by Scott Ian
While we were playing the hurry-up-and-wait game recording Spreading, Charlie, Frankie, and I did a quick hardcore demo with me singing and sent it to Jonny to give him an idea of what a hardcore project from us might sound like. It included the Agnostic Front covers “United Blood” and “Last Warning” as well as a version of Discharge’s “Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing.” We didn’t know what we were going to call it at the time because although I had this comic book character, Sgt. D hadn’t transformed into a musical project yet. Jonny loved the idea of us doing a hardcore band and thought we should call it the Diseased as a play on Anthrax. The more I thought about the hardcore band, the more I started thinking about merging it with my comic book drawings. I’m not a good artist, so they were pretty shoddy looking, but they were funny, and after I did a bunch of them I started writing songs from the perspective of Sgt. D. That’s when I came up with the name Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.).
I thought it would be funny to make the S.O.D. songs super-fast, heavy, and short. So I wrote riffs which were kind of hardcore but from a metal perspective because that’s what I knew. The songs were mostly sixty or ninety seconds long, with some joke tunes that were only three or four seconds. In no time, I had about nine or ten songs done.
But I kinda hit a wall. Everything started to sound really similar. So I called Danny Lilker to help me out. I contacted him out of the blue and I half expected him to tell me to fuck off. We hadn’t had much contact in the last year and a half since Neil kicked him out of Anthrax. We had bumped into each other, but we never had much to say to each other and we definitely didn’t hang out.
He answered the phone, and I told him I was up in Ithaca recording Anthrax stuff, and during some downtime I started writing these really fast tunes that were a blend of hardcore and metal, and I thought he would be the perfect person to work with. I knew Danny was into hardcore because I’d sometimes see him at CBGB Sunday hardcore matinees. He said he’d come up, and a couple days later he got on the bus from New York to Ithaca and spent a few days at the studio. We clicked immediately and plowed right into the material. Unfortunately, that caused some friction with Frankie because suddenly he wasn’t involved in this thing that Charlie and I were doing with our former bassist.
Frankie was understandably angry because he played on these other hardcore tracks. Now we were moving forward without him, and he was out in the cold with Joey and Spitz, who weren’t exactly his buddies. There’s no question that a schism had developed, the first of many in the history of Anthrax. Jonny was caught in the middle trying to keep the peace. He explained to Frankie and the other guys that we weren’t doing S.O.D. when we were on the Anthrax clock. It was never a question of one or the other. Anthrax was always the priority. There was just this time off, but when I got Lilker back into the picture, it felt like it was meant to be. I only ever thought S.O.D. was going to help Anthrax because if we got hardcore kids into the band, it would create a natural bridge for these guys to check out what we were doing with Anthrax.
The friction that ensued actually inspired Danny Spitz to start a side project as well and try to get Joey and Frankie involved. Fans of English pop might remember when a couple of guys in Duran Duran went off and did Power Station, which was huge, and then some of the other Duran Duran dudes did a side project they called Arcadia that nobody cared about. Charlie and I used to joke that we were going off to do Power Station and they would be Arcadia—which never happened, anyway.
As much as I hated leaving Frankie out, I knew Lilker was the right guy for S.O.D. because he’s a great writer and his underground sensibility matched the music. We wrote the next ten songs while Danny was in Ithaca, and then S.O.D. was done. It was like Anthrax, but different. Eventually, it would be termed crossover. There were some great metal riffs, but it was definitely rooted in hardcore, and it was all about fun. That’s it. If it didn’t make us laugh then it wasn’t S.O.D. The band was one big inside joke and that’s what made it great. Even though Danny and I wrote all the songs (except for “No Turning Back” and “Pi Alpha Nu,” which Billy Milano wrote), S.O.D. would never have been what it was without Billy.
I met him at an Agnostic Front / Murphy’s Law show at CBGB in early ’84. He came up to me and said, “Oh, aren’t you in Anthrax? I heard you come to shows here.” Then he told me that he overheard some skinheads who hated longhairs talking about beating me up, so he suggested I come backstage to hang out with him and Agnostic Front.
