Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (9 page)

We saw Metallica when they supported Raven in ’83 or ’84, but never got a chance to meet them. Rita Haney—a chick who was always hanging around Dime—did know them, so then in ’85, when they came back through town with W.A.S.P and Armored Saint, we got to hang out with them. I remember being completely in awe of them and their music because they were doing exactly what we hoped we could do. That experience really had a big impact on me and Dime in particular. Even at that time Hetfield was the kind of guy who you just
let
talk—very, very serious and you got the sense that there was something grilling upstairs but you were never sure what it was.

But he and Lars let Dime and I jam with them at Savvy’s on a few songs from their first record, and from that point the friendship was set. Let’s just say that jamming on some Metallica tracks with these guys made me think that we, too, could reach that kind of level and break out of the Texas scene into something way bigger. They were our idols, and remember, they were nowhere near the band they would become when they really blew up. But even at this stage they had a street-wise attitude to being on the road that we really admired and the various levels of debauchery that it involved.

They had a chick in every town that they nicknamed “the Edna’s”—someone they were fucking on every trip—and because we knew an “Edna” in our town, that was our standing joke with them from that point on.

We also ran into Marc Ferrari of Keel at a show somewhere, and when he heard our demo tape he went on this mission to help promote us with a view to getting us signed. That’s how we got the word around. It really stuck with him and whenever he had a break from tour he’d take a two-week sabbatical to help us out. His enthusiasm really put a foot in the door for us whenever we went out to L.A., because he knew all these guys like Tommy Thayer and the guys from Black ’n Blue. Ferrari would make sure he handed out plenty of our cassettes so that our music was heard by as many people as possible. Distribution was the issue with the early records. Yes we had an importer trying to get the word out there but because the records were produced independently, they were expensive for the fans to get a hold of; but despite that we still managed to move around 25,000 copies of
I Am the Night.

ME, A BLIND DATE,
and Rita Haney were all fixin’ to go up to San Francisco to try to hang out with the Metallica boys. So we rented a car and set off—Dime, who was still pretty brand-new when it came to being away from home, ended up chickening out, leaving me and the two girls to go up to San Francisco without him. We never made contact with the Metallica guys, but we hung out a few days, took a bunch of drugs, and I puked all over every inch of Golden Gate State Park. I still have the photographs to prove it.

We also got to see a record dealer called Import Exchange, who handled the import and export of our records up until that point. They already handled other metal artists like Metallica and Anthrax, but the purpose of going in person to see them was simply to say, “Here I am; what have you done for me lately?” Otherwise it’s hard to know whether they’re actually doing anything for you or not. Luckily it seemed that they
had
actually done something because we were starting to see a little bit of cash from record sales coming in.

When we got back, we needed to make a decision on who was going to be the band’s singer going forward. Terry Glaze was a pretty good songwriter, had that high voice and the hooks, but that wasn’t the direction we were going in. He was also trying to finish his college and we were kind of tired of him trying to be fucking Dave Lee Roth, so we needed a replacement. Dime did this thing with Terry where he’d leave a boot in his guitar case as if to say, “I gave him the boot,” but Terry never did work out what it meant.

TERRY GLAZE

I was attending college while I was still in the band, so one thing wasn’t affecting the other at that time, but I was getting tired of the way that the business structure of the band was playing out, and I knew that was going to be an issue later on. The Abbott’s had three votes—the old man and the brothers and they would never ever split their vote on
anything
—so I knew I was never ever going to have any say on band issues. So if my commitment could be questioned near the end it was because of that and the fact that I didn’t really like the super-heavy direction it looked like we were headed in. The last night we played together was in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it was a very strange end. We got up onstage, played a great show and then afterwards, that was it. No “Hey, man, all the best” or anything; we just parted ways.

We tried out a bunch of other guys as singers for a few months but none of them were what we wanted, until a booking agent of ours suggested we get in touch with a guy called Phil Anselmo out of a band called Razor White, a metal band who’d been out touring like we had but with more emphasis on states like Mississippi. Vinnie got him on the phone a couple times and then said to us, “Look, I’ve been talking to this guy and we’ve got to at least try him out. He sounds really cool; he’s got this Bon Jovi–type pitch to him.” To which I thought, “Oh, fuck.”

