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

by Scott Ian

  I wanted to have a couple of socially relevant songs on the album as well, so I wrote “One World.” If “Aftershock” from Spreading the Disease was about the result of a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia—the endgame—“One World” addressed the steps man could take to avoid total annihilation: “Russians, they’re only people like us / Do you really think they’d blow up the world, they don’t love their lives less / America, stop singing “Hail to the Chief” / Instead of thinking SDI we should be thinking of peace.” Hey, I was young and still thought I could change the world with the power of metal!

  “Efilnikufesin (N.F.L.)” is about John Belushi, a hero of mine. It’s about what a waste his overdose was because he was so fucking talented and had so much more to offer the world, and it was kind of my way of warning kids to stay away from narcotics. That was a big thing for me. I wasn’t preachy about it, I just hated that shit.

  Whenever I smoked the pin joints in school, I never got high. Weed never did anything for me. So I had virtually no interest in drugs, and that carried over into Anthrax. Blow became all the fashion in the eighties, and even at our level, we’d see friends in bands who were always wasted on the stuff; they would get it for free because no one could actually afford it. I hated when people I hung out with were on blow. None of them would shut up. They’d just talk bullshit for hours and hours. Worse still was the antisocial aspect of it. No one wanted to do it in front of you, so they went into the bathroom to snort it. Then they’d come out sniffling, and it was obvious what they’d been up to. That shame factor made me hate it even more. I thought, if you wanna do it, just do it. Don’t fucking hide away like a rodent. And if you don’t want to share it with people, then just wait until you get home. Everything about cocaine turned me off. Just the idea of putting something up my nose was unappealing. I have to admit I was kind of scared of it, too. Some people overdosed and died on cocaine, not to say anything about heroin. I’ve always stayed away from all that shit.

  I had other ways to escape besides drugs, and I wrote about them on Among the Living. Two songs on the album come from Stephen King stories. He was such a big part of my life. His books were so creative and inspiring, especially The Stand, which “Among the Living” is based on. And then “A Skeleton in the Closet” was about the King novella Apt Pupil, which is about a teenager who discovers a Nazi war criminal and blackmails the guy into telling him detailed stories about his horrific crimes. Stephen King stories became such a major part of my life at that point that they were really all I knew. I didn’t understand much about the real world when I was twenty-two. Most of my life was spent in fantasy land.

  Anthrax were getting ready to head into Top Cat rehearsal studios in New York in July 1986 to finish writing and rehearsing Among the Living. I was sitting in my mom’s house with all my gear when the phone rang. It was Kirk Hammett and he seemed frazzled. He was calling from Evansville, Indiana, and he sounded out of breath. “So, James was riding down a hill on a skateboard and he fell off and broke his wrist. He can’t play guitar and we don’t want to cancel any shows so we need someone to come out and play guitar and James will just sing. Can you possibly do it?”

  He was speaking so quickly I didn’t think I understood what he was saying at first and asked him to repeat himself. Yeah, what I heard was right. Metallica wanted me to come out and play rhythm guitar for them on the Master of Puppets tour. I was stoked. “I’d love to. Of course I’ll do it!” I told Kirk.

  All I would have to do was learn the Master of Puppets stuff. I knew everything else. Then reality hit me. We had an album to make, and we were supposed to be in the studio in three days to finish writing and rehearsing before we started recording. I told Kirk that, and he asked if there was any way to push it back. I told him I’d check with Jonny Z, and he gave me the number of the hotel where they were staying. I called Jonny at 11 p.m. and said, “Dude, I just got a call from Metallica. James broke his arm and they’re asking me to come out and learn the songs and finish the Ozzy tour, and I really want to do it.”

  Jonny immediately dashed my hopes. He told me we had deposits on the studio and we were on a deadline. “You can’t just take a month off because you want to,” he said. “This will fuck up your whole schedule going into the next year.”

