FROM THE NYHC BOOK ARCHIVES: Dan Lilker

This interview with Dan Lilker (bassist for Anthrax, S.O.D and Brutal Truth) was conducted on November 8, 2013, for my second book NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980 - 1990

How did you first find out about Hardcore Punk?
Dan Lilker: Randomly in 1981, me and Scott Rosenfeld - better known as Scott Ian - went to Great Gildersleeves and saw The Exploited. We didn’t know what to make of it. They were playing thrash, but at the time, we didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. The most we had been exposed to something like that at that time would have been the Ramones or The Clash. We stood on the balcony and watched the pit and watched them and we were like ‘Holy fuck, look at this!’ But we didn’t walk away from that saying ‘We should play fast music!’ We just thought ‘Well, that was interesting’ and went back to our fuckin’ Raven records. 

But Scott went down to a couple of CB’s matinees before I did. People give Scott shit about when Anthrax got into Hardcore and think he co-opted NYHC. But I give him credit that he exposed me to that stuff. Simultaneously with turning me onto NYHC, he turned me onto Discharge, which was very influential on Nuclear Assault and my bass sound. It just appealed to me because we were thrash dudes and were trying to find all the fastest music we could. It was so exciting to find this whole, big new source of intense music. The realistic lyrics in Hardcore were really cool to us too. Metal bands wrote lyrics about anything that would just fit into the music, so it was just cool to find music that had some focus. 

Once you found out about Hardcore, did you immediately go down to CBGB’s to check out the matinees?
Me and John Connolly (Nuclear Assault vocalist) eventually worked up the nerve to go down to CBGB’s to a Hardcore matinee. We thought all these skinheads were going to beat the shit out of us, which they didn’t at all. 

When we would see pictures of skinheads, we thought they were these huge, intimidating dudes that would beat the hell out of us as soon as we showed up there. When actually, it was the total opposite. The first person I met was Billy Milano and then, of course, there was Billy Psycho. All those dudes were so welcoming; offering to go around the corner and burn one or have a beer. A mutual respect thing ended up going on which was cool because firstly, we now knew we weren’t going to get the shit pounded out of us by the skinheads and also it was cool to have some comradery with a new group of people. 

Did you instantly see the connection between Hardcore and what was coming out of the Metal underground with Metallica, Anthrax and all that?
When Thrash Metal kicked in, it wasn’t hair metal like Winger. It was something that was unpalatable to most people. It was fast, noisy music and that’s where the lines started to blur between Hardcore and some of the Metal stuff. Whether it had crazy lyrical content like Slayer or the socially relevant message of Agnostic Front, it was still something that was working on the outside. The parallel was that we were both underdogs and it was us against the world. Both Hardcore and Thrash Metal was something that when most normal people heard it, they just went ‘Ick!’ So that united us. 

The thing that really struck us coming from the Metal scene, was there wasn’t much ego involved. It wasn’t like Overkill with their big stage set-ups. There was nothing like ‘You can’t come backstage without a pass’. Anybody could do it and that was really inspiring to us. But at the same time, there was stuff that was amusing to us. Like how the dude who was the singer – who usually was the least musically talented dude – was always two beats behind. But after a while, things like that made this stuff very endearing in a way. There wasn’t a wall between the musicians and the crowd. It was all about coming up and stage diving. We were really impressed with how there was no separation. With Metal, a lot of the kids who got into it wanted to be rock stars and fuck chicks. For us, we had to start playing music or we would have gone crazy. So we latched onto that pretty quick. 

Was your interest in Hardcore accepted in the Metal scene?
I remember this one chick came up to me and said ‘I saw you on the back of the S.O.D. album wearing a Broken Bones shirt and I went out and bought their record and thought the shit was really cool’. John Connolly loved it. He was tired of writing bullshit lyrics. The fact that we could have lyrics that could have a cause and a meaning is something we all could relate to. Lou and Pete from Sick of it All came down as metalheads and got into all that shit. It was just a bunch of people getting into it simultaneously. I wouldn’t want to go out on a limb and say ‘I got people into this shit’. 

How did the formation of Nuclear Assault happen?
In February of 1984, I got thrown out of the band I started and I was like ‘Well, I can sit around feeling sorry for myself or I can start another band’. I took advantage of a shitty situation. I had been into Hardcore for a little while and I decided I wanted to start something that was a little more intense. John Connolly had been an early member of Anthrax as a vocalist and he was still kicking around and not doing too much. When I got thrown out of Anthrax, I was like ‘What the fuck do I do now?’ So I called up John and said  ‘Hey man, do you want to do something intense?’ He said ‘Sure! Sounds good!’ It wasn't until December ’85 that the whole line-up clicked. 

How was Nuclear Assault accepted on the Hardcore scene? 
We were simultaneously playing in front of Metal people and doing shows at CB’s and mixing it up. No one was like ‘Who the fuck is this Metal band?’ It was more like ‘Oh! It’s John and Danny’s band’. We had been hanging out with those people for a while. It wasn’t like it was an invasion. 

Then there was this whole thing in New York where there were bands like us and Carnivore and Whiplash coming from the Metal scene and crossing over into Hardcore. And then you had a band like The Crumbsuckers who were always heavy and had the chugging guitars that were more like Metal. Hardcore had the fast, strumming style, but once you palm mute the guitar, all of a sudden, it sounds like Metal. Since there was heavy stuff coming from both directions – both the Metal and Hardcore scenes in New York – people were paying attention to it. 

How did S.O.D come together?
S.O.D was a little more contrived than Nuclear Assault. That was basically Scott getting into Hardcore and going ‘I want to play shit like this’. 

