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

by Scott Ian

  When we checked into the Hilton in Indianapolis, Indiana, on June 17, 1991, all hell broke loose. Slayer made sure they started the tour armed with paintball guns, so after a couple shows we all had to have paintball guns to defend ourselves. There were twelve guns between our camp and theirs, and every day on tour there were wars backstage. Someone from Slayer would sabotage us and open fire. These paintballs fuckin’ hurt when they hit you. We didn’t have warrior vests or helmets. We were in T-shirts and jeans, and there was nothing but cloth protecting us from the blinding sting of a paintball to the back or stomach.

  There were two rules: no shooting at the head and no up-close assassinations, but the rules were loose and there was nonstop fucking warfare. Sometimes we’d go onstage with big welts from where the paintballs had hit us in the arms or legs. When we got to Indianapolis everyone got extra drunk—even me—and extra rowdy. I was drinking beer, and Slayer vocalist and bassist Tom Araya introduced me to tequila. I never had tequila in my life, and, let’s just say, it clouded my judgment. Someone’s hotel room opened up onto this roof area. So we went out his window, walked across the roof, and saw the giant white Hilton sign on the side of this building. We immediately grabbed our guns and opened fire. We shot hundreds and hundreds of rounds for twenty minutes until there wasn’t any white left on the sign. It looked like a vomit-colored Jackson Pollock. We were proud of our work and high-fived one another before we went back to our rooms. The hotel didn’t share our artistic aesthetic.

  The next morning when we were checking out, our tour manager, Rick Downey, and the guy who was on the road with Slayer were having a heated discussion with someone at the front desk. In our drunken state the night before, we all figured the paint would wash off the sign or drip off. No one thought they’d wake up in the morning and the Hilton sign would be 8,000 shades of puke. Rick walked up to us and delivered the bad news. The hotel was charging us for damaging and cleaning the sign. It was going to cost $10,000 and we would have to split it $5,000 per band. We couldn’t very well say, “It wasn’t us!” Everyone had seen us with our paintball guns. It wasn’t a big secret that we were having backstage battles. So you didn’t have to be a CSI detective to know what happened.

  Every New York musician dreams of someday playing Madison Square Garden. It’s one of those things you strive for. MSG is the Mecca of New York venues, and everyone huge played there—Zeppelin, the Who, Sabbath, Alice Cooper. And when I was a kid, that’s where KISS made me realize I wanted to rock and roll every night for thousands of people. I also saw legendary shows there by Ted Nugent, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden before Anthrax got off the ground. Our opportunity to headline the Garden came in 1991 when Clash of the Titans hit New York. The show sold out. We were super stoked and invited all of our friends and family members to come hang out with us backstage. My mom came, though our relationship was still frosty at best; we had only recently started talking again.

  She said she was happy for me and hugged me, and I believed her. I took pride in the fact that we were headlining MSG and my parents were there to see it. Our dressing room was packed, and we decided not to have our tour manager clear the room thirty minutes before we went on. It was a moment worth celebrating. Then, five minutes before Anthrax were scheduled to go on, we left our dressing room and started to walk toward the stage. I was so excited to be walking in Gene Simmons’s footsteps. Our intro music started playing, and above it I heard my mom’s shrill voice, “Scott!!!” I figured she wanted to congratulate me and give me one more hug or a kiss for good luck. I smiled and turned around.

  “I left my jacket in the dressing room! I don’t know how I’ll ever get it. There’s all this security back there and everything and I’m not sure which door it is. Will you please get it for me?”

  I actually laughed out loud over the ridiculousness of the situation. Here I was expecting a Kodak moment where Mom tells me how proud she is of me, and instead of carrying that extra little victory with me onto the stage, I have to exit my big moment to run back to the dressing room to get my mom’s jacket and then make it back to the stage in time for the beginning of our set.

  Fortunately, I reentered my moment, and the MSG show was everything I hoped it would be, especially when we had Chuck D and Flav join us on “Bring the Noise” for the first time ever in front of a sold-out New York City crowd. It went down so well we knew we had something huge on our hands.