  I already knew the answer before I called him. I was just hoping he’d do some magic and make it happen like he did when he got Metallica to New York to record Kill ’Em All. I called Kirk back and explained the situation. I apologized, and they ended up getting James’s guitar tech John Marshall to fill in. That was a major bummer for me, but I was being totally unrealistic when I originally told Kirk I could do it.

  We saw Metallica soon enough when they invited us to tour Europe with them in the fall of ’86. The first date was September 10 in Cardiff, Wales. There were six weeks of shows booked and they were all sold out. We both went over so great every single show. And Metallica were incredible even though James still wasn’t playing guitar because of his broken wrist.

  A tip for new bands hitting the road: it’s okay to have a friend be your guitar tech, but make sure he’s someone who can play well so in the event of an emergency you have a fill-in right there on hand. It benefitted Metallica, and it didn’t hurt us any when Lilker left the band. At that point in their career, Metallica were in a bus and our gear was on their truck. We were in a cargo van with luggage. We had a driver because none of us wanted to attempt to drive in the UK on the wrong side of the road. We had one crew guy to help us out. He helped set up the drums, and Metallica’s crew helped with our guitars. There wasn’t much in the way of amenities. We got a dressing room every day but we weren’t getting a per diem, so we had no money. Metallica had catering for the tour, but there was a mix-up the first few days, and the catering company didn’t know that we were supposed to be getting fed, too.

  For those days we all dug into our pockets for change to buy shitty snack foods like sausage rolls and English pizza. Now that’s real torture—forcing a bunch of New Yorkers to eat the English version of pizza. It’s all dough with lumps of cheese and kernels of corn.

  The first day of the tour, our driver offered to run down the road and get some pizzas for us. We gave him a bunch of money to come back with four pies. He returned thirty minutes later holding the pizzas sideways and had no idea he had done anything wrong. When we opened a box all the cheese and sauce had slid into a mushy pile decorated with corn niblets. We had nothing else and no more money, so we were stuck in this cold dressing room pulling chunks of cheese from the edge of the box, replacing them on the warped, slimy slices of pizza crust and trying to avoid the corn niblets. I thought, “Fuck this. Take me home now. I hate it here. I don’t know how Iron Maiden survive in this country.”

  Then we started the show, and I really wished I was still at home in my mom’s house. We played great and the crowd loved it, but during the entire set we got showered with saliva. We started with “A.I.R.,” and it began raining spit—not just on Joey or me, but on all of us. I thought, “Oh no, they fuckin’ hate us!” Then we ended the song and everyone screamed and applauded. So we started the next song, and sure enough the fountains of phlegm started again. It happened every song. We wondered if it was some kind of joke they played on opening bands. Halfway through the set, one of the guys in Metallica’s British crew told us, “They’re spitting on you because they fucking love you! It’s an old punk rock tradition called gobbing.”

  I was thinking, “I wish they didn’t love us so much.”

  We had played the Hammersmith Palais, our first UK show, in May of 1986, and there wasn’t any spitting and they loved us that night as well. Apparently, gobbing was a semi-recent phenomenon that started with English punk audiences in the mid- to late seventies. In metal it was short lived, thank God, but we happened to be there right when it was at its prime. It’s a good thing Billy Milano wasn’t there. He would have killed everyone in the crowd. Metall
ica got it twice as bad as we did.

  During Cliff’s bass solo the spotlight was on him. He was throwing his head up and down and his hair was flying everywhere. The spit that spattered him looked like swarms of bugs flying around a street lamp in the summer. Hundreds of gobs landed in his hair. It stank like bad breath. It’s a good thing they had showers at those venues. We were only gobbed one other time, in Ireland in 1989 when we were headlining. We adamantly told the crowd, “If you spit on us we’re leaving.” We actually left a show in Omagh, Northern Ireland, after two songs because they wouldn’t stop spitting.

  The last night of the UK tour with Metallica was in London at the Hammersmith Odeon, and Music for Nations threw a big aftershow party for us at the Forum Hotel. We were having a blast, thinking, “Wow, look at us! We just played a sold-out UK tour. Everybody loves us.” We were high on adrenaline, drunk on beer, and about as rational as kindergarteners.

