by Scott Ian
There was just one drawback. The Black Sabbath of 1986 wasn’t the Black Sabbath that made Paranoid or even Born Again. Iommi was the only original member. Bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler left the band after the Born Again tour and didn’t come back until Sabbath reunited with Ronnie James Dio on Dehumanizer in 1992. When we went out with Sabbath, the band was supporting the album Seventh Star, which was a commercial and critical flop. The cover was just a picture of Tony in the desert, and the record jacket had to say “Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iommi,” since it didn’t feature Geezer. Iommi was backed on the tour by vocalist Glenn Hughes, bassist Dave “the Beast” Spitz, and drummer Eric Singer. In other words, audiences didn’t exactly flock to the shows. We were supposed to be out for a month, and they canceled the tour after five dates because the ticket sales were weak.
Still, we had fun while it lasted. Glenn Hughes was out of his mind back then. He was really drunk and silly all the time, and even though Sabbath didn’t sound like Sabbath, we felt like we were in the company of rock royalty—at least from the headliners. As we might have expected, Blackie was a total asshole. He wouldn’t talk to us, did extra-long sound checks so there wasn’t time for us to sound check, and acted like a total diva. But whatever. We got to meet Tony Iommi and play five arena shows before the tour went belly up. To be able to perform for 3,000 people in an arena felt like a good omen, even if most of those people didn’t know who we were. We thought, “This is it. We made it. We’re in the big leagues. We’re only ever going to do this now.”
Of course, as soon as we were done with the tour, we were back in the clubs, but we didn’t care. We had a taste of the big stage, and it whetted our appetites for more. We were going to work as hard as we needed to in order to get back there. Our agency scrambled for us when the Black Sabbath tour ended, and in four weeks we were out on a headlining club tour. We had our own bus and we did well, playing for three to four hundred kids everywhere, meeting promoters, radio station programmers, and journalists all over the country and reconnecting with people we met two years earlier when we came through with Raven.
The record was selling well, people were buying T-shirts. It felt like we were back on an upward arc. We didn’t make a dime because we were still recouping all the money the record label spent on us when we were in Ithaca, but we had a blast, and we all got along well because we had great chemistry. We felt like we needed each other to be Anthrax. Danny was still as cocky as the day I met him, but he was doing a great job onstage, and he had become the rock star he always wanted to be, so he was happy.
Joey had come into his own as the front man of the band, owning it every night onstage. Offstage he was different from the rest of us. We’d say, “Joey, you’re from another planet. It’s called upstate New York.”
He was from Oswego and we were all from the city. Danny lived across the Tappan Zee Bridge, but that was close enough to the city to be considered a New Yorker. Joey was kind of hickish—not in a bad way. He was just different from us because of his upbringing upstate. He couldn’t help who he was, and I think that’s what made him stand out and made him special. No other band had a guy like him. He was a fish out of water, but he was a fish out of water who learned to breathe. It worked because he loved what he was doing even though the kind of music we played was still sort of foreign to him.
Being a singer was all he ever wanted to do, and now the band was blowing up worldwide; he loved it. Joey has that indescribable thing that great front men have. He’s able to get up there and control the audience and keep them in the palm of his hand. There’s a duality there because Joey’s a total rock star even though he’s totally not a rock star. He’s the nicest, kindest, and most gentle human being, but when he gets onstage he’s a fucking lunatic.
Even though we only played about a hundred shows between the fall of 1985 and the summer of 1986, touring for Spreading the Disease was really important in establishing us as a band that was going to stick around and that could bounce back after the departure of its lead vocalist.
The wildest show we played on the Spreading the Disease tour was April 26, 1986, at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. The place was notorious for crazy violent punk and hardcore shows, and the gig was promoted by Suicidal Tendencies singer Mike Muir. The bill his promotion company put together was Anthrax, D.R.I., COC, Possessed, and No Mercy, which was one of Mike’s side bands. Billy Milano flew out and came to the show, and it’s a good thing he did because it was a chaotic mess. There were 3,000 people there, and they were a volatile mix of skinheads, punks, metalheads, and Suicidal gang-looking dudes. Can’t we all just get along? Fuck no!
