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

by Scott Ian

  At the same time I was basically living with Lynne at her apartment in New York, I was talking to Debbie about buying a house for us. Again, the girl I was with at home had no idea what was going on when I wasn’t with her. It started to feel like a serious case of déjà vu, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake I made with Marge. I couldn’t live that lie again. Yet there I was, sneaking out of the house in California all the time so I could find a pay phone to call Lynne. Eventually it became too big a secret to keep, and I decided to break off the engagement with Debbie and move in with Lynne.

  I told Debbie I had been having an affair for months and that’s why our relationship had gotten so shitty. I apologized and told her I just couldn’t be dishonest with her anymore. It wasn’t fair.

  She freaked out and screamed and cursed at me. She cried and slammed doors, then yelled at me some more. But somehow over the next two weeks of me being home, we reconciled the situation. I started thinking with my brain instead of my dick, and I asked myself, “Do I really want to go back to New York and live with this crazy model chick?” As unstable as my relationship with Debbie was, with Lynne life was fucking nuts. She was really into cocaine and pills and shit that I knew nothing about. I wasn’t doing any drugs, just drinking. That scene was over-the-top crazy, and I thought, “Do I really want to walk away from what I have going on here, which seems more solid? Is that the best move? Maybe what’s happening in New York is just a phase.”

  I decided that being with Lynne was just a way to escape the pressure I was under and to get my rocks off without all the baggage that goes with a real relationship. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that it would be a real mistake to get serious with Lynne. So instead of ending it with Debbie, I broke up with Lynne.

  Chapter 21

  No More Room

  Anthrax recorded Sound of White Noise with Dave Jerden, who had worked with Jane’s Addiction, Alice in Chains, and tons of bands we loved. We stayed in LA; we did the drums at A&M Studios and tracked everything else at Eldorado and Cherokee recording studios. We had spent so long working on the album that we all had our parts down cold, and before we knew it we were done. It was the closest we had come to the final recording being exactly what we had imagined. Elektra sent out tons of advances of Sound of White Noise to journalists and radio programmers, and the reactions were phenomenal.

  John and I went to Europe to do interviews a few months before it came out, and people were fucking pumped. They loved it. I don’t remember any negative reviews from anywhere that had previously supported us. The media ate it up, but I didn’t know how fans were going to react until it was released and we went on tour. The first indicators were good. “Only” was the first single. We shot a video for it that MTV played, and the song was on the radio. It was a completely different experience than what we were used to. Elektra Records had invested a large amount of money in the band and was putting the full power of their company behind it, just like they promised. Sound of White Noise came out May 25 and debuted at number 7 on the Billboard album chart. The album sold almost 100,000 copies our first week, which was more than double any of our other records.

  Debbie and I found a nice house in Huntington Beach down the street from the beach. I was able to get a mortgage for the place because I carried a copy of Billboard magazine into the bank that included a chart showing how high the album debuted. The loan officer literally said, “Oh, you have a top 10 record. You obviously have enough money for a mortgage.”

  It’s a good thing they accepted the chart as proof of income. Despite this big advance check for the album, my first divorce bled me dry and I still owed Marge about $50,000. I couldn’t prove from my tax forms that I’d been employed at a certain location for a certain amount of time and earned a regular income. I also had my cut of the money from the Elektra deal, but that was gone in fifteen minutes. I had a check for $508,000, and it felt like I had won the lottery. But I put aside 40 percent of it in an account to pay taxes, I wrote Marge a check, and I put a huge down payment on the house and set up a mortgage. By then I only had about $50,000 left for living expenses. Granted, I bought a house, but it was scary that so much money could be gone so quickly.

  The whole band was excited about the chart position of Sound of White Noise. We felt like we had beaten the odds and everything was going our way. We changed singers, and we survived and came back stronger. What else could we possibly think at the time but that people were stoked by our decision? Later, we found out that wasn’t entirely true. At the time, the majority of our fans still supported us, but there was a certain percentage, maybe as much as 30 percent, that couldn’t accept Anthrax without Joey Belladonna singing. I understood that gut reaction because I felt that way when David Lee Roth left Van Halen. I didn’t buy anything they put out or go to any of their shows until Roth came back. Their 2012 album, A Different Kind of Truth, was the first Van Halen record I bought since 1984. So I know how it works. Did I buy the Judas Priest records with Tim “Ripper” Owens? No, and I love Ripper. He’s a fucking awesome dude and an incredible singer, but Priest only has one real singer. We understood that we had crossed some of our fans. We insulted them and fucked up their world. We changed from something they loved into something they didn’t want anything to do with.

  That didn’t matter though, because we loved the record and we were still a great live band. There were a lot of highlights that came from the album. There would also be some huge disappointments. We came out of the box really strong. The record went gold in about six weeks based on the success of “Only.” We had a big summer tour with White Zombie and Quicksand lined up, and most of it sold out right after the tickets became available. Everyone wanted to get a second single out to radio and a new video to MTV in time for the tour. We wanted to go with “Room for One More.” We thought it was a fucking kick-ass track, and people were really reacting to it live. We thought it was our “Enter Sandman,” and it would take us over the top. It’s heavy, it’s got groove, it rocks. And it’s super catchy as well.

