by Scott Ian
We hired Steve Barnett and Stuart Young, who managed AC/DC, and then we started writing, figuring the next album would make up for whatever we didn’t accomplish with Sound of White Noise. We thought everything was okay. We were still on Elektra, and we were determined to give them something they couldn’t ignore, take control, and make the right marketing decisions.
John and I were still raging every night and often arrived later to writing sessions than ever. So the rest of the guys decided we should move to a place in White Plains, New York, that was just a few miles from the Anthrax studio in Yonkers. Since there was nothing to do in White Plains, they figured we’d stay out of trouble and be more responsible. We acquiesced because we knew we were guilty of being late or showing up hungover to sessions when we did Sound of White Noise. We reluctantly agreed to stay in this crappy furnished apartment. It was like an airport hotel with a small desk, a couch, and a TV. It sucked big time and it was mind numbing. There was no way we could be creative in that place. But we had a rental car to drive to the studio, so after a few days John and I began driving forty miles to the city at night and hanging out in SoHo. We’d go to these hotspots like Spy and Wax, where you had to know someone to get in. We’d party, get insanely drunk, and then drive back to White Plains at 4:30 or 5 in the morning.
John’s nickname back then was the Phantom because he’d get to a point of severe drunkenness and then he’d just disappear. No one would know where he went. When he was living in the city, he’d somehow find his way back to the apartment and get back into bed or crash on the couch or the floor. He’d never tell you when he was leaving. He’d be there one minute, the next he’d be gone. But I couldn’t rely on him getting back to White Plains by himself. We had to drive back together. I don’t know how I never got pulled over or drove the rental car off an overpass I must have driven shitfaced at least a dozen times, which I don’t recommend to anyone. It’s a great way to end up a cadaver. But somehow I always got lucky.
Once, the only thing that saved me was a blizzard. John had Phantomed out. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I finally stumbled out to the street, and he was sleeping on the still-warm hood of a parked car. I got him into our car and he immediately passed out. The snow was so heavy I could barely see out the windshield. I was practically seeing double because of how much beer I drank. Fortunately, the storm was so bad it was impossible to drive faster than ten miles per hour. It took a long time to get back to White Plains that night, but if the weather was better and the roads were clear I probably would have crashed. The next day we were having coffee and I said, “We’re moving to the city. If we don’t, we’re either going to jail or we’re going to kill ourselves.” The idea of getting arrested was almost worse.
We told the rest of the band we were leaving White Plains and moving to the city. They said that was fine as long as we kept our shit together. And we did. For the rest of the album cycle, we made it to rehearsal on time and always delivered. Being back in the city meant we could go out at night. But it was also a way to unite us more as a band. But right as I was striving to make Anthrax a cohesive unit, Danny Spitz became more of a phantom than John.
The whole time we were writing and rehearsing for Stomp 442, Danny was hardly ever there. He popped in at most once every two weeks. He wouldn’t stay, either. He’d grab a cassette from the eight-track we’d done demos on, take it home, and then show up again two weeks later with his solos added to the songs. When we listened to what he recorded, it sounded like he hadn’t paid any attention to what we had done. His solos were almost unrelated to what we were playing.
Maybe we should have seen it coming. Some of the solos on Sound of White Noise were melodic ideas Charlie came up with and then showed to Danny. I think he pretty much checked out at some point on the Sound of White Noise tour, maybe because Joey wasn’t there for him to hang with anymore, and they had been pals. Whatever the case, we wrote all of Stomp without Danny then decided to kick him out of the band. He didn’t know what we were doing, he didn’t know the songs, and he didn’t seem to care. It was like he was telling us he didn’t want to be there.
We knew we could continue without Spitz, no problem. Charlie and I were coming up with lead ideas, and Dimebag Darrell had already told us he wanted to play on the record. We also had Paul Crook, who had been Danny’s tech for years. He knew all of Danny’s parts, and he was an insane guitar player on his own. Still, we kept procrastinating because none of us wanted to be the one to hand Danny his walking papers. It was hard enough to fire Joey. Danny had been with us almost since the beginning of the band.
