John Bush Takes Us Inside Anthrax's 1990's Era | Exclusive Interview [10:03-15:08]

I think it was among the living tour, so, but I also saw anthrax opening for Raven at the Country Club, which is a legendary venue in Los Angeles out in the Valley in Recita, and I saw them opening for Raven, and I think that was like 1984, 85, and that was after the year that Raven and Metallica went out and toured together, so the next year was Raven and Anthrax, and I saw them there, and that they were awesome, and it was the fistful of metal tour, so. Did you have, or in the years before joining the band, did you have a relationship with any of the members? Not really, not really, but I knew Scott a little bit because you know, he's Scott, he's just, you know, I think our paths cross somewhat, but I don't really think I ever met them too officially before actually going to the first rehearsal of kind of auditioning, and then I got to, you know, like, hello Charlie, hello Frankie, hello Dan, Scott, I think I've met a few times, but yeah, I don't, I don't think we, you know, I'm sure our paths crossed and we probably were somewhere where maybe we had a brief conversation, but it was brief up until that point, so it was funny, and that was, I can't remember the place we rehearsed for the first time when I went in audition, but that was in 92 before I officially joined the band, but it was cool to get to know them, and you know, again, these guys are legends and amazing musicians, and contributed so much to the world of heavy metal. Absolutely. And what, you know, at that time when you were asked to join Anthrax, you had just released a record with Armored Saint, and you were, I mean, what, tell me about that time and how better to come to be that you got offered this opportunity, and what was in that decision to leave, because these are obviously your bandmates for the last eight years, your closest friends growing up, how does all that play into this, this opportunity? Well, we just made the record simple salvation, which is a record that was kind of almost, almost didn't happen, because the main guitar player in our band day, Pritchard passed away from leukemia, and he was, you know, the main guitar player and big songwriter in the group. And we had to go through his illness and his passing, and it was just a devastating time, about 89 to 90, and going through that was very, very difficult. We wrote a bunch of songs that we didn't know if you're going to see the light of day during that time. We had been dropped by our label, Crystals Records, which was, that happened around 88. So we made three records with Crystals after signing to them and getting our first major record contract. And then we got dropped, and then we found out about Dave's illness, and having leukemia back in, like, 1988, 89 was not good, because it was something that most likely led to people's death, and Dave was an adopted child. So the objective was to get a bone marrow transplant, but he didn't have a sibling because he was adopted. So it really lowered the possibilities of finding anything that wouldn't match. So they had to wait for a match for him to have even a chance to go in and have a transplant. And this is, again, 1989. But in that time, we would just keep writing the songs, going to be like, well, the one thing we can be sure of is that we are musicians, and we can make music, and we can use this kind of difficult time and uncertain time to just kind of go deep and see what we can pull out musically and lyrically. And so we did, and then we ended up writing the songs that were eventually recorded on single salvation. That came on 91, but that was, he actually had passed away before that, and we kind of regrouped, bringing back Jeff Duncan, Phil Sandivall as the two guitar players who were in the band different times, who played with Dave at different times. So we brought them back and decided to make this record, and it was an awesome record into this day. A lot of people view that as our cornerstone album, whatever that means. But it was. It was amazing. But I think so much went into that record, and I wouldn't say expectations, but there was just a lot of emotion that went into that album, and everything, the process of going through what Dave was going through, writing those songs, recording those songs eventually, him passing away, and then going back out on tour and trying to make it happen. And remember, this is like 1991, so the beginning of the grunge movement, and things were just morphing, and things were changing, and Armored saying it was just where we weren't really there. Like, we were there musically. We made this amazing record, but we just were not really going to be part of this change