Anthrax bassist Frank Bello recalls “stalking” KISS back in latter’s early make up days

Anthrax bassist Frank Bello recalls “stalking” KISS back in latter’s early make up days

Anthrax bassist Frank Bello was recently interviewed by Eamon O’Neill for UK’s eonmusic. Bello was promoting his autobiography Fathers, Brothers, And Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, And Anthrax, which was released earlier this month via the publisher Rare Bird.

O’Neill noted that Bello‘s autobiography talks about the bassist stalking KISS back in the day. Bello commented: “There’s a lot of fun stories about my upbringing. To take you to the place where it was, I grew up in the Bronx in New York. Now, growing up as a diehard Kiss fan you have to understand, I just wanted to meet them because those were the days when you didn’t know what they looked like without make-up. It was very mysterious. So, me and my group of friends – specifically my friend Tom – our goal was to meet these guys and get to know them somehow. We knew they were New Yorkers; they lived in New York, and they lived in Manhattan, and that was twenty-five minutes from us.”

Bello continued: “Tom had an ‘in’ with the management. Somehow, he got calls about when these guys were going to have a meeting in Manhattan at the management office. I still remember, it was on 56th Street, Madison Avenue. We went down there – we took the bus, the Manhattan Express – and we cut out of school, and we would sit out and wait from say, 10 o’clock in the morning until whatever time Kiss showed up. We didn’t know what they looked like because their faces were always covered with make-up, so we would just look for these 6ft 1, 6ft 2 guys with suits on, with long hair, walking through the streets, and that’s how we knew it was the guys in Kiss.”

O’Neill exclaimed that “tenacity paid off” to which Bello replied: “Yeah. We got to meet them and eventually, we got to know them. This was a great time in our lives because we got this inside scoop on Kiss, and we would ask them every question in the book; “when’s your new record coming out? What’s the new songs like? When’s the tour?”; we got all the inside info. As diehard Kiss fans, they were our superheroes, and they were very, very cool to us, and it taught me a great lesson in life of how to treat fans. If I ever became successful, I said; “alright, these guys are cool, and they’re talking to us one-on-one” –specifically Gene Simmons, who I’m proud to say wrote the forward to this book, which is an honour for me.”

You can read the rest of the interview with Frank Bello at eonmusic‘s website.