by Scott Ian
“Hey Dad . . .”
“Why are you calling so early?” he interrupted. “Are you okay? Is everything alright?”
I explained to him everything was fine but that I was at Prospect Park Hospital and I needed him to pick me up.
“Why are you at the hospital? Are you alright?”
I told him I did mushrooms and had a really bad trip and that I’d give him the details later. Everything got really quiet for a few seconds. Then he burst out laughing. “How fucking old are you?” he said. “Do you think you’re still eighteen?”
“Dad, I’m thirty-three. You know I’m thirty-three.” I felt ashamed. He laughed again then said he’d get up and come get me. An hour later he picked me up and drove me to his place. I changed my puke pants, and we had lunch and went to my brother’s soccer game.
During my one time tripping on mushrooms, I had almost killed myself twice, once on the fire escape and again when I tried jumping out the window of the car. It turned out the only one who was trying to kill me was me. Standing there sober, I shivered and decided I never wanted to be out of control like that again. The drunkest I’ve ever been, I was always under my own power. When I couldn’t control myself anymore, I blacked out and I was sleeping. That wasn’t the case with mushrooms. I wasn’t there. Scott was gone and they were in control. I’d never do that again.
Chapter 23
The Last Regret
On October 30, 1993, I got a message from Al Jourgensen saying he was going to be in town to play this all-star show at the Viper Room in LA on Halloween, and he wanted to invite me. The band was called P, and they featured Al, Butthole Surfers vocalist Gibby Haynes, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, and Johnny Depp. I was at my house in Huntington Beach, so it was easy enough to make the show. I asked Everlast and my friends Bobby and Rich to come. We all met out front of the club and squeezed our way inside. The place was packed way beyond capacity. We had our backs to the bar, we couldn’t move. We decided to give the band five minutes and then get the fuck out of there unless the music was really incredible. P took forever to come on, and we’d already been there an hour. I noticed a lot of people at the bar were acting really weird and were definitely on something heavy. All of a sudden, there was some commotion in the crowd near us. We couldn’t even get out of the way. All we could do was lean. Some dude pushed through with a guitar case, trying to get onstage. People surrounding him were yelling for everyone to get out of his way. It smelled like someone had shit their pants.
“Fuck this,” I said. “If the band isn’t on in the next five minutes we’re out of here. I don’t care if we see Al or not.”
Right as we were about to bolt, the lights came on and the dude who had poo pants walked on with a guitar. The lights were dim, but I could tell it was ex–Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante. Everyone knew he was a major junkie, so it made sense that he stunk like a bum. He walked up to the mike, a dazed expression in his eyes, and smiled a toothless grin. He mumbled that he was gonna play some songs, but he was really hard to understand. He slurred indecipherable lyrics and picked at his guitar like he was trying to remove scabs. It was fucking awful. After the second song he started to say something, then turned and threw up on Gibby’s leg.
We had already suffered through eight minutes of this, and it was like watching a super-slow-mo video of someone spontaneously combusting. He played one more song, then P came on, and it was almost worse than Frusciante because now there was a whole band onstage making incoherent noise. They played some cover songs, but they were so bad you couldn’t tell what they were. One of the only details I remember from the actual performance is Al stepped on his own guitar cord and unplugged himself. He spent the next four minutes leaning over and trying to find his cord. I zoned in on this because it was a real feat of gymnastics. The way he was bending and stretching trying to reach his cable on the floor while holding a guitar was gravity defying. The song ended, and Al found his cord and plugged it in.
A screech of insanely loud feedback shot through the room. Gibby was singing something, and he turned around to Al and shouted, “Shut up! Stop making noise!”
It was a disaster. My friends and I looked at each other and gestured that it was time to leave. We walked out of the club and onto the corner of Sunset Boulevard.
“Why don’t we go back to my place?” Everlast said. “I got booze and we can play pool.”
