ANTHRAX Guitarist Talks About New Album, End Of S.O.D.

ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian recently spoke to the Chronicles of Chaos extreme metal webzine about the group's recently released collection of re-recordings, "The Greater of Two Evils", and the break-up of his hugely popular side-project S.O.D. (STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH),among other topics. A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

Chronicles of Chaos: Looking back at those difficult times, did you ever think that ANTHRAX might be on the verge of extinction?

Scott Ian: "Well, it was never going to go away. We were never going to quit because something bad had happened in the music business. That's just frustration for me and it just causes me to fight even harder. You know, the song 'Refuse to Be Denied' on the last record — that's where that title came from. After all that shit had happened at the end of the '90s, I remember writing that on a piece of paper and I had that stuck up in a room at my house for a year, so that every day I would see it. Admittedly that's not what the song is about, but that's where the title came from. My attitude was like there's no way that anyone is going to ever stop me from doing this unless I decide that I don't want to do it anymore. I refuse to have any outside source, outside of anyone who is not physically inside this band, to ever have an effect on what do or what we don't do, because that's the way it's been since day one. And as frustrating as it is, you have to overcome those fucking obstacles -- and that's what makes us as strong a band as we are. There's a lot of bands that never even made it out of the '80s, because they couldn't overcome those fucking low times and couldn't deal with stuff and get over the hump or whatever you want to call it. That's something that I would never let stand in my way or in the way of this band, and that's just how I am in all walks of life. It's just the way it has to be."

Chronicles of Chaos: So let's talk about S.O.D. for a second, if I may. A lot of news sources was quoting some really harsh comments from Billy [Milano] after you guys had brought out "Bigger Than the Devil". Care to comment on the reason for this bust-up?

Scott Ian: "There was no bust-up. S.O.D.... you know, you can talk to all four members of S.O.D. and they'll give you a different answer on their opinion of what S.O.D. is, and that is because S.O.D. was never a band. Billy might give you a completely different answer to what I just did, but I look at it this way: Billy might be the mouthpiece for S.O.D., but I invented S.O.D.; I drew the mascot on a piece of paper, I wrote the first ten songs, and then I called [Danny] Lilker up and we wrote the next ten songs, and we asked Billy to sing on the record. S.O.D. was never a band and there's never been something to bust up. It's something that was a project and it remains an on-going entity, but it was never meant to be a band that makes records and then tours and then makes another record. It was never supposed to have that kind of baggage. The fact that we even made 'Bigger Than the Devil' was a complete fluke in that sense. It's just something that was only ever supposed to be for complete and absolute fun without any of the things that being in a band entails — without any of the business; without any of that. We were able to create this thing with 'Speak English or Die' that operated completely outside of the music — it was the exact opposite of the way things are supposed to be done. And that was the point of it. Making that album was a complete reaction to doing 'Spreading the Disease', because we had spent six months in the studio, because we had a producer who was being paid by the day, so the longer he took the more money he made. I wrote that S.O.D. album during that time and then we recorded and mixed that record in three days, and it enabled me to call Carl Canedy and tell him that we'd done the album in that amount of time and it sounded pretty fucking good, and that with 'Spreading the Disease' he had ripped us off. That was the whole idea with S.O.D.: it was supposed to exist outside of the normal. Billy, I think, had different ideas: he would have loved for the band to more of a permanent thing. He would have loved to have made more records, done more touring or whatever. Everyone who has ever been in S.O.D. have always had their eyes open, though. Charlie and I obviously have our priorities, and Lilker has always had his — whether it was BRUTAL TRUTH or NUCLEAR ASSAULT — and that's just the way it is. Billy and I have an interesting relationship: we're more like brothers than anything else. Sometimes you could not like each other, but you're still brothers, you know? That's our relationship in a nutshell."

Read Scott Ian's entire interview with Chronicles of Chaos at this location.