by Scott Ian
“What’s wrong with you? How could you do this to her?” My mom dug into me and so did her parents. My dad was the only one who supported me. He has always had my back.
Marge begged for a second chance and I agreed to go into couples therapy. I figured, “Hey, I’ll try it. I owe her that much. Who knows? Maybe this therapist will say something and a lightbulb will go off in my head and we’ll live happily ever after.”
I sat at couples therapy bored out of my mind, and after a few sessions the therapist said, “You really don’t want to be here, do you Scott? You’re not working at this.” I said, “No, I’m not. I’m telling you, I’m done. I’m not in love with you and I don’t want to have kids. I’m being honest. I’ve been dishonest for years, now I’m being honest, and I have to go. I have to get out.”
I moved out of the house and into a studio apartment in Greenwich Village.
Chapter 17
Starting Over
I went back to LA soon after breaking the news to Marge, and when I got back to New York in late 1989, Debbie came back with me and moved in. It was nice to have real companionship. Everything was great. We’d eat out, go to movies, and have lots of sex. I guess most new couples do. The mundane becomes the unusual and being with someone is suddenly exciting again. Marge would still call pleading for me to come back. “Please, please, please. Let’s try again. I can change!” That was a drag, and my sympathy quickly turned to annoyance. “No, no, no. It’s over! Don’t you get it? I’m done. Done!”
I always loved New York and I still do, but by the end of 1989 I couldn’t wait to get out of the city. There were too many ghosts, too many memories. Going to Los Angeles to make Persistence of Time gave me an escape route. Debbie came with me. She was thrilled because, basically, she was going back home and she wasn’t in love with New York like I was. To be fair, she didn’t have the best experiences there. One night, I convinced her to come with me to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Looking back, it reminds me of the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) to a porno movie and she storms out.
Debbie wasn’t thrilled about going to the film to begin with, but she knew I really wanted to see it. The movie is a gritty, realistic depiction of mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas, his sidekick Otis Toole, and the heinous murders they committed in the sixties and seventies. She was already tense when we sat down in our seats. The theater was right in Times Square, and it was old, shitty, filthy, and broken down—the kind with rips in the screen that distract you throughout the film—and the place was pretty empty. About forty-five minutes into the movie, during one of the really violent scenes, we heard a rhythmic noise behind us, like a seat creaking in time, quiet at first, but it gradually became more noticeable. We heard moaning and heavy breathing. Debbie turned around and saw a guy two rows behind her forcefully beating off while he watched the movie. She screamed, stood up, and left in a state of pique. I followed her and apologized, but she yelled at me as if I had planned the whole charade. She was so angry that I took her to such a twisted film she threatened to break up with me. It took some effort, but I was able to talk her down. We were leaving for LA in just a few days, so she wouldn’t have to deal with crazy NYC anymore.
We got a free ride to LA because I was able to put all my shit on the gear truck heading to California. First, though, I had to shoulder the weight of another pile of Jewish guilt. A couple of days before I left for LA, Anthrax were at Electric Lady rehearsing songs for Persistence of Time. I planned to meet my mom at the studio and have lunch with her. I thought that would be a good time to tell her I was leaving New York and going to LA with Debbie, which I knew she wouldn’t be happy about. She had always liked Marge and was heartbroken when our marriage ended. Actually, I didn’t know how upset she was until we were coming back from lunch and walking down Eighth Street back to Electric Lady.
In her best Jewish mom voice, she said, “I just have to tell you. I’m very, very unhappy with this decision. I think you’re making a huge mistake. This is the wrong choice, absolutely wrong. I don’t know how you could do this to Marjorie. It’s a horrible thing you’re doing. You want my blessings? If I had my way right now, you’d fall in front of a bus and wake up in the hospital with amnesia and not remember any of this, and this girl from California”—she fucking hated Debbie—“you wouldn’t know who she was.”
