Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (33 page)

MARIA FERRERO:
We had Metallica, Raven, and Anthrax playing that show at Roseland, and that night Jonny and Marsha signed Metallica to Elektra, Anthrax to Island, and Raven to Atlantic. I was like, “Wow, that’s a big deal,” ’cause those are big, mainstream companies. So for me, that was the moment I said, “Oh, wow! This is real.”

Despite the hype surrounding Metallica, Anthrax seemed to come out of nowhere with their 1984 ragged-but-raging Megaforce record
Fistful of Metal
, which led to their deal with Island Records, where they released four critically and commercially successful albums. But Anthrax was hardly an instant success. When high school classmates Scott Ian and Danny Lilker formed the band in 1981, even Jonny Z repeatedly tried to shoo them away. At the time, Anthrax was a rotating door of musicians with dreams of greatness and just enough talent to leapfrog the obstacles they kept creating for themselves. Steadily, though, they improved, and with the help of Megaforce and a never-say-die mentality, they were able to clamber their way into metal’s Big Four, alongside Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer.

SCOTT IAN:
Dan Lilker and I were always totally about metal. We used to drive sixty miles from Queens to this metal bar called 516 in Old Bridge [New Jersey], and that’s where all the guys in the Old Bridge Militia used to hang out. We’d all stand there in this shitty little bar, sometimes with fake cardboard guitars, drinking beer and headbanging. That’s what we did for fun—listen to this music and bang our heads and jump around like idiots. It was so nerdy, but it was the greatest feeling ever.

DAN LILKER (Brutal Truth, S.O.D., ex–Nuclear Assault, ex-Anthrax):
The first show we did was a battle of the bands in a church basement. Cease Fire was the other big band, and we won by doing Priest and Maiden covers, and we might have had a few originals.

CHARLIE BENANTE (Anthrax):
In the early eighties, I had some friends in Queens who knew of this band called Anthrax that played locally in schools, but they hated them. There was talk of me auditioning for them, and my friends were like, “Don’t you dare do that, dude. They suck.” I was like, “Well, lemme just go try.” Scott and Danny came over to my house and we jammed and it wasn’t perfect, but I could see there was a lot of potential.

SCOTT IAN:
We were looking for a drummer because our old drummer [Greg D’Angelo] had left. Someone recommended Charlie, who was in Throgs Neck in the Bronx. We went to Charlie’s house and he had this drum kit up in his little room at the top of this four-family house. We jammed “Fast As a Shark” by Accept and “Invaders” from Iron Maiden. We said, “Can you play double bass?” and he went
dumma-dumma-dumma-dumma-dumma
with his feet flying. We said, “All right, you’re in the band.”

JONNY ZAZULA:
Anthrax would constantly bring their demos to us at the flea market and they were a real royal pain in the ass. One of the only reasons we even allowed them to hang out there was because Danny Spitz was the lead guitarist for Overkill at one point, and he was quite a character. But I wouldn’t even listen to their stuff. One day I went to breakfast with Marsha at an IHOP in East Brunswick, New Jersey, where [the] flea market was, and parked there waiting for me at the IHOP was a car that had “Anthrax” license plates. They asked if they could play their tape during my meal. I told them after I ate I’d meet them in the store and we’d talk. That’s when we put it on. They were so persistent. I liked production by Ross the Boss (ex-Manowar, Dictators) on “Soldiers of Metal.” I didn’t really want to release it, but Scott had used $2,500 of his bar mitzvah money to produce the song, so I printed up two thousand singles and sold all of them in two and a half weeks. That was really surprising, so we signed them.

SCOTT IAN:
[Ex-lead guitarist Dan] Spitz was working at a guitar store on Forty-eighth Street before he joined. I used to go in there all the time. He was this cocky little fuck, and one time he said, “Yeah, I’ve heard about your fucking band. I’ll fucking blow away your lead guitar player. You should have me in your band.” I was like, “Uh, dude, I just came in here to check out an amp.” A month later we auditioned him. Before him was a guy named Greg Walls. He did a bunch of demos with us, but he just wasn’t into it.

