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

  He asked me why I was arrested, and I told him I broke into Legends Field.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Dad, I need paperwork filled out and . . .”

  “How old are you?” he repeated.

  I sighed. “I’m thirty-four years old. You know that.”

  “Well, maybe you need to start making some better decisions in your life,” he said. But he agreed to call his lawyer right away. It turned out that wasn’t necessary because Heather had gone back to Ed’s house, woken him up, and told him we got arrested. So he had already gone through the process of getting the paperwork taken care of, and bail was being posted. When I got off the phone with my dad, Angela called her sister, and Heather told her we’d be out by 11:30.

  Before we left, they wanted us to have TB shots because there had been an outbreak of tuberculosis in the jail and if we didn’t get the shot they wouldn’t take responsibility if we got sick. Knowing I was getting out made me cocky. I told them I wasn’t getting any shot. The nurse said, if I didn’t get the shot, I wasn’t getting out for at least another day. We got the shots. Not long after, I got an upset stomach. I don’t know if it was the injection, the unbelievable amount of booze I had in my system, or the stress I had been under since we got arrested, but I realized I had to take a shit right away—a fucking bad, insane booze shit. I didn’t see any bathrooms except for one toilet in the middle of the room in front of everyone. I poop-walked to the infirmary where I got the shot because there was a door in there that looked like a bathroom. It was open. I saw the toilet. Thank God!!!

  I told the nurse, a heavyset older woman, that I needed to use the toilet. I asked politely if I could go.

  “Go ahead,” she said and pointed to the stained, wet toilet in the main room.

  “No, that’s why I came in here,” I groaned. “Can I please use the toilet to have some privacy?” She looked right through me and said, “Ain’t no way you’re using this private bathroom.”

  I went back and sat next to Angela. I didn’t tell her what was going on. Instead, I experienced an award-winning episode of mind over matter. The mental concentration I had to exert to avoid completely soiling myself was mind-blowing. There was no way I was going to sit on the filthy toilet in front of forty or fifty people, some of whom were Anthrax fans sweeping up the jail. These guys were prison inmates who had to clean up the drunk tank every day. They heard I was in there and were happy just to glance over, smile, and nod. I couldn’t possibly take a shit in front of them. I sat there with my cheeks clenched and my stomach in knots for three fucking hours. The pain was insane, but I acted like everything was normal.

  Finally it was 11 a.m. and they called our names and processed us out. Ed and Heather were waiting for us. They asked us what we wanted to do and I said I really wanted to go back to Ed’s to take a shower right away and get something to eat. By then the news of what had happened was public. Ed turned the radio to 98 Rock in Tampa and the DJ said, “Scott Ian, if you’re still in town, call us. We want to know what happened.”

  I almost crapped myself right there, but I held it in and didn’t say a word. We got back to Ed’s and I went straight into the bathroom, turned the shower on, slid onto the clean, shining toilet seat, and took an Incredible Hulk–sized dump. I can’t believe the porcelain didn’t explode and the toilet didn’t overflow. Everything poured out of me; it was a huge relief. I felt well enough afterward to go to Universal Studios to check out the rides. The last thing I expected was for people to point at me and yell, “Hey you stole home plate!” but word travels fast.

  I’ll get into more detail about how I expunged my criminal record and cleared the air with George Steinbrenner later. Everything has its place. Just note that the incident at Legends Field was an anomaly for me. It was the only time I’ve ever been arrested, and it’ll definitely be the last. See, I’ve never been an attention-seeking, drug-snarfing metal dude with a death wish. I have plenty of friends who are, and I love drinking with them and listening to their stories. But that’s not me. I’ve never shot up, never done blow, and I haven’t even smoked pot since 1995.

