What's in a Name?

It can’t have been the easiest year for Anthrax. The band had enough on its plate trying to record a new CD and looking for a reasonably high-profile record label. Then, in the aftermath of September 11, the band’s once-esoteric name became a household word, and not because the aging metal act was suddenly chasing Britney up the charts. Anthrax now meant murder by mail.

The band addressed the name issue head-on at a benefit show it helped organize in its native New York City. They played in white jumpsuits, each emblazoned with a single word of a five-word message: “We’re Not Changing Our Name.” And musically, the release of the live album Sound of White Noise both slaked the thirst for new output and helped eradicate the stain of what the band saw as a poorly assembled cash-in of a live record released by its longtime label, Island.

But that still leaves the daunting tasks of recording and releasing all new material and flogging it to a world that has grown increasingly indifferent to the sort of old-school thrash metal for which Anthrax is known. Not that Anthrax hasn’t always bushwhacked a hard trail. When there wasn’t enough natural resistance, the band seemed to go out if its way to find some: They switched to surf gear as a visual image when the rest of metal was still very much denim and leather. They teamed up with Public Enemy for a remake of “Bring the Noise” way before it was cool to mix funk and crunch. And finally, just when the rest of the world was starting to jump on the rap-metal bandwagon, Anthrax took a turn back to the truly heavy right.

One thing that has allowed Anthrax to continue moving forward, in spite of its penchant for doing things the hard way, is the band’s ability to pull new teenage fans into the fold. “If we weren’t getting those younger kids, it would be terrible,” says founding guitarist Scott Ian with a near-audible shudder. Whether they’re picking up on what their older brother was into or just seeking out heavy music wherever it can be found, kids still end up finding Anthrax. “It’s people that don’t want to be force-fed their music on MTV or VH1 or the radio, who don’t want to be dictated to, who want to use their own brain cells. We have a more discerning audience member,” concludes Ian, tongue firmly in cheek.

This tongue-in-cheek approach, combined with a rare ability to find a hook, has sometimes put the band at odds with metal purists. “We really never have fit in anywhere,” says Ian. “For a little while in the ’80s, what we were doing became almost trendy. But outside of that, what we’ve done has never been mainstream.”

Ian insists that the band has never done anything to change that, either by chasing a trend or by repeating itself. They are very self-absorbed that way. “It’s like, ‘Hey, rap metal’s really big now. Let’s go back to 15 years ago and do what we did then and try to fit in.’ We can’t do that. We’re both our own worst critics and we bore really easily. That kind of self-indulgence has always made it really hard for us to be too accessible. But at the same time, it’s kept us happy.”

Ian won’t go into the next studio record’s musical direction except to say that it is “sonically, the best-sounding Anthrax album yet” and “the closest we’ve come yet to getting what the band sounds like in my head onto a recording.” When pushed, the guitarist will also admit that the record is a lot “‘riffier’ than we’ve been in a long time, maybe going back as far as something like [1987’s] Among the Living.”

Anthrax is signed to Beyond Music, but Ian is troubled about that relationship. The band joined the label two and a half years ago, but they’ve yet to record. Ian now describes Beyond as “a shadow of a record label,” while wondering aloud if the label is “even capable of breaking a band.”

Given the band’s name and NYC roots, world events have shoved such relatively niggling worries aside for now. “If you just talk about relating directly to the band — outside of just being a human being and worrying about if a million people were going to die from anthrax — my only frustration was people that were coming at us, who really didn’t have a clue, making it seem as if somehow we were capitalizing with a band name we’d come up with 20 years ago,” explains Ian. “We didn’t even talk to the media at first. We were getting swamped with requests. Everybody needs an angle, and there’s so much space to fill, so suddenly for like two seconds we became interesting. Nobody was calling us to talk about the band. The Economist and The Wall Street Journal were not calling wanting to know how the songwriting was going for the next record. You know? Fuck that.”

Ian wants it to be known that he has nothing of import to add to the debate about anthrax. “What we have to say about this topic is the same as anyone else: ‘We don’t want to get anthrax.’ ” But Ian soon realized that his worst fears about an ill-informed media circus were unwarranted. “I spoke to someone at The Washington Post and The New York Times and someone from Time, and they had all been fans from way back, and that made me a little less fearful of the whole process, a little less worried that we were simply going to be attacked.”

As are we all, now that the powder attacks seem to have ceased. Thankfully, the day that the word Anthrax will again conjure power chords rather than fatal illness is fast approaching.