John Bush Takes Us Inside Anthrax's 1990's Era | Exclusive Interview [15:08-20:12]

that was taking place. So we had a couple of tours that were a struggle. We had a couple of good ones. We went out open for the scorpions in Germany, like six or seven shows, replacing the band Tesla, who was opening, and those were big awesome shows. But the future was still very uncertain, and then as it had it, as it came, then anthrax contacted me because they parted ways with their singer, and so it was like, what am I going to do here? I'm going to say no to this, and I couldn't, so I didn't. But it was still a real challenging moment to say, I'm going to leave the band and go into this other band, and I felt a lot of guilt doing that a lot, but it's the way, it's now in retrospect, that was the path of my life I was supposed to go, and it did. You all came back together to produce a lot more records. We did. We found our way back together in the end of the 90s, sorry, around 99, and then we decided to start writing songs for another record in case we could. Anthrax was taking a break themselves. They were doing a couple different things, so we all kind of said, let's do some other stuff. I mean, Joey started working on tunes that eventually led to the record revelation, which came out in 2000. We had some new music that we wrote for that record, and then we also had some old material, so we had a combination of some material that we knew we had in the bag as well as some new stuff that we were feeling really good about. But I was never leaving Anthrax at that point. It was just going to be a little hiatus. And when you joined Anthrax, I mean, with Armored Saint, you were a primary songwriter. And with Anthrax, Joey was not a songwriter, it was Charlie or Ian or Scott. Was there a question of whether you would be able to contribute, obviously you did? And that's a big part of it, and that's a change in that sound. Right. I wanted to, because I was a main songwriter and Armored Saint, so I didn't want to just come join some band and be told what to do. Of course, I'm a teen player and open-minded, and Scott writes awesome lyrics, and he was the key lyricist in Anthrax in the 80s, so I was, of course, saying, yeah, let's write your stuff and let me write some stuff, and we'll put it together, and we'll see what we come up with. But yeah, I wanted to be part of the songwriting, because that would have been just disappointing to be told what to do. It wasn't really what I wanted to do, so musically, I wanted to be part of the songwriting. And I think that was a big plus, and they welcomed that because they wanted this new life of blood to be resurrected into it, and it did, and we made Sound of Wine Noise, which is a record that really fills like a 90s heavy metal record. It came out in 93, who wrote all that stuff in round 92, and I remember hearing the riff for only the first time when they said, this is one of the ideas, and I went, wow, that sounds really cool, and just cutting edge, and I was impressed, so, and we ended up writing that song. I think Scott had the title and the chorus idea, or somebody did, but we ended up writing that song like in one rehearsal, a matter of like an hour, so it was, there was obviously a good camaraderie between us and myself in the band, and then we just continued to work on songs, and I think a lot of people really look back on Sound of Wine Noise as a record that is just kind of a pivotal 90s metal record. Absolutely. It was produced by Dave Jordan, who produced the armored saint, the cymbal salvation. I did back-to-back records with Dave, actually, it was where. Is that how Dave got involved, or was it by coincidence that he ended on the record? I think it was a coincidence, Dave, he was doing so many things at that time, he did Allison Chains, he was doing James Addiction, what was that other band shoot, escapes me at the moment, but yeah, he was just Red Hot, producer at that time, so I think that was the idea of just, let's get Dave in there and do it, just so happens that, like I said, the record he did before was the armored saint cymbal salvation record, which is funny too, because I was telling you, my wife and I run a casting studio, and right now it's directly across the street from, we moved recently in the last couple of years, but right now we're on Sunset, and it's really right across the street from the recording studio that Dave had, which was El Dorado's studio, and it's kind of like, here's our studio, and El Dorado's here across from Sunset, and then Sunset sounds here, and then the old