by Scott Ian
Jonny originally arranged to have us record Fistful of Metal at Barrett Alley Studios in Rochester, where Metallica did Kill ’Em All. So we drove there in October 1983, ready to record the album with Metallica’s first producer and engineer, Paul Curcio and Chris Bubacz, only to find out that the mixing desk was gone, and they had ordered a new one that wouldn’t be there for at least three weeks. We had a truck full of gear and nowhere to record. The studio let us crash there for the night, then we called Jonny back in New Jersey, and he said he didn’t know the studio wasn’t ready. Since we couldn’t record in Rochester, Jonny called Carl Canedy of the Rods, because Carl lived up in Cortland, and asked if Carl knew any other studios in upstate New York.
We unloaded the truck, and Danny Spitz and I took the U-Haul and went on a road trip while everyone else stayed at the studio. We checked out two places. The first was in Elmira, and it was just a crappy room on top of a store. They had no gear and it sucked. The second was Pyramid Sound in Ithaca. It was a real recording studio with a control room, a ton of gear, and a big live room. We met Alex Perialas, who ran the place. They were way more expensive than Barrett Alley, but they were awesome, and Danny and I decided this was where we had to do the record. We talked to Jonny Z, who worked out a deal with Alex. He told them he had a record label and he would have all of his bands come record at the studio.
They were happy with that, so we drove back to Rochester, got the truck, and went back to Ithaca to do the record with Carl producing and Chris engineering. The album was a combination of anger and aggravation from the two years of crap and member changes that led up to the lineup that’s on there, combined with the uncontained excitement and youthful energy of finally being able to get into a real studio and make a whole record. At first, we were a little intimidated, but we were prepared. We had rehearsed five nights a week for two years, so we knew our shit and we were tight. And we were pumped. We had a shoestring budget to work with, but we made the most of it. Plus, we were good at nailing songs on first or second takes. We were in Ithaca for three weeks, and we stayed at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Cortland, which was really a crash pad run by two sisters. We also spent some time in a fleabag motel in Ithaca. Even though we were still an unknown band and weren’t making any money, we felt like we were living the dream—making a real album, going to bars, and hooking up with local chicks who were impressed we were in a band, even though they didn’t know Anthrax from Aerosmith.
We worked at Pyramid Sound for three weeks. In addition to tracking our songs, Neil and Jonny convinced us to record a cover of Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” Around that time, Quiet Riot went to number 1 with their cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” so Jonny thought we needed a cover song as well to help propel our album sales. Neil was way into it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think “I’m Eighteen” made any sense in the context of the rest of Fistful of Metal, but that didn’t matter. To protest, I didn’t play rhythm guitar on that track. Spitz played all the guitars. It’s the only song in the history of the band that doesn’t feature me. I flat out didn’t want it on the record, and it certainly didn’t take us to number 1, so I guess I was right.
Chapter 8
Fistful of Headaches
At the same time as I was living out my rock and roll fantasies, I was still dating Marge. After she graduated from high school, she went to Northeastern University in Boston, so she was gone for four years. We were supposed to be exclusive and have this long-term relationship. I visited her about once a month in Boston and would hang out for a few days, so when she was in class or was busy with her studies I’d check out who was playing in the area and go to local punk and metal shows. I hung out a lot at the Paradise, this small club on Commonwealth Avenue. It was really small and narrow but a lot of cool bands played there. Another club that booked metal shows in Boston was the Channel, a big warehouse on the water which was demolished in the late nineties to make way for some major highway construction. And if there was no one good at either of those places, there were always punk shows at the Rathskeller, which everyone called the Rat, probably because that’s what ran around the place besides people. It was kind of like the CBGB of Boston but even grimier. There was a doorman outside named Mitch who got cancer. So he had a laryngectomy and could only talk with one of the mechanical devices you hold up to your throat. When he spoke he sounded like a grumpy version of one of those really old Speak & Spell learning toys.
