Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (11 page)

PRONG HAD JUST
put out a record called
Beg to Differ
, produced by Mark Dodson, and we all really loved the tone of it but we couldn’t get ahold of Mark for some reason. Then we thought about Max Norman, who did the Ozzy records, so he came down. Max was crazier than a fucking loon, drinking all the time, and he had this lazy eye so you never knew who or what the fuck he was looking at.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Max was going to produce this record, but his manager Ron Laffitte, who was a good friend of mine, kept dragging his feet and everyone wanted to get going into the studio right away. Here’s the thing: I knew that Max was holding out to produce a much bigger band than Pantera, but Max’s manager didn’t know I knew that. While all the delays with Max were going on, I told the Pantera guys about Terry Date because I managed him also. So I suggested Terry go down for the weekend to see how it goes with the condition that if Max got back to me, Terry would have to step down. I did hear from Max’s manager—three days after he was meant to call me—but by that time we’d agreed that Terry was the guy, and in retrospect I don’t think Max and Pantera would have been a good match; they’d have been trading blows within minutes—and I love Max!

When Terry Date came down he fit in perfectly. He was hungry, kind of middle class like us, really knew his shit, smoked weed, and didn’t really drink that much—which was good because we needed someone to be in control and, more important, keep us in control. We used to say, “Terry, produce me a beer!” It was his job to make sure there was just enough beer in the studio.

TERRY DATE

I really have no idea about who in the band requested me but I got involved because my ex-manager—who I’d left six months earlier—called me up and said he had a demo tape from this band from Texas that he really wanted me to listen to, which was
Cowboys from Hell
. I listened, really loved it, and flew down to meet them in Dallas. To my recollection they knew pretty much everything by then and when I came in they were very organized except for maybe a couple of songs. Rex, Vinnie, and Dime would work out the stuff first of all, and then Phil would come in and make sure it fit into his world. That’s how they worked. I never felt limited by one guitar player and one bass player either; in fact when it’s that guitar player and that bass player it’s actually a luxury.

Pantego Sound is located in a little subdivision section of town just outside of Arlington, and when you walk in the door there are parquet floors everywhere. There’s a drum room on one side of the building and a huge main room, so we started by putting nothing but eight by ten plywood sections on the main room floor. We wanted to get it as bright and lively as we possibly could, but we felt that the room was kind of dead. It had to be right because, for a record that needed to clearly demonstrate our aggressive intentions, we desperately wanted that “attack” kind of feel.

This was long before the days of Pro Tools or anything like that, so our approach was to play everything live on the floor, often without Phil’s vocals. So, if you wanted to play with a bass cabinet, which I mostly did, you still had to baffle stuff off with a 4 × 4 piece of wood or fiberglass—both of which serve to reflect the sound. Nowadays you wouldn’t have to do that, of course. Technology can get around that. You can just plug into a pod (basically a pre-amp) that modulates the sound and then sends the signal wherever you want it to go.

We’d all play on the floor while Vinnie was getting his drum track done, and just about every first take he did was the best. But because he was such a perfectionist, he usually ended up with twenty different drum tracks that he would endlessly analyze and say, “Well, I like how that part felt better there; let’s put that in there.”

Then he wouldn’t like that so they’d have to chop it back and forth while Dime and I would just be sitting there going, “Dude, this is fucking taking forever.” Vinnie’s drum tracks are what took most of our time in the studio. Plus, with a multi-reel recording system like we had, you actually had to physically cut tape with a razor blade, and know exactly where you cut it, then connect other pieces of tape together so that you can run it back and forth. It was a nightmare unless you happened to get it right on, and because Vinnie and Dime wanted to be so precise and technical, it would get to the point where we ran out of fucking razor blades and tape.

Because Vinnie had spent so much time in the studio with his old man as a kid, he was very technical-minded and already had a pretty good ear for what the sound was going to be like for the drums and guitar at least. But he didn’t know shit about bass and, back in the day, bass sounds weren’t really very noticeable anyway, particularly on heavy metal records. Because of our set-up, with only one guitar player with a huge sound like Darrell had, bass was an important feature of the makeup, albeit a real dipped sound (when the voltage output dips at high volume causing the sound to be compressed) that really added to the kick-drum. Bass was still sonically there, but it was always so hard to fit in with Darrell’s guitar. He always played with a little solid-state amp behind him and his signal path was fucking ridiculous.

I remember thinking his whole sound was just so overpowering. We often joked that if somebody else plugged into Darrell’s rig they could never sound like him. But if Darrell plugged into any other gear, he would always sound like himself. He was that unique.

His brother’s drums were overpowering, too, but for different reasons. Vinnie liked a lot of reverb because that was another sonic trend he had learned from his old man. There was an echo chamber underneath the drum platform and it was this huge spring that he loved the sound of, but sometimes I felt that it bordered on overshadowing the fucking song.

Dime always wanted me to play every riff pretty much as he did—sort of mirror it an octave lower—but as a trained jazz bass player, I wanted to incorporate more of an “okay, if you’re going to play way up high, we need someone on the bottom who’s going to syncopate with what you’re doing upstairs” type of thing. That was a major thought in the back of my mind. I didn’t want to always play what I played, but I was conscious of the fact that it’s easy, as a bass player, to step all over the melody. I just wanted a balance.

