by Scott Ian
So Don tells Darrell a tale about the break-in and what he is supposedly dealing with. He weaves a black widow’s web of deceit to fool Darrell. It has to be bulletproof to get one over on Dime, and this web of bullshit is all based in the truth of how the vault was broken into. It’s good. Really good. So Don tells Darrell about how accountants, insurance agents, and the police are investigating all the employees who have access to the vault and that they have concluded that it must be an inside job, that the people who work at the Hard Rock are stealing the guitars themselves and selling them.
DON: Darrell, remember when I sent you those change-of-ownership papers for the guitar a few months ago?
DARRELL: Yeah.
DON: Well, you never signed those papers and sent them back to me, did you?
DARRELL: Uhh, no Bernstine, I didn’t.
DON: Well, because of that, the Hard Rock never officially owned the Crown Royal guitar, and yet it was here and now it’s missing and I’m getting the blame for it. They think I stole it, that somehow I cooked the books, and now I’m in jeopardy of losing my job. I could end up going to jail, AND the Hard Rock is in jeopardy of losing their whole insurance policy on all their guitars because of insurance fraud, and it’ll cost them millions of dollars to get a new one. So I need to get the guitar back from Scott.
While Don is telling Darrell this brilliant gem of a lie, I am calmly taking it all in, intently paying attention, drinking it all in like a fine whiskey, waiting for my turn to retaliate. I also really was drinking a fine whiskey.
DARRELL: Yeah, so what’s the problem? Give him three hundred dollars and get the guitar back.
And then Don drops the bomb.
DON: Scott wants fifteen thousand dollars for the guitar.
I have to cover my mouth to stop from spraying whiskey all over Don from across the table.
DARRELL: HE WHAT?
DON: Scott wants fifteen thousand dollars for the guitar. He knows how much we pay for these things, and I guess he sees the chance to make some money and, you know, whatever, I can’t blame the guy—he’s got us over a barrel. He wants to make a little cash.
DARRELL: A LITTLE CASH?! Hold on, Bernstine! That motherfucker’s your friend and he’s my friend, and he’s tryin’ to fuckin’ work you for fifteen thousand dollars? FUCK THAT SHIT! Goddamn Baldini, what the fuck?! Why don’t you just call the cops, motherfucker? They’ll get the guitar back for you.
Darrell brings up the police, and I have an idea. I quickly write a note on a napkin for Don: NO COPS! Just like in Darrell’s call to me. No cops. You have to love when things come full circle.
DON: No cops, Darrell. I can’t call the police because then they will take the guitar and it will go into evidence, and I’m still the one who’s going to get the blame. I’m the one who’s going to get fucked in this scenario because I paid you for the guitar, and I never got that change-of-ownership signed. I’ve already talked to my boss—they’re gonna write the check to Scott just to avoid all the fucking issues wrapped up in this mess, mainly because the Hard Rock can’t afford to lose its insurance policy.
Don is good. He’s killing it. I high-five him and walk over to the bar for another round of drinks.
DARRELL: Fuck that shit, Bernstine! I’m callin’ Baldini right now! Talk some sense into that motherfucker.
Illustration by Stephen Thompson.
DON: Well, that’s why I was calling you, Darrell. Maybe if Scott hears your voice and how upset you are, he’ll change his mind about wanting fifteen grand.
DARRELL: Goddamn right. I’ll call that motherfucker right now! Good-bye.
My phone immediately starts ringing, and I let it go to voicemail. Don and I listen to the message: “Baldini, it’s Dime. Hey man, call me back. I need to talk to you right away.” While we’re listening to the message and for the next five minutes he calls back over and over and over, each message getting angrier and angrier. Don and I stop laughing long enough to finish our drinks and order another round. Don picks up his phone to call Darrell back, and I ask him what’s next, and he smiles and says, “Oh watch this.”
DON: Hi Darrell, did you get a hold of Scott?
DARRELL: Naw, man. I can’t get him on the phone. It just keeps going to voicemail!
DON: Okay, okay, well, Scott called me about five minutes ago—let me ask you a question, Darrell: Did you ever tell Scott how much we paid you for the Crown Royal guitar?
