My Dinner With Anthrax

Even when considering Scott Ian's second career as a VH1 pundit, Anthrax's appearance on Married...with Children is baffling. What did Fox have to gain from a cameo by a thrash metal band with no radio exposure? How many people who bought Persistence of Time had any interest in the Bundy family? By 1992, when this episode aired, Anthrax were writing more challenging songs and had dropped the goofy lyrics that marked their early records. If they wanted to be taken more seriously, this wasn't a good way to go about it.



The jokes are predictable and the acting is cartoonish (save for Christina Applegate, who looks like she's watched a few episodes of Headbanger's Ball), yet I'm ready to watch it all over again. The band can't act well enough to disguise how much fun they're having. "In My World" has not softened with age, and it's still novel to see it "performed" on a major American sitcom. For possibly the only time in their career, Anthrax look like rock gods and not thrash metal underdogs.

The Five Best Metal Interpreters

Frank from Metal Injection once told me that he thought Testament deserved to be in Metal's Big Four and not Anthrax. This seemed like it was worth fighting over, so I informed him that he was wrong. I stand by my case, but he did make one point that I could not counter, which is that Anthrax's best songs are all covers.

Recorded metal covers don't usually do much for the original or the interpreter. Watching the Dillinger Escape Plan roar into Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" in person is a favorite memory for anyone who's been so lucky, but no one who owns Broken needs another version. It takes some extra character to successfully reimagine a song with a tape rolling, and for that we salute these five.

1. Anthrax

Anthrax have no shortage of great originals, but it was their charisma--Scott Ian's tones, Charlie Benante's blast beats, the entire band's penchant for comedy, comic books and Stephen King--that edged them past Testament, Exodus and Overkill. They elevated Public Enemy with "Bring the Noise," spanked Trust with "Antisocial" and topped themselves with this d-beat breakdown of of Joe Jackson's "Got the Time." Flea once observed that this song "made my kidneys flip upside down."



2. Faith No More

FNM won metal hearts in 1989 with a take on "War Pigs" that remains the best cover of the most-covered metal band in history, then proceeded to weird out listeners with faithful, unironic takes on the Commodores' "Easy" and John Barry's Midnight Cowboy theme. Check out their video for the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke" and keep waiting for the punchline. There isn't one. 



3. Guns N' Roses

They did "Live and Let Die" better than Paul McCartney, "Mama Kin" better than Aerosmith and "Since I Don't Have You" about as well as the Skyliners. Other than the obvious choice of Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," I have never heard a better Dylan cover than GNR's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." It reminds me of Nick Hornby's take on pre-sellout Rod Stewart in 31 Songs*.



4. Metallica

It takes more than original songwriting to become the greatest metal band of all time. The $5.98 E.P: Garage Days Re-Revisited did more for underground metal than any fanzine ever did, and its '90s sequel is Metallica's most underrated release. Who knew what a great song "Breadfan" by Budgie was until James Hetfield's downstrokes invigorated it? When Hetfield retires, his right hand should be enshrined in a museum, next to Axl's larynx and Ozzy's liver.



5. Rage Against the Machine

On their last studio album, Renegades, RATM ran Dylan, Springsteen, Eric B. & Rakim, the Stones, Minor Threat, EPMD, Devo and more through Tom Morello's effects pedal wizardry and Zack de la Rocha fiery delivery. It all sounds like Rage; in short, it's fantastic. Any other metal band would be laughed at for taking on Afrika Bambaataa's "Renegades of Funk," but with Rage at the helm it's as potent as "Bulls on Parade."



*On Stewart's version of "Mama You've Been on My Mind." "Stewart's evident love for the song rescues it, or at least spotlights it: where Dylan almost throws it away, with the implication that there's plenty more where that one came from, Stewart's reverence seems to dignify it, invest it with an epical quality that Dylan denies it. I probably like both version equally now, but if it hadn't been for Stewart, I never would have been able to spot that there was anything there."

Anthrax for Bobby Digital

My office comrade, Bobby Digital (no, not that one), got to see Anthrax play Jimmy Fallon. Right as I was congratulating him, he described the event the way that Jesse Helms would probably describe an Anthrax show. No surprise there--Anthrax aren't a band that inspires a lot of indifference. But Bobby D also enjoys Iron Maiden and Metallica, so I sought to give him an audio discourse on New York's greatest metal band.