  Cliff and I ran into a room that had chutes for the laundry, and we unzipped our flies and pissed down them. At one point, there was a circle of us standing there, me, Kirk, Cliff, James, Charlie, and Frankie. We all had drinks and made a stupid metal pact like, “Headbanging bros forever!” We toasted and drank. Then all of a sudden Cliff and Kirk got serious.

  They told us that when they got home from the tour they were going to fire Lars. They said they couldn’t take being in the band with him anymore and were done putting up with him. I knew there were issues between him and some of the other members, but every band has its problems. They usually work themselves out.

  Cliff explained the plan: “The three of us have agreed. When we get home from this tour, we’re gonna get rid of Lars, even if it means we can’t use the name Metallica anymore.” Somehow Lars owned the name at that point, or at least they thought he did. I looked at James and said, “This is crazy but you are Metallica. Everyone is going to know who you are even if you use a different name. At this point, everyone already knows you. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself. It’s still gonna be you guys and your music.”

  It was weird to think of Lars being out of Metallica, and I hoped they’d be able to work things out with him and that it wouldn’t be the end of the band, but I wanted to back my friends, and Kirk and Cliff were always the guys in the band I was closest to. We were all basically nerds who liked the same things: music, horror movies, and comic books.

  I didn’t ask why they were gonna kick Lars out. I figured it was because they wanted a better drummer, but apparently there was also a lot of business-related stuff going on behind the scenes they weren’t thrilled with. That conversation ended the UK tour on a sobering note. We had a day off, and then we were scheduled to play twenty-seven more shows in Europe with Metallica.

  The first date was in Lund, Sweden, on September 24, and that was a good gig because no one spat at us and everyone loved both bands. The next day we played Lillestrom, Norway, for about 4,000 people, which was also great. Then we went back to Sweden to play Solna, near Stockholm. That was Cliff’s last show.

  It was at a big gymnasium-type place that held thousands of kids. Normally, we’d stick around for Metallica’s show and then hang out and goof around when they finished, leave at the same time, and head to the next city. We were on a bus now, which made traveling easier, but that night we decided to leave early because the roads were icy. There had been a storm, and our driver wanted to head to Copenhagen as soon as possible to avoid the streets freezing up. We figured we had another month on the road to hang out with Metallica, so no big deal. We saw the guys after we finished our set, and I said, “We’re going to take off. We’ll see you tomorrow in Denmark.”

  We got into Copenhagen and stepped off the bus around 9:30 the next morning. We had a hotel that night because we had the next day off. We were pretty groggy as we walked into the lobby to the front desk. I saw our tour manager talking to some guy, so I waved and said, “Hey Mark, what’s up?” He had a look of total shock on his face. There was no color in his cheeks. He looked scared. Something was not good.

  “The promoter for the show tonight says there’s been an accident,” he told me. “Metallica’s bus crashed on the way here.” Then he paused, and when he started to speak again he had to force the words out—almost cough them into existence. “Cliff was killed in the accident. Everybody else is okay. Lars had some minor injuries and was taken to a hospital.”

  My brain started spinning like a gyroscope. I replayed the sentence over and over: “Cliff was killed in the accident.” After what seemed like five minutes but was probably only ten seconds, I shook my head and said, “Really? Really? You believe that?!?” I was in complete denial. “There’s no way. I’m sure they just got too fucked up to make bus call and they made up this crazy story. We’ll all laugh about it later.”

  Anything seemed more plausible than the thought that their bus had crashed and Cliff was actually dead. I had never heard of anything like that before. I’d never ever heard of any band’s bus crashing let alone killing a member. It seemed completely unreal. When you’re in this tour bubble and things are going great, you feel invincible. Something like this happening was out of the realm of possibility. I asked the promoter, “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah I’m sure,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to believe it. Then reality hit me like a sucker punch. People around us started talking about what had happened. Fans showed up at the hotel to show their support. Somehow everyone found out where we were staying and eventually there was a big crowd in the street. Mark got a call that James and Kirk were on their way to the hotel. Lars had checked out of the hospital. He broke a toe but would be fine. He had family in Denmark, so I figured he was going to see them.

