit to carrying illegal substances up front, we’ll make things easier on you.”

  “Excuse me?” I said and almost laughed because it seemed like a Monty Python sketch. “We’re not carrying anything illegal. What are you talking about?”

  “All right, that’s it then. Come with us,” replied his beefy partner. “You’re under arrest.”

  “For what?”

  “For suspicion of carrying illegal substances,” said Crooked Nose.

  We walked with these two cops to a police station inside the train station. They had us remove our jackets and they searched them. Mine was empty, but Cliff had a cold so he had some Sudafed pills loose in his pocket. The police didn’t believe it was cold medicine and said they’d have to send them to the lab to be tested. They brought us to the back of the station and separated us. Then they put me in a six-by-six cell, with a sliding window instead of bars. It was a concrete room with a space to sit. They had me remove my clothes, so I was standing there in my boxers, freezing. They shut the door and walked away. Nobody read me my rights or said a fuckin’ word, and they didn’t say how long they thought I’d be there.

  In England if they feel like searching someone for anything, you have no recourse whatsoever. Apparently, they don’t share the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. I knew I was gonna be okay because I didn’t do drugs, but Cliff was a big pothead, and I was thinking, “Jesus Christ, if he has a joint on him we’re fucked.” My New York, Jewish paranoid brain immediately flashed to the scene in Midnight Express when Brad Davis, who plays Billy Hayes, is caught with drugs, gets thrown in a Turkish prison, and is beaten by guards. I was thinking, “This is it. My family is never going to see me again. I’m going to be in some fucking weird prison, and the next time I see my girlfriend, she’s going to put her boob on the glass like in the movie, and I’m going to have to kill a guard and bite his tongue out.”

  I started banging on the door. “Hey, is someone out there?” Finally, a guard slid the door open. “What do you want?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked as innocently as I could.

  “We’re bringing your mate back to the flat to search the place.” My stomach dropped into my testicles because I knew Cliff had a big bag of weed back at the house. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shrug his shoulders as Crooked Nose, Beefy, and four other cops led him out the door. I remained in the cell for another two hours with nothing to do but replay possible scenarios in my head of having to call my parents and explain to them why I might never see them again. Time ticked by at the speed of gridlock traffic, but my mind continued to race. I figured we’d get a chance to talk to a lawyer, and maybe we could plea bargain a reduced jail sentence. But I was convinced I was going to be thrown into a jail somewhere in London, and who knew what a bunch of pervs were going to do to a short, skinny, longhaired American Jew. Finally the door opened and it was one of the cops. He handed me my clothes and said, “Get dressed. I’m going to take you to the captain’s office.”

  I thought, “This can’t be good.” I wondered if my cell mates would just beat me up every day or make me their bitch and gang rape me. I walked into the captain’s office with the cop, and Cliff was already sitting there with a half smirk. Immediately, the captain started apologizing. “Sorry, you know. But we have a lot of problems with drug dealers, especially on the days of football matches. You have to understand, my officers suspected that you were carrying.”

  I lost my mind and started screaming at the guy. “You’re apologizing? I just spent six hours of my life in a jail cell in my boxer shorts because you thought we looked like drug dealers? You’re fucking out of your mind. What kind of a country is this?”

  I went nuts—Cliff was punching my leg to get me to shut up—but I was on a tear.

  The guy said, “I understand you’re upset . . .”

  “Upset? I’m going to get a fucking lawyer and sue your police department for wrongful arrest!” So Jewy of me. I couldn’t believe that they were allowed to do this. I was beyond control. “You backward-ass motherfucker. I was freezing in there. No one offered me anything to eat or drink. You treated me like a fucking convict, and I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept yelling. “You don’t have anything better to do than torture American tourists? We fucking told you we didn’t have anything, but you pulled us aside and treated us like shit just because of the way we look.”

  I didn’t stop to think that maybe the captain could have arrested me for swearing at him. Fortunately, he didn’t take any further action. I think he actually felt bad. The cops escorted us out of the station, and we headed back to the apartment. With all my rage vented, I wanted to know how we managed to pull the get-out-of-jail-free card. I asked Cliff, “What the fuck, dude? What happened back at the house? How did they not find your weed?”

  “Where’s the first place you would look if you were searching for someone’s stash?” he said.

  “I dunno. Under the mattress??”

  “Exactly. And what’s the one place they never looked?”

  These dumb cops never even checked under the bed. Six bobbies combed the place. Kirk was just a little surprised sitting in the living room practicing guitar when they all walked in, and they turned the flat upside down. But all they found were empty beer cans because they never looked under Cliff’s mattress, where he had a big bag of weed. Odin himself must have been shining his light down on us that day.