We got to Philadelphia to start making the record with the Butcher Brothers, and we called Spitz and said, “Don’t come to Philly, we’ve made a decision and you’re out.”
It seemed like he knew it was coming, but then he sued us for all kinds of money he knew we didn’t have. That’s just the way lawsuits work. You go for millions and hope you get something. He lost everything—every lawsuit he filed against us.
He even tried to file a copyright suit against us, which was ridiculous. He claimed he wrote all the songs on Stomp 442. His attorney sent us a list of the song titles, half of which weren’t even songs. One of them was “A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All,” which is a line from the Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” Charlie had written that on the demos that we made for everyone in the band. Danny assumed that was a song on the album.
The copyright infringement case went to federal court, and it was so shoddy the judge threw it out and berated Danny’s lawyer. He said, “If you ever bring a lawsuit like this in front of me, I’ll start disbarment procedures.” But the fiasco still cost us $80,000 in legal fees. We should have taken that out of Danny’s cut when he rejoined Anthrax for the reunion tour we did in 2005 because that money came right out of our pockets. We didn’t hold John responsible for any of the legal expenses because he was in Armored Saint for practically the whole time Danny was in Anthrax.
Looking back, it dawned on me that Danny had a wife and kids by that point and they took priority over the band. We had done this eighteen-month tour and then we got home and went straight into writing mode for Stomp 442. He didn’t want to work on a new album. He probably wanted to be home with his family and hang out with his kids. I can’t blame him for that, especially now that I have my own son. But he should have tried to work out a schedule with us so he could spend more time at home. He never did that. He just cost us eighty grand.
While we were working on Stomp 442, Time Warner cleaned house. Bob Krasnow, Steve, everyone who was on our team was washed away by this corporate tsunami. The company brought in Sylvia Rhone to run Elektra. She was previously the CEO and president of East/West Records and made her name by discovering R&B and rap acts. At the time, we didn’t worry about it. We were bummed that the people we liked working with were gone, but we were still signed, and we figured we’d make friends with the new crowd that came in. We knew nothing about Sylvia Rhone, other than that she had Pantera, who were starting to make a lot of noise. Vulgar Display of Power had broken, and they were on the verge of becoming huge. And she had worked with AC/DC, so we figured we were cool. Then we heard from our new manager, Steve Barnett, “You’d hope that she’d know something about metal, but I know her from dealing with AC/DC, and she’s a fucking nightmare.”
Steve arranged a meeting with Sylvia to discuss our future plans. He walked in her office. Our contract was sitting on her desk, and as soon as he sat down she said, “I never would have signed this band in the first place. I never would have done this deal.”
“That’s a good start, Sylvia,” said Steve. “Hi, how are you, and what do you mean you never would have done this deal?”
“I never would have done this deal with this band, ever,” she repeated. “It never would have happened on my watch. What’s happening? What’s the plan?”
“You do owe the band $1.6 million in adva
nce for the record,” he reminded her.
“I’m well aware of what they’re getting paid!”
Steve told her we were in Philadelphia working with the Butcher Brothers and we were expecting full cooperation from the label. We had a lot of specifics in our contract about marketing dollars and video budgets. It was ironclad and the best record contract we’d ever heard of for a metal band—$10 million for three albums. Of course, people assumed it was $10 million in our pockets, and that was far from the truth. The money went into video budgets, marketing, and promotion as well as the $4 million advance for Sound of White Noise.