After I got back home, I talked on the phone with Marge a lot, but I realized pretty quickly that seeing her once a month wasn’t satisfying my libido. It’s a shitty thing to say. I could have jerked off and stayed faithful, but there were girls at clubs who were digging us, and when we were hanging out at L’Amour or 516 trying to promote the band, there were always chicks around and some of them were really hot. I thought, “Well, Marge is away in Boston. It was her choice to go to college there and leave me in New York.”
That’s a fuckin’ selfish attitude. Shit, I was nineteen, and these girls we’d meet were available and eager. You didn’t have to be terribly smooth to hook up with them. There was no Facebook or Twitter, so there was no chance of getting caught. There were way more ways not to get caught back then. If you got busted cheating, you were basically an idiot.
In my brain I thought I was in love with Marge, but the monogamy option just wasn’t going to cut it. The other option was to be with Marge for the rest of my life and realize that I’d only ever had sex with her and one other girl. That couldn’t happen. It’s not like I was hooking up on a nightly basis. It was really only an occasional thing, but cheating is cheating, and I kept the charade going on for years. Marge thought we had this great relationship because I’d come see her once a month and we’d go see a museum exhibit or something and have sex. And then I’d listen to her talk about all of her classes while I nodded and smiled and thought about Anthrax.
In some ways, the joke was on me. In Boston I had Marge and in Ithaca there were girls that made me feel like a rock star. After we were done with the album, I went crashing back to reality. I was back in my cell in my mom’s apartment, and I had all my gear in there because we’d left the Music Building by then. We weren’t there every day and didn’t want to pay the rent anymore. That left us with no place to rehearse or leave our shit. I had to stack all these Marshall cabinets and guitars and pedals to the ceiling. There was just enough room for a single mattress on the floor next to the windows. I slept and lived there for almost three years. I’d come back from a show and load my own gear back into my mom’s apartment. There were no roadies or techs. Just me. It didn’t matter. Whatever needed to be done, I was fuckin’ gonna do it.
Soon after Ithaca we were back in New York with the finished album. That was Anthrax circa 1984 and I still like it for what it is. At the time, of course, I loved it, but I always hated the mix. And I hated the cover art way more. That and the title were Neil’s idea. Back then, Neil had this chain-mail metal glove he’d wear onstage, which he made himself. He used to sit in his apartment and weave these metal links with blacksmith tools for hours on end. Maybe he should have been a renaissance fair craftsman and not a singer. He saw that Judas Priest were wearing all this metal and he figured we had to look more metal than them—hence the glove.
“We’ve got to have a guy on the cover of the album who’s getting punched by a guy wearing my metal glove through the back of his head and it comes out his mouth!”
That was Neil’s idea of “metal.” It was my idea of crap.
“We’ll call it Fistful of Metal because I wear a glove and it’s fuckin’ metal!” Neil enthused.
Nobody else had any ideas. We had one other piece of art done for us that tied in with the song “Death from Above.” The chorus was, “Jet fighter, jet fighter. Turbo jet engines ignite.” So someone did this art based on a photo of a fighter pilot in an F-14 with a helmet and the oxygen mask. It was cool and sleek. But it r
eminded me of Black Sabbath’s Never Say Die. Also, it didn’t look very metal.
So we went with Neil’s idea and had an artist friend of Danny Spitz named Kent Josphe create the image. We didn’t know what else to do. We looked at Metallica’s Kill ’Em All and said to each other, “That’s a terrible cover. Let’s not use that guy.” Jonny Z was using him for all his stuff, and it was terrible. Exciter’s Violence and Force is the worst-looking record of all time. So by default, we ended up with a rush job done by Danny’s friend. We were pretty shocked it was so bad because we had seen the guy’s portfolio and he had lots of cool paintings and drawings. Plus, he’s the one who did our logo for the “Soldiers of Metal” single. He sent us six or seven logo ideas, and that one stuck out. Slam dunk. That’s Anthrax right there. The logo was killer. So we figured we’d let him do the artwork based on Neil’s idea.
