by Scott Ian
Everyone in the band knew we needed to move forward. It’s not like I was mad at Joey. It wasn’t like with Neil where we hated the guy. We all loved Joey; it just wasn’t working creatively anymore. I wasn’t thrilled about firing him, but it had to be done. Having him singing my words felt fake, and that couldn’t continue. Maybe the band couldn’t continue. If I was lying to myself, I was lying to the audience. Everyone from management to the label asked us a million times, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” I understood their concern. Some bands never recover after they change their lead singer. And it wasn’t like Joey was hurting our sales. We were doing great. “Do you really want to fuck with the formula?” asked Jonny. “Is this the right time to do this?”
In truth, it was the only time to do it and it was the only thing to do. We all felt like we had exhausted every possibility to make it work. If one of us even had a doubt, it wouldn’t have happened. I felt terrible about asking Jonny Z to call Joey and tell him he was out of the band. It was arrogant and shitty of me not to call myself. I had so much else going on with Debbie and the band at that point that it was one task too many. So, Jonny Z fired Joey with a phone call, and that really blindsided him. He had no idea how unhappy we were with him or why there was no way we could grow if he was still in the band. He was oblivious to the depth of the turmoil and took it pretty hard. The timing was crazy, too, because our deal with Island was up, and Elektra and Columbia both wanted us and were willing to pay an obscene amount of money.
Chapter 20
A Bush in the Hand
Back in the eighties and nineties, Bob Krasnow ran Elektra. He was a visionary and a great record-man as well as a businessman, and he hired a staff of people who were passionate about music. There has always been a division at labels between artistic individuals like Rick Rubin, who come from a love for music, and bean counters, who are there to make sure the label makes money. We talked to Metallica, and they were really happy with Elektra so we sided with them. Bob and our A&R man, Steve Ralbovsky, came to our New York show on the Public Enemy tour. By that time we had decided to fire Joey, but we didn’t know how to break it to the label that was about to advance us $4 million. Finally we told Steve and he told Bob. If I said we weren’t worried that having a new singer in the band would put the kibosh on the whole deal, I’d be lying. But Steve got back to us and said, “If you think this is going to make the band better, then we back your decision.”
What a lot of people don’t realize is when we fired Joey he got his share of the Elektra advance—an equal cut as the rest of us. He had worked just as hard as we had for all those years and toured as much as we did. He was a huge part of Anthrax’s success. He was the singer in the band that got us to the point that Elektra wanted to offer us a huge amount of money. Of course we felt he was entitled to his share. The timing for the Elektra deal was bittersweet. My divorce with Marge had gotten ugly, and her attorneys were fighting for all they could get. She knew there was a lot of money coming, and she wanted a hefty chunk. Since we weren’t officially divorced, I couldn’t get remarried yet, which was fine with me because, even though things seemed to be going well with Debbie, I wasn’t ready to ask her to marry me. That mistake was soon to come.
We worked with a good team at Elektra. Steve had signed Soundgarden. He was very much on the cutting edge of what was happening at the time. To be honest, Elektra signed us on the back of “Bring the Noise,” not so much on our catalog. They were happy that we had all these gold records on Island and a devoted fan base that was going to help them recoup their investment, but to them, “Bring the Noise” was new and different, and it was getting the most amazing mainstream press. Elektra was still known as the “artist’s label,” and they wanted to have the coolest, most forward-thinking acts. When they started courting us, they confirmed our belief that covering “Bring the Noise” was a groundbreaking move. “Goddammit,” said Steve, “if I would have had that song you’d have sold five million copies of that fucking record. Island just had no idea what they had.” Steve was familiar with our other music as well. Bob was not.
“I don’t know one song from your band,” Bob said straight up when he signed us. “But my people tell me you’re the best band in the world right now, and you’re only going to get better, and I hire these people for a reason.”