  The Clash of the Titans tour ended in Miami, and we were determined to pull an end-of-tour prank on Slayer. We decided to break their evil façade and make them crack up laughing onstage. Back then there was no smiling in Slayer. They were SLAYER. Their singer, Tom Araya, is like a big smiley grandpa bear now when he plays, but back in the nineties no one in Slayer ever broke character. They grimaced, scowled, and snarled the entire set. Slayer took pride in being the most savage band in town, or at least looking the part, but we knew that offstage they were just a bunch of goofballs who loved to fuck around and laugh all the time.

  Slayer’s end-of-tour prank was to shoot the shit out of us with their paintball guns during our set. They hid in the wings of the stage like Navy Seals and picked us off. That shit hurt! But we expected nothing less. What were they going to do, run out with water balloons and feathers? Hell no—they’re Slayer.

  The day of the final show, we sent a crew guy to a fish market to buy the biggest fish he could find. It must have weighed two hundred pounds and it stank. We had the lighting guys put it up in the rigging, and we instructed them to slowly lower it as soon as Slayer started playing their last song, “Angel of Death.” We wanted the fish to be right in Tom’s eye line as soon as he started his bloodcurdling scream. It couldn’t have worked out better. They started the song, and the fish came down super slow and hit its mark at the perfect time. We were at the side of the stage laughing. Their guitarist Jeff Hanneman was headbanging, looking as mean as a serial killer, his long blonde hair matted with sweat and flying everywhere. All of a sudden he saw this fish in his peripheral vision and busted out laughing. Then their other guitarist, Kerry King, saw it and tried to maintain his composure, but he lost it, too. You could see him trying to stop himself from cracking up; it looked like he was constipated. Then the mighty Tom Araya broke and laughed while he was singing. The fish hung so perfectly in front of his microphone, and it dangled there for the entire song.

  Two weeks after the Clash of the Titans tour ended, I got a call from our business manager, asking me where I wanted him to send the check. I was confused and asked him what it was for and he told me it was for tour profits.

  “We made money?” I said in awe. That’s when the lightbulb went off in my head. “Hmmm, maybe Jonny was right. I guess we shouldn’t have spent five grand shooting paintballs. Maybe we should stop building bigger stages, because if we did that, we could get a big, fat check at the end of every tour.”

  We got back from the Clash of the Titans and things were happening. Money and tour offers were coming in. But the core of the band was fucking rotten. I was losing my mind, and I felt like I was keeping an important secret away from everyone who really needed to hear it. I don’t remember the first time I ever expressed my dissatisfaction with Joey to the rest of the band. Frankie knew quite a bit, and so did Charlie, because through the writing process of Persistence, I told them how frustrated I was. Then we’d tour and everything seemed to go well. I can’t pinpoint a final moment. It was a slow, slow, slow burn, and maybe the dynamite detonated during Clash of the Titans. Only the explosion didn’t happen in the open; it took place in my mind. During a day off in Chicago, we shot the video for “Bring the Noise” with Public Enemy. Boom! The explosion that validated my feelings about the future of the band went off in my head like a nail bomb. Chuck, Flavor Flav, and I were rapping. The rest of the band members were playing their respective instruments. As happy as I was to be rapping with Chuck, in my heart I wished Joey was doing it, that he would’ve stepped u
p and got outside his box, but that just wasn’t going to happen. So where does Joey fit in that picture? He’s running and jumping around, being goofy, and finding something to do to be a part of it. But I was the one rapping and being the front man. That’s probably why still, to this day, people who don’t know the band well think I’m the singer of Anthrax. Nine times out of ten, that’s what they say to me. But we were burning too hot to make a change right away.

  After the “Bring the Noise” shoot, we were in this van on the way back to the hotel, and I said to Chuck, “Man, that was a lot of fun, fake-playing that all day long. We should do some real shows together.”

  “Tell us when and where, and we’re in—whatever you want to do.”

  It was that simple and organic.