DARRELL: No, why would I? It’s none of his business.
DON: Well, Scott knows we paid you $15,000, and now he wants $20,000. He figures it’s worth more now.
DARRELL: WHAT THE FUCK, BERNSTINE? You tell that Baldini motherfucker he’s not getting a fuckin’ dime! FUCK THIS SHIT! This is a bunch of goddamn bullshit if I ever heard some!
DON: Darrell, Darrell, hold on, let me…
DARRELL: No, you hold on, Bernstine. I ain’t done talking yet! I am tellin’ you right now, Bernstine, if you guys pay him for that guitar, I will NEVER speak to you again. And you tell Baldini when you see him that when I see him next month, I’ll fuckin’ take care of him!
Illustration by Stephen Thompson.
Darrell hangs up the phone. Don and I do a triple high-five across the table. It’s going better than I could’ve imagined. I am reveling in the moment, and I tell Don, “Dude, do you think we could keep this going for a year? Play a really long game? Get actors involved as cops, and so on?” I was thinking really big.
Don laughs, takes a drink, and says, “Scott, I appreciate how evil you are, and how evil I am, and your need for revenge, but let me ask you something: Were you ever angry at Darrell about the ‘Sebastian’ call?”
I said, “Fuck no. Maybe I was a little angry at the fake-‘Sebastian’ they created, but that person didn’t really exist, so how could I be angry with him? No, I loved it. That prank call was fucking amazing.”
Don nods and smiles like a wizened old wizard and says, “Exactly. You heard Darrell—he is actually angry. Have you ever known Darrell to be angry?”
I thought about it for a minute and said, “No. Never. I’ve known that dude, like, twelve years now, and I didn’t even know he could get angry.”
Don said, “Right? He’s always just Darrell. We really got under his skin with this idea of you making a pile of cash off his guitar and my vulnerable position.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied. “I hear what you’re saying. I don’t want him to think I’m ‘Baldini motherfucker.’ I don’t want to be that guy to him. All right, we’ll call him back. Let’s end it. Let’s figure it out. We’ll order another drink, and then we’ll call him back.”
Don says, “What do we want to do? How are we getting out of this?”
I said, “Follow my lead,” and we put our two big noses together and conferred.
Don calls Darrell back. Darrell answers the phone, and before Don can even get a word out Darrell says,
DARRELL: I told you, Bernstine, if you’re paying Baldini, we’re fuckin’ done. Good-bye.
DON: DON’T HANG UP! Darrell, please don’t hang up. I’ve got somebody in my office here. I’ve got some news—I think we’ve got this shit figured out. I just didn’t want to put him right on the phone with you. I wanted to make sure it was okay with you because…
DARRELL: I don’t give a fuck, Bernstine! I’ve wasted enough time on this bullshit. Put him on the phone!
Bernstine hands me the phone and I yell, “SEBASTIAN BACH, MOTHERFUCKER!”
Illustration by Stephen Thompson.
There’s a slight pause, and then Darrell says, “BALDINI! HAHAHA, BALDINI! Motherfucker! You been there this whole—WOW, you got me back! ‘Sebastian Bach,’ motherfucker! Holy shit! You fuckin’ got me back! It’s been what, three years? You fuckin’ had me goin’—the two of you motherfuckers! I never stood a chance! HAHAHAHA!”
I said, “Hey Dime, how are ya? HAHAHAHAHA!”
Darrell said, “Does it feel good, Baldini?”
I said, “
Dude, it feels fuckin’ great.”
We were both laughing and Darrell says, “Goddammit, when you got on the phone and said, ‘Sebastian Bach, motherfucker’—ya got me, Baldini! Trying to make a dime offa Dime! All right you two, have a drink on your old brother Dimebag, and I’ll talk at ya later!” And then he made this bobcat scratching sound that he would always do (he would do a move with his hand at the same time, like a claw scratching at you) and hung up the phone.
I was basking in the afterglow of hilarious revenge and felt like Darrell was proud of me for coming back at him so strong. I couldn’t have done it without Don, and we toasted to Darrell many more times that night.
And from 1998 until Darrell was taken from us at the end of 2004, he never said “Sebastian Bach, motherfucker” to me ever again.
