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

by Scott Ian

  “Listen, I’ve got good news and bad news. You’ll never have to play a show for Jonny Z again.”

  “Did you fire Jonny?” he excitedly asked.

  “No, you’re fired.”

  “What?!?”

  “You’re out of the band, Neil. You’re done, it’s over. You’ve made our lives miserable and that’s not going to happen anymore. We’re moving on. We’re finding a new singer . . .”

  “You’ll never do anything without me! I’m the only reason this band’s done anything. You’ll never find a fucking singer as good as me, you’ll never get . . .”

  This time it was my turn to interrupt him. “Yup, thanks, Neil. Bye.”

  He was still yelling at me as I hung up. Charlie, Frankie, and I high-fived and laughed. We called Jonny Z and told him the news. He sounded as happy as we were. In the wake of firing Neil, there was a minute I thought of suggesting we get Lilker back in the band. Maybe I could have salvaged my friendship with him, but Frankie had been with us for eight months at that point. I very well could have said I wanted to give Danny another chance because he was unfairly ousted. But Danny was in the rearview mirror. I was more consumed with finding a new singer and moving forward, and Frankie played with his fingers like Steve Harris and no bassist was better than him onstage. Plus, he had become family.

  When I say Frankie’s family, I’m not talking about an intense bond between unrelated band members. Frankie actually is family. Charlie is Frankie’s uncle, and their relationship can sometimes be an insanity unto itself. The two guys are both talented stubborn Bronx-born Italians, and they grew up in a house together like brothers. Charlie is five years older than Frankie, and when Frankie was really young his parents split up and he moved back into Charlie’s mom’s house because Frankie’s mom is Charlie’s older sister.

  They hung out together all the time, jamming, listening to KISS, and fighting. As calm, cool, and collected as Charlie is, Frankie is the opposite. He’s as volatile as nitroglycerin. Charlie’s got a long fuse, but when Frankie burns it down to the wick, they both explode and leave collateral damage.

  One time we were working at Top Cat rehearsal studio in New York, when Frankie started yelling at Charlie about something and Charlie shouted back. Before I knew what was happening, Frankie grabbed a skateboard and whipped it at Charlie. It missed him and bounced off the wall. Charlie picked it up and threw it back harder. Then Charlie stormed out, and Frankie yelled that he was gonna kick his ass. Family!

  We went back to Ithaca, New York, to record our second album, Spreading the Disease, in November 1984 with Carl Canedy, since he did a good job with Fistful of Metal. We had already written most of the songs. Musically, it was a real collaboration between me, Charlie, and Lilker. The only thing that wasn’t written yet was “A.I.R.,” and that came way later, after Joey Belladonna joined the band. Charlie brought that in toward the end of the recording session, and it really showed how much he was coming into his own as a songwriter. It also showed where our heads were musically and is pretty much a bridge between Spreading the Disease and Among the Living.

  Once again, we had songs, but no singer. That little snafu could have derailed a lot of bands, but we were on fire and nothing could stop us. It was just another obstacle we’d have to overcome. We had lineup changes before; this was just another bump in the road. I never for a minute doubted that we’d come back stronger.

  We started off by hiring this guy, Matt Fallon, who used to sing with guitarist Dave Sabo (who hadn’t yet formed Skid Row) in Steel Fortune. I met him when we played with Metallica and Steel Fortune in Sayreville in 1983. The guy sounded good onstage. So, when we were looking for a new singer, some mutual friends recommended him, and I checked out Matt again at a Steel Fortune show in New Jersey. He was commanding and his voice was powerful. Afterward, I asked him if he would audition for Anthrax. He was totally into it, he sounded good at the audition, and we all figured we were set.

  But when Matt started singing in Ithaca, we realized he was green and was in way over his head. When he sang, it was like he suddenly lost his voice. He did a lot of takes and nothing sounded good, so it became pretty clear right away that he wasn’t going to last. He had way more attitude than experience, and he had a big mouth. While we were in Ithaca, we got an offer to open a show for the Scorpions in New Jersey, and we were all pumped about it. Then Matt said, “We can’t open for the Scorpions.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “We can’t be on the same stage as them. They’ll fucking blow us away.”

