Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (35 page)

While
Down II
was a great piece of music drawing from a bewildering array of influences, and a record that I had considerable personal investment in, its successor’s main strength and depth lay in its message. For all of us involved,
Down III—Over the Under
was about overcoming a whole lot of negative things that engulf us: personal tragedy, addiction, and Katrina being three of the most obvious. Sometimes you can’t control these things and so you’re faced with a dilemma: be angry and bitter, or take control and just get over it. We chose the latter. We wanted to put out a positive message to show that tough times could make us stronger.

“On March the Saints” was the pivotal song on the record and the kind of song you’d want ten of on any record you ever make. It was focused and direct right from the point where Kirk Windstein came up with the riff and I added the bass line. Then Philip added vocals over the top and we had this monster hard rock song that celebrated the resilience of New Orleans in the wake of natural disaster.

While Pantera’s bloodline was still intact because of the fact that two of its members were in Down, both Phil and I viewed Down as something completely separate, perhaps even more than it was when we’d started it as a side project back in ’98. While we understood that fans might also hope to see something of Pantera in us, that was something we tried to distance ourselves from. We both went through a lot after Darrell’s death—in different ways, too—and I personally felt that my musical journey had to keep moving forward, but still maintain a healthy amount of respect for the past.

WE HIT THE ROAD
with Metallica in 2008 as support on their World Magnetic Tour and that whole experience was significant for me for a few reasons. I’d just been through rehab and I know for a fact that James Hetfield went through hell while he was trying to address his problems. Pepper Keenan is one of James’s best friends, so he knows exactly how strong James had to be to deal with his issues.

There are two James’s that I know and they run kind of parallel to each other. There’s the one that kind of doesn’t say a whole lot but when he walks in a room there’s a presence that makes you shut up. Then there’s a side to him that you only see when you sit down with him one on one, which I got the opportunity to do when we were on the road together.

James and I became close because we’re in the same kind of fraternity, if that makes sense. I’m an alcoholic and he shared some of my issues, so we’d sit and talk and I got to know a completely new side of him. We’d talk every night about certain stuff—it didn’t have to be about recovery—but we continually bonded. We talked about the spiritual aspect of dealing with the kind of lifestyle that we’ve both endured and he became crucial to me being healthy. He’d be on a jet somewhere while we’d be riding eighteen hours on a bus to get to the show, but he and I would text each other back and forth to maintain the new friendship we’d created. I’d sit and watch Metallica every night from the same spot at the side of the stage, and at the same point in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” he’d come over and hit my hand and I’d stand there thinking, “This is the guy that I met over twenty years ago in Dallas and now they’ve sold a hundred million records.” I couldn’t believe that they had come full circle like this.

While Pantera were on top of the world in mid- to late ’90s, Metallica were the band that everyone missed while they were doing all the
Load
and
Reload
stuff, and James himself had gone from being really distant and someone I really didn’t know to someone who was open and caring toward me. I was always respectful of him when I was around him and that’s something that a lot of people forget about. When someone’s geared up and about to get onstage in front of twenty thousand people, they need that kind of respect to allow them to go ahead and do their job. It can’t be party, party all the time.

Despite being a control fucking freak, James is a very, very knowledgeable, down-to-earth person. He’s been in control from the very start despite Lars being the spokesman. You’ve seen the movie
Some Kind of Monster
? Well, what happened to Metallica was not dissimilar to what happened in Pantera, in that the tensions were caused by years of living, breathing, and shitting together. You could say that James had problems when that film was shot, but they
all
had fucking problems for the same reasons that we had. And as I learned finally, it doesn’t get any happier until you get yourself into a place where you make the connection between your health and your happiness. If you take care of mind, body and soul, everything else that comes is just a blessing.

After you’ve been through all the shit that rock ’n’ roll takes you through and you get clean, sober, and start to recover from the disease, you really start to look at your life and say, “Thank you.” When you’re out there drinking and the whole bit, none of that “thankful” stuff matters. You don’t even stop to think about it, so you can lose yourself very easily in thinking you’re a god, and I say that from personal experience.

Touring with Down was a completely different experience than it was with Pantera, particularly outside of the U.S., and the reasons for that were that I was much more open to new experiences than I had been when I was younger and because some of the other guys, Pepper Keenan in particular, wanted to get out of the hotel to go and visit whatever’s around that’s worth seeing. I would never in a million years have wanted to go to Tel Aviv when I was in Pantera because I had preconceived (and inaccurate) notions of what it might be like. Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. Turns out Tel Aviv is not unlike walking down a beautiful American beach. Like walking down Santa Monica.

We cancelled the first time we got offered a chance to play there, but Pepper was so adamant we go that we took the next offer that came. The place we stayed at was nothing spectacular, but it was one block from the beach and I went surfing every day with Pepper. The surf was great, too, even though it almost killed me on the last day. There was an American restaurant and bar nearby, completely unexpected, right there on the boardwalk at the beach, and it was just perfect.

CHAPTER 22

SEVEN ’TIL SEVEN NO ONE KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN

D
espite being in a far different headspace than I’d been in for many years, I was still in a lot of pain in 2009 and 2010. I eventually couldn’t take it anymore and went to my doctor and said, “Doc, something’s really killing me. I’m in a lot of pain” and he jumped to an incorrect conclusion straight away by saying, “Well, Rex, you’ve got to quit drinking.”

