Fathers, Brothers, and Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, and Anthrax , livre ebook

Rare Bird Books - Frank Bello

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100 pages

English

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Description

Anthrax is one of the biggest Metal bands of all time

Between 1991-2004 Anthrax sold 10 million records worldwide

Four of their albums have reached Gold status

Bello was also the bassist for the Metal band Helmet

Events in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Bay Area

Music media outreach

Promotion to Anthrax fans and heavy metal fans

Podcast appearances

Promotion when touring resumes

Sujets

Histoire de la musique

Informations

Publié par	Rare Bird Books
Date de parution	02 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781644282489
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

this is a genuine rare bird book
Rare Bird Books 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302 Los Angeles, CA 90013 rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2021 by Frank Bello
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302 Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Dante
epub isbn : 9781644282489
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Bello, Frank, author. | McIver, Joel, author. Title: Fathers , brothers , and sons : surviving anguish , abandonment , and Anthrax / Frank Bello; with Joel McIver. Description: Includes index. | First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2021. Identifiers: ISBN 9781644282311 (hardcover) | 978-1-64428-248-9 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH Bello, Frank. | Anthrax (Musical group : U.S.) | Rock musicians—United States—Biography. | Heavy metal music. | Rock music. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Music | MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Heavy Metal
Classification: LCC ML420.B45 B45 2021 | DDC 782.42166/092—dc23

This book is dedicated to the strong women in my life who raised me and instilled the strength in me to always strive to be a better man—my mother, Rose, my grandmother, Tina, and my wife, Teresa.
I also dedicate this book to my son, Brandon. This is how your dad did it, and you can do it, too. Never say die, and never say “I should have.”
Finally, this book is dedicated to my brother, Anthony, who was taken from us in 1996. You were the best of us. We will meet again.

Contents
Foreword by Gene Simmons
Introduction
1 Ass-Kickings and Eggplants
2 First Kiss
3 Into the Madhouse
4 Armed and Diseased
5 Island Life
6 Cliff
7 Who’s the Man?
8 Euphoric Persistence
9 Acting Up
10 Anthony
11 Cathartic Days
12 Helmets On
13 Brandon
14 Buckling Up
15 Father, Brother, Son
Acknowledgments

Foreword
by Gene Simmons
B eing men, we tend not to talk about our emotions. If you say, “Hi, how are you?” to a woman, she’ll immediately tell you her life story, but we don’t share our emotions—even though we all have deep wounds in us.
It’s shameful how fathers, the male of the species, tend not to stick around for their families. It’s not always because they have problems with alcohol and drugs. Sometimes men just give up and walk out on their kids. When you do that, you don’t realize that you have scarred forever a young child who thinks they did something wrong.
“What did I do wrong that my father left me?”
That’s a question you’ll never be able to answer. I never have. My father left us when I was about seven years old, and even though I bought him houses and supported him until the day he died, I never went to visit him, and I did not go to his funeral. Of course, after that happened, I was ashamed. Like I said, those wounds will never heal. They last for a lifetime.
Thank God for this thing that we do: this suit of armor we wear onstage. Like Gestalt therapy, or Dr. Janov’s primal scream therapy—look it up!—playing music allows us to be in a padded room and scream our heads off to try and get the rage out. It’s part and parcel of what Frank’s band Anthrax and my band Kiss does. We get up and play aggressive music, and it’s an outlet. It lets out some of that rage, at least for a while. When you’re quiet for a while, it creeps back, so it’s good to keep playing onstage in front of people.
In this book, Frank talks about finding healing by being a loving father himself. This was also the case for me. I was hesitant to get married forever. I met the loveliest woman, Shannon, and we were together for twenty-nine years before we got married. We had two kids together, and still I refused to get married—until I finally married her when I was the age of sixty-two. We’ve been married for nine years now, and it’s getting better and better—but I was always afraid when I confronted myself.
I was afraid that I would turn into my father and abandon the family.
I have not done so.
In this book, you’ll read Frank’s memories of hanging around outside our management office in New York back in the seventies, waiting for Kiss to come out so he and his pal Tom could talk to us. I remember all those times, and I have to tell you, those memories stand out for me just as much as my memories of playing in front of 50,000 or 100,000 people. That’s terrific, too, but on a completely different level, because there’s no intimacy. You don’t get to have a conversation with somebody in that situation.
On the other hand, when you see the wide-eyed sense of wonder of a fan who comes up to you, you see what it’s really about. Above the fame, above the money, above the women, above all that, is the connection being made by band and fan—and we got it back, don’t kid yourself. If you think fans like Frank and his pal Tom got off on us, the fact that they had that bright-eyed sense of wonder got us off in return. It made us think, “This is what it’s really about.”
I remember when I was a fan myself. I used to hang out and bug Stan Lee and his secretary Flo Steinberg at the Marvel Comics office, and Stan used to write me postcards saying, “You will do great things. Hang in there, true believer,” and all that stuff. It was like a message from the gods to me as a little kid.
I think the great ones never forget where they came from. What Frank and his pal did was reignite the fire in us, as a reminder that we got everything we wanted. When they came around to talk to us, Frank thought he was bugging us—but it’s actually the opposite. I hope he’ll tell you that when he came around to bug us, we actually had conversations. Truth be told, it meant a lot to us.
All these years later, Frank has fans of his own. For those of you out there who want to hear something fresh, put on your Anthrax records and turn the bass up, along with some high end so you can hear the actual notes that Frank plays. You’ll hear some very interesting stuff. As in a string quartet, he does what the cello would do. That idea goes back to the baroque era and the Renaissance, and to The Beatles. When you heard Paul McCartney’s bass lines, they were hooks in and of themselves, and they didn’t just follow the drums. Sometimes they jumped off the drums and went against them, or dropped out altogether. Train your ears and listen to what Frank’s bass is doing.
This is the important thing. When a little wide-eyed kid who wants to play bass comes up to Frank, I’m sure that Frank won’t forget himself as a little wide-eyed kid, too. I hope he takes the time to inspire that young fan—because in a very real way, life is about a relay race. You run the best race you can, and then right in front of you is someone who hasn’t run the race yet. Pass the baton on as fast and as well as you can and let them run their own race.
Gene Simmons, 2021

