Joey Belladonna: “I Don’t Even Talk with the Other Members of Anthrax Right Now”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_OPHQcgEGO4

I know we all like to think that all the members of our favorite bands are BFFs and hang out with one another 24/7 even when they’re not on tour, but, alas, this is not the case. There are plenty of well-documented instances of people who don’t especially like one another putting their differences aside in the name of keeping the band together: most recently, we learned that David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen apparently still can’t stand one another, but Keith Richards has said as much about Mick Jagger, and there have been rumors for years that Steven Tyler and Joe Perry ain’t exactly besties, either.

Well, add to this list one Mr. Joey Belladonna, of Anthrax fame. In a new interview with Sweden Rock Magazine, Belladonna offered the following semi-depressing information (transcription courtesy of Blabbermouth):

“I don’t even talk with [the other members of Anthrax] right now. I mean, there’ll be a few e-mails, but they’re so short. It’s not like I sit on the horn [telephone] and talk with Charlie [Benante, Anthrax drummer] all day. He don’t have time for me. I do, but they just don’t, you know?! It’s only out of necessity [that they keep in contact with me]. So even back then, I don’t think it was anything really that cool. Part of me might not have joined it because it wasn’t as open as when I jammed with friends at home and they’d always come over my house all day and play for hours. And we’d go out together and we’d hang out together. Anthrax wasn’t like that, you know?”

He also says that things have always been this way for him in Anthrax: he calls first joining the band in 1984 a “business-like” endeavor and admits that “I don’t think I’ve ever really found my place with this band. I mean, as much as we do what we do, it’s so corporate in its own way.”

None of this is shocking, given Belladonna’s on-again, off-again history with the band, and in the end (bad joke intended), I don’t think it really matters — if they can put together something as good as Worship Music without talking more than they absolutely have to, well, whatever. But if you had any fantasies of Joey Belladonna/Scott Ian/Frank Bello truth-or-dare games followed by pillow fights, well, sorry to burst your bubble.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the corner praying that this somehow leads to a Jon Bush re-reunion.