Charlie Benante was born on November 27, 1962, in the Bronx, New York. He became Anthrax’s drummer and a major source of its guitar riffs, with both performance and songwriting credits on “Indians” from the band’s 1987 album Among the Living.
His musical education involved plenty of repetition. In a 2025 interview with Rock Candy, Benante recalled coming home from school to learn Rush and Iron Maiden drum parts note for note. Playing along to records helped his timing, and he was playing clubs as a teenager. He tried the school orchestra, but quickly knew it wasn’t for him. Visual art mattered to him, too: he was attending art school when he joined Anthrax in 1983. His mother had reservations about that decision, he told the magazine, but understood how much he wanted to make music his life and supported him.
The guitar became central to what he brought to the band. Looking back on Among the Living in a 2017 Reverb interview, Benante and guitarist Scott Ian described a writing partnership in which Benante supplied most of the riffs, while Ian added sections, including bridges and rhythms beneath guitar solos. Benante wrote on a star-shaped guitar Ian had sold him for $100. It was an inexpensive instrument that kept producing ideas, and he remembered it as the starting point for much of Anthrax’s early music.
Getting those ideas onto tape involved another set of decisions. Benante felt Spreading the Disease, the album before Among the Living, hadn’t fully captured the sound he wanted for Anthrax. For the follow-up, the band worked with producer Eddie Kramer and pushed for a recording that preserved the impact of their rehearsals. When the first mix came back with more reverb than they wanted, they asked for a drier sound.
Benante’s playing needed room to move within that approach. “We wanted a very live vibe. No click tracks,” he told MusicRadar in 2010. They allowed the tempo to follow his performance. There were practical compromises, too. Kramer wanted the front heads removed from the bass drums and pillows placed inside, but the altered feel made Benante’s fast double-kick passages difficult to execute. The heads went back on. An old Ludwig snare supplied the combination of attack and warmth he wanted.
Even with the kit set up to suit him, “The Horror of It All” demanded extra work. Benante recalled making several attempts at the rapid double-kick passage near the end before he could play it cleanly. Revisiting the album also made him notice how busy some of his original drum parts had been; in that 2010 interview, he said he would approach some of them differently.
By the time Anthrax made For All Kings, released in 2016, Benante was bringing some songs to his bandmates fully mapped out. He told Reverb that he preferred writing at home, away from touring distractions, and set himself a target of 20 songs. He sent demos to his bandmates, then met Ian in Los Angeles; bassist Frank Bello joined them to develop the arrangements. Some demos already contained complete songs. The album also gave Benante space to work with electronics: he used Roland equipment for the introductory passage before “You Gotta Believe.”