Once we knew Elektra had our backs, we were already making plans for a new singer. From the start, we knew we wanted John Bush. He was far and away our first choice. There really wasn’t anyone else. I loved John’s voice from the first time I heard him sing “March of the Saint” in Armored Saint. He reminded me of a heavier John Fogerty, and I’ve always been a huge Creedence Clearwater Revival fan. Bush has this timeless voice that’s more rock than metal. He always seems more Paul Rodgers (Bad Company) to me than James Hetfield. That growl was so gritty and visceral.
There was a time before Kill ’Em All came out that James didn’t want to sing for Metallica, and he actually asked Bush to join. But John stayed with Armored Saint because at the time they were doing as well as Metallica. When I think about it I’m like, “Thank God John said no.” But I have to admit it would have been a great Fringe episode. Would Metallica have blown up if John Bush was their singer?
It wasn’t just me who was gung ho about getting John. It was unanimous. He was like the hot chick that everybody wanted to hook up with. He had universal respect in the metal world and was considered one of the best singers around. Way back in 1988 when we had that meeting with Joey Belladonna about his alcohol and drug use, Charlie, Frankie, Danny, and I all decided that if he didn’t get his shit together we’d ask John to join.
At the same time we wanted to cover our backs. It was kind of like when a company knows who they want to hire for a staff job but they place an advertisement on Monster.com anyway just in case. We auditioned our buddy Death Angel vocalist Mark Osegueda, who has a great voice but was strangely too metal for us. We also tried out this guy from Mind over Four, Spike Xavier, who was cool, but the vibe wasn’t right for Anthrax. He later had some success with Corporate Avenger.
Fortunately, we got our first choice even if it took a little arm-twisting. In March 1992 Jonny Z called up John Bush. Now, Bush is a smart guy. It had been years since he had last talked to Jonny, and he knew what was going on with us. So he picked up the phone and said, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you in a while. Interesting. You called me once before to join a band you were managing.”
“Yeah,” said Jonny. “Anthrax are coming to LA to rehearse. They’ve been writing new songs and they’d love it if you would come down and jam with them.”
John thanked Jonny for thinking of him and then told him he didn’t want to join another band. My attitude was, “Fuck that shit! There’s no way . . .” Nothing against Armored Saint, but by 1992 they were pretty much done, and we were at the opposite end of the spectrum. We kept pressing Jonny to call John back and ask him if he would just come down and hear some of the new songs. We had already written “Only” and “Room for One More,” and we wanted John to at least hear them before he ruled out joining the band. I also wanted John to know that we didn’t have lyrics or melodies yet and we wanted him to write with us, which is something Joey never did. I didn’t want a mouthpiece anymore. I wanted a singer who was going to come in and collaborate. And I wanted to stress to John that we wanted him to be a full member of Anthrax, not just a hired gun. With some cajoling, John agreed to join us in the rehearsal studio. We jammed on some Sabbath and Priest. We even fucked around with U2 and Living Colour. Then we played him demos of our new songs.
“Wow, that sounds different,” John said. “It’s not thrash.” We played him “Only,” and he said, “It’s really big, anthemic, and epic,” and we said, “We need you. You’re the missing piece right now.”
Just in case John still didn’t want to join, Jonny Z had an open audition at a club in New York. They had a cover band learn f
ifteen songs, and people got up and told them what song they wanted to sing. Jonny videotaped the whole karaoke session and sent us the tapes. It was total comedy. Maybe there was one person in two or three hours who could have played in an Anthrax cover band—but certainly not in Anthrax. If John Bush hadn’t joined, we would have been back to plan B, which was having me and Frankie do the vocals, and we definitely didn’t want that.
After the first meeting with John, he called us back and said, “Let’s do this. This is going to be huge.”
