As the founding member of Anthrax, Scott Ian has been cranking out riffs for several decades and has barely had a chance to catch his breath ever since.
An architect of the thrash genre, his band Anthrax – alongside Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth – are regarded as part of ‘The Big Four’ and is widely regarded as one of the greatest rhythm guitarists in metal.
He’s also been part of tongue-in-cheek crossover metallers Stormtroopers Of Death, supergroup The Damned Things with members of Every Time I Die and Fall Out Boy, and most recently, Motor Sister with his wife Pearl Aday, with whom he has a son. A self-confessed horror and comic book nerd, he’s also fronted Nerdist’s Bloodworks web series, made cameo appearances in The Walking Dead and Deadwood, penned two books – his autobiography I’m The Man and most recently, Access All Areas: Stories from a Hard Rock Life – and performed his own spoken word shows too.
In this 2017 interview, Scott traces his steps from fledgling thrasher in New York City to metal’s go-to horror expert and all-round nerd.
What were Anthrax's early shows like?
“We mostly played covers at the time with a few originals sprinkled in, early NWOBHM stuff: songs from the first Maiden album and Saxon and early Judas Priest. We were trying our best to write our own songs, but we certainly didn’t have an album or a show’s worth of material. We’d play shows in a church basement and sell the tickets to our friends. We were just having fun.”
How quickly did you sign to Megaforce?
“If you ask me, not soon enough. [The late] Jonny Zazula [label boss] kept pushing us off, saying we weren’t ready, so we’d give him another demo tape. He was the guy who brought Metallica in from San Francisco and somehow financed their first record. We knew he was the guy we wanted to be with, and if he was going to critique our demos, we were going to listen. It was a little over two years since we started that he said we were ready to make a record.”
Didn't he ask you to meet Metallica when they arrived in New York City to make their debut album?
“Welcome them or be the bearer of bad news? If memory serves, when they got to New York, Danny [Lilker, original Anthrax bassist] and I went to the building where we rehearsed to meet the band. We didn’t know that Metallica was going to be living there; there was no heat or hot water. Neither did they. It was just an old building that someone gutted and rented the rooms out to bands. We helped them out where we could, and gave them a refrigerator and a toaster oven. The place was not comfortable.”
What was Cliff Burton like?
“He was the guy I kind of gravitated to initially. I eventually became best friends with Kirk, but this was when Dave [Mustaine] was in the band. I became buds with Cliff. We were into the same things: comics, movies, books. We hit it off and he was a very cool dude. He was the most original character I’d ever met in my life. We all thought we looked original with our tight jeans and hi-tops and metal shirts, then there was Cliff. In 1983, he was walking around in those bellbottoms, denim jacket and REM pin; it was a statement. He was his own man. He was a funny dude, a consummate ball-buster and a really smart guy.”
What was the first Kiss song you remember hearing?
“It was Rock and Roll All Nite on the radio – from Alive! – in 1975. I was in the car with my parents. I thought the song was amazing but the DJ didn’t back announce who it was, so there I was, 11 years old and had no way of finding out who it was. There were no record stores I could go to. A few weeks later, I saw Kiss on television. I didn’t know anything about them and shouted to my brother, ‘Oh my God! It’s the song!’.”
When did you first see them play?
“I first saw them at the Nassau Coliseum [in Uniondale, New York], but that was with parental supervision. Then I saw them at Madison Square Garden on December 14, 1977, with my brother and a couple of friends. We took the train from Queens on our own. Manhattan was a dump. It was a scary shit hole but awesome at the same time, because that’s where all the action was. No-one bothered with us. We flew under the radar. But the city was so different in the 70s. Everything changed when I saw them on TV. I loved comic books and horror; they were one fiery, bloody package being mainlined into my brain. It was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
What got you into horror?
“On Saturday and Sunday mornings, there was these two shows called Chiller Theater and Creature Feature. I’d watch them with my mom and my brother. I got into horror movies when I was five, probably: original Universal stuff like Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, Creature From The Black Lagoon and the British Hammer films too. I was reading comic books ever since I could read. I think I may have read about Carrie by Stephen King in the newspaper or it might have been Famous Monsters magazine when I was 11. I got Carrie and that was it. Salem’s Lot was incredible and The Stand came out; that was the one for me.”
