by Scott Ian
We didn’t know it at the time, but on a psychological level my brother and I related to characters who were thrown into a life they didn’t ask for. Growing up, we tried to shield ourselves from our parents’ unhappiness as much as we could. Like Frankenstein, we just wanted to be left alone.
We lived in Bayside, Queens, in Bay Terrace until I was eight years old. It was a very Jewish, upper-middle-class-to-rich part of the city. We were certainly not in the upper middle class. We lived on Bell Boulevard in an attached two-family house. We were on one side and some other family was on the other side. But there were giant houses right down the street from the house we lived in. So in the wintertime we’d get snow shovels and walk around and offer to shovel people’s driveways for twenty bucks. We made a fucking fortune—by preadolescent standards. I had tons of friends on that block and the next block over. Everyone knew everybody else. The rest of Bayside was Irish, Italian, German, and it ranged from very lower middle class to filthy rich—a mishmash of wealth and ethnicity.
In around 1972 we moved out of Queens, which sucked because I was leaving all my friends right after third grade. We moved to Seaford, Long Island, and I started fourth grade at a new elementary school. As bad as it was for me, it was way worse for my mom. My dad had good intentions. We had been renting in Queens, and suddenly he was able to buy a house in Long Island, so hey, we were following the American dream. We had a backyard and a driveway. But my mom didn’t want to move out of Queens and leave her friends any more than I did. My dad did it to put her in a new environment where she might be happier. The effect was just the opposite. She was even more depressed in Seaford, and that’s when her life started getting really dark. She was not a Stepford Wives mom. She drank more, took more pills, and even became suicidal. The strongest memories I have from that time are of her in hysterics, crying or screaming at me and my brother. She would fly off the handle and we would just try our best to stay out of the way. Sometimes no matter how careful I was, and I was one careful eggshell-walking motherfucker, I’d get caught in her crazy tornado and then I would literally just run for my life. I can remember one of these delightful occasions when she was screaming at me for something and I turned and ran from her, out of the living room and into the hall, head down in a full-on sprint, hoping to make it to the relative safety of my room, when suddenly I got hit in the back with something hard. I went sprawling forward and was lucky to break my fall with my hands. I got up quickly, clutching at my back, trying to figure out what hit me, and saw my mom at the end of the hallway crying. I was crying as well, my back was killing me, and I realized that she had thrown something at me. She was shrieking in hysterics and apologizing and I saw the ceramic Exxon coffee mug (free with a $5 purchase!) lying broken on the floor. I just beat it to my room and slammed the door. My mom stayed away, and I avoided her until my dad came home and we sat down for dinner. She told my dad what she did and how sorry she was and that was fuel (no pun intended) for another screaming match later that evening after Jason and I went to bed. I was okay physically; mentally I was fucking pissed off, and looking back on it now this was probably the beginning of me figuring out how to get the hell out of that house and away from all the dysfunction.
Jason and I spent most of our time in Seaford in the basement playing with our GI Joes and reading comic books, hiding from our parents, who were always fighting. The basement was our Fortress of Solitude, our Sanctum. My mom was miserable and crazy, always freaking out, and my dad would go to work every day and come home and then we would have a tension-filled dinner. After that, they would fight, and my brother and I would play and go to bed. The time from 1973 to 1975—when my parents finally split up and my mom, my brother, and I moved back to Queens—was the most turbulent part of my childhood. The kids I was hanging out with when I left the house were my age and a little bit older. And already some of the fifth graders were starting to drink and smoke weed. Some of them stayed out past midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. I was too young for that. I went out with them one time, and there were young kids drinking this stuff called Tang-O, which was a ready-made screwdriver—orange drink with shitty vodka. I tried it and it tasted gross. But ten- and eleven-year-olds were getting wasted on it every week.
These kids used to say, “Are you coming to hang out?” and I usually said, “Nahhh.” Some of them replied, “Quit being a baby. What are you gonna do, go home and play with your GI Joes?”
I wouldn’t say yeah, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I totally escaped into this fantasy land in my head because everywhere I looked there was turmoil. Kids were getting wasted and I wasn’t ready for that yet. Then I’d turn around, and my mom and dad were screaming at each other, and my mom was throwing glasses and dishes. I felt much more secure in the basement with my brother.
My parents definitely loved Jason and me, but we were not nurtured and coddled—not even close. My dad worked in the city even when my parents were together. So we’d only see him at dinner and on weekends. And my mom was at home pissed off when we came back from school. Sometimes she’d get drunk and angry and shout about how her life didn’t turn out the way she wanted it to and it was all our fault. Sometimes she’d have these full-on fits and start throwing our toys. We had the GI Joe Apollo mission capsule. Either my brother or I did something that upset her, and she screamed, “Wait ’til your father gets home!” Then she took this thing and flung it across the room; it hit the top of the living room wall and crashed to the ground in pieces. “You’re fucking buying me a new one,” I remember thinking. “You broke my GI Joe toy!”
