Taking a Powder

Kirk Baird

Friday, Jan. 11, 2002 | 4:26 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

What's in a name? Everything when you're Anthrax.

An '80s pioneer of speed and thrash metal similar to Metallica and Megadeth, Anthrax also no doubt inspired many of today's rap-rock acts such as Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park with its seminal joint effort with Public Enemy on "Bring the Noise" in 1991.

On Oct. 4, however, when the first U.S.-reported case of inhalation anthrax in 25 years placed an already-nervous nation on high alert, the band received notoriety of a different kind.

Already reeling from a canceled tour as the opening act for Judas Priest, which was directly related to the events of Sept. 11, the band -- John Bush, vocals; Scott Ian, rhythm guitar; Frank Bello, bass; and Charlie Benante, drums -- was forced into playing spin doctor as numerous publications contacted Anthrax about its name.

The group returns Thursday to Las Vegas as part of a four-week tour of makeup dates with Judas Priest. The Sun recently talked with Bush from his home in Los Angeles about the problems Anthrax has faced over its infamous moniker, and how the band elected to handle it -- including issuing a humorous press release about not changing its name:

Las Vegas Sun: First the tour was canceled, and then there was the anthrax scare. It seems as though there is a black cloud hanging over the band.

John Bush: I don't want to really look at it like that, since it seems pretty ominous and negative. We've had our share of a little bit of hardships as of late, but we're hoping we're having a turnaround. We just finished doing all the taping for a VH1 "Behind the Music" (episode), which we think is awesome.

Strangely enough, as much as this whole anthrax thing is scaring the hell out of a lot of people, it actually probably made a lot of people think about the band again who hadn't in a while. Our hope was that this thing was just going to fade away very quickly and very few people were going to be affected by it, and I think that's happened. And then maybe people will think about the rock band Anthrax.

Sun: There's also the old public relations saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

JB: And we know that. It was a real conflicting feeling about everything that was going on. We don't want to have anything associated with death -- that's not what it was about. When you're 19 or 18 years old and you're thinking of a name for a heavy metal band, you think of something that sounds powerful and perhaps a little bit scary, and that's how Scott came up with the name of the band. Again, it wasn't to be taken in such a literal sense. And then, lo and behold, this happened.

It was strange because at that time our record sales definitely increased. What had happened is that people who hadn't thought of the band in a while kept hearing the name and would go, "Yeah, what about the band?" And maybe they went in and checked out, specifically, the greatest-hits record. We're trying to be optimistic, but we didn't want to see anybody get hurt or die, and thankfully only a few people were (directly) affected by it. A lot of people were (indirectly) affected in the fear factor -- including us.

Sun: Overall, it seems to have worked out well. The band even issued a release for the media that, while not making light of the anthrax scare, found humor in the situation.

JB: Deep down we're all real sarcastic people anyway, so that was probably our natural instinct to respond to it with a pinch of sarcasm -- again, not downplaying anybody's true emotional fear that may be taking place. It was a trip because we were getting calls from the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine. That's when we decided we should really put a press release together. Obviously, if somebody wanted to talk to us in conjunction with music and how it was affecting our lives that way, then fine.

We did a thing with People magazine and various radio stations and various rock 'n' roll magazines that we talked to. But there's no reason for us to talk to Wall Street Journal people. That's not going to do anything but put a slant for their newspaper and make it seem like they're showing some other side of the whole Anthrax thing. And we knew it wasn't going to show an optimistic view of us at all. So we said, let's just create a press release, make it real special to us and let everybody know how we feel about it.

And then when we get calls from Fortune magazine, we can say, "You can release this, but we have no comment otherwise."

Sun: In the release you said the band was keeping its name, hoping "no further negative events happen." But was there ever a moment when you considered changing the group's name?

JB: No, we never considered that. With everything that's happened in conjunction with Sept. 11, I think it's just shocked the world so much it forced everybody to kind of sit back and go, "All right, how do I respond to this?" ... I'll use the government as an example. I know it would be funny for me to say they handled it right, but I really think they did, in a way that there was not an immediate, impulsive response.

I think that is what we did on, of course, a much smaller scale. We decided we were not going to make some impulsive decision about what we were going to do. People were asking, "Oh, are you going to change your name?" We said, "We never said that. We never even considered that." We didn't think about it at all.