What did you think of the It remake?
"I loved it. People bag on King adaptations and rightly so; there are a lot of crappy movies made from his stories, but there are also a lot of great ones. They aren’t necessarily based on his horror stories; the greatest King adaptations are things like The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and Stand By Me. It is straight up horror and I think they did a great job. The fact our music is [on the soundtrack] and one of the kids [Belch] was wearing an Anthrax t-shirt was pretty awesome too.”
Stephen King is linked with one of your other favourite bands, AC/DC, who soundtracked his first feature film Maximum Overdrive. When did they first crash into your life?
“I first heard Powerage in 1978. We’d listen to tapes on a boombox during lunch at school. That’s how we’d find out about new stuff. There was a kid was called Zlatko, but we called him Golden. He put on AC/DC and cued up Sin City, so that was the first song I heard. As soon as Bon started singing, I was enthralled. I’d never heard a voice like his. He sounded like a pirate. That day, I got the record and listened to it over and over again. Riff Raff, to me, was the song that made me want to find heavier guitar stuff.”
Malcolm Young had a profound influence on your guitar playing, didn't he?
“100 per cent. I already loved playing guitar at that point, but after hearing AC/DC, it felt like that’s what I was supposed to be doing. Jamming Let There Be Rock with my friends was better than skateboarding, baseball and comic books. It prioritised things in my brain and helped me understand that’s what I wanted to do.”
Tell us about the Angus and Malcolm portaits you've had tattooed on your biceps.
"They're portraits from the Highway to Hell album cover, and were both done by Kat Von D. Malcolm basically taught me how to play rhythm guitar. I find the older you get, my patience for sitting under the needle gets thinner and thinner. I’d sit for six or seven hours and it would suck, but now? After 15 minutes, I’m done!"
Your CV doesn't stop at music. You've made appearances on TV shows like Married With Children, Deadwood and The Walking Dead. What's the thrill of being on a TV set?
“I’m such a genre fan. Getting to peek behind the curtain is so exciting for me. It doesn’t ruin the magic for me; it amplifies it. I could sit on set and watch them do a scene over and over again. It’s fascinating. I got my own web series on Nerdist [Bloodworks] and got to hang out with effects guys and it was great. To go get made up as a ‘walker’ in The Walking Dead was amazing. It was the greatest Halloween costume you will ever have. It was pretty mind-blowing to see it come together.”
What was the last TV show you binge-watched?
“I do most of that on tour or on aeroplanes. What was the last show I binge-watched? I know what it was. Oh, I know. It was The Handmaid’s Tale. It was so brutal.”
You released a second book, Access All Areas: Stories From a Hard Rock Life. Were some of these stories kept out of your first autobiography I'm the Man: The Story of That Guy from Anthrax to stop it from becoming 1000-pages long?
“That was part of it. I didn’t have the stories written yet, like when I started playing poker in 2006. How do I fit it into my autobiography? It didn’t make sense to make a sudden left-turn from the reunion tour with Joey [Belladonna] and now we’re going to spend 65 pages of me playing poker. It was too tangental from the flow of the chronology of the band. A lot of these stories are from my personal life rather than Anthrax. I knew I had a lot of other stories to tell.”
Are you quite disciplined when it comes to writing?
“I am, yeah. Until I hit a wall and there’s nothing left. A couple of weeks go by and it starts to flow again. Would I write a novel? I kind of cringe when I say it, but yes, that’s the goal. I have an idea for a horror story; I’d love to try and see where I go with it."
What's left on your bucket list?
“I’d love to do something with Stephen King, whether he writes song lyrics or to somehow collaborate with him would be the greatest thing ever. If you go back to Spreading The Disease or Among The Living, his writing certainly helped me be able to write lyrics in the first place. I wrote about what I knew, so that would be full circle for me.”
