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

by Scott Ian

  By the time I started high school, my only goal was to play with other people and have a band. I was never one of those kids who sat in their rooms practicing lead guitar for eight hours a day. I couldn’t do that. I needed to be with other musicians jamming real songs, whether they were covers or originals. Sitting in my little shitty six-by-six room practicing would have driven me crazy. I was persistent and tenacious, and it didn’t matter that I couldn’t solo like Eddie Van Halen. I figured the only way I was going to make it is if I got out and played gigs in Manhattan.

  I used to read Rock Scene magazine and see pictures of the Ramones hanging out at Gildersleeves and CBGB in ’76. I wanted to hang out there, but I was too young to get in. So I had to wait until CBGB started doing hardcore shows when I was a little older. Even so, the Ramones were a big influence on me because they were in Forest Hills, which was at most five miles from where I lived. They were a bunch of longhaired dudes with Levis and leather jackets and T-shirts, and I looked just like them. I was like, “Look at these guys! They’re on TV. They tour the world. And they’re from Queens!” At that point in time, I didn’t know KISS were from Queens, too. Back then, no one knew anything about KISS that the band members didn’t say in interviews. Their early history was a mystery. But the Ramones were proud about being from Queens. I went to go see them at Queens College, and I thought, “If they can do it, I can do it. They’re the same as me.”

  That was the cool thing about bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. They introduced the DIY spirit to rock music. All of a sudden you didn’t have to be a trained musician with amazing skills. As long as you had willpower and tenacity, you could get a band together and go onstage. I had that shit in spades.

  I’d find other musicians through flyers they posted in music stores, and we’d jam out songs by Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, and even Judas Priest. It didn’t seem like things could be any cooler. Then, I lost my virginity.

  It happened on Fire Island in this share house that my mom rented with some other people. Every other weekend we went out to the beach there. One time I met a girl named Susie who was a couple years older than me. We were there for three days, and she was all over me right away. I barely said a word. I was fifteen. I didn’t have any game—no moves whatsoever. But the first night we were sitting on the couch together, she started kissing and grabbing me. It was like something from Penthouse Forum.

  “Dear Penthouse, you’re not going to believe what happened to me.” We didn’t fuck that night, but the next evening she put on the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever. Like I said, I never hated disco, but I was loving the Bee Gees that night. Everyone had gone to sleep; all the parents were in bed. And right there on the couch, Susie totally attacked me. We were just a few feet from the bedrooms. My mom could have walked through the living room at any time.

  I asked her if she was a virgin, and she said she wasn’t. I pretty much figured that by how forward she was. I was nervous so I said, “Uh, I am.” And she went, “Don’t worry about it.”

  She kissed the shit out of me, stuck my hand down her pants, ripped her shorts off, undid her bra, and whipped her boobs out and unzipped my jeans in about three seconds. She was Ali-fast, and foreplay be damned, she hopped on top of me and guided me into her. I took it from there. Some things come naturally, even for geeks who play with GI Joes and love the Fantastic Four.

  I was like, “Wow, you rule! Can I take you home with me so I can show you off to all my friends? No one is going to believe I’m fucking this hot seventeen-year-old chick.” It was a pretty great way to lose my virginity. But even though I was staying out at night, hanging with older kids, and trying to get my music career off the ground, it would be another two years until I got laid again. And that would be with the girl who became my first wife, Marge Ginsburg.

  Before that, I hooked up with my first semiserious girlfriend, Kim Eisenberg. She had long brown hair and was only a little taller than I was. I met her in Florida because her grandparents lived in the same development as my grandparents. We hit it off and continued the relationship in New York when I was a junior in high school. She lived in Coney Island and I wasn’t driving yet, so I had to take a two-hour subway ride on the F train to see her. We didn’t see each other all that often, but we stayed together for about a year. She was nice to me, and I liked telling my friends I had a girlfriend. In the end, the commute proved too difficult, so we broke up. Another reason it ended was because we didn’t sleep together. I obviously wanted it, but she said she wasn’t ready.

