Scott Ian

“I've been flipping out. It's hard to believe it's real”

- 

CONSIDERING THAT THEY'RE old pals, Scott Ian wasn’t surprised to get a random text from Tom Morello. The surprising part was the text’s content: “Do you want to come jam a Sabbath song at the final Black Sabbath show in Birmingham on July 5?” Obviously, Ian — a lifelong Sabbath devotee — was in. Soon the rest of Anthrax was in too.

It’s mind-blowing,” Ian says. “I’ve been flipping out. It’s hard to believe it’s real. It’s not hard for me to think back to my childhood discovering them — and the earliest days of Anthrax. We were a bunch of kids in Queens [New York], doing our best to emulate the bands we loved, thinking, ‘Could you imagine if we ever got to do this?’”

Were you nervous when you got Tom Morello's text?

Tom had texted me because we're friends, so we'll text each other out of the blue, and I got this text, which I read back quickly. In my brain, I got so excited reading the text that I thought he was asking me if I wanted to play a song with Black Sabbath onstage at some final show that I knew nothing about — but that Tom is now texting me about. [Laughs] I literally started sweating, like, the thought of that... I was like, “How is this even possible?” Then I calmed down, looked at the text again and realized, “Okay, he’s not talking about me playing with Sabbath together onstage with them.” I was equally excited about it — just much less nervous.

Do you remember the first time you heard Sabbath?