Scott Ian: The Hellish Childhood of a Jewish Metal God

In an excerpt from his new autobiography ‘I’m the Man,’ the guitarist from Anthrax remembers growing up in Bayside, Queens

 By Scott Ian for Tablet Magazine

 

I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1963. It was an auspicious beginning, sort of. Oddly enough, that’s where the legendary Music Building was located, which is where Anthrax, Metallica, and other bands made history writing and rehearsing some of the earliest and most memorable thrash songs. Metallica even lived at the place for a while. And man, it was a slum. When I went there with Anthrax, I used to think, “God, this neighborhood is such a dive. It must have been so much different when my parents were living here.” But maybe it wasn’t, and that was one of the hardships they had to face. If so, it was one of many.

My parents never had it easy. They were second-generation immigrants, and when I was growing up my father, Herbert Rosenfeld, was working in the jewelry business and my mom, Barbara Haar, was a housewife. I think that was part of why she was so unhappy. She didn’t want to be a happy homemaker. She wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t have the patience. My parents came from working-class families and got married way too young. My dad’s father, Harold Rosenfeld, was born in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my grandmother Sylvia was born in 1912 in Manhattan. They met in the south shore of Brooklyn while he was driving a Good Humor truck. They got married in 1938 and he continued to work in the summer. Then in the winter before my aunt and dad were born, my grandparents would drive to Florida every winter in a Model-T Ford and live there with the money he made selling ice cream—like they were on vacation.

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