Anthrax – Black Lodge (1993)

Song Story

In the early ’90s, ‘Twin Peaks’ became one of the biggest TV sensations ever. That famous question — “Who killed Laura Palmer?” — was on everyone’s lips, with viewers poring over every frame in search of hidden clues. And when we say everyone, we mean everyone, including Charlie Benante and Scott Ian from Anthrax, who were completely swept up in David Lynch’s eerie masterpiece.

When the second season of the show started in autumn 1990, the band was just about to embark on a lengthy European tour, but first things first: “For the latter part of the second season we were on tour in Europe – Benante recalled to fansite Twin Peaks Archive – and I remember being in Finland and having a friend of mine Fed-Ex a tape of the last episode. I didn’t want to hear about it; I wanted to see it. That’s how obsessed I was with it”. Anthrax played in Finland on November 15, 1990, months before the season finale, so “last” obviously means the last up to that point, in this context. Indeed, the episode that aired that week was a very important one for the plot. As a huge fan of the show myself, when I had the chance to interview guitarist Scott Ian in 2005, I couldn’t help but fire (walk with me) a few questions: “Favorite characters? Well, certainly Agent Cooper. And I loved Bob. I loved anything from the Black Lodge – it was awesome. But yeah, Agent Cooper was definitely my favourite”.

Even after the show went off the air, their interest didn’t wane. Actually, it went on to directly influence the album they were working on. ‘Sound Of White Noise’, released in 1993, was the first one with ex-Armored Saint John Bush behind the mic. A fresh start for the band, who embraced a renewed sound, without severing the ties with their thrash metal roots, but certainly adding a more modern rock feel to it. One of the new songs brought them back to those northwestern lands: “Angelo Badalamenti was doing the music for ‘Twin Peaks’, and we were very inspired [by his work] – explained Ian – Charlie came up with this piece of music, and then I started writing the words to it, and we called it ‘Black Lodge’. We were very inspired and influenced by the music on that show and by the show itself and just the metaphors and what it represented”. The black lodge, for those who are not familiar with the show, is a sort of evil alternate dimension inhabited by malevolent spirits. “So we wrote this song – Scott continued – and then we had the idea: what if we could get Angelo to work on it with us? Someone from the record label was actually able to contact him. The next thing we knew, Angelo was in the studio with us, listening to us play the song, and he really liked it. So he took a copy of the song and went home. Then, a week later, he came back, and he had all these charts written out for the orchestra parts, the strings, and other things, and he’s explaining: ‘I’m going to put strings here and a thing here’. It was amazing, it was really cool. We didn’t really know what he was talking about, because none of us could read music like that for an orchestra. But we just said: ‘hey, whatever you want to do, you go and do it. The reason we even wrote this song is because of you’. He came back another week later with all these parts that he had recorded with other musicians playing strings, and it just sounded so fucking cool. It was a great experience. We had obviously never done anything like that before, and it was great”.

But ‘Black Lodge’ is not the only song linking ‘Sound Of White Noise’ to ‘Twin Peaks’. As a matter of fact, when it was time to record the video for ‘Only’, the first single off the album, the band decided that it had to have some ‘Twin Peaks’ in it. It was just because of their love for the show, as neither the music nor the lyrics of the song had anything to do with it. It helped that Benante and the band were friends with the late Jennifer Syme, who was Lynch’s personal assistant back then: “She was really helpful in getting Bob – the character played by Frank Silva – in our video for ‘Only’”, further explained Benante to the Twin Peaks Archive. “We were talking about getting Michael Anderson – who played the dwarf also known as “the man from another place” – but he was kinda difficult and wanted too much money to do it, so we scrapped that. Bob was a scary character, but in that environment with us, he was just one of the guys. I remember him being very quiet. [When Silva passed away a few years later], we were like ‘Wow’. I couldn’t believe it”.

🟥 Song Story is a series of articles about famous hits and forgotten deep cuts, tracing their origins, detours, and legacy. A full index can be found here.