So while we all had a sense of what we wanted our individual parts to sound like, Terry Date’s job was to put it all together in a way that didn’t sound like four individual people, but like a tight-as-fuck band.

With most iconic records there’s always a moment that ignites the process, and ours was when Dime came up with the signature riff for the track “Cowboys from Hell” completely out of the blue. Of course at first we said, “What the fuck is this?” But as we gave it time and lived with it while driving around in the car for a couple of days, we realized it had this groove to it that suddenly gave us our own sound, something that we weren’t even conscious of trying to do. We just wanted to write the best songs we could and sequence them in such a way that would make a killer record, but this type of groove took us by surprise.

Technically,
Cowboys’
title track is one of those box riffs, because you’re playing inside of a box. What I mean is that it’s basically a blues scale, something we’d all probably picked up on from watching all these blues players in the clubs with the old man. Sure, Darrell could play all the other scales he wanted—scales you’ve never even fucking heard of, too—but if you really listened to what his essence was, you’re hearing a lot of blues, just at a faster tempo.

Terry Date was very smart because whenever anyone was in the room, he’d have tape rolling. So even if we were just sitting there fucking with a riff and not doing anything formal, he would always be recording so that we could go back at a later date and listen to what we had. Back then we couldn’t afford to roll two-inch tape—or at least not like someone like Tom Petty, who does it from the moment he walks in the studio—but we’d always have
something
rolling, even if it was just a basic cassette, so we could go back and say, “let’s try this part” or “let’s change that part” as we built new tracks.

“Cemetery Gates” was written while Dime and I sat in the office playing on acoustic guitars, mine being some big, orange Kramer acoustic bass that someone had bought me. He had the major riff already worked out but the intro part was all me and him, and I ended up playing acoustic guitar and piano in the finished song, which added a little texture.

We pretty much just jammed through all the songs to get a feel for them and make sure the formula was right—the bridge was here and the chorus was there and the whole bit. Then we’d get down to the lead section and say, “Okay, Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we going to do here? Do we change chords?” But we could always work it out.

“Primal Concrete Sledge” was one of the few songs that we didn’t have written and demoed before we got in the studio. It came off a drum pattern that Vinnie had and then the riff was built around it. Then we’d go section by section until it was all done, rough, punching everything on tape like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Then we made a copy and drove around listening to it for a day or two and that was the way that we decided if we were happy with what we’d come up with.

Getting the lyrics down for the record worked out pretty easily, too. We’d just give Phil the riff and he’d listen to the song and pretty much come back the next day with something. He’d ask for a few words or notes every once in a while, but the rest of it he did himself because, in that sense, he’s a genius. He was
always
writing. There was always a notepad and pen in his hands, and when he wasn’t doing anything else, he was writing ideas for songs and always took it, and everything else happening, very seriously.

I remember one night while we were making
Cowboys
when Phil came into the studio crying like a baby. His buddy Mike Tyson had gone down in Tokyo. Basically it looked like Tyson had gone over there, did a bunch of blow, didn’t train, and got his ass kicked. Well, for Phil it was like the world had ended.

“Fuck you all. Fuck every one of you motherfuckers,” I think he said.

“Dude, it’s a fucking boxing match,” I told him. Then I just sat there and laughed at how something so trivial matters so much to someone.

WALTER O’BRIEN

I was in and out of the studio while they did the record but only to listen and be excited about it and not to tell my band how to make a record. If I knew how to do that, I’d be making records myself! I trusted them and I trusted Terry, so I would just go in every couple of weeks just to make sure it was headed in the right direction. If I had problems, I’d let them know, but I never really had any problems.

Because we’d been organized and had everything demoed well in advance,
Cowboys from Hell
was probably done in a couple of months. We were already starting to go up to New York to showcase the band at places like L’Amour and the Cotton Club before the record was even mixed at the Carriage House in Connecticut. Going to our first real big mix was a trip, too, seeing how that all went down. At the end of the day we were all just bawling like kids saying, “Wow, what an awesome record.” And so at last
Cowboys
was ready to go and so were we.

Our image was new and so was the music. So while I would always acknowledge the pre-
Cowboys
material as being an important part of my personal musical development, we, as a band did make a conscious decision to distance ourselves from those first four records. We definitely wouldn’t have been as insanely tight as we’d gotten without those tough formative years, nor would we’ve been as bombastic as live performers—we knew that—but when
Cowboys
came out we all decided, “Look, that was our past, let’s let it be.”

CHAPTER 8

EARLY TOURS AND ANECDOTES

P
resumably to start immediately recouping their investment, Atco records wanted us out touring the record as quickly as possible, so even before the record came out in July 1990 we were out on the road in April, initially with Suicidal Tendencies and Exodus. Now that we had a foot in the door, it was time to start working.

WALTER O’BRIEN

I brought the band to a booking agent named John Ditmar, and I knew he’d be the guy to organize this and between us we used our contacts to get the band exposure. Normally metal bands would go out for eight weeks and then were done, but I said, “No, this band has got to work every day of the week for at least a year because that’s how you break a band.” You’ve got to play small places first and work your way up, not because you’re small, but because you want the fans to have that intimate connection—the kind that lasts a lifetime. So we’d tried to open for a bigger act but then we’d always go back and headline a smaller place and we rotated that; and we certainly weren’t going to pull the plug after eight weeks. Instead they played two hundred and sixty-four dates touring
Cowboys from Hell
in the U.S. alone…