  One time we actually tried. We were at a party at my friend Richie’s house on the first floor of the building we lived in, and she came in from Coney Island. After my mom went to bed, we snuck into my room and I tried to make it happen, but it was just a complete failure. She wasn’t really into it, and I’d never even tried putting a condom on before. I was frustrated because it wasn’t going on right, so I said, “Fuck this rubber. I can’t use it. It’s not working.” And she said, “I’m not doing it without one!”

  “Apparently I’m not doing it with or without one!” I snapped back. We returned to the party, and two days later she called me and gave me the “maybe we should see other people” line. At that point, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was play music.

  It had nothing to do with that experience, but my first band, Four-X, was named after the condom. We just took the e out and added a dash so we wouldn’t get sued. The band was composed of me and a bunch of my friends: Dave Weiss—who I knew from the neighborhood—on drums, Paul Kahn on bass, and Neil Stopol on vocals and guitar. Neil was one of the first people I met after my parents split up and my brother and I moved with our mom back to Bay Terrace. We became friends immediately. Four-X played a talent show at Bayside High School. At the time we just did covers, but I thought we were really good. It was fun and we played well. But Four-X didn’t last very long because we didn’t have the right chemistry. I thought Dave was a great drummer. I’m still friends with Neil, but honestly it didn’t feel right with him, and I think he felt it, too. It wasn’t until I met Danny Lilker, who was a grade behind me, that the elements started to come together for Anthrax.

  Danny was a tall, skinny kid with curly hair, which he was growing out. He always wore rock or metal T-shirts and seemed like the kind of guy I would get along with. His nickname in high school was Beethoven, because he had perfect pitch and he could figure out anything. All he had to do was listen to something, anything, and he’d instantly figure it out, regardless of genre. I met him in 1979 when I was a junior and he was a sophomore and we were in this after-school project called Sing Band. This group of actors would do these sketches and sing, and we’d play music as the band for their songs. It was the kind of stuff you’d hear in Broadway musicals, and I’ve always hated that crap, but it gave me a chance to play for an audience.

  I found out that Danny lived just a couple blocks from me and I would pass his home every day on the way to school, so I’d stop off, pick him up, and we would walk to school together. We started hanging out and became really good friends. We talked about our families, and it turned out his was messed up as well. His sister was a pretty heavy drug addict. Once, she shot up in a van in front of me. Seeing that scared the shit out of me. I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve only heard about this on TV.” Danny took it all in stride. I could tell it upset him, but he didn’t want to interfere. We both had other priorities.

  At the time he was in a band called White Heat, which played gigs in Manhattan, including Great Gildersleeves, and they performed originals. I was in awe and pretty jealous. Their guitarist, Peter Zizzo, was the first guy I knew who could play all the Van Halen licks. He was a shredder and had equipment I could only dream of: a Charvel guitar, a killer Marshall amp. I used to tag along with Danny to their rehearsals like a total groupie. White Heat’s singer, Marco Shuhan, was a tall dude with long hair who lived in Manhattan. To me, that was the d
ream. Oh my God! To get out of Queens and move into the city. I had no idea how to accomplish that. Even back then the city was expensive. To be in a band and live there, you had to have gigs and a record deal, and all of that was way beyond me. I just wanted to form a great band.

  White Heat weren’t great, but they had some good songs and they could draw a crowd, even in the city. Every day when we were walking to school, I would say to Danny, “Hey, when White Heat break up, we’re going to start a band together.” He’d laugh and we’d keep walking. Before Danny and I had a band, we had a name. He had learned about the bacterial disease anthrax in science class, and one day he turned to me and said, “Have you ever heard of anthrax?” I said, “No, what’s that? It sounds cool.”

  It turned into this thing. I’d say to him, “When White Heat break up, we’re going to start a band called Anthrax.” Back then, nobody knew terrorists would eventually use it to wage biological warfare. Few people even knew it was an infectious ailment that usually affects wild animals. It just sounded metal. Danny would say, “We’re not breaking up. What are you talking about? We just did another demo and we’re playing shows.” And I would say, “Yeah, whatever, but if you guys break up, me and you are going to form a band and tour the world.”