RIP Dimebag Darrell Abbott
RIP Don Bernstine
I hope you two are getting your pull and having a blast!
BATHTUB PIKE
For all intents and purposes I shouldn’t be the fan of seafood that I am. Even against a myriad number of compelling reasons to avoid the delicacies of the sea, I find myself having no problem eating a shrimp head or puffer fish or any other strange thing from the sea that extreme eater Andrew Zimmern would eat (if I eat tuna balls slathered in durian, do I get my own show too?). I’m a Jew, and it’s in my genetic makeup to hide, like a vampire from the sun, from shellfish. And besides the religious thing, seafood can kill you. Shouldn’t that be reason enough to not eat it? How about the fact that if you saw something that looked like a crab or lobster skittering across your kitchen floor when you turned on the lights, you’d do nothing short of napalming the monstrosity.
As a kid, my practicing Jewish friends would tell me horror stories about an uncle who was paralyzed after eating a bad clam or a neighbor who contracted gout from a bad piece of fish. And I certainly didn’t need my hypocritical shrimp-cocktail-eating-at-Bar-Mitzvahs-friends to tell me about the dangers of oysters. Those stories were real urban legends, tales of murdering mollusks and brutal bivalves poisoning everyone in their wake.
We used to go to my grandfather’s house for the Passover holidays. Before my grandparents moved to Florida they lived in Queens, and my memories of their house are of small, dark, oppressive rooms and plastic slipcovers. My grandfather was a strict Orthodox Jew, and Passover was a long, dark day of standing and sitting and standing and sitting and lots of oldies speaking Hebrew and my brother and I doing everything we could to sneak a piece of matzo without any of the Passover Nazis catching us.
On one of those long days we arrived at their house early so my parents could help out and my brother and I could suffer even longer than usual. We didn’t even get the payoff of the hide the matzo game that all our friends got to play. If it wasn’t in my grandfather’s Seder book, it wasn’t part of Passover, so there was no money exchanging hands. On that day we arrived early, and I was roaming around the upstairs of the house unattended, exploring the mysteries of these people from Poland and Russia. I walked into a bathroom and noticed that the tub was full of water. As I got closer to the full tub, my curiosity roused as to why the paint-chipped, drain-ringed bathtub was filled with water. I could imagine my grandfather saying, “Who ran the bath? Such a waste, all this water—someone take a bath already!”
This bath wasn’t for me, though.
I looked over the edge of the tub and saw a fish lazily swimming around. Initially I froze, my eight-year-old brain filled with surprise and fear. I thought, Did that fish somehow swim up the pipes from the sewers and get into Grandpa’s tub? I didn’t know how NYC plumbing worked, so I checked the toilet. No fish in there, just the long weird fish lolling in my grandfather’s bathtub.
I ran downstairs to ask about my grandparents’ new pet. “Grandpa, grandpa, there’s a fish in the bathtub!”
And then to my horror: “Of course there’s a fish in the bathtub. It’s the pike for the gefilte fish.”
I can remember standing there confused at this statement. Pike for the gefilte fish? In your gross tub that all you dusty old people bathe in upstairs? And then I thought about all the previous times I ate gefilte fish in that house, and I think I swooned a bit. It was one of the seminal moments of my life.
Guess who didn’t eat the gefilte fish that day or any other day ever again? It was hard enough watching everyone at the table shoveling it into their mouths and talking with mouthfuls of bathtub pike. I still gag just thinking about it.
You—or actually I—would think that a moment like that would put me off fish forever. Tub fish, yes, and as a kid I’d ask my parents where whatever fish they were asking me to eat came from. The East River, Lake Erie, the puddle underneath the overpass after it rains—no problem. Just no tub fish, thank you.
IN THE END…
… is a song on the Anthrax album Worship Music. It is the song, the centerpiece of the album, with all the other songs built on top of it. I wrote this piece about it back in 2012, a year after Worship Music came out. It’s unusual for me to have written a tribute to a song we wrote—that’s something I’ve never done before. This song just stayed with me in a different way after we were done recording and the album was released. It spoke to me, constantly pulling me, telling me that its story needed to be told.