I looked at her and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, absolutely not,” she insisted. “I’ve wished this every night since you told us you had split up with Marge.”
“Ma, that’s pretty fucked up. You want me to get hit by a bus?”
“I don’t care. This is how I feel,” she said.
She was going nuts, practically foaming at the mouth. So I said, “You know what? Go fuck yourself! Go fuck yourself, Ma. Really. Take it back! Tell me right now that you’re sorry.”
She stood her ground and refused to apologize.
“Go fuck yourself!” I said again. There were no other words to express how betrayed I felt. I walked into Electric Lady, shut the door, and I didn’t talk to her for almost two years. My attitude was, “You’re my mother. I love you, but I don’t have to like you. And I definitely don’t have to talk to you.”
Eventually my father convinced me to reach back out to her. He said she wasn’t going to be around forever and I would regret not remedying the situation or at least having closure. “I know how she is,” he added. “I used to be married to her. Just call her. Be there. Be her son. Be civil. Just get back into her life.”
I wrote her a letter, because I couldn’t call her. I didn’t want to hear her voice. I wrote and I told her exactly how I felt. I said, “Apologize or don’t apologize at this point. I don’t care. But I’d like to have you back in my life in some way, shape, or form.”
She was thrilled. But it took a long time for me to feel close to her again. Granted, I was in California and I had a 3,000-mile buffer. That was great. I’d see her once or twice a year when I was in New York with the band, and my obligations as a good son were met. But I don’t think all of the ice around my heart melted until recently when I saw how happy she was interacting with my son Revel and how much he laughed when he was with her.
Debbie and I lived at the Oakwood Apartments over on Barham in Toluca Hills, North Hollywood, which is where the band was staying while we were recording. I had a furnished apartment there, so I put all my shit in storage. A few months later we found an apartment in Huntington Beach off the Pacific Coast Highway. In less than a year I went from living in a tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village to a brand new modern two-bedroom apartment right on the ocean. I had never lived anywhere but smoggy, grimy New York, and suddenly I’m in a location that looked like something out of Endless Summer. It was really a dream come true because I had wanted to be in California again ever since I was there in 1977 to skateboard.
Los Angeles was like a carnival funhouse with no security, a giant playground where there weren’t any rules and I could act like a kid all the time. A lot of people from New York have this East Coast–versus–the world mentality. I’ve never believed in any sort of rivalries between cities. Even when I was a proud New Yorker, I never hated LA. I loved the weather, the geography, the history of Hollywood, the James Ellroy noir weirdness, and the Charles Bukowski excess LA offered. There were great clubs, great bands. California had Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, and Testament. At the time it was everything New York wasn’t.
Some of my friends said, “Dude, why do you want to move out to LA? Fuck LA! Fuck the West Coast.” And I’d tell them, “Man, every time I go to LA, I have a blast. Come out and see for yourself.” My brother Jason and a few of my friends did and ended up moving there not long after. Debbie started introducing me to her friends right away, and I was instantly hanging out with all these old-school punk rock and heavy metal surfer dudes who had been in Hunting
ton Beach their whole life and who all knew me from Anthrax. For about a year and a half it was great, then reality started to take its toll.
Things had changed a lot between 1987 and early 1990, and I wanted our music and lyrics to reflect that. My divorce was getting really ugly. I looked back at my life with new perspective and started thinking about the future. Most of my friends were having kids, and I was still touring in a rock band and about as far from settling down as possible. Even though I was with Debbie and I was faithful to her, I felt an emptiness in my soul. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything really meaningful, just repeating the same cycles: shampoo, rinse, repeat. I know a lot of dudes dream of being in a successful rock band and would sell their soul to make it happen. Sometimes I felt like I had already done that, only without being at the crossroads with my guitar and Jack Butler disguised as Gene Simmons. Maybe signing a record contract or a manager’s contract is pretty much the same thing as making a deal with the devil. Having toured the world and lived out all the stupid rock and roll mythology, I started to wonder if there was more to life. Don’t get me wrong. I had a blast making music and playing shows and being a juvenile delinquent, but I started looking into the future more and trying to figure where I’d be in ten, twenty, thirty years. And that weighed on my mind while I was writing the lyrics for Persistence of Time.