  We planned to tour together starting in October, and that’s when it became obvious to me that four guys in Anthrax wanted to push the envelope and try new things, and we all felt Joey was still in the same zone he was in for Spreading and Among. By mid-’91, the cancer that was eating at the gut of Anthrax started impacting my home life. Maybe the two sources of friction had nothing to do with one another, but they rubbed together in my head like two pieces of sandpaper. After Clash of the Titans, I was looking forward to having some time at home and being with Debbie. Within a few days, I realized everything was wrong.

  She seemed weird, really possessive one moment and then she’d tell me she needed space the next. We didn’t have sex for a few days after I had been on the road for a long time. I thought she was being very distant. When I asked her if things were okay, she made it clear they weren’t.

  “You come home from tour and you expect everything to be normal!” she began. “While you’re away, I get to do my own thing. Then you come back and you’re just in the way! I wish you’d stay on tour.”

  “Isn’t it good that I’m home and now we get to be together?”

  “Yeah, but I like to do my thing and not have to revolve around your schedule,” she said.

  I got a little angry: “You can do whatever you want. I’m not your boss. But we live together. We’re a couple. It would be nice to be a couple, not just live separately as roommates in our house.”

  We made up and apologized to each other. I was so excited to be home with her, and she was on a different planet altogether. I should have taken that little blowup as a sign of things to come. Instead, I viewed it as a natural reaction to an unnatural situation. Touring can turn normal people into complete basket cases.

  We finished up 1991 by making good on our pact with Public Enemy. I always wanted to bridge barriers like that and help open people’s minds to new ideas and sounds. Primus came on the tour with us. They were just breaking at the time, so they brought out more people. When we finished our set at the end of the night, everyone would come out, and we’d all do “Bring the Noise” together. We filmed the Irvine Meadows show. There were 15,000 people, sold out. There was a smell of invention in the air that night. Everything we did with Public Enemy was a career highlight. At the same time, there’s no question that we alienated a portion of our audience by doing those shows. Some of our fans didn’t like it, didn’t understand it. They didn’t want to come to the show, and they would wait until we put out another record to decide whether they still wanted us on their radar.

  People loved “I’m The Man” because it seemed like a novelty. Nobody took it seriously because we didn’t keep rapping after that. “Bring the Noise” wasn’t a joke. It was something we strongly believed in. No other metal bands were playing with rap groups at that time. Doing that may have opened us up to a new, alternative audience, but that didn’t replace what we lost.

  Before the tour, I asked Chuck, “What do you think these shows are going to be like?”

  “We have different audiences for different tours,” he said. “When we were out with Sisters of Mercy, it was all white college kids. Black kids weren’t coming to that show. When we’re on a hip-hop tour, it’s obviously a black audience. But more white people buy our records than black people. This tour is going to be all white people. You’ll see.”

  He was absolutely right. It’s not like I thought we would become the first metal band embraced by the black community and this whole giant audience that buys rap records would start consuming Anthrax albums. The white college kids who didn’t listen to metal but listened to rap and indie rock—maybe some of them got turned on to us. As symbolically important as that tour was, it didn’t change anything, at least not right away. But we weren’t thinking about laying the groundwork for a new musical genre at the time. We were having too much fun for that. Back then and even today, people look at Public Enemy as this militant black, super-serious rap group. They used to scare the shit out of white people, and some thought they were anti-Semitic, because one of their members, Professor Griff, made some unfriendly comments about Jews. He told one journalist, “Jews were responsible for most of the wickedness in the world.” He was sort of fired for that but rejoined the group later.

  I just felt bad for him. I was friends with Griff during that whole time, and he knew I was Jewish. I don’t think he hated Jews, I think his comments were taken out of context. Was it smart to say whatever he said? No, but we hung out and laughed, and he never had a problem with me. Spitz is Jewish, too. There were two Jews, two Italians, and a part Italian / part Indian in Anthrax. All that was missing was a punch line: “These two Jews, two Italians and a half breed walk into a bar . . .”