I thought that was a good idea. As we were about to bolt, the back doors of the club flew open, and a bunch of people came out and lay some dude on the ground. We figured someone got really fucked up and his friends were leaving him there so he could sober up. Then I realized there was no more sound coming from the club and Flea was outside staring at this guy. Other people started coming out, including Johnny Depp. Five minutes later an ambulance pulled up, and paramedics got out. They worked on the guy for five minutes.
“Whoever that is, he’s in bad shape,” Everlast said. “He’s obviously not breathing. He’s probably dead.”
“Fuck, this is getting really weird,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Before we had a chance to leave, Christina Applegate walked up to me. “River’s dead,” she sobbed. It took me a second to realize who she was talking about, because I didn’t see River Phoenix in the club and I had never met him before. She repeated, “River’s dead.”
“River? . . . Oh, River Phoenix,” I said.
“He’s dead! He’s dead!” she cried then took off.
We agreed that we should get the fuck out of there before the TV news crews showed up. As we were walking away, some paparazzi asked me and Everlast to take a picture. River’s body was on the sidewalk just behind us, in the shot. Paparazzi are annoying at the best of times; this was seriously not fucking cool. Everlast exploded at the guy, “YOU WANT TO TAKE A PICTURE OF US WITH THAT DEAD KID ON THE STREET BEHIND US YOU SICK DISRESPECTFUL FUCK? SHOW SOME FUCKING RESPECT MOTHERFUCKER!” Everlast grabbed the guy and was going to take his camera and smash it when Rich got between them and pulled Everlast off the guy, saving him what would have been a big lawsuit and maybe jail. Everlast thanked Rich for stepping in, and we went to his house and turned on the TV. Sure enough, within five minutes of watching CNN, they reported River Phoenix had died.
As crazy as my little thrash metal world was, that was a different scene entirely. You could tell there was some bad mojo when you walked into the room that night. It felt much safer in our sheltered circle of chaos. As much schism as there was in Anthrax, no one ever overdosed. Still, we weren’t REO Speedwagon. Sometimes shit would blow up when we least expected it to.
One night, Debbie and I went to see Danzig at Irvine Meadows, and we bumped into this guy who started talking shit to me. “Hey, Mr. Anthrax guy. You fucking suck!”
I didn’t care. It’s funny that people think I’m going to get mad if they tell me my band sucks, like their opinion means so much to me I’m willing to fight them. Idiots. So I ignored him. This guy followed me all night everywhere. I was there with Debbie and my friends Billy and Bobby trying to have fun and watch the show, and this guy was six feet away, busting my balls, trying to start something. Before Danzig went on, we walked down a flight of steps to go backstage, and there’s this guy again coming up the stairs. “Fuck you Mr. Anthrax! You fuckin’ suck.”
I just laughed. Then Debbie yelled at him, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up already?”
“Fuck you, bitch! Why don’t you suck my cock?!?” That was it—fuck with me fine, but fuck with my family or friends? No fucking way. I snapped.
I saw red and charged toward him. Bobby grabbed me in a full nelson and dragged me back down the steps. I was at the bottom of the stairs, and this dickhead was at the top. “I’m gonna fucking kill you!” I shouted.
People turned around and stared. Nobody knew this idiot, but everyone knew who I was. The guy laughed at me and shouted something. Billy
was at the top of the stairs talking to him. I wondered what the fuck Billy had to say to this asshole. Then Billy shrugged and the guy charged down the stairs. As soon as he got to the bottom, Bobby let go of me. The guy took a swing at me, but it was a sloppy, drunken hook. I’d been taking boxing lessons for three years, and I dodged his punch with ease, and then I landed a full-on straight right as hard as I could to the side of his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes and was out cold. I instantly felt terrible. As much as I wanted to pummel this moron, I was bummed that I knocked out a drunken idiot, and now I felt like the idiot. The guy’s friends came running over, and I braced myself to fight them, too.
“Dude, we’ve been telling him to shut up all night,” one of them said. “We’re really sorry. He fucking deserved it.” They picked up their friend and all walked away. I was shaken. I’d never hit someone like that outside of a ring.