Anthrax started seriously working on the album in early 1990, and that’s when the cracks really started to show, and that little foul smell I was detecting in our chemistry started to become a garbage dump. Working on that record was not fun. The inflammatory mood of the sessions was foreshadowed by a fire at our practice space in Yonkers. We were renting a room on the second floor of a printing shop. We’d had it for a few years at that point, and it was basically our jam space that we used all the time. I was staying at an apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village, and I got a call early in the morning from Charlie saying, “You don’t need to come to the studio today.”
I was expecting to swing by and work on some songs, so I asked why, and he said, “There was a fire in the building last night, and it’s all gone.”
“What?!?” Practically before I could hang up, I got on the train and headed to the studio. We were all there and the second floor, where all our gear was, was smoldering. The fire was out, but the building was still smoking.
No one would let us in while the firemen were there, and we kept asking, “Is there any gear left?” But they just said to stay away and they’d pull out whatever was left the next day.
Once the firemen left we were like, “Fuck this.” Everyone in the band and some of our friends climbed up on the roof, got in through a window, and started salvaging what we could. In retrospect it probably was stupid to walk into a building that had just been in flames. The floor could have caved in on us, but we weren’t thinking about that, we were thinking about our Marshalls and our Jackson guitars. We literally made a human chain so people inside handed stuff out the window to guys on the roof and from the roof to the ground. There were a whole bunch of us. We pulled out everything that wasn’t destroyed, even stuff that was burned but maybe salvageable. In total, it was about half of our equipment. We easily lost fifteen speaker cabinets and a lot of guitars and four track machines. I also lost two Jubilee Series Marshalls that I had gotten in 1987. They were great heads, but they were only two years old, and I was able to replace them. At least I was able to pull out the two main guitars I used back then, my white Jackson Randy Rhoads and my black 1981 Gibson Flying V. The Jackson Rhoads had been in a different part of the room and hadn’t been touched by the fire. But the guitar case holding the V was pretty damaged and moderately burned. I opened it and saw the pick guard and knobs were partially melted because it was close to where the fire was, but it looked super cool. It was otherwise undamaged and still, to this day, it has the melty knobs on it—I just left them on there.
Fortunately, we were insured, and we were reimbursed for a lot of the stuff we lost. So it wasn’t a total catastrophe, and we were able to move forward without losing any momentum. We knew we didn’t want Persistence of Time to be a thrash album. Even though less than three years had passed since Among the Living, we felt so far removed from that scene. We had grown into something bigger and better than just a thrash band, and we didn’t want to be pigeonholed. We wanted to be taken as seriously as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. We naturally started to change, evolve, and explore other avenues of heavy music.
Thrash burned bright and hot in the eighties, and now everyone was moving on to other things. The same thing happened to the NWOBHM. With the exception of Priest and Maiden, a lot of bands we loved from that era didn’t make it past 1985. Where were Raven, Angel Witch, Saxon, and Venom? It wasn’t too hard to imagine ourselves in that same predicament. We were still drawing crowds and selling merch and albums, but I knew that if we didn’t do something bigger and better, people were going to get bored.
From the point State of Euphoria was released, I felt like time was ticking, which might be why time was such a recurring motif in Persistence of Time. The truth is, we never made it easy for straight-ahead thrash fans, as thrashy and brutal as Spreading the Disease and Among the Living had been. We constantly challenged ourselves, and consequently our audience, because we wanted to keep our music fluid and evolving. Maybe that’s one reason we’re still around. If State of Euphoria was Among the Living II and Persistence of Time was Among the Living III, we probably would have gotten bored and broken up by 1992.