Our relationship with Sylvia started out bad and got worse. We made Stomp 442. Dimebag Darrell played lead guitar on “Riding Shotgun” and “King Size,” and we thought that was an awesome selling point. The record started with a flurry of punches and didn’t let up. It wasn’t thrash, but it had that energy and anger. “Random Acts of Senseless Violence” ripped. The song was an indictment against anyone who would use a gun to commit a crime. “Fueled” was a great radio track, and the whole vibe was summed up by the chorus: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Marcos Siega shot the video, and we thought we had everything going for us . . . until the record came out. We understood that Elektra didn’t believe in us, and we tried everything we could to change their minds. I pointed out that our last album sold 700,000 copies and Pantera had a number 1 album. I said, “Look, if 15 percent of our audience goes out and buys this record, it will sell 100,000 copies in its first week. All you have to do is the minimum amount of promotion to let those kids know that the new Anthrax record Stomp 442 is out there, and they’ll buy it!”
Elektra did less than nothing. They did what they were contractually obligated to do, but they used every means at their disposal to find all the loopholes in the deal. It’s like they wanted us to fail and were trying to sabotage us. We sort of saw it coming and wrote songs like “Riding Shotgun,” the lyrics of which expressed our discontent with the company: “Two steps forward, one hundred steps back.” Elektra didn’t spend a dime at radio and didn’t promote the album at all. It felt like they held up the memory eraser from Men in Black to make people forget we were ever a band. We went from selling over 100,000 the first week in 1993 to selling under 25,000 copies in our first week two years later. It seemed impossible and made no sense.
It was hard to believe that all those fans of Sound of White Noise were listening to Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana and wanted nothing to do with Anthrax anymore. Metal had dipped, but it wasn’t dead. Pantera were selling tons of records, Metallica had Load and Reload, which both did well. Elektra just dropped the ball. Dropped it down the sewer.
Far worse—our audience didn’t seem to care about us, either, anymore. We played venues one-third the size of the places we were booked at in ’93 and ’94, and they weren’t packed. It was completely demoralizing. It felt like after all the increased success we had over the years, we had run face first into a wood choppper. Steve Barnett flew out to a show at this club, Trees, in Deep Ellum, near Dallas. There were six hundred people there. He hadn’t seen us live before, and after the concert he said, “You guys are fucking amazing. We’re going to turn this ship around. It’s a big ship, but you deserve to be cruising back the other direction.”
He agreed it was crazy that we weren’t selling records and that Elektra was fucking us every way we turned. They had pretty much closed the Anthrax file and thrown it in the fire. We went from being a band that went gold with every record since 1987 to a group that could barely sell 100,000 records on a major label. We were done. Nobody gave a fuck. Then Steve, Mr. “We’re going to turn this ship around” Barnett, got an offer from Sony to become the head of their international department. So he jumped ship, too. Nobody had our backs. Nobody wanted to book us, nobody wanted to promote us. We weren’t selling tickets. Those tours for Stomp 442 lost money. The world totally changed, and to this day I don’t have an answer for where 600,000 people went.
By the end of ’95 going into ’96, my personal life was mirroring my career. I had this big monthly financial nut that I couldn’t afford anymore. I was starting to panic because I could see my income stream drying up and I didn’t know what to do. As that became more of a disaster, so did my marriage. I was blindsided. I never thought of myself as a rich guy. But for a few years there I did have a lot of money. Then, when I didn’t, everything went into the toilet. I was spending most of my time in New York because that’s where we were working with the band. God knows what Debbie was doing back in our house in Huntington Beach.
There was virtually no communication between us anymore. When I was in California, we lived together but we weren’t partners. We’d sleep in the same bed without ever having sex. I thought she was still my friend. I still had feelings for her. I still wanted us to have a relationship; I just didn’t know how to fix it. I’d try to be romantic and I’d always run into this wall. I’d make moves on her, and she’d say, “No, no, no, not in the mood.” It was exactly what I used to do with Marge, and I couldn’t accept that because I really didn’t want my second marriage to fail. My head was screaming: “Oh my God! You’re going to be divorced twice. You suck! You’re really bad at being married.”