Introduction
W elcome to this book! We’re going to have a lot of fun together, believe me, but we’re going to talk about some serious stuff, too. I’m a happy guy and I like to think I’m a funny one, too—don’t we all?—but there’s an angry man inside me, too.
I don’t like that guy.
Say I’m driving somewhere with my wife, Teresa, and some idiot cuts me off. I’ll be instantly fucking raging and ready to kill that guy, and I’ll start exhibiting all the signs of road rage. That’s when Teresa will say “Frank!” in that “wife tone.” All wives have that ‘wife tone,’ and thank God they do. I used to fight it, and answer, “What?” but now I go, “You’re right,” because it makes no sense to get that angry. Where’s it going to get you? In trouble.
That angry guy has been there all my life. My therapists tell me that abandonment by my father when I was a kid is a big part of it. You might have been through some of that stuff yourself, and if so, the idea behind this book is to offer you ways to deal with the emotions caused by all that, like the rage I just talked about. You saw what Gene wrote in his foreword. He’s been through all this shit, too.
Why did I write this book now? Well, you get to a certain age and you start to reflect. Now that I’m in my fifties, I’ve come to realize what a great ride my life has been. I’m not done yet, though, and I don’t want to deal with the angry guy inside me for the rest of my life. Enough is enough, and I don’t want my son, Brandon, to suffer any negative consequences from it. That’s the most important thing in my life—to be a great dad to Brandon, and to heal the anger that I feel. And you know what? Being a good dad is how I deal with it. I think a lot of men, young and old, could learn from that.
As this book took shape in 2020 and 2021, and it became obvious that it was going to address some serious subjects, my cowriter Joel and I decided to donate a portion of the proceeds to relevant charities. There are a ton of great, courageous organizations out there battling to raise awareness of the damage done when parents abandon their families, but these two particularly appealed to us:
For The Children, www.forthechildren.org
National Fatherhood Initiative, www.fatherhood.org
Thanks for buying this book. In doing so, you’re helping out a whole lot of people who urgently need it.
I want this book to be a comfortable conversation between us—just a chat between friends, maybe over a coffee or a beer. Think of it that way. We’re just fans of music, so let’s just talk about it and see where we end up.
Now let’s get started. Man, have I got some crazy stuff to tell you…

1
Ass-Kickings and Eggplants
A s my friend Dimebag used to say… “Let’s go!”
I was born on