Dan Lilker
(ex-Anrthrax, ex-Brutal Truth, ex-Nuclear Assault)
With the realms of the Thrash Metal genre or, if you must, sub-genre, even the most ‘casual’ of fans will attest to the impact bassist Dan Lilker has had on the genre as a whole. A founding member of impossibly long-running titans Anthrax (Lilker performed on their full-length debut Fistful Of Metal, 1984), S.O.D. and Nuclear Assault, among others, the notoriously prolific New York City-born icon would eventually co-found Grindcore legends Brutal Truth in 1990, ultimately issuing eleven releases over the course of the twenty-one year existence. Now, with the long-awaited re-release of his ‘tell-all’ autobiography Perpetual Conversion and an all-too-brief South American reunion with Anthrax once again propelling him to the proverbial spotlight, the oft-charismatic Lilker was kind enough to speak with us regarding, among many other things, his long and storied career within Metal.
Todd: What made now the right time for re-print of Perpetual Conversion? Was the original edition out of print?
Dan: “The first edition came out on my 50th birthday in October 2014. Thus, last month being my 60th birthday, we did the reprint. But it’s not just a reprint. It’s more like a second edition. …For the last five years or so, the original printing had been unavailable. So for that reason, just by itself, we wanted to make sure to get more out there, so we did this second edition. We talked to various publishers, but we couldn’t really find anyone who was willing to do it with us because there’s certain costs with photographers that are in the book. But the point being, we said ‘Fuck it and did it ourselves’. …And since I really haven’t been doing a hell of a lot in the last ten years, compared to the thirty before that, instead of doing a whole new round of interviews and more updates, the new edition has a new forward by (vocalist) Thomas Lindberg from (Swedish Melodic Death Metal group) At The Gates as well as an all new colored photo section in the back featuring the stuff I did get up to this year.”
Todd: Was the original Publisher not interested in an updated re-print? That must’ve been incredibly frustrating.
Dan: “That would be correct. It was originally released by (Publisher) Bazillion Points and I certainly have no issue with that. He said he wasn’t really interested in doing another printing of it and I’m a mature man, so I didn’t go ‘Well, why, dude?’. So we said ‘Okay, that’s cool’. We did talk to a lot of really well-meaning publishers on a Punk level, but yeah, there are certain things with this book where we’re using licensed pictures from photographers that you have to pay. And end of the day, we just said ‘Well, we know we’ve got a friend of ours who’d be a benefactor and help us out with this’. …And it wasn’t that much, so we had another run done with the updates.”
Todd: How did you approach gathering and organizing of the information contained in Perpetual Conversion? How easy was it for you to remember all of the details? All things considered, that must’ve been quite the chore.
Dan: “(Co-author) Dave (Hofer) did most of the legwork on that, the author. He lives in Chicago. When we decided in 2008 that we were going to do this, he would come out and spend long weekends here and basically interrogate me because he had never done a long-form book. He’s written for Metal Maniacs and Punk Planet, but those are ‘zines. I couldn’t tell you how many words that is, but not as many as a book, certainly, so he approached it chronologically. A lot of stuff was really helped by the fact that I’d been really good about saving memorabilia. When I was on tour, I would always grab posters and I kept all my laminates and tour books. And I never moved a lot when I was younger, so I would just take the stuff and put it in a pile so it never got messed with or damaged. But even so, a lot of stuff was in this big bin you can get at Wal-mart, so they’re safe. And now that we own a house, we actually have what looks like a Metal museum downstairs. What would normally be the playroom is decked out with tons of cool posters and stuff. That stuff really helped jog my memory because I’d see a bunch of tour dates when Nuclear Assault opened for Exodus in 1989 and then you’d see a certain city like Nuremberg (Germany) and you’d go ‘Oh, yeah’ and you picture the city and then you remember an amusing anecdote or something like that. It was hard, but also it was a labor of love, like Dave would say if he were here. He’s not dead, he just couldn’t do this interview. …We also had him interview a ton of people to round it all out.”
Todd: Did you find it cathartic to vicariously relive the highlights and corresponding ‘low points’ of your career?
Dan: “It was kind of cool because when you do it in a chronological way like that, you have to include all the reformations like when Nuclear Assaults started doing stuff again in 2002. Shit was jumping all over the place, but yeah, it was kind of cool having it all documented and being able to hold a copy of the book. It’s not like it was a huge ego trip, but there was definitely a sense of accomplishment that I would hope is deserved at this po-int. And those were the days too, right? …Because when you think about it, all of that was forty years ago now.”