  That was the last straw. It only took two months for us to tell we weren’t happy with this guy anyway, and after that comment Charlie, Danny, Frankie, and I decided to send him packing. If you don’t have confidence in your own band, you might as well work in a car wash. Within hours of that conversation, we pulled a Mustaine on him. We literally went and bought him a bus ticket back to New York, gave it to him, and said, “Sorry man, this isn’t going to work.”

  Chapter 10

  Joey Belladonna:

  Take One

  When Jonny Z found out we fired Matt Fallon, he was livid. We were already over budget, and he was waiting for us to come out of the studio with this finished album. The last thing he knew, we were done with the guitars, bass, and drums, and all we needed was the vocals, and suddenly he heard we fired Matt. We were so desperate, we considered putting out the record as a four-piece. We’d have two singers like KISS. Frankie would be Paul and I would be Gene, because Frankie had a clean singing voice and I could sing in more of a hardcore style. We figured we’d split up the songs and plow through them because we couldn’t sit in the studio twiddling our thumbs for much longer. Nobody was thrilled with the idea, especially me and Frankie, but we figured we’d do it if that was what it took to finish the fucking record.

  We were about to start tracking vocals when Carl said, “Look, I know this guy from around here who was in a band called Bible Black. They used to play around upstate New York. He’s a great singer. He’s got long black hair. He looks the part, and he has a great voice. I know his name is Joey. I just have no idea how to get hold of him.”

  Carl made a bunch of calls and was able to track down Joey Belladonna through a guy who promoted club shows. Joey was living in Plattsburgh, New York, and didn’t know who we were, but he was looking for a gig so he drove to Ithaca two days later. He knew nothing about thrash. He didn’t know Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Exodus—­­he was into more classic rock. He arrived to audition wearing really, really tight jeans and leather boots that weren’t Doc Martens or anything. They weren’t cowboy boots, either. They were somewhere in between . . . rock boots. One of them had a chain on it. And he was wearing a sleeveless tiger-striped shirt that was cut too short. It looked like he had put on a costume, dressed up to meet us like he thought this was what a singer should look like. For some bands it would’ve been great, just not Anthrax.

  I was standing there in an Agnostic Front T-shirt and ripped Levis with suspenders, thinking, “What the fuck? At least he has long hair.” I have to admit I was judging him by what he looked like. Maybe he was doing the same thing to me. I tried to put my biases aside and give him a chance since he was already there. Maybe later we could teach him how not to dress. We had a mike set up in the studio, and we asked him to go in and sing something without any backup, just so we could get a feel for his voice.

  He shuffled up to the mike and started singing “Oh, Sherrie,” by Journey, and “Hot Blooded,” by Foreigner. The songs he chose wouldn’t have made my top 10 list at the time, but he sounded great and we had never worked with a real singer before. Joey sang with vibrato, knew how to breathe properly, and had technique. He enunciated what he was singing and sustained notes like Rob Halford. Instantly, Carl said, “That’s your golden ticket right there. Listen to that guy’s voice. You guys will be unlike any other band out there. This is go
ing to put you miles ahead of anybody.”

  We were thinking the same thing, but we didn’t know how Joey’s voice would blend with the thrashy music we were playing or if he’d even be into singing along with it. We asked him if he’d hang out for a week and jam with us. He was into it. He had a bag with him, so he came prepared to stay for a few days. We decided to go out to dinner and hang out. I actually said to him, “Um, do you have any other clothes because we don’t dress like you’re dressed.”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t dress like this, either,” he said. “I heard you guys were a metal band, so I got some stuff to wear to hopefully look like what I thought would be cool, but I can see it’s not.”

  He changed into jeans and a T-shirt and looked like a normal guy, which made us all more comfortable. We laughed with him about the idea of having to look a certain way to be “metal” and talked a lot about music. He liked stuff like Rush, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath and had albums by Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. So we figured he’d eventually fit in.