The Suicidals were running security for the show, which made about as much sense as the Hells Angels handling security at Altamont, and everyone knows how well that turned out. Skinheads were getting onstage just to fight with the Suicidals. By the time we got onstage, the audience was a sea of brawls. About thirty minutes into our set, someone jumped from the seats behind the stage and ran through Charlie’s drums, knocking over part of his kit. Not long after that some big biker-looking dude got on the stage, and one of the Suicidals smashed the guy’s head in with the bottom of a mike stand. He was lying unconscious and bleeding on the stage. We said, “That’s it. We’re out of here,” and we got the fuck off the stage. We went straight to our dressing room and saw that it had been completely trashed. Everything was destroyed, so we made a beeline for our bus. We locked the door and sat there waiting for our crew to show up so we could leave.
A few minutes later, Billy came stomping onto the bus. His shirt was torn and he was filthy. There was blood all over his hands, shirt, and pants. We thought he had been stabbed. “Don’t worry. It’s not my blood!” he growled.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I said.
He laughed. “Every skinhead in LA thinks he’s a fucking tough guy. Every skinhead in LA wants to fight the guy from New York. So I fucking had at it.”
He beat up ten guys in the crowd that started shit with him. He looked like it, too. There was so much blood, it looked like he’d been next to someone who stepped on a land mine.
The skinheads weren’t always the ones causing trouble. A lot of times the security was just as bad. They didn’t know what to do with crossover crowds, and they usually targeted hardcore fans as the troublemakers. When the skins entered the mosh pit and started jumping the barricade, security got freaked out and sometimes started pounding fans for no reason. We stopped plenty of shows on the Spreading the Disease tour to scream at security to stop beating kids up. When we played Albuquerque, New Mexico, a few days before the LA show, a bunch of kids with shaven heads were dancing at the front and scurrying over the barricade. Instead of pushing the fans back into the crowd, the security guards grabbed them and threw them out of the venue. When I saw that, I stopped the show and said, “C’mon, these guys aren’t hurting anyone. If you don’t let them back in here right now, we’re done. We’ll just leave. We’re not playing another fucking note until that happens.”
The crowd went nuts, and all these security guards crowded together to confer. Then this guy with a different colored T-shirt joined them. He must have been their boss. Next thing we knew, eight of the dudes who were kicked out were back in the venue. We started playing again, and the security all gathered tight together at the barricade. One of them was beating on a kid. I leaned over and punched the guard in the back of the head.
“You big, fat fucking Nazi,” I said. “Stop beating up these kids. There are a thousand of them. What if they all rushed the stage and started beating the fuck out of you?”
The guard jumped up on the stage and rushed at me. I took off my guitar and swung it like a baseball bat. The guy jumped back. Then our Hulk-like security guy, Billy Pulaski, pulled the guitar out of my hands, grabbed me, and threw me behind him. He got between me and the guard, and the security guy stopped and went back into the crowd. The audience w
ent wild. They loved it.
After the show we were in our dressing room, and our tour manager came up and said there was a gang of security guards waiting outside to beat us up. They were between the door and the bus. We didn’t know if we should call the cops or make a run for it. Suddenly, two of the skinheads who were kicked out that I got back into the show came up to me: “Hey, we can help. Just hold on.” They left and came back five minutes later. One of them said, “Alright, let’s go. We have a bunch of people outside and we’re going to get you to your bus.” Sure enough, we went out, and there were a dozen or more skinheads and other dudes between where the guards were waiting for us and where we were. The skins circled us and walked us to our bus. We didn’t say anything, but these guys were yelling at the guards: “Yeah, you think you’re fucking tough now, you fucking assholes! Let’s go!” Since there were a lot more skinheads than security guards, we were able to walk right to our bus and drive away.