  I didn’t get into music for pussy. I got into it for music. Sure, there were girls along the way, but not like there were for those ’80s hair bands. For the longest time, thrash metal was a dude scene; if there were any chicks at the show, they were usually dragged along by their boyfriends. Basically, I’m a guy who made a name for myself by working my ass off. There have been plenty of ups and just as many downs, and through it all Anthrax have persevered. We’ve been rewarded for our efforts and grouped as one of the Big 4 along with Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth. But my story is very different, as much respect as I have for each and every one of those guys. I don’t have tragic tales about being abused, abandoned by my parents, sleeping in the streets, choosing between my next fix and my next meal, or getting into gang fights and cracking guys over the head with empty 40s. As my mom likes to say, at heart I’m a good Jewish boy.

  I grew up in Queens, New York, got good grades, and geeked out over comic books, horror, and sci-fi. Then I discovered rock and roll, and everything changed. In that respect I was like a lot of aspiring musicians, but I always had inextinguishable drive. From my early teens, I was motivated to find musicians to play with, write songs, get signed, play shows, and grow and grow and grow. I was persistent as hell, a tenacious prick if there ever was one. Every time an obstacle came up, I used my laser-beam focus to figure out how to get around it and move on. Keep moving forward. Overcome problems, deal with changes. Singers and guitarists came and went and sometimes came back. I carried on. My story in Anthrax is one of determination, dedication, and sometimes luck, both good and bad. It’s a story filled with triumphs and challenges, but it hasn’t all been drama and struggle. I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun, and I’ve come to the realization that the music business is the craziest, least predictable enterprise on the planet. Literally anything can happen. Having spent more than thirty years releasing albums and touring, I’ve accumulated a boatload of funny and fascinating experiences regarding my band, friends, peers, and people I met from the time I first picked up an acoustic guitar to the moment I stepped foot onstage at Yankee Stadium for the Big 4 Festival. When it comes to Anthrax, I’m the man and this is my story.

  Chapter 1

  I’m the Boy

  I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1963. It was an auspicious beginning, sort of. Oddly enough, that’s where the legendary Music Building was located, which is where Anthrax, Metallica, and other bands made history writing and rehearsing some of the earliest and most memorable thrash songs. Metallica even lived at the place for a while. And man, it was a slum. When I went there with Anthrax, I used to think, “God, this neighborhood is such a dive. It must have been so much different when my parents were living here.” But maybe it wasn’t, and that was one of the hardships they had to face. If so, it was one of many.

  My parents never had it easy. They were second-generation immigrants, and when I was growing up my father, Herbert Rosenfeld, was working in the jewelry business and my mom, Barbara Haar, was a housewife. I think that was part of why she was so unhappy. She didn’t want to be a happy homemaker. She wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t have the patience. My parents came from working-class families and got married way too young. My dad’s father, Harold Rosenfeld, was born in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my grandmother Sylvia was born in 1912 in Manhattan. They met in the south shore of Brooklyn while he was driving a Good Humor truck. They got married in 1938 and he continued to work in the summer. Then in the winter before my aunt and dad were born, my grandparents would drive to Florida every winter in a Model-T Ford and live there with the money he made selling ice cream—like they were on vacation.

  My dad and his sister were raised in a tenement house in a fourth-floor walkup. They never had any money even after my grandfather
got a job as a shoe salesman to earn some extra cash. He was a good, hardworking man, but they could never afford any luxuries, and he kept a diary of every penny he spent in a day.

  My grandmother on my mom’s side, Lena, was from Russia, and her husband, Moe, was born in 1902 in a tiny Polish village called Nisko, which is no longer on the map. During World War I the Germans occupied the village and started killing all the men. So, when he was seventeen, his parents smuggled him out of the country. He lived in Amsterdam with a family who hired him as a grocer. Once he saved up enough money to buy counterfeit identification papers, he stowed away on a ship to New York and got all the way to Ellis Island. He got off the boat and waited in line with all the other refugees, but, when the people at immigration saw that he didn’t have the right papers, they turned him around and put him on a boat back to Amsterdam. He spent another six months or so working and then he was able to get the proper paperwork. Then he got back on another ship, came back to New York, and this time immigration allowed him in.

