Christmas is coming, and if you need a memoir for the music fan in your life, Harry Guerin has read just the thing.
As anyone who saw his July 2013 spoken word show in Dublin will attest to, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian can tell a good yarn. And whether it's two-and-a-half hours or 300-plus pages, his energy levels never falter. This warts-and-all (Motorhead's Lemmy is here in a great illustrated cameo) memoir sees Ian play up his neurotic New Yorker credentials to increase the comedy level, but it's also a surprisingly candid look at the professional and personal toll of being in a band. Like Ian's rhythm guitar riffing in his night job, I'm the Man is tight, sharp and fast.
In brief: Ian has huge success as part of the thrash metal movement in the mid-to-late Eighties, marries the wrong people, sees his band relegated to yesterday's men in the mid-to-late Nineties but toughs it out long enough to have a career rebirth and find true love with Meatloaf's daughter, and world completion with fatherhood. Throughout all the setbacks Ian never doubts that the band is what he was put on this earth to do, his resolve and stubbornness inspirational, whatever your own path in life. Apart from a bout of heavy drinking at the turn of the century, he never descends into rock and roll cliché - the man is just too sensible.
But for such a well-written and rounded book there are two glaring omissions: the post-September 11 attacks and hoaxes involving anthrax (the disease) and how they impacted on Anthrax (the band) are not discussed, while the recruitment and later departure of a new lead singer, Dan Nelson, receives less than a paragraph and a suggestion to read up more on Wikipedia. Poor. Perhaps Ian will find it in himself to write about both in his planned second volume - they really are important chapters.
If music and irreverence are your things, you will enjoy this book and like Ian more by the end because of his honesty, not hard-sell. Perhaps with a nod to This is Spinal Tap's Marty DiBergi, Ian reckons the stage has become his own personal Shangri-La. Readers will certainly feel younger after his book.
4/5