We all had that attitude. We really felt that John was the right voice for Anthrax at that time. Metal wasn’t all about singers that sounded like Bruce Dickinson anymore. It was meaner. We didn’t want a growler or a screamer; we wanted someone who could sing his balls off but sounded like he would kick your ass if you crossed him. That was John. The first thing we did together was write the lyrics for “Only.” We were so excited afterward. I never knew we could write a song like that. It was Anthrax, but it was a totally different Anthrax. I was feeling really good about our future.
As excited as I had been about Spreading the Disease and Among the Living, now I had a completely different feeling. I had someone to work with, a writing partner who was on exactly the same musical wavelength I was on. We would sit for hours on end at my place in Huntington Beach and throw ideas around. I’d hand him a verse and he’d finish it. He’d hand me words, I’d finish them. We were like an old married couple that completes one another’s sentences.
Having a cowriter took so much pressure off me, and at the same time it was a lot of fun. I loved hanging out with John as a bandmate and a friend. I was friends with Charlie, Frankie, and Danny, but we didn’t hang out. Now I had a guy in LA I could go to bars with. He was like a bro. I couldn’t have been happier, knowing we made the right decision. We heard what we were coming up with, and we thought this is the new Anthrax! At one point, Elektra asked us if we wanted to change the name of the band, because when we played them the demos they said, “This shit’s amazing! It’s you guys, but it’s not you guys.”
We understood what they were saying and we felt the same way, but we never considered it, not for a second. From a marketing perspective, they figured that since Seattle had blown up and alternative bands were happening, maybe they could market us as something other than metal if we changed our name. We were strongly opposed to that. We felt that if we changed our name, we’d be over. Our fans would feel betrayed and we’d be through.
The working process for Sound of White Noise was slightly different from the way we created the other Anthrax albums. Charlie wrote about 90 percent of the music at his place in New York. With me out of the music-writing picture, Frankie, who had always wanted more of a role in the band, saw an opportunity. He came up with ideas and showed them to us. Some of them were really good, but they weren’t Anthrax. Charlie and I were certainly very set in our ways and comfortable with how things worked when it came to songwriting. We weren’t the Beatles. We didn’t all come to rehearsal with full songs. The band collaborated on the arrangements and it worked. People liked our music and each record sold more copies than the previous one. We didn’t want to fuck too much with the formula.
Understandably, Frankie had a huge issue with the fact that we wouldn’t let him in and he even threatened to walk if we didn’t use his ideas. Frankie was very much a part of the writing when it came to melodies; it was the music he came up with that just wasn’t happening for us. We encouraged him to write his own songs and sell them to other people or put them out as a side project. But he’d always hold that “I’m-gonna-quit” gun to our heads, which created tension between him and Charlie. John and I avoided most of it because we were doing our own thing, working on lyrics and vocals, and flying back and forth between LA and New York to collaborate with the band. We had rebuilt the studio in Yonkers after the fire, and were back in there. We stored our gear in half of it and the other half was a jam room. John and I would stay in New York for weeks at a time and take the train to the studio every day. We’d write all day there and then come back to the city and go out all night. After a while, we started subletting apartments for three or four months at a time so we didn’t have to stay in hotels. We enjoyed being bicoastal. We could write lyrics just as easily in California as we could in New York. Then, when we had a good batch of stuff done, we’d go to Yonkers and start rehearsing. It was the best of both worlds, because I could be with Debbie for a while in LA and then John and I would go to New York and rage every night.
He was single, and when I was in New York I didn’t pine away that I wasn’t with Debbie. I was having too much fun. We’d get back from the studio at 8 p.m., shower, eat something really quick, and be out until five in the morning drinking. Then we’d wake up at 1 p.m. and take the train back to Yonkers. We did that for months and months. It was the first time in my life I drank pretty regularly for a few months straight. It was like I was making up for all those years I didn’t imbibe. We’d drink beer like it was the healthiest beverage on earth and there was only a limited supply. By the time we’d get to the studio, we were usually hungover but ready to work.
