by Scott Ian
“You passed out,” said Artie.
“How long?”
“About thirty seconds.”
I still felt like shit, so we called the paramedics. I went to the hospital. They checked my blood sugar and told me I seemed okay. An hour later I felt fine. No one could explain what had happened. I figured I probably ate a bad shrimp and got food poisoning. That happens all the time with oysters. Eating shellfish at the wrong place is kinda like playing Russian roulette.
Chapter 16
Euphoria & Despair
We went back to New York, and Mark Dodson and Alex Perialas mixed State of Euphoria at Electric Lady Studios, which is an amazing place and has a great vibe. But even being there felt hollow since I was convinced we had sold Anthrax short. When the record came out on September 18, 1988, it was a huge success. We made a video for “Antisocial” that did really well at Headbanger’s Ball and other outlets, but whenever anyone would praise the record, I would think, “Oh, you don’t fucking understand! This is Anthrax slumming on autopilot.”
The only songs we still play from that record are “Be All, End All” and “Antisocial,” and that’s not even our song. It’s by the French band Trust. “Now It’s Dark” was a cool song and I loved the lyrics about Frank Booth, the character Dennis Hopper played in David Lynch’s brilliant movie Blue Velvet. “Finale” was good, too, and featured some of Charlie’s fastest double-bass playing ever, but four songs don’t make a great album. There was no consistency in the writing because the rest of the record was rushed. To me, State of Euphoria simply didn’t hold up compared to the previous three Anthrax records.
It really fucked with my equilibrium. I can’t even listen to it, and when I think back about some of those songs, I feel sick. It felt like the first time we made a mistake as a band. Instead of following our creative instincts, we let the music business dictate what we were doing. I was sure it was only a matter of time until people started realizing how shitty State of Euphoria was.
I actually got paranoid and neurotic and started to think we were becoming a joke because I had lost confidence in myself. I had always felt like I was in charge of making the right decisions for Anthrax, and I began to question my judgment in a big way. We were on a tour cycle for an album I hated, and we had to play songs from the album every night. That made me angry.
We’d play “I’m The Man,” and I’d think, “Who are we? What is this? You don’t see Metallica doing this.” I felt like maybe we were becoming a parody of ourselves. I second-guessed wearing shorts onstage and thought, “Oh, no, our image is becoming really goofy. At least we’re not still wearing chain mail.” But it just didn’t feel “Anthrax.”
In the video for “Antisocial,” Danny Spitz was wearing a fucking Tweety Bird T-shirt with long red jam shorts that came down past his knees with the Jetsons all over them. And he was playing a guitar with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it. I fucking gag thinking about that. How is this metal? It was more like a promotion for Cartoon Network, even though that wouldn’t exist for another four years.
I think I was so thrown and self-conscious because we totally could have put our feet down and told the label we needed more time to finish the record. We even could have dropped off the Iron Maiden tour if we had to. We had said no to offers and demands many times before. We got greedy. That’s all there was to it. The brass ring was hanging in front of us—a stadium tour with Iron Maiden—and we grabbed it.
Fortunately, touring with Maiden was a dream come true, so that took some of the sting away from the fact that we had made a shitty record. They were great guys to hang out with—very professional but also extremely friendly and full of advice. And you’ll never see a band so consistent onstage night after night. The shows were amazing for us as well. We were playing to sold-out stadiums of people losing their minds to Anthrax. We were selling hundreds of thousands of records and selling truckloads of merch. We had “made it.”
The pace didn’t let up after the Maiden tour. But Joey was getting more and more unpredictable. He was at the peak of his partying, and we were constantly dealing with his outbursts. When we were playing with another band that partied, he’d wander off to their dressing room to rage with them or members of their crew. I saw him wide-eyed and out of his head, looking like a serial killer, many times onstage and off. I didn’t interfere until I felt the indulgences were affecting his performance.
My attitude was always, “Hey, man, I’m not your fucking dad. I’m not gonna tell you how to live, but if what you’re doing starts to damage what we’re doing onstage, then we have to deal with it.” On November 16, 1988, we opened Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest for the Wicked tour, and Joey was not singing well. His voice sounded weak. The timing couldn’t have been worse. We were on the biggest, most important tour of our career, we were worth 7,000 tickets a night, and our merch was moving better than ever, but our singer was going down the tubes because he was doing blow and not holding up his end of the live performance. We were not about to let Joey destroy everything we had built up.
During a day off in Chicago, we sat him down at the old Days Inn on Lake Shore, which is now a W Hotel. We all got into the room together like it was an intervention, which it basically was. I said, “Look bro, your partying is affecting your voice. When you drink you turn into a madman, and not only are we sick of it, it’s hurting the band so it has to stop.”
We told him we were there for him, and if he needed help quitting, we’d do whatever we could. We didn’t have to do anything. He literally stopped drinking and snorting coke right then and there, and he has been clean and sober ever since. I have an unbelievable amount of respect for him for being able to do that. It’s not easy to just stop doing drugs cold turkey, and it’s even harder for a problem drinker to lay off the bottle. Joey had incredible willpower and was able to face his problem head-on and say, “That’s it, I’m done.”
