ANTHRAX Guitarist Scott Ian Talks About Parenthood, Worship Music, Playing The Outfield At Yankee Stadium

September 12, 2011, 13 years ago

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ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian spoke with ESPN's The Life about parenthood, the development of their new album, Worship Music and the nervousness of fulfilling his childhood dream in the outfield at Yankee Stadium for the upcoming Big 4 show. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

The Life: Who's profiting more from sales of kids' apparel for your son, Kiss or the New York Yankees?

Ian: "We haven't bought any of either, but from the gifts we've gotten, definitely Yankees. I think we've gotten maybe one Kiss thing, and that was sent from the merch company, but tons of Yankee stuff."

The Life: 1977 was a huge year for you: Being at Game 6 of the World Series when Reggie Jackson hit the record three home runs, then KISS at their '70s peak at Madison Square Garden. What does hindsight allow you to recognize about how those events affected your life?

Ian: "Well, it was actually three things that year. If I could pinpoint one year in my youth, that would definitely be my golden year, like the most important year growing up. The third thing was spending the whole summer in California. My brother and I flew out - I actually used my bar mitzvah money to buy us airline tickets - and we spent the whole summer in Laguna Beach with my mom's best friend. Just to be out there and ride a skateboard the whole summer, because that was when skateboarding exploded and there were all these skate parks in California. Nothing like that existed in New York City. So we got to spend the whole summer out of the city, basically in dreamland compared to where we lived, literally at the beach and riding skateboards all day. Between that, going to the World Series that year, then the KISS shows, it was three things that had crazy impact on my life."

The Life: How did you react to that Big 4 call, being a Yankees fan? Did you jump up and down, or just stand in disbelief?

Ian: "I was more just kind of like … yeah, a lot of disbelief, I think. A lot of sheer euphoria, you know, just like, 'Oh my God! Can you believe this? Can you believe we're going to get to do this?' It's literally a dream come true. We also thought that if there was going to be an East Coast show, it would probably be at Giants Stadium - whatever they call it now - because that's generally where those size shows are done in the tri-state area. But at some point I did say to (Metallica drummer) Lars (Ulrich), somewhere when we were in Europe, that if we did get to do an East Coast show, we should do Yankee Stadium: 'Giants Stadium would be great, but you guys have already done it, and everyone plays Giants Stadium. But nobody plays Yankee Stadium.' I'm not taking any credit at all. That was strictly my own selfish, "Why not float it out there for the universe?" because you never know what may happen."

Read the entire interview here.

Anthrax will release Worship Music, on September 13th in North America via Megaforce Records and September 14th in Europe via Nuclear Blast Records.

Worship Music will be available as a regular CD, CD digi, vinyl and MP3 download. Nuclear Blast Germany is also offering the album as a mail-order edition with 7" (featuring the REFUSED cover song 'New Noise') and two different double-LPs: splatter and orange vinyl.

Worship Music will be released in Japan on September 14th via Victor Records. This edition will include a remix of the album track 'Crawl' as a bonus track.

Check out audio samples from the entire album at this location.

Check out a brand new BraveWords.com review of Worship Music here.


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