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

by Scott Ian

  “This is amazing. It couldn’t have worked out better,” Charlie said.

  “Dude, you’re a fucking monster,” I said to Joey. “You’re destroying on this record. People are going to lose their fucking minds when they hear this!”

  Joey modified some of the phrasing and melodies while they were recording. He knew how controlling I could be about the songs, so he asked what I thought, and I told him, “Keep going! Whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it because it’s working. The stuff’s fucking great!”

  We thought we had a good record—suddenly we had a great ­record. It was like an act of fate or a prophecy fulfilled. It felt like what we were supposed to be doing, so much that I started rethinking the decision that we made in 1991 to get rid of Joey. At one point he said to me, “You know, I could have done this before. I could have sung on Sound of White Noise.”

  I told him he was probably right, and we were just happy to have him back. That’s when I started to wonder, “Did I make a mistake back then? Could he have done those songs, and what would have happened differently if he had? Obviously there’s no way to know what career path the band would have taken had Joey never left Anthrax. But at the time, I wasn’t in a place, nor was the rest of the band, for him to stay. What happened had to happen, and now it’s history. All I know is that Joey gave the performance of a lifetime on Worship Music, and if he hadn’t I think Anthrax probably would have broken up.

  We released the record on Megaforce, which might seem weird considering that’s where we started out with Jonny Z back when I was living at my mom’s place and Anthrax were rehearsing at the Music Building. But Jonny sold the label to his former employee Missi Cal­lazzo around twenty years ago. It was a good decision to go with Megaforce, but we didn’t enter into it blindly. Jonathan Cohen and Izzy split up their business, and we stayed with Izzy, who shopped the record. Roadrunner was interested in putting out the album, as was Nuclear Blast, who were already handling us in Europe. But we took a leap of faith and went with Megaforce.

  First of all, they made an incredible offer: a distro deal in which the label would put up all the money up front to make the record as well as handle marketing and promotion, but we would own the masters. Not only that, we’d make close to seven dollars a copy. Second, we trusted Missi because when we worked with her in the past when Jonny was in charge she always went the extra mile. The timing for Worship Music couldn’t have been better. We were coming off the Big 4 concerts in Europe, which were a big success, so our profile was higher than it had been in years. Joey was back in the band, which gave us extra marketing value and perked the ears of a lot of people. And the pre-album hype from those who had heard it was amazing. Also, it seemed like metal was becoming popular again—not like Jay-Z or Pink popular—but metal bands regularly were debuting in the top 50 on the Billboard album chart, and bands like Lamb of God, Mastodon, and Disturbed were drawing really well and helping to resurrect the genre.

  The release date for Worship Music was September 13, 2011, and we were playing the New York Big 4 show at Yankee Stadium the next day. It was the perfect record release party—50,000 people screaming for us at The House That Ruth Built. It wasn’t the same house, of course. They tore the original stadium down and built a new one across the street. But the place is beautiful, filled with every amenity you could want in a venue.

  Anthrax played Jimmy Fallon the same week, which was surreal. Programs like that wouldn’t even take calls from metal bands years before that. But now it was cool to rock a national nightly TV show. For some reason Anthrax had the ear of the nation again. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with Joey coming back. Maybe we stayed around so long we outlasted all the bullshit. We lived through the nineties alternative scene and the nu-metal phenomenon and the indie-rock explosion, and all the cynicism and negativity that came with each. We outlasted everything, and now we were considered a legendary band—members of the Big 4. Perception is everything, which is fucking crazy, but it’s true, and for the first time in years, people perceived us as contenders. I could live with that.

  The Big 4 show at Yankee Stadium was the greatest moment in my life as a musician, hands down. The place was practically a second home to me, at least in spirit. Anthrax still haven’t won the World Series of metal—Sabbath, Metallica, Maiden, and Priest still hold those honors—but we’ve gotten damn close. In my mind, we’re like the Yankees that I grew up with. We had great years and shitty years, but we kept fighting. We’ve lost players and made controversial decisions. We switched managers and got burned by bad business decisions. But we’re still here and so are our fans.