Another great moment on the Spreading tour came the night we played the Arcadia Theater in Dallas. That’s where we recorded our performance of “I’m The Man,” which we used for the live version of the I’m The Man EP. More significantly, that was the night I met the guys in Pantera. This was back when Terry Glaze was singing for them, before Phil Anselmo came in and they became the Pantera that would shake the world. They were a different band back then and they looked totally glam, but under the hairspray they were awesome dudes.
They weren’t actually at our show, but Dimebag Darrell’s girlfriend Rita Haney was there in the afternoon. She was a skinny little punk rock girl with purple hair, and she was all excited: “After you guys play, you have to come to this club and see this band, Pantera. They’re awesome,” she said. “They play their own songs, but mostly covers. They even play Anthrax songs. They fuckin’ love you guys. They’d be so jazzed. They can’t come to your show because they have to play, but if you came to their show it would mean the world to them.”
We used to get invited to see bands we didn’t know all the time, and we usually politely declined or just didn’t go. But we had nothing else to do in Dallas, so a bunch of us went. There was a big crowd there, about a thousand people, because they were the big local band. During the show, we got onstage and played “Metal Thrashing Mad” with them. Afterward, I got stinking drunk because that’s what you do with Pantera. The next night Pantera opened for us down in Houston and the partying continued. Dime and I joked around, talked about gear, and laughed our asses off. I mentioned to him how I thought he killed it on guitar and I’d love to do some stuff with him in the future. I’m sure I meant it, but I had no idea it would actually happen on three of our future albums.
Every day on tour was a blast and Spreading the Disease was selling. Megaforce shipped around 19,000 copies and they sold out right away. One day Jonny called us and said, “We’re up to 50,000 copies!” That was a big deal for a metal band on its first major-label album. Next thing we knew, we had sold 100,000! The bigger we got, the crazier the crowds got. And the more resentment built up from the people who thought we had turned into big major-label sellouts, even though everything we had done was heavy as fuck and our next album would be one of the fastest, heaviest thrash records ever released.
As much as I loved hardcore and CBGBs matinees, I eventually stopped going because I started receiving threats. I don’t know if kids were jealous or suddenly thought I felt like I was above them. I totally didn’t, but all it took was one misunderstanding for everything to go belly up. For the Spreading the Disease tour, we printed up a T-shirt featuring the old-school “NOT” man on a skateboard, and there was the NYHC logo on the sleeve because I had been going to CBGB Sunday matinee hardcore shows since 1983 and the music was a big part of my life, regardless of the fact that I played in a metal band and had long hair. To me, the hardcore scene was all about individuality. It meant doing whatever you did and being yourself. That’s one of the things so many of the bands at the time were preaching, and I took it to heart.
Then at some point the scene started to change. By 1986 there was new blood. And a lot of the kids who probably a week earlier were listening to Ratt and Dokken decided to shave their heads and start going to hardcore shows because they were pressured into thinking it was cool. It really seemed like they were trying to distance themselves from their past. Inevitably, someone with an axe to grind saw the shirt we printed with the NYHC logo and started a rumor that Anthrax tried to trademark the design. There was absolutely no truth to that, but kids started making a big stink.
One Sunday around the fall of 1986, I went to a hardcore show. There was no one of note on the bill, but I had nothing better to do. I was living in my apartment in Forest Hills, and a few of these sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kids with freshly shaven heads followed me on the subway home from the city, got off the train when I got off, and trailed me on Queens Boulevard onto Union Turnpike. I knew they were behind me, and I was weighing my options. Finally I turned around and said, “What’s your problem, motherfuckers?”
“Fuck you, poser,” one of them said. “We’re going to kick your ass.”
“Fine. Three of you on one, pussies! Let’s go. One of you’s getting knocked out, that’s all I’m gonna say. So let’s go, right now!”
I stood my ground against these three punks wearing their brand-new Murphy’s Law shirts, trying to represent. They stood there and shouted, “Fuck you, faggot. You’re not hardcore.”
“I’m not claiming to be anything,” I said. “I’m just a guy going home from a show at CBGB. If you have a problem with that, let’s go. I’m not afraid.”
