Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (10 page)

We used that boat to do a lot of fishing and caught a shitload of bass. I remember we got lost once out in some body of water and Vinnie kept trying to direct us.

“Take a right. Take a right here,” he’d shout.

“Vince, you have no fucking idea where we are. It’s dark.” And there were these big stumps that stood up two feet out of the water, which of course we hit and the boat almost turned over many times. He was a bad-ass fucking drummer but a complete liability in many other ways, I’ll tell you.

WHEN WE WEREN’ T GETTING LOST
in the boat, Pantera was starting to gather this incredible fan base in town. We’d sell out every night and start making some pretty good dough playing places like the Basement, Joe’s Garage, Matlock’s, Dallas City Limits, and, of course, Savvy’s.

This was during what seemed to be a whole movement where people were getting into m-e-t-a-l music instead of pop-rock like Bon Jovi (we
never
covered their songs)—they even had to remodel Joe’s Garage to fit more people, and that became our home court. Yes, we still had the big, wild hair at the time, but that was just to look the part and get a foot in the door. Musically we were headed somewhere else, although I should mention that I definitely got more chicks wearing spandex and shit than I ever did after I started wearing simple shorts and a shirt.

So while our constant live presence was attracting a large local fan base, it was also grabbing the attention of other metal bands that came through town, which helped get our name out there. One night while Slayer were in town on the
South of Heaven
tour, they showed up at one of our gigs on a night off, and by the time the night was over, Kerry and Tom got on stage and started jamming on “Reign in Blood” with us. Next thing I know, Phil and Kerry are best buddies and Kerry’s sleeping on Phil’s couch. At one point I even thought that Kerry wanted to join the fucking band. That’s how intense it was.

Power Metal
came out in ’88, our first album with Phil on vocals, and although a lot of people like to say that we were playing a glam style of music, I think that’s a total misconception. Although the image we portrayed may have
looked
like other hair bands, the music we were playing was much heavier and showed more of a thrash metal influence from bands like Slayer and Metallica. It was still funded by all of us—we paid for all the studio time at Pantego Studio produced by the old man. We all felt this need to move our career up to the next step because we were still selling records and merchandise from the back of the car, which was very DIY non-professional.

Despite that, the record would go on to sell a hard-to-ignore 40,000 copies on Metal Magic Records—our own independent label—and it was no surprise when the major labels started looking closely after that. With the import guys up in San Francisco and another importer moving the record for us, we finally started seeing some decent cash come in.

Having label interest, which we had, and actually having a record deal are two different things. Something that definitely hadn’t helped us actually
secure
a major record deal was that we had a really shitty lawyer, even though Jerry Abbott really thought he’d hit the fuckin’ jackpot when he found the guy.

The way I see it, the real reason old man Abbott hired him was that he could mislead the dude and secure the rights to some of our early publishing and later, our
major
publishing. It was soon clear to us that this guy was no good, kind of washed up, and he definitely wasn’t getting the point across as to what Pantera was all about. We kept telling Jerry that we had to change something—get another lawyer—because this guy wasn’t doing fucking anything for us, but looking back it seems clear that he had his own reasons for leaving things as they were.

The frustration was getting to us. We already had demos for what would later become
Cowboys from Hell,
had the thing pretty much in the can, and here we were trying to live this dream but the rejection began to get really monotonous. Every major label we talked to said the same thing: “No, we drop.” “No, we’ll pass.” “No, we can’t do this.” “Send us more material”—every excuse you can think of. We seemed to be getting nowhere while our peers were going everywhere.

Case in point, Metallica—who were roughly our age—would soon be out playing stadiums with Van Halen, but before they did, they came through town again while they were in the studio recording ...
And Justice for All.
Every time we got together with these guys, it just got dumber and dumber. We’d go out with them to a strip bar, and Lars would just pick someone out and say, “This is on
your
tab.” We barely had money to buy cigarettes, far less huge drink rounds. We were all still surviving on two hundred bucks a week at this time, and I remember going out to a tit bar with these guys and it was seven bucks a shot.

“Dude, we’re all fucking broke,” I told him, when his finger finally pointed in my direction to pay a tab which included several rounds of shots.

“This round is on
you
!” Lars said again, so Dime and I just walked out the door of this tit bar and left Vinnie sitting there.

On another one of these nights we were sitting outside some club and they were playing us their new record; there’s no bass on it and they’re laughing their asses off saying: “We got this new guy Jason and we’re fucking with him—we’re just not going to put his bass in the mix.” They were fucking
howling
about it and I guess they saw it as their way of harassing him.

I’m saying, “So where’s the bass?” and they just said, “Ha ha, it’s not on it.” There’s been a lot of debate and speculation about that issue over the years as to whether it was an intentional attempt to humiliate Jason Newsted, and we heard it straight from their mouths. They meant it.