  I looked at my watch and said, “Too late to get your Walkman,” and Cliff said, “Fuck
it, let’s go get drunk.”

  We went back, picked up Kirk, and got wasted. The evening ended with the three of us wrestling in somebody’s hedges on the front lawn of their house and getting yelled at as we went running down the street. What were they gonna do, call the cops on us?

  Chapter 9

  Turbin failure

  When I got back from England, it was business as usual—only worse. Neil was in a rage about everything. He thought he was all-powerful and had no idea he had signed his death warrant by firing Lilker. Unfortunately, he had a stay of execution while we were on tour. He became a straight-up dictator telling us what to do all day. We’d travel in a van with a couple rows of seats. There were two people in every row except the back row, which Neil had to have entirely for himself. We all put our personal shit in the truck with the gear. Neil insisted on having his suitcase in the van; otherwise, he wouldn’t come on the tour. He needed to receive special treatment because he was the singer and he had us by the balls. The rest of us would share the driving. Neil would never drive. He’d never let anyone borrow anything. If I’d forget my shampoo and ask if I could borrow his, he’d say, “No man. It’s a special shampoo. It’s from Israel and it’s the last one made.”

  All of Neil’s possessions were the last one made and came from Israel. They were impossible to get again so he had to make them last. It was incredible how selfish he was. We told Jonny Z that we couldn’t go on anymore with this guy, and if we were going to make a second record, we had to find a new singer. It’s pretty risky for a band to switch singers on its second record, so we expected Jonny to flip out. Fortunately, Jonny hated Neil almost as much as we did because Neil used to talk shit about him to us and it would get back to Jonny. Neil would say, “Fuck Jonny Z, we have to get a real manager. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

  “I don’t know, man,” I’d say. “Look at Metallica. Things are going pretty well for them.”

  “Fuck them. What are they ever going to be?” Neil replied. “Who are they? Nobody. We have to be like Judas Priest, that’s who we have to be like.”

  The way Neil saw it, you were either Priest or you were nobody. He was above this speed metal shit we were playing. He wasn’t into thrash. He loved Rhett Forrester and Riot and Priest. That was it. He felt like he was slumming by being with us. But he wasn’t about to quit, no matter how many times he threatened to. That was alright. By the time we hit the road with Raven, we knew his time with Anthrax was running out, which gave us the freedom to stop feeling like we were under his control. We were untethered and ready for revenge.

  We replaced Lilker with Frank Bello, who started out as one of our roadies. He just stepped in, and it was so easy because we were friends, he could play, and he already knew the songs. Frank hated Neil too and was an active participant in our Turbin torture tour. When we were out with Raven, we bugged the shit out of Neil at every opportunity. He was furious and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in control of every situation anymore. “Ghostbusters” was the biggest song on the radio that summer. You could flip through the stations in any city and hear it six times in a row, probably. Neil despised that song, so every time “Ghostbusters” came on the radio, we’d crank it no matter how late it was. Everybody else in the van would sing the chorus as loud as we could, and Neil would freak: “Shut the fuck up! “Shut up, shut up! I’m trying to sleep! You have no consideration.”

  That was always his line, “You have no consideration, I’m a singer, I’m a singer, you have no consideration.” Eventually, he gave up. “Ghostbusters” would come on, and you’d hear, “Fucking dicks!” from the back of the van as we all sang along. It was great. He’d threaten to leave, like usual, and this time we called him on it. “Fucking leave! Who gives a fuck? Quit, quit the band! Who cares?” That just made him angrier.

  On the tour with Raven, we were driving long distance in a rickety van, and we had a tour manager, who was supposed to give us our ten-dollar per diem once a week. A week went by and none of us got any money. We asked Tony, Jonny Z’s partner, who was also out on the tour, where our money was, and he said to get it from the tour manager. So I went, “Hey, man, I didn’t get a per diem.”

  He told me he gave the per diems out Monday, and since I didn’t pick mine up when he handed them out, I wouldn’t get it that week. I thought maybe that’s how it worked on big tours. What did I know? But it seemed weird. I asked Wacko if I had to pick up my per diem the day it was issued, and he said, “No, when you want it just ask for it.” I said to him the manager told me otherwise, and he said the dude was probably pocketing my money.

  Now, I’m not a huge, muscular guy or anything, but I’m a New Yorker, and I don’t like being taken advantage of. I went back to the guy and said, “You motherfucker! Give me my $70 right now or I’m going to hit you in the head with a bat!” I got my money.