Not long after decking the moron at the Danzig show, I asked Debbie to marry me, which triggered an avalanche of other unpleasantness. It wasn’t Debbie’s fault, surely, but sometimes all it takes is a crack in the foundation to realize your walls are about to crumble. Looking back, getting engaged to Debbie was a mistake, but it had nothing to do with what happened afterward with Anthrax. Elektra finally released the “Room for One More” video. It got decent airplay on MTV, and we figured radio would take to it as well. But Elektra decided not to push the song to radio because they thought we were done. We had released two singles, and now radio was through with us because “Black Lodge” wasn’t a hit. That was perplexing, since our fans were stoked on “Room for One More,” as we knew they would be.
We stayed on the road all the way into the summer of ’94. Rob Halford’s Fight opened for us on the last leg of the tour. By that point we had sold around 700,000 copies, which, other than the “I’m The Man” EP, was our best-selling record. We felt bittersweet because this was the record that was supposed to go double platinum and beyond. I’m convinced it came down to the fact that we caved and let Elektra make the decision about “Black Lodge.” Had we gone with “Room for One More” first, I’m sure Sound of White Noise would have done for us what Countdown for Extinction did for Megadeth. If we had done what we felt was right in our hearts, we would have sold millions.
That’s definitely the biggest business mistake we’ve made in the history of the band, and it cost us big time. If I could use a Tardis and change one thing, that’s it. That would be the single event I would alter in my whole professional life.
On July 10, 1994, Debbie and I got married. A few days before the wedding, some of my friends threw me a bachelor party in the clubhouse of an apartment complex on PCH, and there were strippers and booze . . . and Gene Simmons. He fucking drove down from Beverly Hills to Huntington Beach to come to my shitty little party. He walked in and everyone lost their minds. No one could believe it was him. At first everyone thought it must be a Gene impersonator. The strippers immediately lost interest in me, and within seconds one of these girls was doing a handstand with her back to Gene and her legs up over his shoulders. Gene went with it and obliged by sticking out that famous tongue of his. The room literally exploded.
Afterward, we went to some shitty café on Main Street in Huntington Beach to have something to eat with Gene Simmons. “You came to my bachelor party?!?” I blurted.
In that unmistakable Gene voice, he said, “You invited me, I came.”
I asked Gene if he wanted to come over to my house and hang out, and he said, “No thank you, I’m going to go home now.”
So me, my best friend Andy Buchanan, who was living with me in LA at the time, and Guy Oseary, who ran Madonna’s label and is now her manager, crossed Pacific Coast Highway to get more booze from a convenience store before it closed, and Gene went with us to get a water for his drive home. We walked into a convenience store I had been to a thousand times because it was right in my neighborhood. I went to the back of the store where the beer was, and I heard raised voices. I walked back to the front, and Guy was arguing with a seventeen-year-old kid who was the son of the owner. They were yelling at each other, so I said, “What the fuck is going on?”
Turned out, the store owners were Palestinians, and the kid got mouthy when he saw Guy’s Star of David necklace. “You’re wearing a Jewish star!” the kid said. “To my people, that is what wearing a swastika is like to your people.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Guy said.
“You fucking Jews!” the kid snarled.
Guy is Israeli and doesn’t take kindly to anti-Semitism. He’s a hardcore Jew—unlike me. I was all drunk and happy. I said, “C’mon guys! Gene Simmons is here!”
Gene looked at what was going down, dropped his water bottle, said goodnight, and walked out of the store, disappearing into the fog on PCH like a real-life Demon. He didn’t need this shit.
I was trying to calm everyone down. I said, “Hey, you know me. I’m in here all the time. I’m Jewish. Did I ever want to kill you?”
“Fuck you, too!” said the kid. Suddenly, my mood went from cheery to black. I reached across the counter, grabbed the guy, and started pulling him toward me. “You fucking punk! What’s your fuckin’ problem, motherfucker?!” I shouted. “I come in here and spend money in your fuckin’ store. My friends spend money in your fuckin’ store. What the fuck?!”
