About the Album
Fistful of Metal is the debut album by American heavy metal band Anthrax. The album was released in January 1984 by Megaforce Records in the United States and by Music for Nations internationally. The album includes a cover of Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen. This is the band’s only album to feature Neil Turbin on vocals and Dan Lilker on bass.
Danny Lilker and Scott Ian had been the original founders of the band, but Ian elected to fire Lilker shortly after the release of the album. Ian had several reasons for doing so, specifically: the band found him to be lazy and very unprofessional, he had failed to pay his share of the rent for the band’s rehearsal sessions, he had required more than thirty takes (2 entire days worth of studio time) to record the song “I’m Eighteen”.
As his replacement, the band hired drummer Charlie Benante’s nephew, Frank Bello, who has played on every Anthrax album since. Neil Turbin had contributed song ideas, lyrics, titles and arrangements to some of the songs on the debut album. Both Scott Ian and Charlie Benante, who played guitar in addition to drums, felt they needed tighter control on the songwriting. Feeling the tracks on the first album were extremely weak, Turbin was fired from the band, and Ian and Benante started a songwriting partnership with Ian writing all the lyrics, and Benante writing the music.