The same tour we convinced Joey he was going over the edge, the rest of us almost got arrested for one of the most pointlessly gleeful nights of drunken destruction of our career. We were playing two nights with Ozzy at Long Beach Arena on December 30 and 31, and Jonny had booked almost a whole floor of rooms at the Hyatt on Sunset. All we could think of was this was the Riot House where Led Zeppelin committed all these crazy antics in the seventies. Nothing much happened after the December 30 show, because we were getting amped up for the second night and we didn’t want to risk getting thrown out before New Year’s.
Between the band, crew, and all our friends who came out to celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday, we more than made up for it the next night. We had the bathtubs and sinks in two rooms filled with ice and bottles of liquor, beer, and wine. When those were overflowing, we filled garbage cans with more booze. The scene was set for a raging aftershow party. That was one of the few nights in the eighties that I got really drunk. Pretty much everyone else was wasted as well, and we all spun completely out of control. We didn’t restrict the shenanigans to pouring water and piss over each other. We were flinging full bottles of beer from either end of a long hallway. Someone could have gotten really badly hurt. The floor was slippery with beer and there was broken glass all over the place.
One minute I was laughing my head off, then out of the corner of my eye I saw someone’s arm in a throwing motion and a bottle would whizz by my head and smash on the wall. We eventually got bored of whipping beers at each other, so someone chucked a bottle through a closed window, over a terrace, and down onto Sunset Boulevard. Suddenly, everyone was smashing windows with projectiles. We didn’t stop at bottles, either. Room lamps went out the window facing the parking lot along with clock radios and pretty much anything that wasn’t bolted down. We yanked a TV off the stand and threw it out the back side window into the parking lot. Even though we were shitfaced, at least we had enough common sense to realize that throwing a TV onto Sunset Boulevard could land us in serious shit; we could go to jail for
killing someone—not that we couldn’t have taken someone’s life with a beer bottle or a lamp—it just seemed like a TV was a lot worse.
It was hard to haul the TV out the open window. Those giant tube sets they had in people’s rooms in the eighties were fuckin’ heavy. It took a couple of us to toss it out of the hotel to the empty parking lot below. We didn’t see it land, but we sure heard it. There was a satisfying crunch as it made contact with the pavement. A few minutes later, the police arrived. We were so drunk and cocky we thought, “What can they do to us? So what, we’re throwing bottles and other stuff. It’s New Year’s Eve. Who cares? What’s going to happen? What are they going to do? We have a whole floor of rooms we’ve paid for. They can’t do shit to us! They can’t throw us out. We own this fuckin’ floor!”
Again, we stupidly felt invincible. We thought we were entitled to fuck with people and make their jobs hard by doing irresponsible shit and assuming we didn’t have to face any consequences because we were big-time dudes in a band. It was a terrible attitude to have, and it’s the kind of thing that turns perfectly nice people into total assholes. When the cops arrived it was about 3 a.m. I was in one of the party rooms and the door was closed. John Tempesta, who later joined White Zombie and played in Testament, Exodus, and the Cult, was Charlie’s drum tech at the time. He was there with me and so was our security guy Billy.
There was a knock at the door, and I looked through the peephole and saw one of the hotel employees. He had already come up twenty times. There were other parties going on at the hotel, so the first few times people came up we’d say, “That wasn’t us. We didn’t throw any bottles.” When one of the more sleuth-like hotel staffers asked why the window in our room was broken, we told him it was an accident and that someone fell against the window. It didn’t take much investigation on their part to see that a TV was missing from one of our rooms. Even the Keystone Cops could have put two and two together and realized we had tossed it.
The guy said, “We’re going to have to ask you all to leave.” By that time, four LA sheriffs had joined him. “You’re being kicked out of the hotel.”
Tempesta was drunk out of his mind and didn’t take kindly to this news. “Fuck you!” he shouted at the hotel manager. “I ain’t fucking going anywhere. Fucking throw me out? Fuck you!!”
He didn’t see the cops. I tried to warn him. He didn’t hear me. Instead of backing down he stumbled up to the manager and flipped his middle finger in the guy’s face. “Fuck you, little man! You can’t fucking tell me what to do.” Then Tempesta poked him, I guess to emphasize his point.
A second later, a cop slammed Tempesta on the ground, jerked him back up, rammed a knee into his back, and cuffed him. Apparently, as soon as John touched the manager, that counted as assault. Billy tried to come to his defense, and a policeman threw him against the wall. Not wanting a giant knee in my spine I said, “Excuse me. This isn’t my room. Can I go to my room to get my stuff?”
They let me leave, so I ran down the hallway to Jonny Z’s room. He was there partying with Marsha and a couple other people. I told him the cops were here and they were arresting Tempesta and kicking us all out. Jonny was out of his mind and wired as fuck, but he was our Peter Grant—the dude who managed Zeppelin and kept them out of too much trouble—he’d fix this. Jonny went over to the hotel manager and shouted, “What’s going on here? You can’t throw us out. We have the whole floor of rooms. No band’s ever going to come back here again if you make us leave. I’ll see to that.”