  Mark asked if we would stay at the hotel to be with James and Kirk when they arrived. Of course we would. Our friend was dead and our other friends were grieving. It was insane. A couple hours later James and Kirk showed up. James was heavily sedated and drunk at the same time. Kirk said doctors had given James a bunch of sedatives because he was freaking out, but they didn’t put him to sleep so he kept drinking. We were all in a room together, and James kept pounding beer, vodka, whiskey—whatever was within his reach.

  Kirk was pretty drunk, too, but stable. He told us what happened. He wasn’t awake when the bus crashed. All he knew was he was suddenly getting thrown around like a rag doll in a dryer. Then it stopped and he got out of the bus and everyone was screaming. It was pitch black. Everyone was trying to account for everybody else, and no one could find Cliff. And then they saw his legs sticking out from under the side of the bus, and they fucking lost their minds. I can’t even imagine what that was like, and I never want to know. Even to this day it’s hard for my brain to wrap around that image.

  James started crying and screaming, “Cliff!!! Cliff!!” Then he became destructive. He kicked over lamps and threw bottles of booze. Frankie and Charlie looked at each other and, without saying a word, mutually decided to get James outside before the hotel had him arrested. The hotel management wouldn’t care that Cliff was dead. They’d just want to prevent their place from getting trashed. The two of them took James outside for a walk figuring maybe he’d calm down. I stayed inside with Kirk. We could hear James down the street screaming Cliff’s name over and over. I was completely heartsick. I hung out with Kirk a little while longer. He was finally passing out. He said, “I’m going to sleep, I don’t think I’ll see you in the morning.” They were leaving super early to fly back to San Francisco.

  We didn’t know what we were doing. People were scrambling to try and get us flights, but we were supposed to be on the tour for five more weeks. Now, we had to try to change flights and no one had any money to buy new tickets. We were stuck in Copenhagen the whole next day, then Jonny Z figured out the cheapest way to get us home. We flew to London, stayed there for a day, then got a flight back to New York. As soon as I got home I showered, packed m
y bag, slept, then got up to fly to San Francisco.

  I stayed at James’s little apartment in the city and at Kirk’s mom’s house for a few days, hung out with Metallica, and then went to the funeral. I met Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin for the first time and their guitarist, Jim Martin; they were good friends with Cliff. We all hung out at Kirk’s mom’s house for hours every day drinking beer and talking. Those guys were already figuring out what to do next. I asked James what was happening with the Lars situation.

  “We’re not going to do that now,” he said. “We can’t lose two guys, we can’t do it. We’re going to find a new bass player. The last thing Cliff would want would be for us to not play music. That’s the last thing that guy would want. We’ll start looking soon and figure it out.”

  Within a couple of days, we were sitting around Kirk’s house, making jokes. Someone said, “Get Lemmy.” I suggested Gene Simmons. We were just throwing stupid names out there to keep the tone as light as possible, so we weren’t all completely depressed. We drank and told stories about Cliff. It was so surreal. I half expected him to walk through the door and say, “Ha, ha. I got you guys!” It seemed like something Cliff would do.

  Then Metallica were auditioning people. I thought Armored Saint’s bassist Joey Vera was going to get the gig. He seemed like the obvious candidate. He’s a great player and they were already friends. But he decided to stay with his band, which was doing pretty well on its own. Armored Saint had two records out on Chrysalis and were just about to record Raising Fear. Next thing I knew, they offered the job to Flotsam and Jetsam bassist Jason Newsted. Michael Alago, who signed Metallica to Elektra, is the one who told me. I had never heard of Flotsam and Jetsam. I said, “Jason who?”