Chapter 2
Music Is the Message
The only time there was peace in the house was when my parents were listening to music. No one from my family played music for a living, but my dad used to sing, and at some point in the fifties he sang doo-wop on the street with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (before they were Simon & Garfunkel), who went to the same high school as he did. Both of my parents had stuff like the Woodstock soundtrack, Neil Diamond, Elton John, Carole King, the Doobie Brothers, Bob Dylan and The Band in their record collections. I loved that stuff, but I didn’t know anything about aggressive music until I was seven and I discovered Black Sabbath.
My dad had a younger brother who was only ten years older than me, Uncle Mitchell, and I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. When I was six or seven, we’d go to my grandparents’ house, and I’d go into Uncle Mitch’s room. He had all these posters of Zeppelin and other rock bands, cool black-light posters, a big vinyl collection, and lots of comic books. I’d sit there and look at his records for hours. I thought, “This is the coolest place ever. This is the kind of stuff I’m going to have when I’m a teenager.”
One day I was flipping through his collection—the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones—and then I saw the first Black Sabbath record. I looked at the cover and thought, “What is this?” There was a creepy witch standing in the woods. I asked Mitch, “What am I even looking at?” He said, “That’s Black Sabbath. They’re acid rock.” I said, “What’s acid rock?” I didn’t even know what acid was yet. And no one was using the term “heavy metal” to describe music.
He put on the record. It starts with rain, thunder, and an ominous ringing bell. And then there’s this super creepy and heavy Tony Iommi guitar riff that I later discovered was the first famous tritone in rock. I definitely was scared—but also elated. The posters of black panthers with glowing eyes glared at me, and evil wizards stared me down. Then this guy with a nasal voice who sounded like a warlock started singing about Satan and screaming for God to help him. I was like, “I’m not sure what’s going on here.” But at the same time, I wanted to hear more.
Uncle Mitch also had tons of comics so whenever I was in his room I sat there and read. He introduced me to the greats from Marvel and DC: The Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Captain America, The Avengers, X-Men, Thor, Conan, Batman, Superman, Flash, Justice League.
I would lose myself in these worlds created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, and all the great silver-age comics and artists. Back then, comics were twelve or fifteen cents, so every week I’d go to the candy store and use my allowance to buy my own.
Fortunately, when my mother was flipping out my father was always there for my brother and me. Hanging out with my dad was pretty cool. He had the opposite temperament of my mom. He was even-keeled, solid, and calm. He only raised his voice if he really, really needed to. He was a rock, and I give him all the credit for that part of my personality, how I’m able to be calm and roll with stressful situations. If my dad had been neurotic like my mom, I’d be a lunatic in an asylum somewhere. Whenever he could, my dad took Jason and me skiing and to baseball games.
We started going to the original Yankee Stadium in 1972, and we saw a bunch of games after that. It’s odd, because, living in Queens, we should have been Mets fans. My dad wasn’t even a Yankees fan. He was a Dodgers fan. The Yankees were his enemy. I think that’s why I became a Yankees fan. I got sick of hearing about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were, of course, the LA Dodgers by that point, so I gravitated to the Dodgers’ rivals.
Everyone thinks of the Yankees as a world-class team: they’ve been in the World Series forty times and won twenty-seven of them, which is more than any other team in the Major Leagues. But when I was a kid the Yankees sucked. They were horrible right up until 1976. Still, going to baseball games was amazing. It was another world. Every time there was a crack of the bat, thousands of people cheered for the team wearing pinstripes. What a cool uniform. The Mets had goofy colors. The Yankees had class.
I didn’t just love to watch baseball. My friends and I also loved to play. We started out with stickball, which we’d play with a broom handle and a tennis ball. When I was in PS 169 in Bay Terrace, I used to play all the time after school, and I was pretty good. There was a stickball field set up there with the boxes painted on the wall. So it was a natural step for me to go into Little League, which I played for years. I usually played second base or shortstop. One of my role models was Freddie Patek, who was on the Kansas City Royals and was only five foot five. There were still a lot of guys who were actually normal-sized humans playing sports back then, so it gave a kid like me hope.
As pivotal as hearing Sabbath was, Elton John also had a big effect on me growing up. We had all the records in the house, and in 1974, before my parents completely split up, we all went to see Elton at Nassau Coliseum during the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour. The power went out during the show, but it was still amazing. He did all these costume changes, and it taught me how you can be entertaining with more than just music. The songs were great, but he was so theatrical and really played to the crowd. We saw Paul Simon in 1975 and that was amazing, too.
Although it’s hard to fathom, I had a lot of friends who didn’t care about music. They didn’t give a shit about going out and buying records. All they cared about was baseball and comic books, which I was definitely into. But I wanted to take my love for music to the next level. My dad always had an acoustic guitar in the house. He rarely played it. I think he knew about three chords, but I knew it was lying around somewhere. I had seen the Who on television. I knew the band because they had some of the best songs on my parents’ Woodstock record. So I’m watching them, and Pete Townshend starts spinning his right arm around like an airplane propeller. It looked really cool, and that’s when I asked about the guitar and said, “I want to do that. Can I have guitar lessons?”
