Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian remembers a conversation he had in the early 80s with the band’s original bass player, Danny Lilker. The pair were discussing their plans for the group they’d formed together in their native Queens, New York in 1981.
“Me and Danny were sitting around one day talking about the future,” says Scott. “We didn’t know what the fuck we would ever do if Anthrax didn’t happen. I remember us saying, ‘Well, if the band doesn’t make it, we’ll join the Marines.’”
The US military’s loss was metal’s gain. These scrappy but determined kids from New York’s outer boroughs didn’t just help lay the foundations for thrash metal, they accidentally gave the scene its name thanks to a song that featured on their debut album, Fistful Of Metal. The song’s title: Metal Thrashing Mad.
“Did I plan that?” says former Anthrax singer Neil Turbin, who appeared on Fistful Of Metal and wrote the lyrics for Metal Thrashing Mad. “Of course not. I just thought it was three words that summed up how I felt when I listened to the music.”
The roots of Anthrax can be traced to Bayside High School in Queens, where Scott and Danny met. Both were part of a small group of kids with long hair and leather jackets.
“I’m talking, like, eight of us in a school that had 3,500 people,” says Scott. “We all sat together at lunch. One friend had a little tiny boombox that he would bring it to school, and everyone would bring in tapes of the bands we loved.”
The pair were aspiring musicians themselves. Scott had been playing guitar since he was eight or nine years old, while Danny was nicknamed ‘Beethoven’ because he had perfect pitch and could figure out anything on guitar or bass after just one listen. By the summer of 1980, they had put a band together, taking the name Anthrax from a disease they’d read about in a biology textbook.
Several members came and went during that early period, including Scott’s younger brother, Jason Rosenfeld, briefly standing in on vocals.
“As far as we knew, there was no metal scene in New York,” says Scott. “Any time we would bring our demos to a bar or a club that would have live music and try and get gigs, we would hear the same thing: ‘Go learn a Van Halen set and come back when you’ve got that done.’ We didn’t want anything to do with that. We wanted to write our own songs and play our own gigs.”
One of the people who had seen an early Anthrax show was Neil Turbin. Although he went to the same school as Scott and Danny, he didn’t really mix with them. He had sung in a couple of bands, so he was ahead of them in some respects.
“I’d seen Anthrax play with Scott’s younger brother singing,” says Neil. “I actually got a call from Scott saying, ‘We have this band, you should check it out.’ I was like, ‘Sorry, I already have my band going on.’”
That changed when his most recent group fell apart. The two parties came together via an ad in a local music paper. “He was a very headstrong character, definitely on the same page as Danny and I as far as being serious about making music,” says Scott of the singer. “That was really the key for us. Neil was serious.”
By the time Neil joined, Anthrax’s tastes were beginning to shift. Kiss and Black Sabbath were joined by harder, faster bands: Venom, Raven, Discharge, The Exploited.
“We were into anything that was more extreme, anything that was more aggressive, anything that was faster,” says Scott. “Just pushing the envelope of what metal was. And it was reflected in the songs we were writing like Panic and Deathrider.”
It wasn’t just happening to them, either. Across the country in California, other kids were tuning into the same wavelength. Many of them had already formed bands of their own, among them Metallica and Slayer.
“We definitely felt like something was happening, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Scott.
The last piece of the musical puzzle fell into place midway through 1983 with the recruitment of drummer Charlie Benante. His predecessor, Greg D’Angelo, had been a hard rock guy, more likely to listen to Van Halen than Venom.
“Getting Charlie changed everything, because he could play double kick drum really fast,” says Scott. “I remember going to meet him for the first time in his house in The Bronx, and he started playing [proto-thrash classic] Fast As A Shark by Accept. And he was playing it even faster than the record! I remember looking at Danny and his jaw was on the floor: ‘This is the guy.’”
By 1983, Anthrax had a rehearsal space in a place called The Music Building in Jamaica, Queens.
“It was a dilapidated, burnt-out building in the midst of a whole bunch of dilapidated, burnt-out buildings filled with junkies and whatever else, in the worst neighbourhood in Queens,” says Scott. “But we were paying about $200 a month for this room, which was way cheaper than anything else we could find.”
Many of the songs that would appear on Fistful Of Metal came out of that grotty environment. But one nascent song stood out not because of its speed but precisely the opposite.
“I remember Danny coming in with the main riff for what would become Metal Thrashing Mad,” says Scott. “I really dug it because it was unlike the rest of the record. It’s much more of a hard rock song - it always felt more to me like Aerosmith or Ted Nugent.”
It was Neil Turbin who provided the song’s title and lyrics. He was inspired by bands with punchy, two- and three-word songtitles: Saxon’s Wheels Of Steel and Street Fighting Gang, and Riot’s Swords And Tequila and Fire Down Under.
“To me, it was just about matching the feeling I got from the music,” says Neil. “What are we doing? It’s metal, it’s thrashing and it’s madness.”
It wasn’t the first time one of metal’s Class Of ’83 had used the ‘t’ word. The line ‘thrashing all around’ appeared in Metallica’s Whiplash, written in late 1982 and circulated on live tapes around the same time.
But Neil denies his lyrics were influenced by their West Coast contemporaries: “I already had the lyric by the time I heard the Metallica song.”
Like rest of the album, Metal Thrashing Mad was recorded at Pyramid Sound Studios in Ithaca, upstate New York, with producer Carl Canedy, drummer with cult Big Apple rockers The Rods.
“It was a big song right out of the box,” remembers Scott. “People lost their minds when we played it live. They still do to this day.”
Metal Thrashing Mad took on more weight after Fistful Of Metal was released in January 1984 via Megaforce, the label set up and run by the band’s legendary manager Jon Zazula, aka Jonny Z (it was licensed in the UK to Music For Nations). Until that point, bands such as Anthrax and Slayer had been called ‘power metal’ (the name of a Metallica demo) or ‘speed metal’.
In a review of the album for Kerrang! magazine, influential journalist Xavier Russell came up with an alternative description for Anthrax’s music: “thrash metal”.
“Here’s the thing, we had a song called Metal Thrashing Mad, but we never said, ‘This kind of music is thrash metal’,” says Scott. “We don’t take credit for coming up with it for the name of a genre or a style of music.”
Even then, it took a while for the name to stick. Anthrax and their peers may have had supporters in the press, but many metal journalists were suspicious of this new, mutant form of noise.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t get what bands like Anthrax and Metallica were doing, just like they didn’t get what Venom were doing,” says Scott.
Still, Fistful Of Metal and Metal Thrashing Mad meant Anthrax were out of the traps and on their way to becoming one quarter of thrash’s eventual Big 4 – a fair result, since they’d inadvertently given the genre its name.
However, the line-up that made Fistful Of Metal didn’t last until the end of the year. Both Danny Lilker and Neil Turbin would soon be gone, replaced respectively by Frank Bello and, eventually, Joey Belladonna. But Metal Thrashing Mad itself has endured – the song was a constant in their set during the band’s first decade, and has been a fixture once more in recent years.
“It’s funny that it’s called Metal Thrashing Mad, because that song is one of the least thrashy songs on the first record,” says Scott. “But those songs we wrote were really tight, to the point, all killer, no filler. And that’s why Metal Thrashing Mad still holds up. There’s no bullshit to it.”
Anthrax play 70,000 Tons Of Metal in January, Sonic Temple festival in May and Mystic Festival in Poland in June.
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