Then we saw the finished art for the album cover. The first thing I said was, “Wait a minute. It makes no sense. There are two right hands on the cover!” It was the same hand holding the guy’s head as it was punching him through the face. I couldn’t figure out if there were two people, one guy holding him and the other guy hitting him, or if this guy was born with two right hands. The cover was all wrong, but we didn’t have the budget to do anything else. It was either use that or have nothing on the cover but the band logo and the words Fistful of Metal, because we had already agreed on the title. To make matters worse, on the first printing in the States, our fucking name came out pink, not red. Nothing is less metal than a pink band logo, but we were helpless to do anything about that, either. Megaforce wasn’t about to dump thousands of copies of the record just ’cause the band’s name was pink. Everything was wrong with the album except the music.
I kind of look back at it more fondly now just because it’s so goofy, but man did we hate it back then. The thing is, if you look at all the big thrash debut albums that came out, they all had terrible covers: Fistful of Metal, Exodus’s Bonded by Blood, Metallica’s Kill ’Em All, Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good, and Slayer’s Show No Mercy were all pretty bad. I wouldn’t even say ours was the worst. I’ll take Fistful of Metal over Killing Is My Business . . . or Kill ’Em All. But I would say Bonded by Blood took the cake. Whatever that thing is on the cover of that Exodus album is atrocious. At the same time, it’s so great because bad cover art was a big part of early thrash metal. It’s almost as if everyone was thinking, “Alright, we can’t have artwork as good as Iron Maiden because we’re not as big as Iron Maiden, so we’re just going to do our best and this is what you get.”
As soon as we started touring to support Fistful of Metal, Neil got ultra-cocky. He felt like he was the boss man, and he became inflexible. His attitude was “I’m the singer and it’s my way or the highway.” He thought we’d be dead without him. The shitty thing is, he was right. We were on the fast track. Jonny Z was managing us, and he was bringing Raven back in the summer of 1984 to tour like they did the year before with Metallica opening, and this time we were scheduled to open all the dates, starting May 30. Everything was already announced and planned, and if we lost our singer, we’d have had to cancel. Jonny wasn’t going to wait around for us. There were other bands he was talking to like Overkill and Legacy (which became Testament). We had to strike while the iron was hot, and that gave Neil the ability to pull all these power plays.
He decided what we were going to look like and what we were going to wear. He made this chain-mail belt for me that was six or seven inches wide all the way around. It weighed twenty pounds, and he wanted me to wear it onstage. I liked to run around when we played, and the belt weighed me down. But he said, “Scott, you’re going to fucking wear that belt! Lilker, turn your bass down and never step in front of me.” Whenever we opposed any of his ideas, he threatened to quit. We hated his guts, but we were powerless to do anything about it.
The biggest dick move Neil ever pulled was when he fired Danny Lilker behind our backs after Fistful came out in January 1984. The main reason he did it, in my opinion, was because Danny is taller than him. He honestly didn’t think someone should be taller than the front man onstage. He thought it made him look bad, so he tried to stand as far away from Danny as possible, which was hard when we were playing stages the size of Ping-Pong tables.
But I have to admit there were issues with Danny. He was lazy. He was getting into weed and the rest of us were clean. And he was forgetful. We were rehearsing at a studio in New Rochelle by then. It was thirty minutes from Bayside, so I’d pick up Lilker, and we’d drive over the Throgs Neck Bridge to New Rochelle. Twenty minutes after we’d left, Danny would say, “Oh, I forgot my bass.”
“Dude, I figured you’d left it at rehearsal.”
“No, it’s at home.”
“Man, we’ll be there in ten minutes. If we turn around we’ll be late. We’ll have to borrow a bass from another band.”