I told him the truth: “Dude, I haven’t had a drink in over a year.” So he goes, “Okay, let’s get a CT scan then,” but that didn’t show up anything, and neither did the initial MRIs. Finally I got turned on to doctors at the United Methodist hospital in Dallas by some friends of mine who’d heard of a trial procedure that had yielded a very high success rate. During a 3D MRI scan they finally established that my pancreas was full of stones, or polyps if you want to be more medically precise.

The condition was called acute pancreatitis, and they told me that I also had some issues with my gall bladder and that it would have to be removed. It could have been the booze that caused all these issues, yes, but equally, this condition can occur in anyone between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, and I was right on the upper edge of that category. And it can be fatal.

So they said to me, “Here’s the way it’s going to go. We’ll try to get as many of these stones from your pancreas as we possibly can.” So I went in about five times for non-invasive surgery. Then I got a rare form of ultrasonic treatment that blasted my stomach, again to try and dislodge some of these stones, but that didn’t work either. What next?

We had been talking for a while about something called a Puestow procedure, in which they basically cut you in half; then they cut the pancreas in half, too, get all the stones out, and then you’re good to go, except for the gaping hole in your fucking stomach. I was in the hospital for three weeks and I had a team of five looking after me around the clock while I got this relatively rare treatment.

When I got out of hospital after the treatment, I was only at the beginning of the rehabilitation process. I barely had a foot in the door. I still had to go back for regular check-ups, and during one of them they found that they’d sewn me up with a surgical stint still lodged in there. This uppity dude said, “Hey, I’m the one that sewed you up.” And I’m like, “Great, but I’ve found out there’s a band in there that you forgot to cut.” So, I was in and out of there non-stop, pain after pain. I was taking a lot of fucking pain medication, and it wasn’t helping at all. The years of abusing my system had finally caught up with me, and it was going to be a long process to reverse the effects. Worse still, it looked like I was going to have to learn to live with a considerable degree of pain as my punishment.

To deal with it, the doctors prescribed me oxycodone, which is an analgesic medicine derived from poppies, and it’s very heavy-duty shit. But it does help with easing the pain.

The downside is that it also causes some side effects, and in my case the most common one was anxiety, something I’d been self-medicating for years as evidenced by my spiraling alcohol dependency. I was no longer advised to drink alcohol, so I continued taking Klonopin in order to combat the anxiety of not drinking, and the side effects caused by the pain meds. Sounds like a lot of medication, doesn’t it? Well, it is and I really need to be careful. The penalties involved with any kind of alcohol relapse had been doubled after the pancreas surgery. Isn’t it funny how life works.

TERRY GLAZE

Even when we were young—and maybe I shouldn’t say this—I always thought that it would be Rex that went first because I thought his body would give out. Whether it would be his liver, a heart attack, or whatever; but not in a million years did I think it would be Darrell. We all have those people that we look at and say, “They are the one.” And Rex was that guy within the band. The funny thing about Rex is that he remembers every fucking thing.
Everything
. I was talking to him the other day and I said to him, “Rex, didn’t we play a show somewhere when Carmine Appice got up onstage with us?” He goes, “Yeah, it was Cardy’s in Houston in 1984.” “What song did we play?” and Rex immediately said, “Bark at the Moon” by Ozzy. And I said, “How the fuck do you
remember
that?” But that’s typical of Rex.

I rejoined Down on the road for a while and we began the initial process of working out some ideas for a new bunch of songs. My life continued uneventfully, despite the occasional glitch on the road, and over time I recovered my strength. I was still dealing with chronic pain on a daily basis. It seemed like the regular medical services available only want to send you on a wild-goose chase in search of solutions. Pain management doctors are in cahoots with every other part of the chain it seems, so it’s really hard to get definite answers on the best way to deal with the daily pain.

On the marriage front, Belinda and I had continual ups and downs, when we split up and got back together again, until we amicably separated in 2011 after we both agreed that it would be better for all concerned if we lived apart.

From a musical perspective, my life was also in transition. After a guest appearance on an Arms of the Sun record that appeared in 2011, and enjoying the process of playing a few live shows at places that we’d frequented during our club days, Philip Anselmo and I parted ways, maybe for the last time.

I left Down in 2011 for two reasons. First, I wanted a fresh start with another band to see where my musical journey would take me. Second, I was tired of dealing with some of the hypocrisy regarding lifestyle choices within the band. Philip and I had been working together for almost twenty-five years, and while we complement each other in many ways musically and will always be brothers in a spiritual sense, it was time for our paths to diverge, and for each of us to do our own thing away from the shadow of Pantera’s legacy, while still carrying Darrell’s spirit with us.

RITA HANEY

My line has softened over the years since Darrell’s death, probably because I feel an element of forgiveness and a desire for everybody to get along. No matter what ever happened, nobody did this to Darrell. I mean they—Rex and Philip—didn’t. The person who did it did it, and no matter what reason the killer—if he was still alive today—could give to justify that, it wouldn’t change anything. But when you go through something like this, you want to lay blame somewhere. Obviously I had resentment to Rex and Philip because I had to watch Darrell trying to save his band. I wanted to fix it for him. As far as Philip is concerned, we are at least communicating, albeit on a fairly surface level. We haven’t talked about any deep things like resentments because I’ve told him that I still harbor some resentment for how he handled band issues and how that impacted Darrell and I’ve made that very clear to him. And it’s hard for me to trust him. But we’ll see. It’s a start and in time we’ll probably sit down face to face.