ELEKTRACUTION: You can understand if the Elektra...

ELEKTRACUTION: You can understand if the Elektra Records staff is afraid to pick up the phone these days. It might be someone saying that another of the label’s bands has lost a lead singer.

The latest: Anthrax, which announced that it has parted ways with singer Joey Belladonna--just two weeks after Elektra band Motley Crue fired Vince Neil.

Giving it even more a sense of deja vu , Anthrax, a leading hard-rock force whose recent collaborations with rap group Public Enemy were crossover milestones, had signed a new $10-million deal with Elektra just a week before. The Crue’s personnel move comes only months after that band had signed a mega-bucks deal with Elektra.

The change is not expected to have a negative impact on the band’s future. Like Neil, Belladonna is a dynamic front man, but was not really a force in the creative direction of the band.

Still, the timing is unusual.

“Joey was always into Journey and Whitesnake,” said one person close to the band. “The other guys were into hard-core and rap. I think they had thought about splitting with Joey for a long time and were just waiting for the time to be right.”

And what better time than after signing a mega-deal?

Yet neither Belladonna nor Elektra is crying foul. For Belladonna’s part, he’s getting a nice settlement from the new deal (terms were being worked out at press time) and Elektra has an option on his services as a solo act or with a new band he may put together. His attorney, Richard Josephs, told Pop Eye that the arrangement is satisfactory to his client and that there are no hard feelings.

But Elektra’s not getting the same band it signed. No matter who is the creative force in Anthrax, Belladonna has been a big part of its identity. So it seems a good bet that Elektra was aware of the imminent change before the deal was completed.

No one at the record company would talk about the situation, but one source close to the band, Rip magazine editor Lonn Friend, is charging that Elektra actually engineered Belladonna’s exit.

“The parting of the singer has been a long time in the making,” said Friend, a longtime friend of the band. “And (Elektra executives) Bob Krasnow and Steve Rabalsky not only were aware that the band was making that decision, but encouraged it. Elektra believed that Anthrax was a great band with a great future, but they saw Joey as being the weak cog in the machine.”

Josephs said that Friend’s theory was “news to me,” and that the split was purely over the standard “creative differences.” He also said that Belladonna has given him no reason to believe that Elektra forced the change.

“And I haven’t heard anything from anyone at Elektra or the group or management (to make me suspicious),” he said.