  That was my mom’s worst nightmare. In her mind, I was going to be a doctor, a dentist, or a lawyer. That’s the Jewish sign of successful parenting, and it’s why you find so many Goldbergs and Finkelsteins in those professions. I can’t count how many times my mom said, “Who do you think you are that you’re going to make it in the music business? Everybody wants to be in a band. Everyone wants to be on television, everybody wants to be famous. Why do you think you’re going to be able to?”

  “Because, Ma, I’m going to do it,” I said. “I’m going to try. I have to at least try.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” she’d say. “You have to go to school. You have to go to college. You have to have a real job and make money.”

  It all went in one ear and out the other, because I knew what I wanted and I didn’t give a shit what she said. Mom had a point, but there was no way I was ever going to let that slow me down, not once. “Mom, what’s the worst that could happen?” I’d say. “I try, and if I fail, you say, ‘I told you so.’ I could always go back to college later. I could always get a job, so I’ve got to try for a few years. I have to try.”

  As much as I crushed her perception of what a good son does, she tried to shatter my dreams and wouldn’t accept my argument.

  “No son of mine . . . ,” she’d begin. I’d sigh and think, “Here she fuckin’ goes again.” The only worse thing I could do to her was leave to be a race car driver. When I was a little kid, that’s what I wanted to do, and she would shout, “Over my dead body!” I always thought she should have been happy I just wanted to be a musician and not pursue a really dangerous career.

  From 1980 on, I was determined to launch Anthrax and play gigs. There was no such thing as failure. I was already out of comic books by that time. I wanted to be Steve Harris; I wanted to be Glenn Tipton or Lemmy. Those guys were my heroes, and while they seemed completely untouchable and unreachable, I felt a kinship with them. “I play metal, they play metal,” I figured. “They started somewhere and now look at them. I just need to find the right dudes to play with. I have to try harder.”

  My mom turned a blind eye to anything I did in music. Honestly, I didn’t expect anything different, so I didn’t care. I had my friends, my dad, and my brother, and I had the support of the first real girlfriend who would actually have sex with me. I met Marge at a party through a mutual friend. It was early 1981 just a few months before I graduated high school. She was wearing a tight green sweater and jeans and had kind, warm eyes and a nice smile. We talked and got along pretty well, but I wasn’t hitting on her or anything. I couldn’t pick up a girl if she weighed thirty-five pounds and jumped into my arms.

  Then I heard she liked me. That gave me the confidence to ask her out. We started seeing each other, which was great because she was cute and I could tell she really liked me. Any girls I had been with before looked at me as someone to fool around with, not someone they really enjoyed being with. She wasn’t a big music fan, but she thought it was cool that I played guitar and was putting this band together. And it didn’t hurt that we were both Jewish. She was a year behind me and was a student at the Bronx High School of Science, which is where the smart kids went. She spent a lot of time on her studies, so we only saw each other once or twice a week, which was good for me because I was happy to be in a serious relationship, but I had the space to concentrate on music and not be dragged down. The band was more important than my relationship, my family, school, everything.

  The spring of 1981 brought the moment I had been waiting for. White Heat broke up because of musical differences, just like I said they would, so Danny and I formed Anthrax, both of us on guitar. It made sense. We were best friends. We literally hung out every day and had the same taste in music. Dave Weiss and Paul Kahn came over from Four-X with me, and vocalist John Connelly, who also went to school with us—and later formed Nuclear Assault with Danny—sang for us.

  John used to walk around the halls of Bayside High with a saxophone around his neck and always had a thirty-two-ounce bottle of Pepsi in his hand. A lot of times he would wear black jeans, black shoes, black shirt, and a priest’s collar. John was weird but in a good way. Danny was friends with him before I knew him, and he brought him into the band. Our first jam session was July 18, 1981, and everything seemed to click. It went so well and we thought it sounded so good; right then, we agreed to form a band and call it Anthrax.