  That day, we really felt like we were the home team and this was our house. We were the fucking New York band on the bill. Sure, we didn’t want to be the first band to play, but that was out of our hands. It was Metallica’s show and a tour they painstakingly put together. Coordinating the schedules of four touring bands was no easy task. But we were all eager to do it. Even Megadeth understood the promotional value of opening a tour for Metallica, and while Dave Mustaine was suffering from severe neck and back pain at the time, he knew he had to make the show.

  A couple of weeks before the concert, I texted Lars and jokingly wrote, “Listen, for Yankee Stadium we want to flip-flop with Megadeth. They should open and we should go on second. We’re the New York band. We just feel like it’s the right thing to do in New York.”

  That kind of freaked him out. He wrote me back and said, “Uh . . . Okay, well, I’ll make a call,” meaning he’d call management, which was organizing the whole event. I let Lars sweat it out for about twenty minutes, then I wrote him back and said, “By the way, I’m just kidding. I’m only fucking with you. We can’t wait to play.”

  “Oh, thank God!” Lars wrote back. “I really didn’t want to make that call, because do you know what fucking can of worms that would have opened?”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I made the request—just to bust your balls.”

  We had special jerseys made for us that had Yankees pinstripes but said Anthrax. We looked the part, but as we took the electric carts from the dressing room to the stage, I’d never felt so nervous about playing a show. We walked up the back of the stage. I was with Pearl and Revel and the rest of the band. Our old friend, veteran deejay, and That Metal Show host Eddie Trunk was standing behind the stage with Randy Johnson, the baseball player. He pitched for the Yankees between 2005 and 2006 and for six other teams during his tenure in the major leagues. He ended his career with the San Francisco Giants in 2009, having won five Cy Young Awards. After he retired from baseball, he started taking photos professionally. Randy is a big metal/rock fan, and I’d met him a bunch of times, so as we were standing there and he was snapping away, I asked, “What would you do in a World Series when you were on the mound and you were in some super-­high-pressure situation and had to get a man out? You must have been nervous, right?”

  “Out-of-my-mind nervous,” he said. “But you do your job. You shut everything else out, and you do what you’ve got to do. Why, are you nervous?”

  “Dude, I’m kind of losing it right now,” I admitted. “I’m so wired and amped, I’m literally cramped up, my hands don’t even feel like my hands; playing this show, it’s so important to me.”

  “You’re a professional,” Randy answered. “You know what you’re doing. Go out there and do your thing.”

  The intro tape was rolling. What choice did I have but to follow Randy’s advice—I couldn’t not go onstage. As soon as I turned the corner and walked out there and I felt the energy coming from the crowd and I looked up at that historic façade, all my anxiety melted away. And when we ripped into “Caught in a Mosh,” I started crying. I was crying from the sheer weight of what we were doing and what it meant to me as a kid from New York. I was crying from the intense happiness of the moment and the release of years and years of emotion from my brain to my heart to my
hands to my guitar to the ears of the best fans in the world. For the next hour I felt like my feet weren’t touching the floor. I had so much energy and excitement. It was like a great reward, which, in effect, it was. But more than being just recognition of what we’d achieved as pioneers of thrash, it seemed like a gift for sticking it out and persevering against the odds. We had faced and overcome adversity so many times, and it was all played out that moment in a sixty-minute set of explosive heavy metal.

  As soon as we finished the show, I had a new answer to the boring, age-old lazy journalist question, “What was the highlight of your career?” It’s all downhill from here, motherfucker. We could be playing the Taj Mahal for the next record, and I’d be like, “Who gives a fuck? We played Yankee Stadium.”