Stuff like that was constantly happening. Danny was laid-back and lackadaisical, and I was always that guy—bam, bam, bam, gotta move forward—but that was no reason to kick him out of the band. Danny was the guy who was there from the beginning. It was me and him. We started Anthrax, and he was the main riff writer at the time. Charlie hadn’t started writing songs yet, and the stuff that I had written before wasn’t good enough anymore. It still kinda sounded like Iron Maiden, whereas Danny’s writing got so much better as we progressed. The first time he played “Deathrider,” I almost peed myself. It was amazing. But Neil didn’t like Lilker and felt he was holding us back. We finished Fistful in October 1983, and in November we had a show at a roller rink in New Jersey called Skateway 9. Talas, which were Billy Sheehan’s band, were headlining, then came Exciter, then us. We thought we should have been in the middle of the bill, but Jonny said, “Exciter are coming from Canada. We can’t make them open the show. They’re an international act.” International? Fucking Canada? But we liked Exciter, so we relented.
We had a great set, and about six hundred kids lost their shit because we were the local favorites. Exciter were cool and tore the place up as well, and Talas were nuts. Seeing Billy Sheehan play bass was insane and still is. He’s incredible. Things just got better. Fistful of Metal came out in January, and we were thrilled to finally have a record out that people could buy in stores, even if we never got used to that shitty artwork. I was still riding a natural high from having a record out when I got a call from Lilker. He sounded strange.
“Dude, what’s going on? Neil just called me and told me I’m out of the band,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Neil just called me and fired me.”
I figured he must have been confused. Neil didn’t tell me anything. We didn’t have a band meeting. I thought maybe there had been a mistake, and I told Danny I’d figure out what was going on and call him right back.
I called Neil and said, “Dude, what the fuck! You fired Danny?”
“We talked about it. You knew this . . .”
“No, we’ve talked about Danny’s problems and that I would talk to him and we would get him back on track. No one fucking told you to call him and fire him, that’s . . . you can’t just fire Danny, it’s not . . .”
“Well, he’s out,” he interrupted. “It’s either him or me. I can’t be in a band with that slob anymore. He’s an embarrassment onstage. He’s not a professional musician. He doesn’t look like he belongs in Anthrax.”
I would wear leather pants onstage, Neil had his whole Rob Halford–meets–Rhett Forrester look, and Lilker would have jeans and a black leather jacket on with some metal T-shirt. I never had a problem with the way he looked. Cliff didn’t look like the rest of Metallica, and no one cared. It just didn’t matter.
“You can’t fuckin’ do that, man . . .”
“That’s it. It’s either him or me.”
I hung up and called Charlie and Spitz, and everyone
came to the same conclusion. We couldn’t lose our singer. We had to go on tour and support our album. It was sickening knowing our hands were tied and we were backed against the wall. We felt like if we lost Neil the band would be done. We’d be held up for months trying to find someone else to sing for us.
I got off the phone with those guys and sat in my room in my mom’s house and cried. I was sick to my stomach, throwing up. I had gone from a state of elation from having just released our first record to feeling like I had lost a loved one, and in a way I had. I called Danny back and explained the situation: “Neil said it’s you or him. I called Charlie and Danny, and I can’t believe. . . . I don’t want to say this to you, but this is what we’re doing, this is what we have to do if we’re going to move forward. We can’t lose Neil. As much as we hate him, we just can’t.”
Danny was silent for a moment. And then he just went with it. If I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have thought he was angry, but I knew he was devastated. Telling Danny that I was going with Neil’s decision was probably the worst moment for me in the history of Anthrax. It was fucking brutal. I hated Neil before, mostly because he was such a douche, but he was laughable because he was an idiot. Now, I genuinely hated him because he was a tyrant and he made me lose my best friend. I’d dream about the day when Neil wasn’t going to be in the band, either. I’d look at him with his smug expression, and I’d think, “Dude, this is not going to happen for you. You’re never going to be what we’re going to be—not while you’re in the band.”