Anthrax for Bobby Digital

1. Bring the Noise
2. Only
3. Antisocial
4. Got the Time
5. Caught in a Mosh
6. Hy Pro Glo (Al Jourgensen remix)
7. Inside Out
8. What Doesn't Die
9. Among the Living
10. Cadillac Rock Box
11. Taking the Music Back
12. Think About an End
13. I'm the Man
14. Madhouse
15. I am the Law
16. Fueled
17. Refuse to be Denied
18. Metal Thrashing Mad (John Bush version)

One look at Anthrax for Bobby Digital gives me away. I am a John Bush fan. In most circles, that's like saying you prefer Van Hagar, but the fact is that Anthrax were at best with John Bush's growls and not Joey Belladonna's mewls.

Of course, the Joey period is their most popular, and there are plenty of killer songs. "Caught in a Mosh" and Madhouse" should be in any metalhead's collection. Anthrax caught up to their peers in the Big Four by rapping ("Bring the Noise," "I'm the Man,") covering new wave ("Got the Time") and telling jokes (S.O.D.) better than any other metal band. "I'm the Man" has got to be the deftest rap parody outside of Fear of a Black Hat, and "Antisocial" reinvents hard rock as punk rock, but their signature is "Bring the Noise," a perfect rap-metal bridge to Public Enemy that took both bands to their peak while paving the way for Rage Against the Machine and the Judgement Night soundtrack. I like it more than "Walk This Way."

But if Anthrax spent the Reagan Era in the shadow of Slaygadeth, they caught up with John Bush's debut on Sound of White Noise. "Only" and "Hy Pro Glo" deliver a TKO punch to mid-'90s grunge, and "Fueled" earns its Bukowski reference by sounding like it was sung by him. "Inside Out" scores with their best video (because it re-enacts a Twilight Zone episode) and their most ripping solo (because Dimebag Darrell plays it.)

Best of all though is We've Come for You All, their jaw-dropping 2003 comeback, where, amidst the worst publicity of their lifetime (we hope,) Scott Ian and the gang roared back to show the world who the real Anthrax is. From the zombie anthem "What Doesn't Die" to the rifftastic "Cadillac Rock Box" to the all-time heaviest "Think About an End" and beyond, Anthrax claimed the best Big Four record in the past decade. Not that it paid off commercially, but nothing more can be expected from metal's greatest team of underdogs.

Finally, I've alerted you to appearances by Al Jourgensen, Dimebag Darrell and Public Enemy. See if you can find Roger Daltrey.

Download here: Anthrax for Bobby Digital

Song of the Day: Cheech and Chong, "Earache My Eye"

Nobody should buy comedy records. Yes, support your stand-ups, catch their tours and watch their specials. But how many times have you actually listened to Steve Martin's "King Tut" or Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room?" Recreationally? The next time you put either of those on a mix CD, count how many times you laugh and how many times you skip forward to the next track.

That stated, for however thousands of Adam Sandlers, there area few Lonely Islands or Flight of the Conchords who can make a laughs record with staying power. Metal is a prime contributor to this exclusive club, most famously with Spinal Tap and more recently with Dethklok and Steel Panther. Scott Ian has at least five songs that are as funny as anything by Tenacious D. But the heaviest, catchiest comedy metal song of all time is claimed by Richard Marin and Thomas Chong.



I love "Earache My Eye." That stupidly infectious, three-chord progression is weirdly heavy, especially for 1974, when it debuted. The lyrics, credited to "Alice Bowie," detail a a cross-dressing delinquent and don't have anything to do with earaches, eyes, missing prepositions or the "plot" to Up in Smoke, where it makes its most famous appearance.



Supposedly the boys were stone cold sober while filming this, making it all the funnier that they don't even pretend to play their instruments.

Being uproarious, left-field and easy to play, "Earache My Eye" is ripe for live covers, as the Rollins Band, Rush, Soundgarden (in a medley with "Big Bottom") and Korn have testified. Against all logic and sanity, two things that this song is not known for, the best cover version is Korn's. Mainly because it features Cheech on vocals.



As comedians, Cheech and Chong proved that a good-natured, mishap-prone duo with a low budget could invent, popularize and influence a new film genre for decades. And as Alice Bowie, they rocked as hard as David and Cooper.