  The other thing no one mentions is that Public Enemy’s label, Def Jam, was co-run by Lyor Cohen, the biggest Jew in the business. Did Griff harbor some prejudice deep down? I don’t know; I can only judge by my relationship with him. Chuck D definitely wasn’t anti-Semitic. He’s one of the smartest people on the planet and he’s very intense, but what everyone misses is he’s also the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He loves to have fun and is the first to laugh at a good joke. All those Public Enemy dudes look like such hard-asses onstage, but they just want to have fun and entertain the fuck out of people. And Flavor Flav comes from another planet, entirely. He’s like a fucking court jester 24/7.

  The really funny thing about our tour with Public Enemy is that, for all the touring they had done up to that point, they never had chicks and groupies hanging out with them. Back then, it didn’t happen in rap like it did in rock. So when Flavor found out he could hang out on our crew bus and get girls, he never wanted to leave. The first time he saw girls would come on the crew bus, take their clothes off, and have Polaroid pictures taken of them or even maybe blow someone, he went out of his fucking mind. He was on the bus with the crew in the back lounge every day. You couldn’t pry him away with a crowbar. His eyes would be falling out of his skull when these chicks got naked and someone took out the camera and started snapping pictures. It’s amazing he didn’t quit Public Enemy right there and join our road crew.

  It was a perfect matchup all the way around. The two camps got along so well. We used to play pranks on each other, and we always got the opening group, Young Black Teenagers, so bad. Before their set, we had the riggers set up cables like hunting traps so if someone stepped into the circle of wire, the trap sprung and the cable cinched around their leg and lifted them into the air. We got two of their guys. They didn’t even step into the trap. A bunch of our guys and Public Enemy’s guys and the S1Ws (Security of the First World) grabbed them and wrapped these cables around their ankles. They were hanging upside down from the rigging. Thank God none of them broke their ankles. While they were up there, we all grabbed knotted towels filled with baby powder and beat the crap out of them. I’m sure it fucking hurt, and each time we hit them, a giant cloud of powder burst out of the towel.

  The last North American show we did with Public Enemy was in Vancouver on October 24, 1991, and Flavor Flav couldn’t get into Canada because of his arrest record. So Frankie dressed up as Flavor. He didn’t do blackface, but he zipped up his ho
odie so nobody could see his face, and put on Flavor’s outfit. He had the giant clock and big sunglasses. When the show started, Frankie had this big grin on, which he couldn’t have suppressed if he tried. But that was fine ’cause Flavor was always smiling anyway. Terminator X started spinning up on a riser, and Public Enemy came out underneath it. The S1Ws marched out, Chuck walked out, and then Frankie ran out, jumped up, and went into the Flavor dance, which he had down perfect. None of the PE guys knew it was coming except Chuck. The S1Ws were supposed to stand there looking as serious as Slayer, never smiling, acting as PE’s personal army. But they all lost it. Meanwhile, the audience thought it was Flavor Flav and couldn’t figure out what was so funny.

  Everyone had fun on that tour, but for Public Enemy, touring with Anthrax was also an education. At the time, nobody in rap toured professionally. It was the wild, wild West, and Chuck was determined to break the mold and do it right. They learned how by watching us and soaking up everything. Chuck’s lighting guy sat at the board with our lighting guy. Their sound guy stayed with our soundman. They watched everything and everyone so they could emulate what our guys were doing, and I took that as a huge compliment. That’s part of the reason they’re the only rap group that’s been on the road for twenty-seven years.

  We got home from the Public Enemy tour at the end of October, and in my mind our time with Joey was up. Either we were finding a new singer or I was out. I didn’t want to go through another album with a vocalist who didn’t grasp that we had evolved and were no longer just that band that did “Medusa” and “I Am the Law.” It wouldn’t have been fair to me or to Joey to try to pretend we were still on the same page. We went to Europe with Public Enemy in January and February of ’92, and when we got back to the States, the last thing we did with Joey was Married with Children, which aired February 23. Everyone flew to LA for the taping. On the show, we performed “In My World.” I did the spoken word intro, and we only played the part of the song up to where the vocals came in, so, coincidentally, once again Joey was the odd man out.