  We went to Elektra and told them our plans, and they came back to us and said that they thought we should release “Black Lodge” instead because it was more of a ballad. We all thought that was a really bad decision. We understood that it was the least “heavy” song on the album, and we knew bands usually broke big with videos for ballads, but it was still dark. We didn’t feel like it was a summer song that would have fans jumping up and down. I thought I could convince them to go with “Room for One More.” So I went to a meeting at the Elektra building and explained how we all felt. “Black Lodge” was too moody to come out in the summer. It seemed more like a song for October or November. I told them we should hold it until then and have it be the third single. I said, “For now, let’s keep rolling with the heavy shit and then in the fall we’ll tone it down a bit, and ‘Black Lodge’ will be like our ‘Unforgiven,’” another Metallica ballad that went gangbusters.

  The Elektra team didn’t agree. They strongly believed “Black Lodge” was the smash that we needed to release right away. They said we would quickly go from 500,000 records to 1.5 million, and once that happened we could do whatever we wanted. We never had this kind of discussion with a label before, and we’d never had the kind of success we were having, so we figured they knew what they were doing. They told us they would get Mark Pellington to shoot the video. He was the biggest video director in the world at the time. He did Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” which had become the gold standard for other directors. They said they’d spend $400,000 on the video for “Black Lodge,” and it would be our “Jeremy.”

  Our contract with Elektra gave us creative control; we had to agree with what they wanted to do. So we said we needed a couple days to mull it over. Charlie, Jonny, and I had a meeting and decided to go with Elektra’s decision. Even though it wasn’t what we felt in our gut was the right move, their machine was well oiled and running like a fine Swiss
timepiece. Who were we to argue with success?

  We told them to go for it, and they assured us we were making the right decision and that Pellington was in. There was only one hitch. He was tied up with a documentary and wouldn’t be available right away. We asked them if we could get another director, and they said it had to be him. He had already done a treatment for the video, which they loved, and he was “the best.”

  So we started the tour with White Zombie without a new video. Rob watched us every night from the side of the stage, and one day he asked me, “Why isn’t ‘Room for One More’ your single? That song fucking rules.” I told him it was supposed to be, but the label decided to get Mark Pellington to shoot a video for “Black Lodge,” which the label thought had more “bang for the buck.” He was supportive. “That sounds great! Mark Pellington’s awesome.”

  For all of Rob’s outrageous music, videos, and films, he’s the most levelheaded, down-to-earth guy ever. And he’s an astute businessman. Our radar should have blipped when he asked why “Room for One More” wasn’t the single, but we went with the program. As wild as Rob Zombie was during White Zombie’s show, he was the exact opposite of the guy he was getting compared to at the time, Ministry’s Al Jourgensen.

  I first met Al when Ministry were touring for their 1992 album Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs because Jonny Z was managing his band as well as ours. I was already a big Ministry fan so I knew a lot of their songs. When they played Lollapalooza in Jones Beach, New York, they invited me to come up with them and play their cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” Then, when I was back in Los Angeles, I went onstage with them, and Al just handed me his guitar. I did “So What,” “Thieves,” “Supernaut,” and a couple other songs. It was nerve-wracking because his guitar is, by far, the loudest thing on the stage, and if I screwed up, it would mess everyone up. But I pulled it off, and it freed him to run around like a lunatic with his giant microphone stand decorated with cattle bones. The thing was built on wheels so he could ride it around like a scooter and crash into things.

  When we got to Chicago on the first leg of the Sound of White Noise tour, Al joined us onstage at the Aragon Ballroom, and we played “Thieves.” Afterward, he took me for a ride in his brand new, insanely fast Nissan. He told me it was the fastest street-legal car in the United States, and it sure felt like it. He was driving a hundred miles per hour from the club to whatever bar we were heading to. He was a maniac behind the wheel, and a far from sober maniac. I was clinging to the side of the seat for dear life, like that would protect me if we plowed into a brick wall. Al told me how, a year earlier, he had Eddie Vedder shitting in his pants (like I was) in his car, and he played him Speak English or Die, which was, apparently, a huge inspiration for Al to add thrash metal guitars to his electronic music. At the end of the night, he said, “Maybe I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Maybe I’ll come to Detroit.”

  I said that would be awesome but figured there was no way in hell he was going to drive from Chicago to Detroit to see us play. The next day we were hanging out at the venue after sound check, and Al drove up in his Nissan in the late afternoon. I said, “Dude, you drove to Detroit?!?”

  “Fuck yeah. Let’s hang out!”

  We had another wild night, and at the end of the evening he said he’d see us the next night in Cleveland. We were flattered and we were having fun, but it didn’t take a lot of intelligence to realize that if he kept driving this high-octane rocket engine from city to city after long nights of drinking, he was likely to become a statistic.

  “Dude, why don’t you just ride in the bus with us?” I said.

  “Nah, nah, nah. I’m having a blast driving this car.”