I was chucked out of Anthrax in January of 1984 because Neil Pervin, the vocalist at the time said ‘I can’t deal with Danny. I don’t like the fact that he’s taller than me’. He was the kind of dude who did not have a sense of humor. Since we were obnoxious teenagers that just made us want to bust his balls more. They threw him out about eight months later, and then eight months after that, I got this call from Scott saying ‘Hey, I’m going to be doing this Hardcore project and I’d like you to be on it’ and the unspoken sentiment was ‘I feel like an asshole for throwing you out and I still want to play in a band with you’. That was mostly Scott’s thing. He already had things written. Then I went up to Ithaca when they were recording Spreading the Disease’and had some off time. Scott decided that’s what he wanted to do and went for it. 

Whenever I think about S.O.D, I remember this column Tim Yohannan wrote in an issue of Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll around the time Speak English Or Die came out. He quoted the lyrics to your song “United Forces” and wrote something to the effect of, “These lyrics would be great if they really meant it”.
Well, Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll was convinced all the New York bands were fascist skinheads. Since we had a so-called adversary like that, that brought people together. But it was a two-way street. 

But calling the record ‘Speak English or Die’ probably wasn’t the most well thought out thing to do in retrospect. But the whole idea behind that was giving it to people like Jello Biafra. We were tired of hearing that New York was full of fascists. If anything, that was a sociological experiment to see how many people we could piss off. Everybody we thought would get pissed off bit into it. That was a very, very exaggerated sentiment. We took it to an outlandish proportion. There was a grain of truth in it where it was frustrating that somebody’s whose job it was to communicate, couldn’t communicate with you and you’d say ‘I just want to say ‘ Fucking Speak English or Die’. It was just a humorous outlet that we realized later was over the top. When Billy continued on with M.O.D. and had that ‘A.I.D.S’ song it was like ‘Alright dude, the fuckin’ joke’s over’. 

New York is a more course town. We weren’t from San Francisco where it’s super P.C. and everyone is trying to outdo each other with their righteousness and telling everyone ‘Don’t eat that!’ New York is a rougher place and sometimes things like that are more tolerated because we’re not caught up in being as P.C. as possible. 

When people reacted to the S.O.D record, we tried to counter-argue by saying ‘Well, isn’t punk rock supposed to be abrasive and challenging?’ and people came back with, ‘It’s supposed to abrasive and challenging against society, not the rest of the scene,  you dumb asses’. And then we were like ‘Oh..O.K…right, gotcha’.(Laughs) 

Could you understand why some Hardcore people were suspect of Metal people getting into Hardcore?
Some people were dubious and saying things like, ‘Oh, these Metal bands are just trying to be cool and Hardcore’. But there were some people who were definitely doing that. There were some Metal people who only got into the circus elements of Hardcore and embarrassed themselves in the mosh pit by doing some weird gyrations.  

That stuff carried over to when Nuclear Assault went on our first tour of the U.K. There were bands like Heresy and Concrete Sox who were very, very cynical about Metal bands. They thought we were just trying to be cool and wanting to make money off the Hardcore scene. We came all the way there and were selling shirts for the equivalent of six dollars. Yeah, you got us, you know? We’re really trying to cash in! 

Is there anyone you feel totally embodies NYHC?
There’s a man who I love and admire who goes by the name Vincent Stigma. You think of NYHC, you think of him. Steve Martin would tell me stories of how he’d sit there and tune up Vinnie’s guitar with a tuner and as soon as he put in Vinnie’s hand, it must have just been the way he put his left hand on the neck, it immediately sounded out of tune. And again, that’s the endearing quality of Hardcore. 

Why did S.O.D. end?
S.O.D stopped because the other guys in Anthrax were getting fucking jealous. Nobody knew that it was going to be as huge as it got. We just did it because we thought it was funny. The record was recorded in three days for a budget of five grand. 

Another thing that’s unique about the time of crossover were these kids who did this rapid makeover from long-haired Metal dude to a total skinhead. 
Hardcore is a very ideological genre. You got people who wanted to talk about who’s real and who’s fake and who means it and who doesn’t. Imagine if there were message boards back then! It would have been insane! Most of the people who were the biggest loudmouths were the ones who got into Hardcore from Metal six months ago and were insecure about it. They didn’t want anyone to know their pasts, so they get into Hardcore and all of a sudden they’re some self-appointed scene judge. All they were doing was projecting because they didn’t want anyone to know they were the world’s biggest Slayer fan. You’d see these people talking shit and I’d say ‘I remember you from L’Amours. You might be a skinhead now, but I know just who the fuck you are’. I would watch people walk into Bleeker Bob’s and trade in their Slayer records and buy Minor Threat records. I was always like ‘Why can’t you have both?’ 

Was there a point where you became disillusioned with NYHC?
Something happened to Hardcore where all of a sudden it was chugga-chugga slow Metal. The big joke was ‘This sounds like Slayer without the fast parts’. The whole tough guy thing got real big and it just wasn’t doing anything for me anymore. I got bored with it. But I felt grateful to be living in a scene that was so vibrant. It was just so fun and cool to be a part of. 

What did you think of the Straight Edge surge that happened in NYHC around the same time?
People leaped onto the Straight Edge and the positive thing so heavy. Some of these kids were no older than fifteen years old. Their whole reason for going Straight Edge was because they went to a party where some other kid would have three Budweisers and puke all over the place. After that, they’d say ‘I’m not drinking because I’ve seen what it does to people’ and I would say ‘No, that’s what it does to your stupid friends’. You’re judging everyone that drinks or smokes weed by the reaction of a fifteen-year-old jock. A few years later, a lot of those people came up to me and said, ‘Hey, sorry for acting like an asshole to you for smoking weed. I was only sixteen!’ 

***ACHTUNG!***

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