Fresh off of a media blitz surrounding the VH1 reality show "Supergroup," Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, took a break Friday, July 7, 2006, while at a tour stop in Arkansas to talk to The Culture Shock about being on the show and the future of Anthrax.

Scott.

Hey.

How’s it going, man?

Good, how are you?

Pretty good. You in Arkansas today?

I sure am.

I know the tour just started a few days ago, but how was that first gig with Zombie?

It’s been great. Shows have been awesome. Really big crowds. Great. Pretty much what we expected it to be.

How’d you guys get hooked up with him for this tour?

He just called us (laughs). Just like any other tour. That’s how it works. Your agent calls you up and says ‘Rob Zombie’s agent just called and he wants to know if you guys wanna come out.’ That’s just how it works. We’ve been friends for a long time. I’ve known Rob forever. Generally with friends you don’t mix that kind of stuff, friends and business, ‘cause that can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. But, this has worked out good. He was looking to go out again and he thought we would make a great package and so far so good.

Is it strange for you guys having to be the first band to play?

Nah. We don’t ever even think about that stuff, you know, we just look at it from the point of view of ‘is this going to be good for Anthrax?’ And what does it mean to us. Going out with Rob means we’re going to play to play to 3,000 people every night that probably wouldn’t come to an Anthrax show. It’s a great thing for us because we get to make a lot of new fans.

I’m up in Montana and you guys are scheduled to play up here in Billings later this month.

Right.

What do you think of seeing Montana on the tour schedule?

It’s our first time ever (laughs). I’m excited. We’ve never played Montana before. It’s exciting for me to go anywhere for the first time. I’ve actually always wanted to go to Montana. For the last six or seven years, I’ve been trying to put together a snow board trip up there, but we always end up getting lazy and just going to Mammoth. I’m excited to come up there for sure.

It’s cool. It’s this giant mass of land in the United States and a lot of bands are just now coming to Montana for the first time.

Cool. That’s cool. Just in this last year, we’ve done Boise and Spokane and a lot of these places that we either haven’t been to or haven’t been to in say 18 years. It’s cool to start playing a lot of these places and hopefully some good scenes will develop.

I’m a huge Anthrax fan.  Back in the day, I remember in ’87 or ’88, you guys were on the ‘Among the Living’ tour and I was just a little kid living in Rapid City, South Dakota and I remember I couldn’t afford a ‘NOT’ hat, so I made one myself with a black trucker hat and shoe polish.

(laughs) Cool.

It was so ghetto, but it was cool.

Right on.

It’s pretty exciting to hear that you guys are doing these ‘Among the Living’ shows. What are the logistics of that? How are you going to approach it? Obviously you’re not going to just play the nine songs and call it a night.

We’re only doing the ‘Among the Living’ thing on the headlining gigs, so you’re not going to see that in Montana.

Right.

But, we have like six headlining shows on some of the off nights. We had one actually last night in Houston. We play the album straight through from start to finish. We open the show with that and then we go into a bunch of other stuff after that. The whole show’s like an hour, forty five.

I just talked to Joey last week.

Right.

At that point he didn’t even know how you guys were going to approach it. He told m e you guys don’t have to rehearse that kind of stuff. How is that for you guys if you’re not communicating a great deal and the next thing you know you’re on the road and you’re clicking? How does it feel to have that kind of connection?

Well, we jammed it backstage quite a bit and we also rehearsed it at soundcheck quite a bit. I’d say last night was the first time that ‘One World’ and ‘Horror of it All’ being really the two songs that we have never played. They were finally tight last night. It’s not like we were able to instantly walk out there the first time and have it sound right ‘cause it didn’t to me (laughs). We probably played them a dozen times in the last few days before we actually got on stage and played it.

Kind of an impromptu rehearsal just to iron out the cobwebs?

Yeah. I mean, as far as the stuff that we’ve been playing forever, that stuff never really leaves you. We’ll never need to rehearse “I Am the Law” or “Caught In A Mosh,” but these other songs from “Among the Living” that we’ve never played, obviously we couldn’t just walk out and expect it to sound good. We didn’t need to get together in a rehearsal studio to do that, and all fly in and meet up. It’s just a case of getting together backstage and making sure everybody knows their parts.

Obviously right now, you’ve been thrust into a national spotlight with the Supergroup show. I interviewed Sebastian a few weeks ago and got his input from the show. My wife and I got hooked on the show and just loved it. What kind of reaction are you getting from people and are you seeing people out there who weren’t into Anthrax before, but saw you on the show and are intrigued by you guys?

You know, it’s everywhere. Obviously you can’t really, what’s the word I’m looking for? You can’t really underestimate the power of television because as long as I’ve been around and as long as I’ve been doing stuff, then you do a TV show like this and you’re face just blows up ten thousand fold, it’s crazy. Obviously there’s a lot of people who have never bought an Anthrax record who watched the show on VH1, even if they’re not a fan, people just flip channels and they see something and leave it on or people who just watch VH1 all day long or whatever. Everywhere I go now, it’s everywhere. It’s ‘SuperGroup’ this or ‘SuperGroup’ that, which is great because it means people are watching (laughs).

The show itself, from an outsiders view, kind of focused a great deal on Sebastian and Evan’s adventures. What were you and Ted and Jason doing most of the time?