  We started working with Joey in late fall of 1984. He didn’t have a huge ego like Neil or Matt, and was open to advice. We jumped right into teaching him stuff from Fistful of Metal and some of the new songs. There was a learning curve, but pretty soon he caught on to what we were doing. He didn’t ask too many questions and let it all sink in. He was eager to learn but didn’t want to take control. It seemed like good chemistry after all. Every day, he’d sit there with headphones on in the studio, and he just absorbed our style and took in the songs. I sat and worked with him to help him sing with the right attitude and aggression. He caught on quickly, and once he learned something, he made it his own and sang the shit out of it.

  In early ’85 we decided that before we recorded anything with Joey, we should do some shows. We had never seen him onstage, and he had no idea what thrash concerts were like, what a mosh pit looked like, and how intense the crowds were. We booked an East Coast run of dates and told him to think of the shows as an educational experience. I said, “Look, this will be good because you’ll be able to feel what is going on out there with this kind of music, and then you’ll come back with a new appreciation for how energetic and explosive it can be. You’ll have experienced it, and you’ll have it in your gut.”

  He was into that, so we played New York, Providence, Boston, and a couple other cities, traveling around in an old rented RV. Billy Milano was our driver, so Joey got to see pretty quickly the kinds of people we called friends that were hanging around the metal scene. There were other surprises as well.

  Fans were diving off the stage, landing on top of each other. Some leapt feet first and caught fellow moshers in the face with their boots. Fights broke out. There was blood, there was chaos. It was anarchy in the USA. And Joey loved it.

  Removing the training wheels and taking him on tour turned out to be a good move, one that definitely helped his performance on Spreading the Disease. Joey took direction really well and sang the songs as if he had been there from the start. It took a while, but by working on one song at a time and carefully going over every verse and every chorus—letting it all sink in—he delivered some amazing vocals. He learned from our guidance but also added his own ideas for note choices, and his innate sense of melody greatly contributed to the overall picture. To me, the work he did on Spreading the Disease was his best in Anthrax up until he came back for Worship Music.

  One thing about Joey that was initially a blessing—but eventually became a curse—was that he didn’t write his own lyrics. He was perfectly happy singing my words and never questioned the content. That was cool with me for years because I enjoyed the new creative challenge and nobody else in the band wanted to write lyrics. But it added extra time to the recording process—time we didn’t have. Obviously, I’d have to finish the words to the songs before he could sing them.

  There were some leftovers on Spreading the Disease from the first album. Neil wrote the lyrics for “Armed and Dangerous” and “Gung-Ho,” and I wrote everything else. The main theme that comes across on the album is the idea of being an outcast and fighting for survival. “A.I.R.” stands for “Adolescence in Red,” and it was my wordplay on George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” I thought I was clever for coming up with such a highbrow title. Everyone thinks “Madhouse” is about being in a mental institution, but it’s actually a metaphor about us trying to make our mark in the world. “Medusa” is about the character in Greek myth­ology, a woman with snakes for hair who turns men into stone with a mere glance. It became a metaphor for having a shitty wife or girlfriend, but that’s not what I wrote it about. The Medusa just seemed so metal.

  “Aftershock” is my description of a nuclear apocalypse, and “The Enemy” was my first socially conscious tune. It’s about the Holocaust. Being Jewish, I learned from an early age about Hitler and the Nazis and how they killed six million Jews, and I felt it was something I should write about. Call it an ethnic obligation. “Lone Justice” was about the character Roland Deschain in the Stephen King book Dark Tower. It was my first foray into the world of Stephen King, who I discovered in the late seventies after I saw the movie Carrie. I thought the film was really intense, so I checked out the book. I was a pretty avid reader by that time, and after reading Carrie I was hooked. King released The Stand in 1978, and I got way into that. I also wanted the character in “Lone Justice” to be like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  I wrote most of the lyrics for Spreading the Disease in early ’85 because that’s pretty much all I had to do. We had already been in the studio for almost eight months, the guitars were all tracked, and I was still in Ithaca so I could work with Joey and make sure he had the right inflections and emotions for the songs. He started recording his vocals in March. By the time April or May rolled around, things started getting weird with Carl. He would stroll into the studio midday, we’d do stuff for a couple of hours and then Carl would look at his watch and say, “Oh, I gotta go. I’ve got some stuff back at my house that I need to take care of.” This started happening every day, and when he was gone he didn’t want us doing anything with Alex Perialas, who was engineering the record. He just wanted us to wait until he came back, and usually that wasn’t until the next day.