  Sure enough, he showed up in Cleveland. We were playing an outdoor venue called the Nautica Stage. At that time we had two buses, one for the band and one for the crew. All the partying happened on the crew bus, which enabled us to keep the band bus nice and clean. That’s the night Al tried to pick a fight with Rob Zombie. Maybe they exchanged words over something that had gone down over the past couple days and the confrontation came to a head in Cleveland. At the time, Al was seeing White Zombie’s bassist Sean Yseult, and she and Rob had been a couple for years. Whatever. Al was standing outside White Zombie’s bus banging on the door, calling Rob a pussy and screaming for him to get off the bus and get his ass kicked. Rob had no intention of leaving the bus and did the smart thing by just ignoring Al. After about ten minutes of banging on the door, Al gave up and staggered to our crew bus.

  Later that night, I was back on the band bus. The TV was on in the background, and I was eating a chicken sandwich when the front door burst open and Al came storming in and ran through the bus, wild-eyed, gesticulating, and screaming. “That fucking bitch! That fucking whore! That fucking cunt!”

  “Dude, dude,” I said. “What’s wrong? Calm down.”

  “That fucking bitch!” he repeated. “I went in the back room of the crew bus with this fucking pig. She started going down on me, and the next thing I know she fucking straddles me and slips my cock in her pussy!”

  Al was apoplectic at this point: “I screamed ‘Goddammit, you fucking bitch!’ and threw her off of me, and I ran off the bus trying to pull my pants up. I came over here. Who knows what fucking disease that whore has?”

  “Dude, calm down,” I said, trying to chill him out before he started smashing things on our bus. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’re fine. Why don’t you go inside the venue? Maybe you can find a shower and rinse off.”

  Al looked at the table where I was sitting at the front of the bus and there was a stack of unopened Domino’s pizza boxes waiting for the band and crew. He walked over, opened the top box, raked his hand across the pizza, dragging cheese and piping hot sauce under his fingernails. He put his hand down his pants and started rubbing his cock and balls really hard with the steaming cheese and sauce. He screamed and looked at me with frantic desperation.

  “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?!?” I said. “Seriously, are you tripping?”

  He looked at me and said, “I read somewhere that the acid in tomato sauce will kill any STD. That’s right, isn’t it? Didn’t you hear that?”

  Of course, I hadn’t heard any such thing, but I figured I’d go along with him. “Right, Al. Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  He calmed down right away, sat down, had a drink, and got back off the bus and wandered into the night to find another party. Pizza cheese and sauce were dribbling over the front of his pants. After that show, we told Al he needed to lose his car if he wanted to stay out with us. He could either leave it in Cleveland, and then maybe fly back there at some point and drive it home, or we could figure out another plan because it wasn’t safe for him to be driving long distances in the condition he was in after shows. He wanted to drive to New York next, and that was a long haul. We convinced him to go home to Chicago on a day off, and then we paid for him to fly to New York to hang out with us. As far as I know, he went to bed that night in the hotel with his pants filled with cheese and sauce, and God knows how long it stayed down there. He wasn’t big on hygiene, so I doubt he showered at the hotel, and I’m sure he drove with it to Chicago. He probably figured the longer he left it in there, the better chance he had that it would kill any possible disease he might have contracted from this girl.

  A day and a half later, there he was in New York. We stayed at the Parker Meridien on Fifty-Seventh Street. They had an indoor basketball court. A bunch of us were there shooting hoops, and in walked Al, black cargo shorts, black tank top, and big black motorcycle boots, and he ran around and played basketball with us. Years later, he told me that the week he spent with us was probably the healthiest week of his life as a musician because no one on the bus was doing coke and none of us did heroin, so there was nowhere for him to score.

  The whole tour with White Zombie and Quicksand was great. Zombie were right on the verge of br
eaking. Beavis and Butthead was playing the shit out of “Thunder Kiss ’65,” and when those animated characters got behind something, it was destined to explode. It’s such a weird concept that a cartoon show where moronic high school kids almost arbitrarily ranked videos by saying “that’s cool” or “that sucks” had such an impact on the American public, but it did. Type O Negative got big thanks to Beavis and Butthead, and their undiluted praise for Danzig sent him over the top as well. White Zombie quickly became bigger than us, but the timing was good because it brought tons of people to the venues. I got up and played “Thunder Kiss ’65” a bunch of times with Zombie; they would close with it. Charlie and I chose Quicksand as an opener because we loved those guys. Our audience didn’t know them, and I don’t know that they converted much of our crowd. But having them on the road with us was our personal, selfish indulgence because we were in a position to say, “Hey, we want Quicksand out with us, and we don’t care what the promoters think.”

  We were pumped when we got back home from the tour, but we had been so busy playing shows we hadn’t kept track of sales. When we looked at the numbers, we realized that while we were on the road our chart position had slipped considerably. Nothing new had gone to radio, and Mark Pellington still hadn’t started shooting the video for “Black Lodge.” We went to Elektra and asked what was up, and they said that it didn’t even matter what was happening at the moment because when Pellington did the video for “Black Lodge,” it was going to hit and hit hard.