I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” Aside from appreciating being saved from a possible beatdown, Agnostic Front was an NYHC institution. We loved the music, but they lived it. They’d get into fights all the time, and their singer Roger Miret eventually went to jail for almost two years on drug charges. I was thrilled to meet him and guitarist Vinnie Stigma. Afterward, I hung out with Billy, who was the bass player in a hardcore band, the Psychos. He was a huge, intimidating guy, and he was a swarming beast onstage, so he had developed a bit of a reputation in the NYHC community. It was pretty cool that Billy befriended me like that because back in those days there was clearly still a strong divide between headbangers and hardcore fans. Longhairs definitely were not welcome at the CBGB Sunday matinees. Skinheads and punks didn’t like each other, but the one thing they agreed on was that they hated the longhairs. Thanks to Billy, I was accepted into that scene pretty quickly. I even said to Billy, “I’ve never had an issue here with people wanting to fight me,” and he said, “That’s because you know me! Because if they fuck with you, they fuck with me.”
I definitely appreciated that since I was five foot six and not terribly well built. Billy used to say, “We’re going to hire Jacques Cousteau to find your sunken chest.” Billy was great for S.O.D. He looked the part, and he dug into the spiteful, apolitical subject matter without hesitation or remorse, like a shark planting his teeth into the flank of a seal.
Some of the shit he was singing was pretty rough, too. Like the title track, “Speak English or Die”: Nice fuckin’ accents, why can’t you speak like me? / What’s that dot on your head, do you use it to see?” Then there was “Fuck the Middle East”: “They hijack our planes, they raise our oil prices / We’ll kill them all and have a ball and end their fuckin’ crisis.” Now those are some ridiculous lyrics.
It felt great to work on those songs after the painstaking, endless procedure that Spreading the Disease had become. We finished mixing Spreading on June 30, 1985, and all our gear was still set up in the studio. Even the drums were still miked. That enabled us to dive right into Speak English or Die and record it quickly and cheaply. Carl knew we were gearing up to work on S.O.D., and he said to me one day that he’d love to produce it for us. There was no way that was going to happen after all the time it took to make Spreading. We planned to make the S.O.D. record in a week tops, so we hired Alex to do it, and he did an amazing job.
We had one rehearsal the night of July 1. It was me, Charlie, Danny, and Billy, and we tracked the album on July 2. We did the vocals on July 3 and had a barbecue to celebrate America’s 209th birthday the next day. On July 5 we mixed it and it was done. And although the music is totally different than Spreading the Disease, you can play that and the S.O.D. record back to back, and they sound just as good.
When we listened back to Speak English or Die, we knew we had created something great. And it felt special, knowing that we’d done it in a mere three days—pulled it out of our asses, basically. At the time, there was nothing heavier. We had blast beats, and it was faster and more brutal than anything else we had heard. We were all really proud of it.
When people heard this stuff, though, they immediately thought Billy was racist. What they didn’t understand was, there was this fucking Jew behind the curtain. No one bothered to dig into the motivation behind the subject matter; they just reacted, and they dug into Billy big time.
“Scott, you motherfucker!!” he once said. “I get all this shit about being a rac
ist and everybody’s up my ass, and it’s all your fault! You’re a sneaky little fuck. It’s all you, and you just get to stand there and smile and play guitar.”
Billy wasn’t a racist, a xenophobe, or a homophobe, but he totally went with it and owned the Sgt. D character. Plus, he looked like the type of guy who might actually believe the things Sgt. D was saying. Sgt. D hated everybody: black, white, Asian, Arab, Christian, Jew, male, female, child, adult. He lived to hate. Billy was a skinhead, but he totally wasn’t racist or a Nazi. I used to have to say to people all the time, “I’m a fucking Jew. You really think I would be in a band with a Nazi?”
It seemed so ridiculous to me that anyone would ever take what we were doing as anything but comedy. The music dripped with sarcasm; we had three-second songs and a number about milk. Yeah, it was extremely politically incorrect before its time, but that was my sense of humor and I’d been like that since I was a kid. I’ve never had any sacred cows when it comes to comedy, and obviously I’m not a racist, I’m not homophobic, I’m not jingoistic, I’m not any of those things. I just hate political correctness, especially in music. If you’re going to play aggressive music, the idea of pussifying it, to use one of my favorite George Carlin words, takes the power out of it.