  History’s a funny thing. We get called one of the Big 4 thrash bands, which is a huge honor. Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth are composed of some of the most creative and talented metal musicians ever. And when the thrash scene was at its peak, these guys played with more speed and agility than anyone else. Anthrax also grew into a band that strived to play faster than anyone else. But at first the crazy speed came from the fact that we weren’t very good as players yet. Our adrenaline would be pumping, we’d get out there, and suddenly Dave was speeding along, and we were strumming away trying to keep up with him. We even played covers way too fast.

  The first show we ever did was in Flushing, Queens, in the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church. We sold tickets to friends for three dollars, and there were maybe thirty people at the show. The church had a piano, so we opened with Danny Lilker sitting at the piano playing Judas Priest’s “Prelude,” which is the intro for Sad Wings of Destiny. The piano wasn’t miked, but people could hear it because nothing else was on. Then Danny jumped off the piano seat, ran onstage, picked up his guitar, and we broke into Judas Priest’s “Tyrant.” Most of the show was covers, but we also played a couple of Danny’s original songs from White Heat, “Hunting Dogs” and “Satan’s Wheels.” It was terrible, looking back at it, but also a shitload of fun, and our friends were sympathetic and supportive.

  After I finished high school I went to St. John’s University, but I quickly figured out that a college degree wasn’t going to help out my music career, and studying for classes would only hold me back. Plus, I needed cash to upgrade my equipment. My dad supported my music dreams by giving me a part-time job at the jewelry company where he worked. I’d go to school from 8 a.m. until noon, then I’d get on the subway and work as a messenger from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. In January 1982 I stopped going to college entirely. I woke up in the morning as if I was going to school, my mom would leave, and I’d go back to bed and sleep for another two hours. Then I’d get up and go to the city. I’d go to Forty-­Eighth Street and hang out at the guitar stores, then show up at my dad’s office at one o’clock to work for him. I did that for about a month, just dicking around. I finally got up the balls to tell my father that I’d stopped going to class. He asked what I was doing all that time. I told him I was sleeping in and then han
ging out at Manny’s and Sam Ash, then coming over to his office.

  “Does your mother know?”

  “Oh God, absolutely not, of course not.”

  He understood why I hadn’t told her, but he felt I couldn’t keep such a big secret any longer. He told me to tell Mom and then start coming to his office at 9 a.m. to work full-time for him. I was ecstatic because I knew if I was working full-time I could make more money and I could buy equipment and finance our recordings. At the time, I had shitty gear, and I felt that was holding me back from being a professional musician. I used to go to the guitar stores in the city and play their guitars, but I didn’t have money for anything, so I’d always walk out. Once I started working full-time for my dad, I had some cash and it was great, and my mom didn’t have to know . . . until four months later my dad said, “You really do need to tell your mother that you ­haven’t been going to school. What are you going to do? You have to be honest and tell her.”

  So I did. I went home that day and during dinner I told her I wasn’t going to school anymore and I was working for my dad to support my music habit.

  The noise that came out of her mouth was louder than what I would have heard if armed gunmen had suddenly showed up in ski masks. The sounds she made are still moving through space, through solar systems and galaxies somewhere. That scream has kept alien invasions at bay and is going to end up on a planet millions and millions of miles away and destroy all life because it was so bloodcurdlingly loud and frightening. It was like I had stabbed her in the heart with a butcher knife. Every hope and dream she ever had for her firstborn Jewish son was thrown into a volcano.

  I sputtered, “I’m working. I’m working! I’m making money! I have a job, it’s not like I’m doing nothing!”

  “I don’t fucking care! You left school and you lied to me and . . .” She went on this maniacal tirade, screaming about how I was a failure and would never do anything with my life and how she had tried to raise me and had given me everything. She was shouting and crying the whole time. My brother was cowering to the side, glad that he wasn’t bearing the brunt of her anger.