Todd: How did you become involved with (Hardcore Super Group) S.O.D. (Stromtroopers Of Death)? Did you find it weird that members of Anthrax were eager to work with you again after dismissing you from their group?
Dan: “Nobody knew that it was going to explode like it did. I got a phone call in April of 1985 and at this point, Nuclear Assault was in the stage where we were still auditioning members while doing a few shows, so I wasn’t extremely busy. And (Anthrax rhythm guitarist) Scott (Ian) called and said ‘Hey, man, we’re going to do this side project. It’s going to be this joke hardcore thing that’s going to be fast and fun and I think it would be great for you because I know you got that nice, nasty bass tone. …(Original Anthrax vocalist) Neil Turbin had been who wanted me out, but then they threw him out several months later, they might have been like ‘Shit, I think we threw out the wrong guy’. I got the feeling that when Scott called me, it was because he felt horrible about it, so he said ‘Oh, we can ask Danny to play in another band with us’. We had no idea that it was going to get to the level of popularity or infamy that it would. It took three days in the studio, with maybe one more day for Mixing. It cost five thousand dollars and we might have rehearsed twice, which, of course, made it fresh. That was really Scott wanting to do a band because Anthrax was going in a direction with Spreading The Disease (1985). It’s a little more lighthearted than Among The Living (1987) where they got harder again. …But maybe at that point, Scott felt the need to do something on the heavier, faster side. And I think that’s where all of it had come from.”
Todd: I remember (S.O.D. Vocalist) Billy Milano stated he was surprised how quickly the music was completed.
Dan: “Why would a fucking dude from the Hardcore scene be surprised about a fucking short-process recording? I can’t tell you. …I mean, with recording, you never know how long it’s going to take to nail something, but it so happened that even at our tender ages, I think we were skilled musicians and we knocked that shit out really fast. So perhaps he thought he could just sleep in and do it in the morning. And instead, it’s like ‘Okay, so we’re all done, it’s only ten p.m. and we’ve still got three more hours. Let’s go get him.’ I have no idea why he’d think otherwise. The band has been pretty much inactive since ’01 and, unfortunately, it’s going to stay that way now.”
Todd: As far as your playing style is concerned, what ultimately led you to switch from finger-picking to a pick?
Dan: “That was actually at the request of (The Rods drummer) Carl Canedy that Produced Fistful Of Metal. And I’m glad he asked me to do that because you can get a little more precision. After that, I started playing fast and distorted, so playing with a pick, was a (Motörhead front man) Lemmy (Kilmister) thing. When I’d started, I was heavily into (Iron Maiden bassist) Steve Harris and played with my fingers. As I became more aggressive, I was listening more to (Royston) ‘Rainy’ (Wainwright) from Discharge and (Conrad) ‘Cronos’ (Lant) from Venom, so I thought using a pick would be better suited for my usage anyway. I’m really glad he told me to do that.”
Todd: Once your tenure in Anthrax had come to an end, how quickly did you begin planning, for lack of a more succinct term, the propagation of Nuclear Assault? Were you already familiar with all of your future bandmates?
Dan: “After I was relieved of my duties in Anthrax in January of ’84, I immediately called (future Nuclear Assault vocalist/guitarist) John Connolly. John had actually been in an embryonic version of Anthrax as the vocalist when he was sixteen, but that didn’t work out. We were going through a lot of band members back then because we were still a garage band. …John was at home in Whitestone, Queens (New York), honing his skills, so when I found myself musically unemployed, I called him up and said ‘Do you want to do a band? I want to do something pretty fast and aggressive’ and he said ‘Sure’. We went through the usual process, which ended up taking about a year and a half before we got (lead guitarist) Anthony Bramante and (drummer) Glenn (Evans). That was the lineup that clicked. We were also writing songs at that time, so, there were some shows that Nuclear Assault did without the best-known lineup, but they were all few and far between and all very early. Glenn is an awesome drummer and it was always my pleasure to fucking jam with him because he was fucking rock solid. And he was not a Thrash drummer before Nuclear Assault, too. He’d played in (New Jersey-born) T.T. Quick before that, but they were more Hard Rock. Props to him for being able to fucking switch gears and do it well.”
Todd: Once the group was officially formed, was there a certain tonality Nuclear Assault was looking to master?