Of course, I can’t say that was always the case. Sometimes we were hurting bad and less focused, but there was no rush and no deadline. We didn’t feel we had to be clear headed and laser-beam focused all the time. We wanted the process to be fun and productive. Drinking with John was definitely fun.
We took our time writing Sound of White Noise because it was important to get it perfect. Charlie was a little bummed because he was doing most of the heavy lifting when it came to writing the music and we were out partying like idiots. But even though John and I were hungover as fuck a lot of the time in New York, we weren’t raging 24/7. And when we were in LA, we were determined and dedicated. More important, we were writing great stuff.
I think I felt I had earned the right to loosen up and drink because I was the one who kept the lights on in the factory for years. I didn’t want to be the head supervisor anymore. But the main reason I was drinking so much was because I was still trying to get over my divorce and deal with the fallout from another relationship I probably shouldn’t have been in. My divorce from Marge had pretty much bled me dry. I lost my apartment in Queens and a whole bunch of cash, and I had to make alimony payments for a couple of years. When the dust settled I didn’t even own a spoon. I was starting over again from scratch. At one point, I tried to get back boxes of my comics that I never picked up after Marge and I broke up. It was my cherished silver-age Marvel collection, complete runs from inception to the mideighties of The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, and more. These were books I had collected since I was a kid in the late sixties. It wasn’t the most pristine Mile High–type collection; I had read and reread most of them. Then I found out Marge’s dad had put them in storage and insured them for a lot of money and didn’t pay the bill for two years. When I called the storage place, a guy told me I had to pay over $20,000 if I wanted them back. I had no way to get the cash in time, so they all ended up in someone else’s collection.
It was a real dick move, his petty revenge for me divorcing his daughter. The collection was worth a lot more than $20,000, but it wasn’t the monetary value of the comics that I cared about. It was the books themselves. They had been a part of my life for so long, my only connection to my childhood, and now they were gone. I was angry about it for a few months but was able to move on because my freedom was worth anything and being angry about that was just holding me back. That being said, sometimes I’ll see books I had in comic shops or online, and I see what they sell for now and I just have to laugh. Maniacally. Like the Joker . . .
When John joined Anthrax he was in a tough emotional place as well. He had just broken up with a girl he had been with for more than five years, and he was still hurting. In that sense, we had a lot in common. He was bummed and I was starting to be bummed, so a lot of Sound of W
hite Noise addressed personal and introspective subject matter. I had touched on my marriage to Marge on State of Euphoria and Persistence of Time, but only from a distance. I didn’t want to bum out our fans, and at the time I still felt more comfortable writing about comic books, Stephen King, and a little about history and politics. Now, I needed to write songs that were more personal, painful, and real.
It was therapeutic to work with John on “Room for One More,” “Only,” “Black Lodge,” and “Invisible.” In some ways it was catharsis in action because there was still drama all around us. On April 22, 1992, we went to see Pantera and Skid Row at the Felt Forum in New York. During the after-party, I met a model named Lynne through a friend of a friend. We started talking, one thing led to another, and within days we were having an affair. Lynne was connected to the world of fashion, and I started going out with her to all the clubs where celebrities hung out—the real hotspots. John and I instantly fell in with that scene. Every night, we went to these fancy-pants clubs. We got in free, never had to wait in line, and didn’t have to pay for drinks. And there were beautiful girls everywhere. These were tall, thin, gorgeous models, not overly made-up, slutty groupies. I had never experienced this before. It was nuts and I went all-in. I was so hot and heavy with Lynne that I started staying in New York and didn’t come home.
I wasn’t monogamous with Lynne, either. How could I be? There were all these hot women around, and she didn’t seem to care. I was just a lucky guy getting lots of play. I still didn’t have the game of someone like Sebastian Bach or Bret Michaels, who would have had orgies with these chicks on a nightly basis. I had to settle for one at a time, but that was good enough for me. There’s always room for one more. And then I always had Lynne. Living in that dreamworld almost took over my life.