Well the thing that’s very deceiving about it, and if anybody really knows anything about reality television it’s … you’re seeing the storyline that they’ve decided to create to make television. It’s not really reality. Even with Sebastian. Sebastian wasn’t acting like that his 16 waking hours of the day. The fact that they show Sebastian, say, yelling at a publicist for them makes better television than say Sebastian sitting in front of his computer for six hours, doing a mix of a demo, which is what he was doing most of the time. The fact that he wanted to go running or wanted to take a shower, which for some reason turns into a huge drama which is retarded to me because the guy should be able to take a shower before a photo shoot, I mean what’s the big deal? They had to create these situations and these dramas, otherwise they wouldn’t have had a TV show. They would’ve had us in their room jamming seven hours a day, which is what we were doing, but for VH1, that doesn’t work as a reality television show.

That’s kind of what he was telling me. When I spoke to him, only three episodes had aired by that point and he was telling me that he thought it was strange that they weren’t showing you guys back there jamming and rehearsing, they were focusing on the drama.

Well, it’s not strange because if you watch … I’m not disagreeing with Sebastian because in my mind I would also have rather have seen a show that focused on the music and not on everything else. Sure, yeah, show us at a strip club or whatever, but in my mind and I think to a large part of the audience, especially to the audience who are Anthrax fans or Skid Row fans, or music fans, everybody wanted to see more music. But, if you watch reality television at all you know it’s not strange that that’s not what they focused on because you see what they show on these shows, it’s all about drama and it’s all stupidity and that’s what they had to find. It was actually kind of hard for them because the fact that the five of us got along really well, so that’s why a lot of it … they lucked out in the fact that they had that one stupid incident where Sebastian was drunk and him and Evan started play wrestling and that turned into what it turned into. They had their one second of drama that they were able to fill three episodes with. So, Sebastian’s got a drinking problem (says with sarcasm). If that one incident doesn’t happen then maybe they don’t even have a show (laughs), you know what I mean?

Right.

In fact, they’re so lucky that happened.

In retrospect, did you see all the episodes and did it meet your expectations going into it?

Yeah, I had a blast. I loved being there. I loved the whole experience. I even loved the way the show turned out the way it did. Like I said, I would’ve loved it had it been more about the music and showing the process of actually writing a song and if they would’ve actually played the fucking song that we wrote, maybe. Especially the live concert. Maybe they could’ve done an episode where they actually aired the whole concert. Even with all that, I still loved the way the show turned out and I think they represented everybody pretty well. They certainly captured our personalities and nothing was fake. As far as that goes, I loved it. It was a great experience.

You guys are in a position that few bands can relate to where you’ve had major success with numerous vocalists. I remember speaking to John Bush back when ‘Greater of Two Evils’ came out and it was shortly after he had his kid and when I heard you guys were getting that classic lineup back together I figured it was because he wanted to spend time with his family. I never really saw what you guys did with John and I was curious as to how you handled the switch back to Joey.

Well, it was pretty much everywhere in the press and all over the Internet for about nine months. How did you manage to miss that (laughs)? You know what, I don’t even remember. We decided to have a reunion and the first person we called was John Bush. We asked him to be a part of it to do something where we would have John and Joey both come out and how we would’ve worked that out, I have no idea, but that was our initial instinct. John decided it was something he didn’t want to be a part of. I absolutely respect him for wanting to do something or not wanting to do something. The ball was in his court and he decided this was something he didn’t feel comfortable doing. It’s not like he said ‘don’t go do the reunion’ or anything like that, we basically had his blessing to go forward and do this and look it’s 17, almost 18 months on since we’ve been doing it and it just keeps getting bigger and better, so obviously it was an idea we had and it’s an idea that’s worked really well and has brought the band, in a way back to something that I never thought it could be.

Are you guys still throwing around the idea of approaching John later and saying ‘you wanna do it again’ with the double lineup?

I don’t know. We really haven’t looked that far forward. Right now, we’re looking as far forward as, we wanna make a record. We’ve toured and the band’s become really powerful again. The five of us. Just as musicians there’s that natural curiosity of, you know, what would it sound like 14 years later? If we were to try and make an album. That’s what I’m most interested in, what Anthrax would sound like in 2007 with Joey singing, that’s what I wanna hear.

Are you guys planning on entering the studio and cranking out some tunes?

Yeah, if we stop getting tour offers (laughs). I thought we were done six months ago and we just keep getting more offers to go back out. We’re in this weird situation where we’re not really on an album cycle schedule because we don’t have an album out and the touring’s been real successful for us, so every time a good offer comes up, it’s like why not? Why not go do it? It’s fun and it’s just exposing us. Like I said earlier, this Zombie tour’s exposing us to a lot of people who never would’ve seen this band. It’s kind of hard to say no. Once we can get a break from some of this touring, then we’ll certainly be concentrating on music.

Have you heard of the new Cartoon Network show called “Metalocalypse”?

No.

I got a DVD the other day of the first two shows, and you have to remember it. It premieres in August and it’s awesome! It’s about a Norwegian death metal band and they’re misadventures.

Oh really (laughs)?

It’s written like ‘Spinal Tap’ and it’s hilarious. The art’s like the old ‘Aeon Flux’ cartoons. They’ve had James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett and Michael Amott on as guest voices. You’ve gotta keep your eyes open for that one because it’s going to be a special show for fans of metal.

I will for sure. Cool.

If you could share the stage with any bands, past or present, which ones would you choose?

Oh, AC/DC with Bon Scott, for sure. I mean, obviously that’s never gonna happen (laughs). Them, AC/DC now, they’re like the one band we’ve never, ever played with. I would love to get to play with AC/DC. I would love to play with Kiss too. The original classic Kiss lineup with the makeup lineup. We played with Kiss too. We toured with them, but not in their full glory.

Scott, thanks for talking to me.

Right on. Thank you.

Thanks Scott.

Bye.