Frank Bello on Surviving Grief, Revenge, and Anthrax

Frank Bello has spent four decades as the bassist of Anthrax, but the stories behind the music cut far deeper than any thrash riff. Sitting in a hotel room in Dresden, Germany at 1:00 a.m. during a seven-week European tour, Bello joins Beardo and Weirdo hosts Craig Gass and Chris Kael for a conversation that swings from hilarious Kiss impressions to the darkest chapter of his life — and a never-before-connected Hollywood story involving Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinison, and Guns N' Roses.

The episode covers Bello's earliest touring days with Anthrax on five dollars a day, picking eggs from a barn for breakfast on their first European run in 1984, and the night a fan threw firecrackers directly into his ear at a Celebrity Theater in-the-round show in Phoenix during the Among the Living tour. Craig Gass, who attended that exact concert, fills in details Bello had forgotten, creating a rare dual-perspective account of a legendary Anthrax show gone sideways.

Bello opens up about his brother Anthony's murder in the Bronx on March 25, 1996 — the crime scene, the blood-splattered shoes visible under the sheet, and the two weeks of total darkness that followed where he obtained a gun and hunted for the killer nightly from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. He reveals that his wife was the first person he ever told, and that the thought of his mother losing another son pulled him back from the edge. The conversation also uncovers a collision of comedy legends at Mel's Diner on Sunset Boulevard, where Bello witnessed Dice Clay's arrest while Big Val Becigis arrived with Duff McKagan from a Guns N' Roses opening slot for the Rolling Stones — and Sam Kinison pulled up in a Corvette with plates reading "X REV" to heckle Dice in handcuffs.

Anthrax's new album drops September 18th, their first record in a decade, with the lead single already drawing strong fan reaction from a band still channeling raw angst into music after 43 years together.