They said sure, but they wouldn’t let me start on an electric guitar. My dad insisted I begin on an acoustic, and if I could prove to him that I was serious about the instrument, I could switch to electric. My guitar teacher was this tall guy with long hair who was probably nineteen or twenty. His name was Russell Alexander, and I thought he was the coolest dude in the world. He had a Stratocaster, and I had my stupid acoustic. Not long after, he told my dad, “He’s really getting good. He’s really into this.” And I was. I practiced every day and learned all the basic chords. I learned how to read, how to play scales, and rudimentary theory. A few months into the lessons, Russell started giving me guitar homework. I’d have a lesson once a week and have to practice and write out charts, which I hated because that wasn’t fun. I just wanted to play.
Every time Russell came over, I would say, “Teach me ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ Show me how to play ‘Pinball Wizard.’” All I wanted to do was learn songs. I didn’t care about writing out scales on pieces of paper. He would get frustrated and say, “Look, you have to learn this stuff to be able to . . .” And I said, “You mean to tell me every guy in every band knows all this stuff and knows theory?”
“Yeah, they do,” he said.
“I don’t know about that,” I said with the skepticism of a bratty kid. It didn’t seem possible that all these cool rock stars spent years sitting around and doing homework to learn how to play.
I kept taking lessons from Russell for a while, and he taught me some songs on acoustic. In third grade I played Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” at my elementary school talent show on Long Island. It was just me, my acoustic guitar, and a mike in the auditorium. Everyone clapped. I was a little kid. What were they going to do, boo me? But I knew the songs. I totally knew the songs.
So, when I had been playing acoustic for six months, Dad made good on his promise. He took me to this music store in Queens on Union Turnpike and bought me a used Fender Telecaster Deluxe, 1972. It was coffee-table brown with a black pick guard. I wish I still had it—it would be worth about nine grand. I sold it probably around 1978 because I really wanted a Fender Stratocaster. I didn’t know much back then, and to me a Tele didn’t look cool. A Strat was cool, a Les Paul was cool. Nobody I liked played Teles. Also, I liked the shape of the Strat better. It was sleeker and less folkie. I saved up some money and went back to the store where we got the Tele, and they had a natural wood Strat that I really wanted. So I traded in my Tele and gave them another two hundred dollars. That’s how I acquired new gear for years, even into the formative days of Anthrax in the early eighties. I was always buying and selling gear, trying to get more and better stuff and find good deals.
Once I got that first Tele, I told my parents that I didn’t want lessons anymore. I wanted to learn on my own. I had enough foresight to say, “I don’t want to learn guitar to sound like my teacher. I want to sound like me,” because I was afraid they’d take my guitar away otherwise. It worked! They agreed to let me do my own thing.
I knew how to play basic chords really well by then and I had a good ear, so I would put records on and figure out the guitar progressions—pretty much everything except the solos. From there I was like, “I need a better amp.” Back then I had a small Fender Deluxe. I wanted the Twin Reverb because it was bigger, but it was too expensive. And I got a fuzz box, the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedal. I plugged that into the Fender Deluxe, and I’m sure it sounded atrocious, but back then it seemed amazing.
My dad had a first cousin, Eddie, in Long Island who, like Mitch, was only ten or twelve years older than I was, and he lived about two miles away so I saw him a lot. He was a biker, and he shared a house with a bunch of other bikers. They had a jam room set up in the basement with a drum kit and a bunch of amps, and they’d all go down there and play. I’d follow them down when I was eight or nine to watch. They had Les Pauls and Gibson SGs and Strats and wah-wah pedals and fuzz boxes. They’d plug in, and all of a sudden there were all these dudes with long hair and beards and leather vests rocking out. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and it made me want to play guitar even more.
As much as I loved the Beatles, Elton John, and Simon & Garfunkel, I definitely viewed them as entertainment, like comics or horror movies. It wasn’t until September 1975 when I heard “Rock and Roll All Nite” from KISS Alive! that I
thought, “Oh my God, this is something else entirely.” I took to it like a moth to a flame. We were in our yellow Ford Torino station wagon right around the time the album was released, and the song came on the radio. I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t announced and I had never heard KISS before. But I was singing along by the end of the song. My parents were yelling at me to shut up because they didn’t know who the band was and it was too loud for them. Afterward I was like, “Who was that?!?” But the DJ just went on to the next song. I thought, “Oh man, I’m never going to know who that was! That was the greatest song I ever heard in my life and I’m never going to know who played it!”
Then around Halloween I was watching TV during the day, flipping through all five channels we had back then, and I stopped on a talk show that featured these four guys in makeup. I had no idea who they were or what their story was. Then the announcer said, “And now, to play their hit single from their new album, KISS Alive!, here’s KISS with ‘Rock and Roll All Nite.’” It’s funny because sitting there at eleven years old, I didn’t like the way they looked. I said to Jason, “This is stupid. Who do they think they are? They look like idiots. That’s a band? Why do they look like that?” I just didn’t understand. Elton John was flamboyant, but he didn’t dress up like he was going trick-or-treating. The Who didn’t wear makeup and platform shoes.
