Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (28 page)

Fucking
hell
…

I’m all for ink, got a load of it myself, but who the fuck tattoos their
dick
?

I thought, “I didn’t need to see that. That’s waaaaaay too much.” But Dime thought this guy was the baddest dude ever and they were just perfect for each other, completely over the top, crazy motherfuckers. In fact I used to think that Dime would have turned out just like him if he was still alive. They were just so similar.

There were lots of other people coming out of the woodwork by now, too—most of them assholes who hung around Dime. They had tattoos of
him
and the whole bit. They’d come up to me and say, “You don’t remember me?” To fuck with them. I’d sometimes just say, “Am I supposed to? Did we have a child together?”

“Well, I was on the bus back in …” (fill in the place/time).

“Don’t you think there were
other
people on the bus, too?” I’d ask.

Dime and Vinnie seemed to just love having trashy-ass people around them after shows, and I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore.

RITA HANEY

As their career moved forward and they became more successful, I wouldn’t say that they changed as people, but the people who hung around them
definitely
changed. Some of their best friends had the mentality that said, “Okay, you’ve made it. You’re rich, so that means that you pay for dinner every night and buy all the drinks.” I don’t think they even realized they were doing it. But if one of the band guys refused for some reason, all of a sudden they are the dick! At first, everybody was happy-go-lucky and they were going places, but that changed as the people around them changed.

As far as dealing with fans
at
shows was concerned, I’d always sign all the autographs that I possibly could, and depending on what mood Phil was in, I’d get him to do the same. It was really important to me that I made myself available.

I’d go into his dressing room to get him and he’d say, “Man, did you sign everybody and stuff?,” hoping that I’d done enough that he didn’t have to.

I’d say, “Dude, that’s part of the gig. You know we’ve got to do it.”

“All right, let’s go and do it,” he’d eventually say, and we’d go outside and sign all the kid’s shit. That was one way that he and I motivated each other. Even if it was raining outside, you’d have kids who sat there a long time, all day long sometimes, waiting to get a glimpse, so the least we could do was get some kind of idea about what they were doing. See us from their perspective. It felt like the least I could do. It might be twenty fucking degrees out there and you still had some kid in a t-shirt waiting to get something signed. “Please buddy, put a jacket on, you’re going to get sick tomorrow,” I’d tell them. “It’s not worth that just to meet us.”

I’d put a towel over my head and just get out there even in the pouring down rain. Of course sometimes Phil just didn’t feel like going out. His back hurt too much or he wasn’t looking good enough to go out there—hungover or too drugged out—so I’d sometimes make the decision for him. But all in all, he at least understood how much it meant to the kids and we’d both sign until there were no more kids waiting. We carried that mentality we’d had in the club scene in Dallas in the early days around with us because we always tried to hang out with our fans. We’d just sit out in the parking lot, drinking beer and doing stupid shit with the kids as if we were one of them. Another reason for being there for our fans was that we saw a lot of bands over the years that
didn’t
do that.

Obviously it got much harder when things got going on a bigger scale, but our record was getting twenty-five hundred people signed in an hour and a half, and it was our duty to be personable to every last one of them, “Hey man, what’s going on? Sorry I can’t sit and jam with you but we have to move down the line.” I always felt that I had to respect the fans to some degree because they were the ones paying my fucking bills, but it doesn’t come down to that completely.

To me the music—or rather their appreciation of it—came first and foremost. Currency—whether it was fifteen or twenty bucks to see the show—was just a piece of paper that said, “I’m here to see the band jam. To live the experience.” That’s how I viewed the fans, rather than just as someone paying my electric bill. So it was most important to me that we put on a killer show for them.

AROUND THIS TIME,
and while we stopped back home on a break, my wife and I moved out of the house that was beside Vinnie, into a bigger house on the golf course at Rolling Hills Country Club. I used the place for socializing with the guys I’d always played golf with over the years. I’d assembled a group of friends, guys who belonged to different associations in town but who all liked to play golf, hang out at the country club, have a few drinks, and the whole bit. What I liked best about this group of guys was that they all saw me as just a normal person.

The money was still really good, so I could still afford to buy things like this big fucking house and a huge grill from Barbecue Galore to sit in an outside kitchen, a big eight-foot-long fucker. I’d buy meat in bulk and keep it in the freezer. When I knew I had a bunch of people coming over, I’d pull one out to defrost on the morning prior. We were always throwing cocktail parties, and I was well known for my secret method of grilling rump roast, kind of a variation on prime rib.

I had a pretty set routine in those days. I’d get up at around ten thirty in the morning, have a couple of bourbons, and then hit the links for the day. I’d grab my golf cart and I was gone. This was my hobby and I played golf religiously, in order to jam the light switch into the off position.

Golf was my getaway, my escape. I just did not want to be around anything to do with the band unless I absolutely had to. Twenty of us played all day long, then it’d be happy hour at Rex’s house.

I met some folks who were members at Colonial Country Club, which was the Augusta National of Texas in terms of prestige, and was also the place that my dad and I used to sit and watch on TV, back on the couch in De Leon. My dad never got to play the course but I did. It’s an unbelievable golf course—one of the peaches of the South—and I got invited maybe ten times to play in the pro-am at the annual PGA tour event.