Dan: “We never really looked for a sound. …We wrote all the stuff we did and used the tones we thought were appropriate for it. And by the time we were doing Game Over in 1986…I didn’t use the same pedal. You have to remember this is forty years ago, so the details are a little foggy, naturally and I might have smoked a little weed since then. We we’re going for something aggressive and like I said, I was influenced by a lot of bass players who use a lot of grit on their tone. I really like all that. If you listen to the (1982) Discharge record Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, that was very inspiring. (The Venom track) “Welcome To Hell” has that nasty bass tone and during the intro to (Venom track) “Witching Hour”, you can hear that pretty well. As far as how that all worked with the different bands being hard and fast, anything I’ve done hasn’t involved a lot of thought. It’s just really organic and natural, so it’s interesting trying to describe it because it’s one of those things where you have to have some type of out-of-body experience or take LSD, so you don’t even fucking think about doing it at all.”
Todd: Am I correct in remembering Nuclear Assault initially released their efforts on a ‘rotating series’ of labels?
Dan: “I will tell you that horrible story. …We started out on Combat (Records). I.R.S. (Records) was interested because at that period of time, Thrash Metal bands were getting fucking snapped up by major labels after the success of Anthrax, Metallica and Slayer. I.R.S. was like ‘Hmm, what’s this Thrash Metal thing?’ and wanted their finger in the pie. They wanted to sign us, but Combat didn’t want to let us go, so they came up with this genius idea of alternating releases. And that was a fucking incredible failure because what ended up happening was the labels didn’t have the impetus to push the records that much because they weren’t going to be doing the next one. That was an experiment that went wrong, but that’s what we went with at the time. All the business shit is what burnt me out. I play music because I really enjoy it. All of the conflicts associated with the different labels was always such a distraction to me. Whatever. It all seemed like an unnecessary evil, you know what I mean?”
Todd: At what point did you realize your time in Nuclear Assault was soon coming to an end? Considering how invested you were in the creation and overall existence, was it difficult for you to effectively walk away from it?
Dan: “Handle With Care (1989) was last good Nuclear Assault album, in my opinion. …It’s a really good record that was recorded by a band that had been touring and writing music for years. I thought Survive (1988) was a tiny bit too slick sounding with that big IRS budget. Handle With Care was on In-Effect Records, which was a division of Combat/Relativity (Records), so we were back with them for that one. But they did well with that, so I’ll never want to talk shit about In-Effect. I know I was talking about our label disasters before, but that was so much more on the major label side, if you get me. After Handle With Care, we did Out Of Order (1991) and by then, I personally wasn’t inspired anymore. The business stuff I was alluding to before had really bummed me out. And then musically, I was really starting to get into all the stuff from (legendary British independent record label and Publisher) Earache (Records). I had heard the first Napalm Death record Scum in ’87, so by the change of the decade, I had already been into all of this more intense stuff for years. And that all happened during the Handle With Care and the immediate post-Handle With Care eras, which is when everything all went downhill.”
Todd: How was Brutal Truth formed? Was it born from the proverbial turning of the tide (perhaps most notably the emergence of the Grunge phenomenon) within the industry or was it something on more of a personal level?
Dan: “It was originally a side project that took on a life of its own due to my waning interests in playing Thrash Metal. Around 1990, all that shit with the labels and all that stuff was so tied up and fucking twisted, the lawyers we had said ‘Don’t do anything as Nuclear Assault right now. We have to untangle all this’ and the band said ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’. We ended up saying ‘Fuck it. We’ll just do side projects so we can all still be creative, but it won’t be involved with anything it shouldn’t be’. Glenn went out and did C.I.A. (the debut In The Red was released in 1990) and then there was the John Connelly Theory (the Rock-orientated Back To Basics was released in 1991), and Anthony did something, but never released anything. I’d said ‘Well, this is the perfect opportunity for me to pursue something more intense because I’ve been into all that shit for a while anyway’. And that ended up being Brutal Truth. For two years, from 1990 to 1992, I was playing with both bands and that was starting to get hectic because as Brutal Truth evolved and became a real band that was going to be going on tour. I realized there was no way I could juggle all this stuff and not lose my mind because you’d always have t-hese scheduling conflicts, so in 1992, I said to Nuclear Assault ‘Sorry, guys, but my heart’s not in this anymore’ and I left. Brutal Truth was by then a full-time project. …I then immediately went on the Campaign For Musical Destruction Tour of the States with Carcass, Cathedral and Napalm Death even before (the group’s full-length debut) Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (1992) was released. The Earache (Records) guys were like ‘Well, let’s just get you out there. You’re American, so we’re doing a US tour’. It was nuts because we were in a passenger van with Cathedral for two months with fucking (Cathedral frontman Lee) Dorian‘s foot odors.”