After his theatrical tirade, Jonny walked down the hallway with the manager of the hotel and the head sheriff. They talked for a few minutes while we just stood there and Tempesta lay on the floor in handcuffs, cursing the air. When they came back Jonny told us he negotiated a compromise. The hotel was only going to throw out Tempesta and Billy, which was pretty good considering we basically had destroyed a hotel floor. No one was being arrested; we just had to find another place for the two guys to stay. The girl Tempesta was with said they could crash at her house, and that was that. The rest of us stumbled back to our rooms and passed out.
After the Ozzy tour, we did a short UK run with Living Colour opening, and then we went out on the Headbanger’s Ball tour with Exodus and Helloween. We returned to our old routine of throwing buckets of water and pee bombs. We knew nothing could compete with the craziness of the Ozzy tour, so we didn’t try. In June we flew to Europe to play headline shows with Suicidal Tendencies opening; it was Robert Trujillo’s first tour. Fourteen years later Metallica would hire him to replace Jason Newsted. We toured the UK through mid-July with King’s X in support.
I spent so much of 1988 and 1989 on the road or recording with the band that I was never in New York, which meant I never had to see Marge and have the conversation I had avoided for so long. My behavior, meanwhile, had gotten worse, to the point where my marriage vows weren’t worth the empty air they were spoken with.
In September 1989 Metallica played three nights at Irvine Meadows on the . . . And Justice for All tour. I was in LA anyway, since I was scheduled to be on one of the panels at the Foundations Forum metal convention, which was happening around the same time. Frankie was there, too, and so was my friend Andy Buchanan, who flew over from Scotland to hang out. We had no major commitments waiting for us back home, so we stayed for all three Metallica shows.
During the second concert, Frankie and I met two girls backstage. I was immediately drawn to one of them, Debbie Leavitt, who was a little shorter than me, which is always a plus. She had long, dark brown hair and was thin but shapely. She looked to me like the hot girl next door, and she, too, was Jewish. That’s not something I was looking for since I’m not at all religious, but it immediately gave us something in common. It’s funny because Huntington Beach, where she was from, doesn’t really have a Jewish population. Yet there she was, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was eighteen at the time and I was twenty-five, so there was a little bit of an age difference, but it wasn’t like I was R. Kelly pissing on teenage girls. I probably had the mentality of an eighteen-year-old at the time, anyway.
Debbie was into rock but wasn’t a metalhead. She grew up on KROQ and listened to stuff like the Cure, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Depeche Mode. But I could tell she was impressed that I was in a band. We hung out and talked, then I gave her and her friend a ride back to their car, which was in the general parking area of the venue. When I dropped them off, I invited Debbie to come with me to see Metallica the next night.
She said she’d like that and asked if she could bring her friend Kelly. I told her that was cool and figured Andy might hook up with Kelly or at least have someone to hang out with while I figured out if there was anything going on between Debbie and me. Sure enough, we connected at the show. We were talking so much we didn’t see much of the band. I decided to stay with her in LA three more days. I changed my flight and gave Marge some bullshit excuse about having to stay on the West Coast for record industry meetings. She worked for IBM, not RCA. She didn’t know anything about the music industry, so she just accepted whatever I told her. She didn’t like it, but she had no way of knowing I was lying.
During that time, Frankie, Andy, and I had a blast playing basketball with the Beastie Boys in Laurel Canyon all day long. Then I’d go back to the hotel, nap, shower, and meet Debbie for dinner. Nothing happened other than some fine dining and good conversation. We didn’t hook up on that trip; I kissed her, that was it. But when we kissed I actually felt something. Being with her was invigorating, exciting. She seemed interested in my war stories, and I wanted to know what was going on in her life. I felt I should find out more about her and see if there could be anything serious between us.
I started to make regular trips to LA. Every time was another lame excuse that Marge should have seen through but didn’t want to. The first time I went back to LA, Debbie and I hooked up. Somehow, sex with her was different than it was with all
the girls I had been with. Not that we did anything different; it just felt more heightened and intimate. We started sleeping together regularly.
After I flew home, I was right back in limbo with Marge. I didn’t like living this much of a lie, but I tricked myself into not feeling guilty because we had become two completely different people. We were like roommates who tolerated one another. Then toward the end of 1989, Marge started really putting the thumbscrews on me about having children. She had mentioned it several times before over the past year, but I acted like I hadn’t heard her or told her I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted to tell her it was over, but I would just keep procrastinating. Every day I’d tell myself, “You’re going to tell her!” Finally at two in the morning one night, I was lying awake because I was too stressed out to fall asleep. Suddenly she woke up and realized I was still up. She said, “Are you okay?”
“No, we need to talk,” I sputtered.
“About what? I’m tired. Can this wait until the morning? . . .”
“It’s over,” I said, gaining more courage. “I can’t do this. I’m not in love with you and I’m seeing someone else. I need to move out and figure out where my life is going.”
She started crying. She couldn’t stop. She wasn’t yelling or throwing things; she was brokenhearted and miserable. I told her I wanted a divorce. It felt good to be able to finally get all of this baggage out in the open, but the confession created a mountain of Jewish guilt—she told her parents, I told my parents. Suddenly everyone was involved.