  Epilogue

  When Worship Music came out, I was so worried about how the record was going to do. Everyone puts so much focus on a band’s first-week sales, and since nobody buys records anymore, you just have to hope your songs connect with your audience and the label does its job marketing the record so people actually know it’s out.

  Missi didn’t want us to be disappointed, so she told us not to worry about our first week, that it was the first six months of sales or even the first year’s worth that would indicate the success or failure of the rec­ord. Still, I cared about the first week. I couldn’t help it.

  We had so much going for us, with the Yankee Stadium show and the Fallon performance. “The Devil You Know” was all over active rock radio. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll be happy if we sell 12,000 copies the first week.” That’s what We’ve Come for You All did eight years earlier. Three days after the record came out, Missi told us the numbers were good and the projections were coming in high, but I told her I didn’t want to know anything until we had a concrete Soundscan figure. A few days later I woke up, turned on my laptop, and there was an e-mail saying we sold 28,000 copies and entered the Billboard album chart at number 12. I couldn’t fucking believe it—almost two and a half times the number I had in my brain. I couldn’t help having a tinge of longing for the past. Without the Internet, the album would have sold 280,000 copies first week. Back in the eighties, bands that sold 30,000 records their first week would be number 115 or something. But still, I was thrilled.

  Reorders were coming in, and within three weeks we had sold more than 50,000 copies of the record, and it kept selling. Missi knew what she was doing. The record passed the 100,000 mark soon after and is still selling. Our song “I’m Alive” got nominated for a Best Metal Performance Grammy, our fourth nomination. Megaforce had gone to bat for us. The covers EP, Anthems, which included “Crawl,” another single from Worship Music, debuted at number 52, which is great considering it was a promotional vehicle for the single. It also earned us another Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance for our cover of AC/DC’s “T.N.T.” Worship Music was a huge comeback for Anthrax, and now we’re just eager to keep the momentum going. We all still have goals, mainly to keep writing the best songs we can and to keep being a great live band. That’s all we’ve ever wanted to do. We’d love to play more Big 4 shows, but that’s mostly up to Metallica. And one day it would be great to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, just so we can not show up. Maybe that’s a stretch, but right now it feels like anything’s possible, and we’re planning to keep spreading the disease until it’s not fun anymore.

  These days, the only drawback to being in Anthrax is that I have an amazing family and I have to spend so much time away from them. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s a lot easier to spend six months straight on the road when you don’t have anything at home that’s better than what you’re doing. The only thing better than touring with Anthrax is being with Pearl and Revel. It took years of setbacks and struggles (most of which I’ve documented in earlier chapters), but I can honestly say I’m happier than I’ve ever been. The bitter irony is, that’s what makes it so much harder to leave. It’s always the same. The first couple of days are tough enough—leaving the house, getting on a plane, and flying somewhere—and then the brutality begins. There are a few days of trying to adjust and getting into this tour frame of mind. It’s kind of like getting the flu. I’m miserable, my body aches, I don’t want to do anything.

  I’m like that until we start the show. I don’t carry that shit onstage with me. I’m not Robert Smith of the Cure. It doesn’t affect what I do as a performer. The second I step onstage, I’m in another zone. I can’t help it. I’m doing what I’ve dreamt of since I first saw KISS. That’s what keeps guys like me doing what we do for years and years. There’s definitely a timelessness to being in rock and roll. If you talk to addiction professionals, they say that heavy drug or alcohol use stunts people’s growth. Their maturity stops from the time they start using heavily. I feel the same way about being in a band. When I am onstage, it’s like getting to be twenty years old forever, as long as you’re in the band.

  There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Harrison Ford finds the Holy Grail and discovers that he can remain immortal, but he has to stay within a small zone, away from the rest of society. I feel like I’m in that situation sometimes. In the band, you’re in your element, making music, playing shows. You’re the same dude you were when you first started, and you feel that same rush every time you make a great song or play a killer show. It keeps you mentally immortal. When I look out into the crowd and see a sea of young kids reacting the same way to our music as fans did in the eighties, I feel ageless. Rock and roll really is a fountain of youth, but that fountain only stretches from one side of the stage to the other.