Todd: What prompted Nuclear Assault to re-unite? Considering how consistently busy you’ve been throughout the duration of your career, it’s amazing you were able to find the time to re-embrace it on a near full-time basis.
Dan: “It started up again around 2002. After ten years, which was what it was because I’d left in ’92, it was fun to play Thrash again. By then, I’d already played Grindcore and I’d played in a Black Metal band in New York called Hemlock. And I also did a side project with some of the Autopsy guys called the Ravenous, so in that ten-year period, I got to explore my fucking extremely intense side. By then, it was fun to play Thrash Metal again because I got all of that out of my system. Of course I would continue to play all those types of music, but playing Thrash looked looked like fun again. The whole time we were gone, when I’d be out with Brutal Truth, people would come up and go ‘Dude, is there ever going to be any more Nuclear Assault’, which was great. And I kept hearing that. So in 2002 when we got an offer to play the New Jersey Metal Fest, which is associated with the Milwaukee Metal Fest, we decided we were going to do something. That’s how it started. But then Anthony couldn’t really hang. …He had a government job because he was a fucking mailman. But that’s the kind of thing where if you work your ass off, you can retire when you’re fucking fifty-five. You know what I mean? You want to keep that fucking job, so we got (lead guitarist) Erik Burke (Inmania, Kalibas, Sulaco) and we all carried on.”
Todd: What ultimately led you retiring from active touring? Although it must be frustrating to exclude such a large portion of your life, I would imagine that amount of travels would certainly take a ‘toll’ on a long-term basis.
Dan: “I timed it around my fiftieth birthday, which is when the book came out, too, but only ironically. I’d mov-ed to Rochester (New York) in 2002. I grew up in Queens, New York and the upshot of that was, as much as I love this town, but it’s a secondary city for the airlines. When I lived in New York, I could fly direct like New York to Amsterdam, New York to fucking Tokyo, New York to San Francisco or anything like that. Now, you always have to fucking go to a hub, make your connecting flight and then go there. I was always like ‘Oh, God, that sucks’. But generally, from 2008 on, I’d had a lot of horrible experiences missing flights or making connecting flights like showing up somewhere finally, but then your clothes and your guitars aren’t there and it would just fucking get me really stressed out. And then you step back and think ‘Why am I playing music? Because I enjoy it’. But now, the thought of going to the airport going ‘Oh, God, I got to go back and do this again’. You’re like ‘All right. Hold on. Let’s do a little deep thinking here. Is this what you really want to fucking do?’. So after a while, I’m like ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore’. It was just too stressful, dude. And that’s not to say if I had still lived in New York that shit wouldn’t have happened anyway because it’s always an equipment malfunction or an incoming flight that’s late. I just grew to hate flying. I still will fly once in a while now, but my wife and I will go on a vacation somewhere. …We went to Finland in May because I did a musical thing called ‘Lilker Fest’. …But anyway. And also, dude, when you get to a certain age and you play super intense music, it starts to fuckin’ hurt. I’m not twenty-five anymore, but yeah, it was all of that shit. …I was ready to start relaxing a little.”
Todd: In hindsight, were you surprised to get ‘the call’ to re-join Anthrax as a tour replacement for Frank Bello?
Dan: “It was definitely a surprise, but it ended up being a pleasant surprise. Scott had texted me in late February and said ‘Frank can’t do these shows we’re doing in Latin America and a couple of US festivals in May. Can you do them?’. That was only five weeks out from the first show, but I said ‘Sure. What’s the set list?’ and I practiced. Every day, I’d come home from work and run through the set list, driving my wife crazy. But I like to make sure I know stuff and I want to know it with full confidence. I want to play it and still be able to Rock out and have it be natural like second nature. It was fun. I went to some cool places I’d never been to El Salvador or fucking Costa Rica or Ecuador and Uruguay. I went to Uruguay, dude. Those guys are all real great musicians. (Vocalist) Joey (Belladonna) is an amazing singer. I never shared a stage with him. It was lots of fun, but I was surprised.”
Select Discography
Alive Again (2023)
Pounder (EP) (2015)
Rise Of The Infidels (2007)
Third World Genocide (2005)
Alive Again (2003)
Bigger Than The Devil (1999)
Something Wicked (1993)
Live At Budokan (1992)
Live At The Hammersmith Odeon (1992)
Out Of Order (1991)
Handle With Care (1989)
Fight To Be Free (EP ) (1988)
Good Times, Bad Times, (EP) (1988)
The Plague (EP ) (1987)
Survive (1988)
Game Over (1986)
Brain Death (EP) (1986)
Speak English Or Die (1985)