“In the End” started out as something completely different back in 2007 when Charlie and I first started working on it, and it was an inauspicious beginning for a song if there ever was one. We were working on an idea, a strong if unfocused idea, and to make matters even more intangible, we had no idea who else would even be in the band this time around. At that point it was just the two of us.
The original version of the song is mostly unrecognizable now. Between its genesis in 2007 and finishing it in 2011 it went through revision after revision. We were never satisfied, always just missing the mark, but we stayed with it because we knew there was something there, something strong that kept us engaged even through all the frustrations we experienced while trying to find the song within our idea. Our usual MO of Charlie coming up with a catalyst riff to get us jamming and building an arrangement was not working. This song wasn’t going to be like “Madhouse” or “I Am the Law” or “Only,” songs that came together very quickly. This song was tough and refused to open up to us easily. Like some kind of difficult puzzle, it was making us solve its mysteries. We kept at it, every few weeks revisiting and tweaking until, by 2009, we had a “finished” version of the song that we titled “Down Goes the Sun.” And still we knew it was not as good as it should’ve been and actually may not have even made the record.
This was the song that we wanted to write as a tribute to our late friends Dimebag Darrell and Ronnie James Dio. It would be our first chance to say how we felt about those guys in the context of what we do and how deeply they influenced us. The riffs were telling us to write about them, about our friends. Epic in scope with just the right balance of melancholy and aggression, it sounded like a proper tribute to two men who had meant so much to us.
Except it wasn’t yet perfect and it had to be. It had to be perfect to honor them.
First and foremost Darrell was our friend. We’d been on this crazy path together since we met in 1986. His impact on our lives will never be forgotten and will always be missed. He played on three Anthrax records. That pretty much says it all. He was truly the sixth member of the band. Getcha’ pull!
Ronnie, what can I say? I started out as a fan from his work with Rainbow and then of course followed him to Black Sabbath. I saw Ronnie for the first time on the Heaven & Hell tour in 1980. He was incredible, taking Sabbath to new heights with the power of his voice. On the Mob Rules tour my friend Jimmy (who knew Ronnie) was able to score us some passes. We knocked on Ronnie’s hotel room door and Ronnie said, “Hey guys, I just got out of the shower. Here’s your passes—see you after the show,” and he slid the passes under the door to us. I couldn’t believe it.
We met him after the amazing show. I had a
brief chance to shake his hand and stammer a hello, or at least try to, as I was so sweaty and nervous. Cut to years later, and I’m meeting Ronnie again backstage at the 1987 Castle Donington Monsters of Rock festival. Eighty thousand people were there to see Cinderella, Wasp, Anthrax, Metallica, Dio, and Bon Jovi. I walked over to Ronnie, and before I finished introducing myself he told me we had met before and that he remembered meeting me backstage in New Jersey five years earlier. That’s who he was. He would make an effort to put people at ease. He always had a kind word and a smile. He was a mentor to us in so many ways, mainly on how to be so fucking cool. Anthrax was supporting him on tour in 2004, and I remember standing on the side of the stage night after night, blown away by the power he possessed and also giving him Yankees’ playoff game scores between songs. Yes, Ronnie was as fanatical about the Yankees as I am. To have had the privilege to become friends with one of my heroes was an incredible experience.
As 2009 became 2010 we were still trying to crack this song. And then Charlie found the bells. He added bells, playing a dark melody that he included in a new arrangement. Suddenly it was clear; the song had revealed itself—the bells had unlocked its secrets. We made a minor tweak in the chorus, combining Charlie’s new idea with one of our previous ideas, and the song was done.
It was one of those moments of clarity when you just know something is perfect. The song was finally the song.
Now we needed words that could stand up to and elevate the power of the music.
I wasn’t sure how to even try to express what I felt about my two friends. It was excruciating. Every lyric I came up with sounded cheesy to me. I finally had the music that lived up to the task of honoring our friends; now I needed the words to convey the emotions. I kept hitting a wall, and then Charlie sent me a line, “Lone star was dark tonight,” and the wall in my mind crumbled and the words came pouring out, my emotions translating into lyrics that I felt did Darrell and Ronnie justice.