  At the end of the tour, Raven felt sorry for us being in a van and invited us to ride on their bus. It meant I didn’t have to drive anymore, which was good, but we didn’t have bunks, so we had to sit up, which sucked for sleeping. The tour routing looked like it had been put together by a blind man throwing darts at a map of the US. We played Los Angeles at the Country Club in Reseda on a Thursday night then drove 1,200 miles to play Seattle Saturday night. We stopped at some shitty pay-by-the-hour motel to get some rest. We checked in. I pulled the covers back and there was blood all over the sheets. I don’t know if some chick with a heavy flow had her period there or if someone had been killed, and I didn’t want to know. It was disgusting and I needed to sleep, so I took a hundred dollars that I had saved from my per ­diems, checked into a Holiday Inn, and crashed for seven hours. I was broke, but I had my first sound sleep in months. After we played Seattle, we drove back to LA to play a second show there on Monday. It was stupid. But we were fuckin’ metal warriors. We were like, “If this is what you gotta do to make it, we’ll do it. Whatever it takes.”

  Neil made realizing that possibility harder and harder. He was losing his voice onstage because we were playing so many shows and he wasn’t pacing himself. “All the more reason to fire him,” I thought. We’d open the show with “Deathrider,” he’d scream, blow his voice out, and not be able to sing the rest of the show. As much as we wanted him to fail, we didn’t want to play bad shows. I told him he might want to hold back a bit on the “Deathrider” scream and pace himself so he could get through the whole song without losing his voice.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed. “Don’t tell me how to fucking sing. I don’t fucking tell you how to play guitar! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”

  Charlie’s cousin Dennis had a video camera back then, and he’d film the shows. We played one back to Neil and said sarcastically, “Well, what’s going on here? What note was that? Three songs into the set and there’s nothing coming out of your mouth.”

  He still thought he had the upper hand. The last concert of the tour was at Roseland Ballroom in New York City. That was the famous show where Metallica got signed to Elektra, Raven signed to Atlantic, and Island came and scouted us and we ended up signing with them. The venue was sold out, which was unheard of. For these three then–relatively unknown bands to sell 3,500 tickets at Roseland was a sign that something big definitely was about to happen. You could feel it in the venue. The whole place buzzed with excitement, and when we took the stage, the anticipation turned into this tsunami of energy. We opened with “Deathrider,” and right away every fucking kid in that crowd was headbanging and punching the sky. We’d never seen anything quite like that, and we could really feel the connection they had with the music. It was the right songs at the right time. It was like when I first heard AC/DC and this shock wave passed through my entire body like I had been hit by lightning.

  These kids had been waiting for this to enter their lives, and now we were there. Neil surely wasn’t 100 percent that night, but he seemed to have taken our advi
ce and didn’t blow out his voice. He might have missed a note or two, but any flaws were overcome by the enthusiasm of the crowd. After the show, we were all riding high, even Neil, until he got into a huge screaming fight with Jonny Z.

  Megaforce had tour jackets made for us. They were old-school satin vests with the words “Anthrax U.S. Attack Tour ’84” embroidered on the back. I think Jonny did it on purpose, but somehow Neil’s was the wrong size, and he fucking lost his mind. He said, “You fucking big, fat fucking nigger thief.”

  We were laughing. “Huh? Why does he think Jonny Z is black?” Neil was shouting, we were all cracking up, and Neil screamed, “I’ll never fucking play for you again, you fucking fat fuck!”

  Later that night, Neil and I were walking to my car because I had to give the fucking asshole a ride back from Roseland to Queens. On the way he said, “That’s it, Scott. I respect you and I respect what we’ve done, but I have no respect for that fat fuck. I can’t be in this band one more minute if he’s still the manager.”

  Once again it was “It’s him or me,” and this time it backfired for poor Neil, who ended the conversation with, “We’re firing Jonny Z, or I’m out.”

  I dropped him at his house and said goodnight to him and smiled a grin that silently said, “Goodbye, motherfucker!” The day after we got home from that tour, I drove over to Charlie’s in the Bronx. We had been waiting for this day for ages. It was like, “Light the fucking candles on the cake, dude. Call Neil’s house.”

  It took a week to get him on the phone. Who knows what the fuck he was doing during that time? I’d go to Charlie’s every afternoon, and we’d call Neil every couple hours, or even every twenty minutes, to fire him. Finally, RING, RING . . . “Hello.”

  “Neil, it’s Scott.”

  “Hey man, what’s up?”