JONNY ZAZULA:
The money that came from Metallica went to Raven and Anthrax. Then Raven got signed [to Atlantic Records], so I placed everything on Anthrax and stayed with them. Metallica were gone. They’d been signed by Elektra. Then Anthrax got signed [to Island]. So everybody was signed and Anthrax owed me $250,000 from [recording, traveling, everything I had paid for in their career to date]. I never took a dime for the first three or four years. Then we did a merchandise deal for $1.5 million, and not only did I make myself a very good commission, but they paid me back that day. That’s the moment I made money with Megaforce.

SCOTT IAN:
Our first tour was the summer of ’84 with Metallica, and [ex-vocalist] Neil Turbin took it upon himself to make that decision that Danny Lilker wasn’t going to be in Anthrax anymore. Granted, when I got the call from Danny saying, “Hey man. What’s going on? Neil just called and told me I was out of the band,” I was like, “What the fuck?” But I kind of knew it was coming. Neil so had it in for him at the time because he didn’t think Danny was responsible, and I know this sounds crazy, but truthfully, Danny was taller than Neil and Neil didn’t want someone in the band taller than him because he was the front man. But Neil did have a point. When it came to the responsibility department, Danny was a bit lax. It’s one of those things that eats me up to this day. I wish I would have stood up for my friend and told Neil to go fuck himself, but Neil gave us an ultimatum and said either Danny went or he went. We couldn’t afford to lose our singer. We had a record out and he had us over a barrel. Finding a new singer would have been impossible at the time.

DAN LILKER:
Three days after
Fistful of Metal
came out, they asked me to leave the band. Ninety-nine percent of the reason was because they wanted to keep Neil and he couldn’t deal with me because he had no sense of humor. When I realized he could never take a joke, that made it more fun to poke fun at him. In the end they decided it was better keeping the front man than the dude who wrote three-quarters of the record. So I got the short end of the stick.

NEIL TURBIN (DeathRiders, ex-Anthrax):
Even though I have no regrets about doing
Fistful of Metal
or the first tour, there was nothing pleasant in any aspect about it. Scott had aspirations of wanting to be the central figure in the band, being the front man—and the guy is not even a lead guitar player. And there weren’t lots of song ideas coming from him. This was my agenda: I was there to rock. I came there to kick some ass and thrash. Scott admitted to the rest of the band that Dan Lilker had to be let go, but it was a lot easier for him to use me as a scapegoat, especially after I wasn’t there anymore. Everybody knew that Dan just wasn’t cutting it on a number of levels. He took thirty takes to play the [Alice Cooper cover] “I’m Eighteen” in the studio. But there was this great resentment because I was getting a lot of attention, so I was completely undermined. I was foolish because I decided to weather the storm. But the momentum that was created, the excitement level was definitely something that I contributed to, and that can never be taken away from me.

SCOTT IAN:
We did a tour with Neil, opening for Raven in the fall of ’84, and we realized we could not survive as a band if he was our singer. He was a dictator. It was his way or the highway. The rest of us all bonded on the road and he was this total outcast. He would bring two huge suitcases out with him, one for his stage stuff and one for his day-to-day clothing. We were doing the tour in a van that we would take turns driving. He would take the backseat and put his suitcases there and wouldn’t allow anyone to sit back there with him. And he couldn’t sing past the first song. He’d blow his voice out. So we knew right then and there, “You gotta go.”

CARL CANEDY (producer, the Rods):
Neil is a tough singer to replace. Matt [Fallon, who later sang for Skid Row, prior to Sebastian Bach] was inexperienced and really not the right fit for the band. But we were now past the preproduction stage and several weeks into recording their [second] album [
Spreading the Disease
]. I was very surprised by their decision to hire Fallon, and I admired their choice to let him go. They called me and asked me to get Jon and Marsha on the phone. Jon simply said, “Put him on a bus” [as he had with Dave Mustaine]. In that short, three-minute meeting with their manager, Matt’s career with Anthrax was ended. They’d just made the ballsiest move I’d ever seen a band make, and now they needed to get back to work with a new singer right away. I put out the word, and as luck would have it my good friend Andrew “Duck” MacDonald (the Rods, Blue Cheer) told me about this kid [Joey Belladonna] who was a great singer he was considering for
his
new project.