  My grandpa Moe was a smart guy but he was broke. So he went to the Lower East Side where there was a community of Jews that sort of looked after each other, and he got a job as a grocer. He hustled his ass off and climbed the ladder really quickly. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had his own grocery store in Rockaway, and when he had made enough money, he brought his parents over. They were strict Orthodox Jews, which was weird for my mom because she grew up in Queens in a household that wasn’t religious. They even used to have a Christmas tree around the holidays before her grandparents moved in. Then suddenly she was in this house with her dad’s parents, who only spoke Yiddish and wouldn’t even try to speak English. They were hardcore Jews. They hated Moe’s wife and my mom because they thought Moe deserved better. And they really weren’t good with children. When they made everything super religious, my mom rebelled and tried to run away, but they always got her back. And then her father whacked her with a belt.

  It was a different time back then. Basically, you beat your kids when they didn’t behave. It wasn’t abnormal. It was just accepted. You got hit. It’s hard for me to believe because my grandparents never had anything but love for me and my brother Jason, but both of my parents took a lot of abuse growing up. My dad once told me a story about yelling to a friend through an open window when he was a kid. His mother got so mad she picked him up, flipped him upside down, held him by his underarms, and dangled him out the window four stories in the air. And when my uncle got caught stealing her cigarettes, she held his hand against a hot stove. They didn’t fuck around when it came to discipline. There were no time-outs or positive reinforcement. It was all spare the rod and spoil the child.

  Even though they had a difficult upbringing, my parents didn’t pass that on to Jason and me. They were not hitters. Maybe once in a blue moon if one of us really got out of line, we’d get a slap. But, when I was a kid, just the sound of my dad’s raised voice was enough to scare the shit out of me. I’d like to say I had a well-adjusted home life, but that wouldn’t really be true. My dad was twenty-two and my mom was twenty when they got married. And then my mom immediately got pregnant with me. That wasn’t the plan for either of them, but back then if you got pregnant, you got married. No one from a good Jewish home got an abortion. It was unheard of—lucky for me!

  Soon after I was born, my mom cheated on my dad with the love of her life, who had previously spurned her, Lenny Chumsky, and my dad found out. They split up for a while. During that time my mom started drinking heavily, and her father, Moe, shamed her into begging my dad’s forgiveness. He accepted her apology, and they got back together. This was 1964, and people really weren’t getting divorced back then. Maybe it would have been better if they had made a clean break. I feel like their marriage was doomed from the start.

  We moved to Florida when I was three because my dad was unjustly accused of stealing diamonds from the company where he worked, Harry Winston Jewelry. He failed a polygraph test because he’s untestable—meaning he’ll fail no matter what—so they fired him even though he hadn’t taken anything and no one had any evidence that he had. He got another offer from a family in Florida to work at Mayer’s Jewelers in Miami to do repairs and sizing for rings. My parents thought a change of scenery might be good for the family. I don’t remember most of our time in Florida, except for my first vivid memory in July 1966.

  Maybe it was an omen or a metaphor for the trauma that was about to strike our family—okay, it was nothing that dramatic. I was stung by a bee. I wasn’t allergic or anything, but it hurt like hell and I’ll never forget that day. We were living in this apartment complex, and the back of the place had sliding glass doors that led outside. There was a grassy area near the pool, and I was walking through the grass barefoot. The bee was resting on a small piece of clover, and I stepped right on him. He didn’t sting me right away. He flew up and I ran. I remember thinking, “I’ll jump in the pool to escape the bee,” but before I got there the bee stung the inside of my ear. It was really loud, and I screamed because of the noise and the pain. That began my lifelong hatred of most stinging and biting insects. I hate spiders, and I can’t look at a wasp without feeling murderous. Bees and I have a grudging respect for each other nowadays. Fortunately, they removed the stinger and it didn’t cause any serious damage because it didn’t sting my eardrum. My ear just swelled up and hurt like a motherfucker.