I hated the straightedge attitude. I didn’t drink much, but I hated the idea of punk rockers who made loud music preaching about not drinking, not doing drugs, and not having sex. There were straight-edge dudes who told their fans to stay celibate until they were married. I was like, “What the fuck? This isn’t Catholicism. It’s rock and roll.” Those three words have been a euphemism for fucking since the days of Chuck Berry. So from the start, I went into S.O.D. with a few simple goals: to make the stupidest record ever written, to make the heaviest record of all time, and to have the whole thing be tongue in cheek, from the sexism of “Pussywhipped” and “Pre-Menstrual Princess Blues” to the viciousness of “Kill Yourself.”
What was so fucked up about the backlash we got was that anyone who knew anything about Anthrax was aware I was Jewish, yet people would write reviews saying we were racists. When we played live, Nazi skinheads would come to the shows and Sieg Heil us. Billy would say, “Put your fucking hands down, you fucking assholes. I’ll come out there and fucking break them off.”
This whole mythology has built up around Speak English or Die, which people now consider a groundbreaking crossover album. The truth is, when it came out practically nobody knew it existed. It wasn’t until after Among the Living blew up that fans went back and discovered S.O.D. When the album came out, we only played seven gigs in New York and New Jersey. We opened for Suicidal Tendencies at L’Amour, and then we did some shows with Overkill. Our last gig was at the Ritz on December 21, and that was with Motörhead, Wendy O. Williams, and Cro-Mags.
The shows were pretty memorable, though. Billy frequently got into fights with Nazi skinheads. Whenever someone tried to preach hateful messages at us or say they considered us part of their “team,” we were very clear that they pegged us as the wrong guys and they were idiots. We’d tell them to leave the show and fuck themselves. Most of the people in the crowds were into the music and got the joke, but there were always morons and some of them paid the price.
At one of the L’Amour shows with Suicidal, some punk kid in the front row was spitting on Billy. I kept seeing arcs of spit landing on Billy’s back whenever he turned around, but I couldn’t see who did it. Then, I finally saw the guy. It was one of those people we used to call “peace punks,” who supported bands like Reagan Youth. They were dirty and crusty and had this almost Rasta-ish vibe. They hated Billy because he was a loudmouth skinhead, and that was the antithesis of what they stood for. When I saw the face of the guy who was spitting, I stopped the show, got on the mike, and said, “Billy, that fucking crusty-looking dude right there, he’s been spitting on you for four songs.”
Billy reached down and pulled this guy up on the stage and started punching him like he was holding a rag doll. After he got a bunch of blows in, he grabbed the guy’s arm. I figured he was going to escort him out of the club. Instead, he jerked the kid’s arm up so far and hard, the guy let out this sickening scream. Then he winced and gritted his teeth because he was in so much pain. His nose and mouth were bleeding, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks, diluting the blood. There was too much noise in the room to hear a crack, but his arm was dangling at an absurd angle, so Billy must have broken it. No one checked to see, and Billy just turned him around and threw him down the stairs, and then the club security opened the door and tossed him into the street. I was a bit shocked. I didn’t mean for it to go that far, but at the same time, Billy got his point across. Don’t fucking spit on us. If you get caught, you’re going to pay the price.
After the seven shows, Charlie and I had to go back and work on Anthrax, Billy formed the similarly themed M.O.D., and Danny returned to Nuclear Assault. Aside from feeling like I was part of a really killer album, it was great to work with Lilker again. While it didn’t erase what happened in Anthrax, it felt like we were finally able to move past our impasse. I liked knowing that the most recent memory I’d have of Danny was doing S.O.D., not trying to explain why we couldn’t keep him in Anthrax. That was good for me mentally, and I think it was healthy for him as well.
