Charlie Benante has pointed to two origin stories that shaped the way he plays: the German band Accept taught him to play fast double bass, and his 1980s side project Stormtroopers Of Death put an early version of the blast beat on record.
The Anthrax drummer laid it out over the weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, in an interview with Steve Harkins of “TalkShopLive“.
Benante grew up chasing the fast kick-drum work he heard on records by Motörhead and Judas Priest, but it was one Accept track that pushed him to master the technique. He recalled (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“Double-bass drumming was something that I loved. There was these bands, who were — everybody knows these bands nowadays, of course: Motörhead, Judas Priest. And then there was this band from Germany called Accept, and I learned how to play double kick from listening to those bands: Judas Priest, Motörhead and then Accept had this song in 1983 called ‘Fast As A Shark‘, and at the time, it was the fastest double kick at the time, and I loved it. It was just something that I was, like, ‘I’m gonna learn how to play it.’ So I got another kick drum, and I just taught myself. And it was just the music that drove me to kind of play like that. And then once I got into the band Anthrax, probably around ’83, when those guys came over my house to do the audition, and I’m, like, ‘You guys aren’t gonna make me play ‘Fast As A Shark‘.’ And then Scott and, at the time, the bass player Danny looked at each other and they were, like, ‘Can you play it?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, and let’s play it.’ So we played it. Yeah, that was it. That was it. Sealed the deal. Thank you, Accept.”
“Fast As A Shark” actually appeared a little earlier than Benante remembers, it came from Accept‘s Restless And Wild, released in late 1982, but its breakneck double-kick section is exactly why it became a proving ground for a generation of drummers.
Guitarist Scott Ian has told the same audition story from the other side of the room. By his account, he went to Benante‘s house in the Bronx, the drummer immediately tore into “Fast As A Shark,” and he was playing it even faster than the record — at which point Ian looked over at bassist Danny Lilker and saw his jaw on the floor. Benante got the job, and he has been behind the kit for every Anthrax release since, joining in 1983 before the band cut its debut Fistful Of Metal.
Benante is widely credited with helping popularize the blast beat in thrash, and he traces its first appearance on record to Stormtroopers Of Death.
A blast beat is a staple of extreme meta, black metal, death metal and grindcore, and amounts to a single-stroke roll split between snare and bass drum, with the cymbal hand striking in unison with the kick. Benante says the beat existed before anyone had a name for it, and that he stumbled into recording one on the first S.O.D. album:
“The blast beat was something that — I mean, it was around, but it was never called that. Back in 1985, Scott [Ian] and I did this side project called the Stormtroopers Of Death, and on the record, we had this song called ‘Milk’. And our bass player, Danny Lilker, said, ‘Try doing this [fast] beat.’ And I’m, like, ‘Okay, that sounds like fun.’ ‘Cause the song called for it. And it became a thing that people were, like, ‘What are you doing in that song?’ And I’m, like, ‘Well, I’m just doing…’ It was like a one-foot blast through the whole song. And a couple of years later — not a couple of years later, years later, the black metal, especially those drummers in Norway and Sweden, they’d kind of picked up on that kind of beat. It started something, and it just became this thing now, the blast beat. So that was, I think, the first time it ever appeared on record, was on that first S.O.D. record.”
The claim comes with the usual caveats, variations of the beat turn up in other extreme acts of the same era, and its full lineage is debated, but “Milk,” from 1985’s Speak English Or Die, is one of the most frequently cited early examples, and the Scandinavian black metal drummers who ran with the idea helped turn it into a genre cornerstone.
Stormtroopers Of Death was a satirical crossover project featuring Benante, Ian, bassist Dan Lilker — of Nuclear Assault, and formerly Anthrax, and vocalist Billy Milano of M.O.D. The band came together after Ian wrapped his guitar parts on Anthrax‘s Spreading The Disease, built around a crude cartoon character he had been sketching named Sargent D, for whom he then wrote lyrics.
They are routinely named among the first bands to weld hardcore punk to thrash metal, helping to define what became known as crossover thrash. Their track “March Of The S.O.D.” served as the theme music for MTV‘s “Headbangers Ball” for years. The band’s deliberately provocative, offense-for-its-own-sake humor has been argued over for decades — read by fans as satire and by critics as something harder to defend — but their influence on the crossover sound is not in dispute.
Benante remains one of the most decorated drummers in the genre, and he has kept an unusually full plate, also drumming for the reunited Pantera since 2022. Anthrax, meanwhile, have their first new album in a decade on the way: Cursum Perficio is due September 18.