  As soon as I step off, I’m back in that annoying limbo of between-­show apathy. The glamour of globe-trotting wore off a long time ago. Alice Cooper once said, “They don’t pay me to play, they pay me to travel.” That time offstage is so mind numbing. Every day, day in, day out, I’m stuck in a venue or some cookie-cutter hotel. I do what I can to be constructive and stave off the boredom: write and catch up on reading, TV, and movies. I’m fifty now so I’m not gonna start doing drugs to pass the time. But most of the time I just long to be with my wife and my son. Hey, I know this sounds whiney, but it’s how I feel. I know how lucky I am to still be doing this, and I NEVER take it for granted.

  Now, I’m fortunate enough to have them fly out to be with me so we haven’t been apart longer than two weeks. But Revel is getting older and more aware of his surroundings, and pretty soon he’ll need to be in school and won’t be able to come out on the road as much. I’m dreading that, and it makes me cherish my time with him even more and hate being away from him even more than that. It’s a catch-22. Despite my griping I still love being in the band, and when it comes down to it, I’m not ready to give up Anthrax. I’ve worked so fucking hard for so long to do this and to be where I am now. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen next month, next year, or two years from now? All I know is, after all I’ve been through, I’m going to do everything I can to keep it going because this is my band. This is my gig. And whenever I feel like I need some extra motivation, I think of what Randy Johnson said: “Go out there and do what you do.”

  Index

  Aaron Perkis Company, 4–5

  Accept, 53

  AC/DC, 29, 31–32, 166, 212, 301

  Ace of Spades album (Motörhead), 30, 31

  Acid rock, 10

  Adelman, Mark, 276–278

  “A.D.I. / Horror of It All” in Among the Living (Anthrax), 121

  Ad-Rock, 103, 125

  Aerosmith, 29, 69, 160

  “Aftershock” in Spreading the Disease (Anthrax), 91, 112

  Agnostic Front, 89, 94–97, 134

  “A.I.R.” in Spreading the Disease (Anthrax), 86–87, 91, 110, 115

  Album cover art, 30, 71–73, 103

  Alcohol

  Dime teaches heavy drinking, 224–227

  drinking as second marriage fails, 228–229
, 230, 238

  neighborhood kids’ drinking, 8, 16–17, 18

  overused by mother, 5, 7, 16

  poisoning, 60, 61

  raging with John Bush, 179–182, 209, 218, 228

  Alexander, Russell, 13

  Alice Cooper, 69, 166, 302

  Alice in Chains, 165, 184, 214, 248, 270

  Alive 2: The DVD (Anthrax), 263

  American Express card, 216

  Among the Living album (Anthrax)

  writing and production, 110–113, 121–125

  shows and tours (1987–1988), 130–137

  And Justice for All album (Metallica), 144–145

  “Angel of Death” (Slayer), 166

  Anselmo, Phil, 107, 226

  Anthems EP (Anthrax), 301

  Anthrax

  beginnings, 36–43

  band member lineup problems, 42, 44–46, 51–54

  as Big 4 thrash band, 279–281, 289–290

  bring on Charlie Benante, Danny Spitz, 53–57

  depart from thrash sound with Persistence of Time, 153

  destroy hotel rooms, property, on tour, 131–134, 142–144, 166

  individuality, 109, 122, 126–127, 140–141

  managed by Jonny Z (see Jonny Z)

  managed by Steve Barnett, 209

  managed by Walter O’Brien, 217–218, 231, 253

  sign with Beyond, 234–236, 246

  sign with Elektra, fail to promote, 175–179, 213–214

  sign with Island Records, 84

  try to change/add singers, 45–46, 87–89, 174, 176–178, 264–268

  Turbin problems, 45–46, 74–76, 81–84