Between ’85 and ’88 we saw each other more than we had. We crossed paths, me in Anthrax and him in Nuclear Assault. But still, we were never friends the way we had been growing up. Those days were definitely over. It’s hard enough to maintain relationships with anybody from your past, especially when you’re in a band and you’re traveling ten months out of the year. But to completely forgive a major incident like being kicked out of a band you started, well, that was wishful thinking. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would have been the same way. Some things just can’t be forgotten. We still bump into each other from time to time, usually at festivals, and there’s no animosity. It’s never awkward. We hang out and it’s cool. It’s just not what it was and it never will be.
In addition to freaking out over hardcore with S.O.D. in ’85, Charlie, Frankie, and I were listening to rap all day long. That was actually nothing new. Back in the day, when we weren’t listening to Maiden, we’d be cranking Run DMC, LL Cool J, and Eric B. & Rakim, all that shit that came out from ’81 to ’85, even before Public Enemy. I loved it as much as I loved metal. One night my friend and guitar tech John Rooney and I were sitting in my tiny bedroom in my mom’s house, and my gear was out. We started writing rap lyrics about being in Anthrax. “We’re Anthrax and we take no shit / and we don’t care for writing hits.”
Neither of us was a rapper, but we rapped these verses back and forth and cracked each other up. I plugged in my guitar and played the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” while John continued to rap. I said, “This is fucking ridiculous! This is the stupidest thing ever. I can’t wait to show it to the rest of the band. They’re going to die!” Little did I know we were planting the seed for one of Anthrax’s most popular songs, “I’m The Man.”
Chapter 12
A Lesson in Violence
When John and I started writing “I’m The Man,” I just thought it was funny. I didn’t think it was something we would do on a record. A few days later, we were rehearsing in the city, and John and I showed Charlie and Frankie what we had come up with. They loved it, and suddenly it wasn’t just a funny joke. It was something funny that we actually could do. The song is a rap-metal hybrid—possibly the first one ever recorded. Run DMC were sampling guitars; we were actually playing them and drumming and rapping. So if I’m not wrong, we were the first metal band to mix hip-hop in their music.
Although we were really serious about our love for rap, the song is a total joke. Each verse starts like an actual rap song, but with super-dumb lyrics, and then Charlie flubs the last line. We correct him and then the song breaks into this thrash part that ends with Frankie doing an impression of Taylo
r Negron’s character, Julio, in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money, saying, he’s “the man” and is “so bad he should be in detention.” Stupidly awesome, right?
Here’s a snippet: “Charlie, beat the beats, the beats you beat / The only thing harder’s the smell of my feet / So listen up close or you might get dissed / Go drain the lizard or take a . . . chair! / It’s piss! Damn . . . watch the beat!”
We split up the lines between the three of us. Danny and Joey didn’t listen to rap at all, so we didn’t include them, although when we played the song live starting in 1986, Charlie would come off his drum kit, and Joey would play the drums while Danny held down the guitar parts, freeing up the three of us to live out our Run DMC fantasies. We had the song completely written and the parts divided up. We knew we could do a really good job with it in the studio, but then we thought it would be even cooler if we had the Beastie Boys come in and rap with us.
This was before they put out Licensed to Ill in 1986 and blew the lid off everything. We knew the Beastie Boys from hanging out in New York. They were a punk band before they started rapping. So we got hold of them and asked if they’d do this rap-metal hybrid, “I’m The Man,” with us. They were totally into it. Ad-Rock said, “Just tell us when. We’ll come to the studio and we’ll do it. All good.”
We planned to work on it some more later, but we had to change focus because our agency booked us a tour opening for W.A.S.P. and Black Sabbath. We hated W.A.S.P. We didn’t like their music, and their singer, Blackie Lawless, was an arrogant prick, though the rest of the guys in the band were pretty cool to us, especially guitarist Chris Holmes—the guy best known for chugging a bottle of vodka in front of his mom during an interview for the movie The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years while reclining on a flotation device in a swimming pool. But Black Sabbath—holy shit! Going on the road with Tony Iommi, the man who literally invented metal and the first heavy thing my uncle played me way back when I was a kid—that was mind blowing.