HEAVY MUSIC WAS
really changing in ’89. It seemed like there was this whole different brand of music appearing on the horizon that’d soon be labeled Alternative: the first Jane’s Addiction record, the live one; Faith No More; Voivod; and Soundgarden—all these kinds of bands who put out crushing records. So we absorbed these influences along with what we’d taken from what Metallica had done, and created our own thing.

CHAPTER 7

WE’RE TAKING OVER THIS TOWN

M
ark Ross, an A&R guy who worked for Atco Records, was stuck in town sometime in the fall of ’89 because of Hurricane Hugo, so he decided to see us play. His boss, Derek Shulman, had already shown an interest in signing us, but he needed to know what we were all about live, so this seemed like a good opportunity to send one of his employees to see Pantera firsthand, and he certainly picked an unusual night.

We were playing a private birthday party in some strip mall in Dallas—certainly not our regular scene—and by the time we started playing, we’d all taken ecstasy. When Mark Ross turned up, the chick whose birthday it was had slipped on the birthday cake and there was icing all over the floor, and we were sliding around and dancing in it trying to have fun. Being on X makes you do goofy shit like that. Mark had seen that we didn’t take things too seriously. We wanted it to be badass shit, of course, and we took it seriously
enough
, but in between songs we were cut-ups and threw cake at each other like a bunch of classroom clowns.

Just a few minutes after showing up, Mark Ross left the place, at which point I turned to Vinnie and said, “He split, the dude’s gone.” After so many rejections, we were used to this same shit: rejection and people leaving. But then he came back.

The long and short of it is that over the next few months a bidding war would erupt over who was going to sign Pantera. Atco wanted us bad, and at the same time we were thinking about going with Roadrunner, but sometime in December Darrell turned up at my door holding a record contract from Atco Records, part of the Warner Music Group. That opened the door for us to go into the studio to record our first major label record
Cowboys from Hell
, a title that Phil came up with and which in all our minds suggested a kind of southern menace.

Our mentality was clear from the lyrics of the title track: “We’re taking over this town.” We felt like saying, “Here we are. Fuck you, and we’re going to destroy you, so if you don’t like it, fucking leave.” This was the kind of attitude we cultivated to survive. We were all, as individuals and a group, very single-minded and strong-willed about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go.

CHERYL PONDER

Mother was so proud of Rex when they signed a contract and of course she was so pleased that it was finally going to work out. But it wasn’t without a lot of sleeping on other people’s couches, particularly when he hadn’t been getting along with her. She was relieved that his decision to pursue music had finally paid off.

But understand this beyond a doubt: neither Jerry Abbott nor the idiot lawyer got us that record deal, but the lawyer certainly collected his fee, you can guarantee that. It was
our
hard work, dedication, and word of mouth that got us the break we deserved. Despite this, Jerry Abbott made sure he would collect ridiculous royalties on the back of our hard work. So I was really pissed that despite having signed our first major label deal, we were still getting shortchanged. Yeah, that happened to pretty much every band, I guess, but I was bummed out we were not the exception to that rule despite my best efforts to be as clued-in as much as possible about how the business side of things worked.

As part of the Atco deal, we also started a management relationship with Walter O’Brien and his Concrete Management Company that would guide us until the band disbanded in 2003.

WALTER O’ BRIEN
(Pantera’s former manager)

The band had reached out to me during the
Power Metal
days, well before the Atco deal, but I never really followed through on it at the time because they were basically a very different band. I had a connection with Atco because I’d gotten Metal Church out of their deal with Elektra and brought them to him. To cut a long story short, he didn’t want them but he did want Pantera, and he wanted me to manage them. I wasn’t all that thrilled and Derek said, “Yeah, but you haven’t heard this?” and he was referring of course to the
Cowboys from Hell
demo tapes. I was blown away and it sounded like the future of heavy metal. Mark Ross, who had seen them already, tried to get me to come down to Texas to see them live, and I hesitated for a few days. The night he was leaving he called me again and said, “Look, it’s your last chance, I’m leaving now for the airport and if you leave now you can still make it. If you don’t like them, I’ll pick up your airfare and your hotel bill.” I said, “You know what, I don’t have anything else to do and if you’re that serious, what the hell.” So I went down there and met him and the band beforehand at a place called Dallas City Limits, and the band was funny. The first thing Rex said was, “We want you to come onstage to do a cover of ‘Green Manalishi’!” He was totally kidding of course, but when I saw this band come out onstage and explode, I’d never seen anything like it. Rex and Dime were like alternating jumping as high as they could; Phil was climbing up the drum kit and flying in the air and by the second or third song I was literally on my knees at the side of the stage saying, “Please let me manage you.” I wouldn’t say we did a handshake deal but as far as I was concerned it was just a matter of paperwork. I was in. If they didn’t want me, that was another story.

Other than the fact that we were still using his studio, the old man was now frozen out of the deal. He was no longer our manager nor was he our producer, as Terry Date had been approached to look after the production after Phil and I had really gotten into what he did with Soundgarden’s
Louder Than Love
record. But Terry wasn’t our first choice or even our second.