Dan Lilker Reflects on Playing with Anthrax After Decades Away: “Those Shows Were Great”
Earlier this year, a sort of unexpected thrash metal reunion took place when Anthrax asked their former bassist Dan Lilker stood in for Frank Bello after personal reasons kept him off the band’s South American tour. For fans who’ve been following Anthrax for years and years now, it was a move that for many came completely out of left field.
For those that don’t remember or never knew in the first place, Lilker was last in the band roughly four decades ago, having been a founding member and original bassist up until after the release of Fistful of Metal back in 1984. Since then, he’s played in a number of bands including Nuclear Assault, Brutal Truth, and Stormtroopers of Death, where he played with Scott Ian and Charlie Benante.
While speaking on the That Metal Interview podcast, Lilker said he was happy he got the opportunity to play with Anthrax again, saying it was a memorable experience for him.
“Those shows were great. It was fun. I didn’t really know Joey [Belladonna] before that, the vocalist. Obviously, I knew Scott [Ian, ANTHRAX guitarist] and Charlie [Benante, ANTHRAX drummer] from [playing with them in ANTHRAX and] S.O.D. and then there’s Jon [Donais], the guitar player, who’s also a really cool dude who helped me out a lot, teaching me the stuff that I still needed to learn. But yeah, those shows were great. There was eight shows in South America and then there was a couple of U.S. fests, in Florida and Columbus, Ohio. The South American [shows] were in April. I should say Central America — actually, the first show was in Mexico. But let’s just say Latin America. And all those shows were killer. I mean, I’ve played down there a bunch. I went to some places I’ve never been before, like Costa Rica and Ecuador and El Salvador. But good old Chile and Argentina and Brazil, I knew those were gonna be killers because I played there a bunch with other bands. And, yeah, I think everything was great. It was lots of fun. And I think people enjoyed it, man. It’s all over YouTube.”
One rumor that floated around while Lilker was on tour with Anthrax was that they only needed one rehearsal to get ready for the run. During the interview, Lilker confirmed that account, adding that he’d had weeks to prepare, so it wasn’t like he was going in blind.
“Yeah, there was one rehearsal in Mexico, but I’d gotten approached about doing that about five or six weeks before that. So I had time at home to learn the stuff, and then we just did that one rehearsal, because even those guys needed the rehearsal, ’cause they hadn’t done anything at that point since they played, like, the Milwaukee Metal Fest the summer before or something. They’d gone about ten months without doing anything, so even if Frank had done the shows, they would’ve rehearsed regardless.”
Throughout the rest of the interview, Lilker shared other interesting tidbits about his time with the band, including what he found particularly difficult, among other things. You should check out the rest of the interview below.