“Fuck you! I kill you motherfucker!” the kid screamed.
The dad and uncle started yelling, defending the kid. The uncle started to run toward us, and Andy grabbed the guy—who must have been fifty—and slammed him by the neck against the beer fridge, choking him. I let go of the kid, figuring it would diffuse the situation and we could all go home. Wrong. He reached under the counter and pulled out a gun. With hands shaking, he waved it at me and Guy. “Fuck you! Fuck you! I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll fucking kill you, you Jew fuck bastards!”
I was really drunk and not thinking clearly. We were unarmed, so the fact that this kid pulled a gun on us was a total pussy move and only made me angrier.
“Yeah? You pull a gun, you fucking pussy! You need to pull a gun? Come on, motherfucker! You’re bigger than me. I’m just a little fucking Jew! Come on, motherfucker, let’s go right now. I’m gonna fucking kill you!” Then Andy slapped him in the face.
“Fuck you! Fuck you! I kill you! I kill all of you!”
Luckily, that was when we heard sirens. Someone else who had been in the store called the cops. “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Guy said.
We turned around and hightailed it back to my house. Once we were inside we all busted out laughing, partially from the absurdity of what we had been through, but also because we had made it out alive.
Guy said to Andy, “Dude, you’re an idiot! What the fuck were you doing? The guy pulled a gun on you and you slapped him?!?”
“I’m Scottish” was all Andy said and all he had to say. Fucking crazy Scots. And then he added, “I’m lucky I didn’t get my fucking head blown off!”
After that, the wedding was seriously anticlimactic. It wasn’t a big Jewish fiasco like my first wedding. This one was completely nonreligious. It was more like a gigantic party with tons of friends. We held it at the Hilton in Huntington Beach. Debbie handled most of the planning, but there wasn’t a lot. A couple of weeks before the wedding, I met Debbie and her mom at the Hilton to talk to the caterers. While we were there the famous O.J. Simpson police chase happened. We watched him drive the white Ford Bronco down the highway in front of a sea of cop cars. He was running for his life. I should’ve been as well. Two weeks later we were married.
Chapter 24
Stomped Out
Debbie and I celebrated our marriage by taking a honeymoon to Bali. It was relaxing, beautiful, and inspiring. By the time it was over, I couldn’t wait to get back to LA to start writing songs for Stomp 442. At first, life was great for me both personally and professionally. Then everyth
ing turned to shit.
Our label viewed us as a huge disappointment; they were never going to take any blame for making the wrong decision about the way they promoted Sound of White Noise. It was the second time in our career that we got greedy and made a bad call, and we vowed it would never happen again. We were determined not to let anyone make decisions for us from then on, and for better or worse, that’s the way we’ve been ever since.
We were looking to point our finger at someone and blame them for not helping to push us over the top, and that’s one of the reasons we fired Jonny Z. We were mad at him for not standing up to Elektra. We felt he should have known they were going to lose faith in us and taken control of the situation before it went south. Looking back, there was no way he could have known what would happen. We were all equally responsible. But that’s just what happens with managers. Most of the time they probably get fired for the wrong reason. It’s the same way in sports. If a team underperforms, the manager or head coach is the first to go.
The truth is, Jonny’s heart just wasn’t into it anymore. We came a long way and he was an important part of our growth, but he made his money and he wasn’t the same after that. He used to call fifty times a day with ideas. Maybe forty-nine of them were stupid, but one of them was usually good and we’d run with it. That was the great thing about Jonny. He had this fire in his belly that never went out—until it did. He had made a ton of money for what he did with Metallica. They left him and went to Q Prime, and Jonny sued and won. He maintained his commissions for the first four Metallica albums. He was already getting massive royalty checks, and by the time The Black Album came out, he didn’t need to work so hard managing bands.