I tried. Between 1994 and 1997 when we were married, I never cheated on her. I still partied; I just didn’t sleep with anyone. I had already fucked up one marriage by being unfaithful, and I wasn’t going to go down that road again. I was in love with Debbie, and I wanted to prove it to her. But by the end of ’95 going into ’96, when Stomp was dead, my marriage was in its final gasps as well.
I was looking at about $8,000 a month in expenses. Our record bombed, and I realized, “Hmm . . . I have money in the bank, but that’s not going to last too long.”
We were all anxious and frustrated in the beginning of 1996 because we didn’t know what was going on with our career. Regardless of what Elektra decided to do, they owed us $1.6 million for a third album, whether or not they put it out, so we knew there would be money coming in. We had to use some of it to make a new record, but there would be cash left over that would provide income and that provided some relief.
It was a hollow victory, though, because my personal life was miserable and my band life was just as shitty. I felt sorry for myself, which I despised. I will forever see the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Regardless of some of my angry lyrics, I’m not a negative guy. I’ve always seen the glass as half full, even in 1996 when that half-full line was nearly impossible to detect. At one point, I had my band American Express taken away from me because I was using it for personal expenses. I wasn’t stealing; I had every intention of paying back every penny. I just didn’t want to put anything on my own credit cards. So I’d use the AmEx, knowing that our business manager would get the bill at the end of the month and see that I put some restaurant charges on it that certainly weren’t a band expense, and he’d say, “I need money for that; you need to write a check.”
Every month I asked, “Don’t we have any band money coming in?” And he’d say, “No.” So I wouldn’t send a check. Then another month would go by, and there would be a bunch of dinners on the card. Finally, I got the call from Charlie.
“This is the hardest call I’ve ever had to make in my life,” he said.
“What?”
“You need to stop using your AmEx. We’re turning it off because you’re abusing it and costing us money. It’s not our responsibility. These aren’t band expenses.”
I was so embarrassed. “I’m sorry, dude,” I explained. “I’m starting to flip out because I’ve got these expenses and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few months financially.”
“I understand,” he said. “But you can’t do this anymore. We’re turning the card off, and you have to pay back what you owe when the money comes in.”
They took it right off the top of
any money I was owed, and it was done, but I’d never been so ashamed. I felt like one of those politicians who gets caught abusing campaign funds. At least I wasn’t voted out of office.
Chapter 25
Brother, Can You
Spare a Dime?
Nineteen ninety six was a pretty shitty year. Elektra didn’t want another record from us and paid a ton of money just to get rid of us. They even let us keep our masters for Sound of White Noise and Stomp 442, which shows how much faith they had in those records as valuable titles in their catalog. The band had a lot of expenses and unpaid bills at the time, so a large chunk of the money they paid us got eaten up, and we split the rest. At least we had that. But Elektra didn’t care about Anthrax anymore, and that stung. And now we had to look for a new record deal. We got Walter O’Brien and Andy Gould to manage us. They worked with Pantera and White Zombie, two of the hottest metal bands at the time. It wasn’t easy and we were desperate. I went to New York to have a meeting with Walter. I said, “I’m here to ask you to manage the band. You should have been managing us for the last ten years.”
“Wow, I’m flattered,” he said, “but I have to tell you, I just don’t know. I can only do this if I can do it right for you guys, and truthfully, I’m unbelievably busy with Pantera. They’re a fucking handful, and I’d hate for you guys to have to suffer for that.”
I was dying inside. I felt like Walter was our last hope. Everyone had given up on us. Our business managers, who were the biggest in the business, couldn’t get anyone to touch us. Nobody would take meetings with us, and our lawyer was out trying to find us a record deal. It was like we were toxic to the touch—like real Anthrax.
The first question every label executive asked was, “What did your last album do?” And when we told them it sold 100,000, they immediately lost interest. They didn’t want to know how the record before Stomp 442 did. We were only as good as our last album. We were dead in the water. I left that lunch with Walter feeling decimated. We had no label, no manager. We might as well have had no band. Then Walter called the next day.