Finally, they turned around and walked away. But I stopped going to shows at CBGB after that for a while because, who knows? The next guy who had a problem with me might be holding a knife or a gun. I didn’t want to put myself in that position down on the Lower East Side, where a bunch of assholes were just waiting to beat me up so they could say they took down the dude from Anthrax. That could have very easily happened and it just wasn’t worth it.
Chapter 13
The Horror of It All
When we were done touring for Spreading the Disease, we were excited to go into the studio with the Beastie Boys to make the real version of “I’m The Man.” But before we could get to that, we had to finish writing Among the Living, which we had started on tour. A lot of people still consider that our quintessential record; it was definitely the right album for the right time—fast and thrashy, pissed off and energetic as fuck. Everything we learned as a band from recording Fistful of Metal up through Spreading the Disease went into the songs. If Anthrax were an education in heavy, Among the Living was our master’s thesis. It was a product of its environment, bred from the excitement and aggression of being a major part of an ever-evolving thrash scene. We didn’t need amphetamines or blow to make songs that ripped; we were riding high on the thrill of our experiences playing with bands we respected and making the music we loved.
The springboard for the whole record, the song that set us directly on the path of no return, was “A.I.R.,” the last track we wrote for Spreading the Disease. We had actually finished recording Spreading and were gonna start mixing, and Charlie said, “I have one more song we need to get on the record. We have to work on this.” At first we were like, “C’mon, we’re already late. We’ve got the album. Let’s go.” Then he played me the riff and I thought, “Holy shit, this will totally make the record. It’s different from most of the other songs, but it’s complementary. It’s got a lot of energy and it’s catchy.” So he came back to Ithaca and we all worked on that one song. To me, that was the beginning of our true identity as Anthrax. If that song didn’t make it onto Spreading, it would have been on Among the Living. From there, we were on fire and nothing was going to stop us.
While we were supporting Spreading, we wrote “I Am the Law.” Charlie played us these anthemic riffs and the Judge Dredd connection just clicked in my
brain. The music just sounded like Mega-City One to me. For those unfamiliar with the story line of the British comic book, Dredd lives in a postapocalyptic world where the cops (judges) arrest criminals and sentence them on the scene, and the punishments are severe. Judge, jury, and executioner, Dredd is the biggest bad-ass of all of the judges. Another song I wrote was “Indians,” which was an effort to be more politically relevant. It’s about the plight of Native Americans who were rounded up and forced to live on shitty reservations. The idea for the song came to me because the riff sounded like American Indian music and Joey’s mother was part Iroquois (so I was told), so it was perfect. We tested out “I Am the Law” and “Indians” on tour, and they both went over well, so they made the cut early.
We were so used to how each other worked at that point that the rest of the songs poured out of us. We had a style, a particular sound we all knew was Anthrax, and we wrote to fit that format. We knew from S.O.D. that we could play as fast as anybody, so when we wrote a thrash part, our attitude was, “Let’s make that even faster.” And from experience we knew exactly when to inject a slow mosh part for maximum effect. Some of the lyrics were about ridiculous experiences we underwent as a touring band. “Caught in a Mosh,” for instance, is about our guitar tech Artie Ring.
We were playing at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver, Colorado, in ’86 and a kid climbed onstage and fucked up my pedal board. Artie ran out to push this kid offstage, and the two got tangled up, fell into the crowd, and got sucked up by the pit. One second Art was there, the next he was gone, like something flushed down a toilet. Eventually, Artie climbed back onstage. We finished the show and got on the bus. The next morning Artie came crawling out of his bunk, and he could barely move. He was holding his back hunched over, and when I asked him what was wrong he said, “Oh, man, I got caught in a mosh.” We thought that was the funniest thing we’d ever heard, because Artie was my height and skinner than me. The last place he’d ever want to be was in a mosh pit getting trampled. Immediately a lightbulb illuminated over my head. “That’s a song title, right there!” I wrote all the verses about being stuck in places you wouldn’t want to be in life.
