Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (12 page)

We rode in something that could only be described as a fucking bucket of bolts. This thing was like a mobile home and it never stopped moving, day after day, night after night, except for the eighteen or so times that the fucking thing broke down along the way. For a lot of the time we didn’t even have working headlights, so one of us had to hold the wires together when we saw a vehicle coming in the opposite direction so that we’d be visible.

Forget beds, all you had to rest in was a chair that would lean back only just far enough to allow you to sleep on it. But you didn’t sleep. It was cramped, there was too much noise and it was a hundred degrees. The only time it wasn’t a hundred degrees was when it was a thousand degrees.

WHILE PHIL HAD UPPED
his game significantly as a vocalist on the record, he was still trying to find himself as a front man, a true performer, so Suicidal Tendencies were great road mates for us. Mike Muir was a fucking huge influence on him, and I’m sure Phil would acknowledge that. Mike has this demeanor onstage that makes you not want to fuck with him, and Phil definitely wanted that same vibe. He saw the respect that Mike got because of it, so that’s where a lot of his tough guy front man shtick comes from for sure.

DESPITE THE BRUTAL LACK
of comforts, this was one of the best tours we ever did as far as exposure was concerned, and we were also able to keep things much more simple than they would become when we became a much bigger band.

Sound check? Forget it. Writing down a set list each night? Fuck that. We just got up there and fucking ripped.

In lots of ways it was a culture shock because it took us to cities that we’d never visited before—most we’d never even heard of—and that forced us to grow up real quick. None of us had ever really left the roost before and we had survived on short, touring trips around the Southwest, places no more than a few hours from home, before returning to the familiarity of Texas. This time it was different. We were fucking miles from home, but we were so psyched to be out there that it just didn’t matter. “Fuck you all” was our approach. These motherfuckers were going to know that Pantera had been in their town, and we showed up in more than half of the fifty states and Canada while we were out on that first big tour.

While we were in Toronto, sometime before Christmas 1990, playing at a place called the Diamond Club, we caught the attention of Rob Halford, who saw us being interviewed—Dime wearing a
British Steel
t-shirt—on the TV in his hotel room. His band Judas Priest was also in town. I think he then contacted Darrell, came to the club, and next thing he’s up playing “Metal Gods” and “Grinder” with us on stage, songs we used to play when we were doing covers in the Texas clubs.

Soon after that, an offer came to go to Europe with Judas Priest, on that leg of their Painkiller tour, and by this time we thought we were pretty good at touring. It was three months of us and Annihilator sharing a bus, and at that time nobody in Europe really knew who the fuck we were. But we didn’t care. We were invincible and we would make them know who we were, right? We were eighteen swinging dicks on one bus, and it just wasn’t fun. A couple of them got their asses kicked a few times, but we got along all right, mainly.

PLAYING WITH PRIEST
presented more problems than you would think because when you’re opening for a band like them, crowds get antsy to see the main act: they throw bottles of piss and whatever and sometimes they don’t give a shit about the support band, on principle. That wasn’t the case with Pantera, though. More people got us than didn’t. That’s how Pantera were—we raged so hard and sounded so good, they had to like us.

We were also so damn lucky but were too young and gung-ho to even realize. Here we were, a bunch of dumb-ass kids out of Texas playing places in Europe like the K.B. Hallen in Copenhagen, where real bands had played before us—Zeppelin, the Beatles—you know, the really big league, man, about which I’d read in books like
Hammer of the Gods
and shit like that. I loved reading about the drama of rock’n’ roll bands and what they did on tour, so these places actually meant something to me.

I JUST WISH
I’d spent more time looking around all these towns—seeing significant landmarks and exploring the culture—instead of lying crashed-out in the hotel room, but you just don’t see that at the time when you’re young and new to the scene. Yes we wanted to take on the world when we were onstage, but we just didn’t dig Europe at all; it was really foreign to us. We were so used to having pennies in our pockets and going down and getting bean burritos at the 7-11. That’s basically the kind of shit we lived on: anything we could possibly afford. A sandwich here, a meal from some chick there, whatever, so it was really weird eating this food that we had never tasted before.

Here, they only gave us so many loaves of bread and so many pieces of cheese and meat; if you weren’t up early, tough shit. Dime and I used to roll out of bed at 3 p.m. and everything would be fucking gone so we ended up just drinking beer instead.

Of course Dime and Vinnie just wanted their mom’s franks and beans or their spaghetti cooked just like she normally cooked it, but you just don’t get that over in Europe. Phil and I were a little more open-minded, but it still took a lot of adjustment. You can only eat chicken fucking cutlets so many times in Germany after all. It tastes like the same piece of shit that you had the day before, and it’s the blandest-tasting food that you can ever eat. The same applies to England. I love shepherd’s pie and fish ’n’ chips, but is that all there is to fucking eat over there? Maybe I missed the other stuff or went to the wrong places, but there definitely seemed to be a lack of variety.

Although some aspects of the Priest tour were on a big scale because we were out with one of the biggest metal bands on the planet, don’t think for a second that we were throwing money around. We hardly had any. Once we’d fixed food and done our laundry, there wasn’t a whole lot left out of the fifteen-dollar-per-day allowance we were supposed to survive on. As always, there were perks here and there, but nothing major; we were always provided with beer for example, but we found out in the end that the truck driver had been fucking stealing it all for most of the tour so he truly got his ass kicked—almost lost his jaw and his eye sockets, and the whole fucking thing.

GUY SYKES
(Pantera’s tour manager)

The band invested their first advance check from Winterland [a huge merchandise company that had floated us twenty-five thousand dollars] on this tour, and this was back in the days when merch companies actually wrote advance checks, but they hated Europe. First of all there wasn’t a lot of money. Secondly, the crews of older school bands didn’t treat opening acts with much respect. So here we were: a bunch of guys who drank like we drank, and combine that with the fact that we were sharing a tour bus then, you can see how it was uncomfortable. In fact we only got two hotel rooms the whole three-month tour. The tour started in Copenhagen in the end of January 1991, so it was bitter cold and Europe pre the Euro. Different currency, different plugs, different everything so, from that aspect they didn’t enjoy it.

Despite the fact they were a huge band that we totally looked up to, the Judas Priest guys were good to us and there’s a reason for that. Not only did we respect them as our seniors, but we also were huge fans and had survived playing their stuff in the clubs, so to us it was like a dream come true to be out touring with them. Me and Phil played Ping-Pong with K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton every night and they would fucking kill us; those guys were good. It was weird playing Ping-Pong with your idols, but we soon realized that they were just regular guys, and totally full of shit. We didn’t see a whole lot of Rob Halford, though, he was pretty reclusive. But because Scott Travis was the only American in the band, we hung out with him a lot.

GUY SYKES

Judas Priest was one of several bands that Pantera toured with that they genuinely looked up to, so from that point of view the boys were like kids in a candy store. Pantera got along with everyone, simply because they’d spent so much of their early career entertaining the bar crowd, so they were always in a party mood.

DURING THE THREE-MONTH
touring schedule, there were a few days in between where we had the chance to spend some down time together, which was something we had never done before. Vinnie and I got into playing a lot of golf, and whenever we had some time, we’d find a nice golf course and go play. That became our escape in future years, and as we earned more money, the stakes for these golf games with Vinnie and some of the crew just kept getting higher.

I have no idea who came up with this idea, but we decided to take a skiing trip on a day off—because Priest were on a night off or something that night, as I recall—and headed to the Swiss Alps. Now, I had been a good skier since I was ten or eleven years old, so I had no problem whatsoever with the whole deal, but none of the other guys had even been on skis before, and they had no fucking clue what they were doing.