  Joey and I were getting really frustrated, so we asked Carl what was going on and why he wasn’t staying and working with us longer. He actually said, “If you could come out to my place and cut the grass and help around the house then I would be able to spend more time producing the record.”

  I called Jonny and told him what Carl had said, and that was the last thing he wanted to hear because we were getting more over budget by the day and he was having some major problems at home at the time with his wife Marsha and their other partner Tony Incigeri. Tony basically handled Raven, and Anthrax were Jonny’s baby. Our album was costing so much to make that Tony and Marsha wanted to pull the plug, mix whatever we had, and just release it, even though the vocals weren’t done. To Marsha and Tony, Anthrax were a liability. They wanted to focus all of their efforts and finances on Raven, who had signed with Atlantic and were making a record that was going to be more commercial and had radio potential. They thought Raven would be huge. Of course, that didn’t happen. But Tony was arguing that Megaforce was wasting its time and resources on us and Anthrax could never be commercially viable.

  Fortunately, Jonny still believed in us, so he took the money he had left in his bank account—about $29,000—and he moved out to Ithaca. He took off from Jersey and stayed with us in our apartment, because he was determined to get the record done. That’s when the studio hours became more regular. If Carl wasn’t there, we worked with Alex, which was a pleasure because he was totally capable of producing great records, as he proved many times over the years, and he was engineering the whole thing anyway. Finally, all the vocals were done, and it was time to mix the record, which should have taken two weeks, but took a month because Carl was str
inging the process out again. But I have to say on June 30, 1985, when we were officially done mixing Spreading the Disease, I was happy with the way it sounded—way happier than I had been with Fistful of Metal.

  Chapter 11

  Sgt. D Is Coming!

  Most of the time in Ithaca I was alone, and I was trying to think of things to do besides writing lyrics. I almost shaved my head, but Billy Milano talked me out of it. Instead, he shaved “NOT” in my chest hair. He said, “You shouldn’t shave your head, that’s bullshit. That’s not who you are. You’re into hardcore, that’s cool, but keep your long hair.” I already had the nickname Scott “NOT” Ian. It didn’t come from Wayne’s World, either. In my neighborhood in the ’70s everyone would say “NOT” in that same sarcastic way as Wayne and Garth did later, and that became part of my lexicon.

  I didn’t shave my head, but I kept listening to hardcore UK bands like Discharge, GBH, Exploited; NYHC groups including Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, AOD, Cro-Mags, the Crumbsuckers; and West Coast stuff such as Suicidal Tendencies and Black Flag. It didn’t matter where it was from. I loved Corrosion of Conformity (COC), who were from North Carolina, D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles), who were originally from Houston, and this German band Inferno.

  At the same time, I started drawing cartoon strips of a zombie character I named Sgt. D. It was kind of my weird take on World War II comic hero Sgt. Rock combined with my love for horror. Sgt. D is dead and he smokes a cigar and he’s really right-wing and angry—like a cross between an undead Rush Limbaugh and Rambo. He lives to hate. He’s not racist; he hates everyone living. I’d draw these comic strips and hang them up around the studio. In one, Sgt. D was coaching a Little League team full of zombies, and one of his kids slides into first base, and the ump calls him out, so Sgt. D cuts the guy’s head off. It was stupid shit, but I’d hang them up around the studio, and Joey, Carl, and Alex would read them and laugh.