The songwriting process for Persistence of Time was the same as it had been since Spreading the Disease. Charlie wrote the bulk of the music, and Frankie, Charlie, and I worked on the arrangements. I wrote the lyrics. Frankie wrote and helped with the melodies, and then Frankie and I worked with Joey over a period of weeks on the vocal parts. That formula worked great for the first two albums and okay on State of Euphoria; we just didn’t spend enough time on it. But with Persistence of Time, it felt impossible. Our usual process with Joey wasn’t working anymore. Even after we started tracking at Conway Studios in Los Angeles at the beginning of 1990, it wasn’t happening. I had lost the patience I used to have with him because I had no patience left in my life at that point, and I couldn’t come to grips with the idea of my words, thoughts, and feelings being sung by someone else anymore. That balance in my life was gone. It was okay when I was writing about Stephen King stories and comic books, but the lyrics for Persistence of Time were extremely personal and to hear Joey misinterpreting songs about my destroyed marriage made me furious. It’s not like I could step up to the plate and sing. I couldn’t, and that inflamed my frustration even more. I wanted this record to be perfect. After State of Euphoria it had to be perfect. I wasn’t going to settle for just okay. It had to be exactly how I wanted it to be or it wasn’t going to get done.
We busted our balls to get those songs right—and to get Joey to learn them. We thought he had it and he sang them, but they didn’t sound right. He was getting frustrated as well because he didn’t understand what I meant when I said the songs needed a different kind of emotion. He tried to make them sound angrier. He tried to make them more raw. But the core of the problem was that the lyrics weren’t his; they were mine. My thoughts, my feelings, and my ideas, and how could he express my torment? Maybe nobody could. The music on Persistence of Time was much deeper, denser, and darker than anything we’d ever done. It has more in common with Sound of White Noise, musically, than it does with State of Euphoria. It was really a bridge in a lot of ways to that record, yet I couldn’t hear that grittiness because of Joey’s disconnected vocals.
It made me insane. I felt like I had written the best lyrics of my career, and Joey’s voice didn’t match the words. Every time he sang “Keep It in the Family” he sounded happy. I told him, “Dude, this is not a happy song. This is about racism.” “Belly of the Beast” is about the Holocaust, and when he sang it I couldn’t feel the weight and passion that t
hose words needed to convey their meaning. The phrasing and timing on the opening track, “Time,” were challenging, and Joey had to do take after take to finally get close to the vibe I wanted for the song.
That was especially irritating to me, because “Time” was about aging and it was extremely personal. I was twenty-six, my marriage was over, my world was different, yet for Joey everything was the same. To my mind he hadn’t grown with the band, and I couldn’t fix that. I couldn’t stand hearing him sing my words anymore. I hated it, and at the same time we were pulling teeth, working as hard as we could to get the best we could out of him.
It was a terrible time for me, and it must have been worse for him because he didn’t know what he was doing wrong. How could he? On the surface with me everything was business as usual. I was having an internal meltdown over my words, and I wasn’t communicating that. I didn’t have the tools then to be able to, I just wanted it to be right without having to force it. I kept thinking, “How long have you been in this band now? Sing the parts. Why am I doing your job?” Of course, I never said any of that. I could never be confrontational with Joey because he wasn’t combative at all. He’s a really sweet, gentle guy, which made it even harder to approach him. Frankie and I were on the same page, and we talked about where we were going with Joey all the time.
Joey could tell I was getting angry, but I never yelled at him. That’s not who I am. When I’m pissed I become stone dead fucking silent. I walked out of the room quite a bit because if I didn’t, I would have started screaming, and I was determined not to do that. I wanted to be more like my dad, in that respect. In the end, we put a lot of work into Persistence, more than any of the previous records, and I was really proud of it. The songwriting for that record showed me a different side of myself and the band that I wanted to continue exploring. I think it’s underrated. It sold well. It shipped gold and our fans loved it. We maintained everything we had. But for all the work we put into that record, I feel like it should have been bigger.