  My mom hated Florida and longed to get back to New York. My dad loved it. But, as fate would have it, someone at my dad’s company stole a bunch of jewelry and the boss made everyone take a polygraph test. My dad explained what had happened to him in New York. They polygraphed him anyway, and of course he failed again, so the boss—who dealt with the mafia buying and selling hot jewelry—fired my dad and told him that if he found out he was the thief he was going to find himself at the bottom of the ocean with cement shoes. My dad was indignant and stormed out. Later, his boss discovered his private secretary and her daughter were on heavy drugs and they were the thieves. But my dad never got an apology.

  As soon as he lost his job, we moved back to New York, and for nine months my mom had to work in a bagel shop to help pay the bills. My dad got another job in the jewelry business with Gimbel Brothers as an appraiser, and then he became manager of the production department and a buyer of stones at Aaron Perkis Company. We were still far from rich, but at least he had some income flowing in.

  My dad would do anything he could think of to make my mother happy, but she always had something to complain about. That’s when I first noticed that my parents didn’t like being together. By the time I was four or five, my mom seemed weird and distant. She did all the things she felt she had to do as a mother taking care of two kids, but, even at that age, I could tell there was no joy there. When I got a little older, I understood that she didn’t want to be a housewife and she didn’t like being with my father. Then I realized she drank.

  All I knew back then was that there was alcohol in the house. She drank a lot of scotch and it was a problem for her. Later on, I found out she was also taking pills—Quaaludes, Valium, diet pills, anything she could get a prescription for to help her escape. She was miserable because she never wanted to be with my dad. She wanted Lenny Chumsky, but she compromised. It was a fucked-up position for my dad to be in, and from the time I was four years old up until I was eleven and my parents split up, there was a lot of tension in the house. I don’t think they ever loved each other. But for some reason they thought having another child might make their relationship better, so three and a half years after I was born, my mom gave birth to Jason, who became both my responsibility and my right-hand man all through childhood.

  As difficult at it was to be with my mother, there were some good times. When I was four years old she used to read MAD magazine to me. When she was a kid, she had every issue, but my grandmother would clean her room and throw them out. Who knows what they’d be worth today?

&nb
sp; My mom was also a big horror fan. She loved scary movies. In New York on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there used to be Chiller Theater on WPIX and Creature Feature on WNYC, channel 11 and channel 5 back before cable. A lot of times, instead of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, we’d watch horror movies with my mom. Mostly, it was the old black-and-white Universal classic monster movies—Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula—and I loved them all from the time I was four or five.

  When the original version of The Thing came on, my mom said, “When I was your age this was the scariest movie ever made. This is the movie that terrified everybody.” We started watching it, and I was prepared to jump up and run out of the room in fright—only it wasn’t scary. I said, “Mom, it looks like a walking vegetable. How is that scary? Wolfman is much scarier than him,” and my mom said to me, “Scott, in the 1950s that was scary.”

  The thing is, I was never scared by horror movies. I loved them and I still do, but I always knew they weren’t real. To this day, movies don’t scare me. Books, however, sometimes scare the shit out of me because the action and dialogue are all in my head. It’s a different type of reality. You create your own images and your flesh tingles or your heart sinks when something bad happens. That’s why Stephen King has always been one of my favorite authors. The Shining scared me so much that all these years later I still can’t walk down hotel hallways without thinking some fucked-up ghost twins are going to grab me.

  If anything, I felt an emotional connection with the monsters in the classic movies. Not Jason in Friday the 13th or Michael Myers in Halloween. They were just mindless, immortal psychopaths. And of course awesome. But Frankenstein’s monster—what a sad dude. He was already dead, he’s brought back to life, then he’s just persecuted and hated, and he’s ugly and scary. All he wants is to be left alone and everyone fucks with him. I always felt bad for those kinds of monsters. Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolfman gave off such emotions with or without the makeup. He played Larry Talbot, who gets attacked by a werewolf and kills it, but he gets bitten during the fight. So he turns into a werewolf every full moon. He elicits so much empathy because he didn’t deserve his fate. He didn’t want to murder people as the Wolfman; it was completely out of his hands. Dracula was a different story. You didn’t really feel bad for Dracula—he was a vampire doing his thing. Dracula was my least favorite of the original Universal monsters.