ONE OF THE MANY DAYS
I was playing at Rolling Hills, I got to the eleventh green and suddenly had a strange sense of spiritual awareness. I just felt something. We were fixin’ to stop playing for the day anyway, so I said to the guys, “Look, I have to go.” I drove the golf cart in, told my wife, “I’m going to the hospital real quick.” I knew something was up. I didn’t change clothes, just jumped in my car, and went where I knew I needed to go.

Darrell and Vinnie’s mom Carolyn had been diagnosed with lung cancer only a few weeks earlier—which was a shock in itself—and she was being treated in the local hospital in Arlington. She had been like a second mother to me in my teens, and her condition seemed pretty bad. In fact, it was worse than it looked. She passed away ten minutes after I got there. Something or somebody told me that I had to get off the golf course and go down there. Was it God? Who knows, but a voice definitely said, “Get down there and say your goodbyes. She’s going.”

Obviously the brothers did not take it at all well—they were very close to their mother. Her death really affected them for a long time, long after
Reinventing the Steel
, which finally came out in March 2000 and landed at number 4 on the charts. We liked the album for sure and dedicated it to our fans, but we had no idea it would be our swan song.

CHAPTER 17

THE DOWNFALL!!

You’ve gotten this far in the book and you probably think I’m some kind of fucking angel. Sure, I’d cracked a few skulls in junior high, ripped off the guys at Fotomat, and rolled a few joints here and there, but that’s just what you’d expect from a rock ’n’ roller, isn’t it? Par for the course, I’d say. But what were we like as people?

It’s pretty simple: Phil had had his problems, Vinnie pulled his occasional bullshit, and Dime was just Dime. By 2000 and leading into 2001, the band was hanging by the thinnest of threads and the slightest disturbance could have caused that thread to snap. It was a completely dysfunctional situation that had crept up and bitten us all on the ass.

For me personally—and remember this is my book and a commentary of events from my perspective and mine alone—I didn’t really start getting concerned about any aspect of my lifestyle until I had to deal with the consequences of my actions. People have different ideas about what actually constitutes a “consequence,” of course—different levels of tolerance and the whole bit—but for me, consequences are things that make you sit up and pay attention because they actually impact your daily life.

It could be related to health, family, the law, or finance, anything that impacts your life in a way that forces you to change your patterns. I always tried to stay away from the law as much as possible throughout my life. In general terms I don’t like putting myself in harm’s way, and when you break the law, that’s basically what you’re doing. I never ever felt I was above the law in any form or fashion either, which is something that can easily happen when you’re in the public eye.

So up until this point, I didn’t really have to deal with any of the consequences of my drinking other than the hangover. I was on the road, living the life, and I never had any problems from the drinking until 2000 (also the year my twin kids were born), when I first noticed that I was having stomach problems, presumably from years of alcohol abuse. I was waking up in the middle of the night—on those nights when I didn’t have a mini-bar on hand—with the shakes, the whiskey jitters, the DTs, whatever you want to call them. These symptoms, in my mind, added up to a consequence.

Mentally, alcohol was always on my mind, particularly toward the end of the band, but again, not enough to make me take any extreme measures. But it was creeping up on me. You see, alcohol gradually affects your central nervous system and before you know it, you’re at a point where you
have
to have it, even when you’re at home and outside the normal confines of your drinking, and that made the whole light switch thing harder and harder for me to turn off and be there for the kids. I could still just about take a day off booze, and as a compromise on some days I tried to not drink until five o’clock. But as they say, it’s always five o’clock
somewhere
.

My lifestyle was such that I was used to being up until fucking four in the morning, and that doesn’t work when you’re at home with very young children. It meant that Belinda and I were living separate lives under the same roof when the kids were babies, and that’s when I began to feel
isolated
by my lifestyle—being a dad at home with kids should have been a feeling of pure joy.

The truth is that kids change pretty much everything, including your close friends’ perception of you. I’ve thought about this for a few years now, but I really think that Dime was jealous of the fact that I had kids. I think he felt that they were now my main focus in my life as opposed to him, the band, or whatever, and I don’t think he was ever really comfortable with that.

Phil’s approach to life was always fairly consistent for half a decade. He was all about extremes in every fucking thing he did. That’s how it is with him and it’s the extreme that gets him off. If it’s sport, he’s into boxing. If it’s horror films, it’s hardcore gore stuff. Black Metal records, Death Metal records, whatever; he’s just into the extreme edge of
anything
. In keeping with that type of personality, he also had an extremely sensitive side to him that he never ever presented publicly—other than in his lyrics—and because he and I lived together forever, I had seen it.

Dime, putting aside his obvious musical abilities, was always a character and always gave you a run for your money. He was real witty, very charismatic, and always on the spot. On one hand he usually seemed to choose the right words to speak and on the other he’d sometimes make ridiculous comments because he had no idea
what
to say, and he did both in press conferences. Of course the blinking red light of the camera can make you say things that you wouldn’t normally say, so he and I both found it easier to turn into some kind of zombie and shut down rather than opening up. Sometimes journalists would rub us up the wrong way and that just made us want to shut down even more. Thankfully Vinnie was always happy to do the interviews.