SCOTT IAN:
We had everyone looking for singers for us. Our plan B was to have me and [bassist] Frankie [Bello] sing. But Carl said, “I saw this dude play in a band here. Let me see if I can find his number.” He ended up getting a hold of Joey Belladonna, who was living in upstate New York. We were recording in Ithaca and he drove down a day or two later. He had never heard of us. He didn’t know who Metallica was. We just put him in a studio and said, “Sing what you know.” He was singing Journey, Foreigner, and Deep Purple. And we were like, “Wow, he’s got an amazing voice.” As much as we loved hardcore and other thrash bands, we came from the Judas Priest/Iron Maiden school of wanting a real singer.

NEIL TURBIN:
With Joey Belladonna, I didn’t think they put in someone who could sing with more passion than me, or who had the range I had. I don’t think they put in someone who had a connection with the fans or audience, or someone who is a writer. Basically, they hired a puppet.

JOEY BELLADONNA:
I had no clue who Anthrax were. I had never even sung anything remotely in that kind of range. But it was cool to me because I came up with my own vocal twist that sat overtop the music. I wasn’t sure about the heaviness of the music at first, but once we got going it was great.

SCOTT IAN:
[1985’s]
Spreading the Disease
was just the right record at the right time. Everyone was waiting for that kind of music to surface, and we were suddenly the big kids on the block in New York.

DIMEBAG DARRELL:
The sound on
Spreading the Disease
, with songs like “Gung Ho” and “Medusa,” and Charlie Benante’s feet flying off the handle—that was huge for me. It was like somebody hit you with a two-by-four across the face.

In Los Angeles, the city that initially shunned Metallica, something faster, heavier, and more sinister was congealing. Slayer—bassist and vocalist Tom Araya, guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, and drummer Dave Lombardo—formed in 1981 as a classic metal cover band, but over the next five years they took the intensity of Metallica and combined it with the ferocity of hardcore and the occult lyrics of Venom; to date they remain one of the most brutal, uncompromising bands on the scene.

KERRY KING:
[Slayer bassist] Tom [Araya] was in a band with my guitar teacher and their guitarist got the axe, and they got me in to play, probably just to fill space. But I knew the songs, so I stayed. I was sixteen at the time, and then that band fizzled when I was seventeen. So I was looking in the
Recycler
for bands to jam with. I tried out for this band that was rehearsing right above where [guitarist] Jeff [Hanneman] worked. They were these Spinal Tap dudes—old guys that had no business doing anything. But I heard Jeff practicing guitar during some downtime at work, and he was playing songs I knew. So I got Jeff’s number and we started hooking up. [Drummer] Dave [Lombardo] lived right down the street from me. One day he stopped at my house and said, “Hey, you got some guitars?” I guess he heard me playing. And I said, “Yeah, you wanna see?” So me, Jeff, and Dave jammed in his garage a couple times. I got back in touch with Tom, and we jammed, and that was it.

JEFF HANNEMAN (Slayer):
We were in LA, but we all hated glam. I was listening to a lot of hardcore, but I still loved classic metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Kerry was more into the metal. So when we started writing songs, we combined the best of both.

KERRY KING:
When we started Slayer, we did a lot of Priest covers, but then we heard those first two
Metal Massacre
records and we knew we could write songs that were better than those, so we progressed rapidly.

TOM ARAYA:
We met the folks at Metal Blade and they said, “Listen, we’ll put you on this
Metal Massacre III
album. So we did “Aggressive Perfector” for
Metal Massacre III
in 1982, and that was the birth and beginning of the Slayer sound. We wrote that song just for that record and we rehearsed it for weeks. We recorded it in one day. We listened to it and compared it to everything else on the record, and we thought, “This fucking rocks!” The only thing we kept saying was, “This needs to be a little faster.” So we kept trying to do stuff that was faster and heavier and more violent.