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1986 and we still had shows to play that year, one of them on New Year’s Eve in Shreveport. So I talked to Phil on the phone and we all agreed that he should fly out and try out for the band.

By now I had moved from my position on the Abbott couch and was living in a place with a bunch of drug dealers who were raking in so much cash I didn’t have to pay them any rent. They had an extra bedroom and were buying us equipment as well, kind of like sponsors, so if things worked out with Phil, he’d have a place to stay right away. I should say that I had no part in their drug business; I just lived high on the hog with the money it was bringing in.

RITA HANEY

Rex had spent a lot of those early days at Darrell and Vinnie’s house, sleeping on the couch, and their mom Carolyn definitely saw Rex as their third son. His mother was sick and his father had died at a really early age, so he didn’t really have a lot of family in his life, except the boys and their mom.

On the day Phil was due to arrive in town, one of the guys I was living with loaned me his bright red ’77 Corvette Stingray so I could go and pick Phil up at the airport, and that definitely made an impression. I wanted it to turn his head. Phil must have definitely thought, “Wow, this is a fucking trip.”

We took Phil and his bags to the house and told him this is where he’d be staying for a little bit (which ended up being two years), then that night I took him to rehearse in the front room of mama Abbott’s house. Vinnie and Dime’s folks had been divorced since back when the boys were in junior high, so they lived with their mother Carolyn in a small place in Arlington that became Pantera headquarters. We kept all our stuff in the garage and we had also bought a trailer, and I’d have girls over and bang them in there, which was kind of cool back then.

So, that first night with Phil we set up a PA, where we had a bottle of tequila—my drink of choice at the time—and a joint, and jammed like we’d been together for an eternity. Everything clicked right off the bat. Phil had just turned eighteen.

CHAPTER 6

THE KID FROM THE BIG EASY

E
ighteen or not, Phil Anselmo was a bad ass. Even at that age he was the kind of guy that you knew the moment he walked in the room not to fuck with him. He and I stayed in the drug dealer’s house for two years until it became too hot. The cops eventually came and busted the place, thankfully after we’d both moved out. I moved in with my girlfriend, Elena, who was becoming my first real love, and Phil shared a place with some other friends but he always had that chip on his shoulder—something to prove all the time—and he would never back away from a confrontation.

One night we were playing at Savvy’s club, which was still our regular gig, and a guy from some other band shouted his mouth off at Phil. Phil went outside and kicked the
whole
band’s ass without any help. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was a fuckin’ bruiser. Being from New Orleans and us being from Dallas meant that Phil immediately brought a new dynamic into the band. He’d had a different upbringing than we’d had in Texas, so he definitely brought the tough guy street smarts, and he was also as funny as hell. Really, really intelligent. The cat is brilliant at what he does. Even then he was one of the best writers I’d ever seen.

He’d been raised mainly by his stepfather and was heavily into horror movies from a very young age. Then metal caught his attention—it really turned him around. Back then he had this incredible, high voice. He could sing Rob Halford stuff and just nail it, and that’s what we were into because we felt that the high stuff would go great with all the riffing happening downstairs.

As part of our efforts to get noticed, we went to Hollywood and showcased our material everywhere—the Whisky, Troubadour, and Gazzarri’s—every place that we could possibly get in. Then we had a residency for a week in Phoenix and one in El Paso, Texas, trying to make enough bread just so we could put fuel in the vehicle and get back home. Whatever my kitty was from playing all these sets for a week, my bar tab pretty much took me out of the picture, even though I was still underage. It was pretty tight living.

SO WITH GIGS
taking up nights and weekends, we’d spend the days just writing songs. The boys would get me and Phil, and we’d all go to the studio and start piecing stuff together. We probably already had two-thirds of the
Power Metal
record done by this point—certainly we had all the melodies—but Phil started turning us on to all kinds of different stuff that we hadn’t listened to before, because he turned out to be the biggest fucking metalhead of all time. He knew every fucking band there was to know.

Thrash metal was the big thing at the time, with bands like Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer all releasing killer thrash metal records in ’86 and ’87, and it seemed that if you didn’t have some kind of thrash element to your songs you were going to be left behind.

As closed-minded as the Abbott brothers were, they
listened
to the stuff that Phil put on in the vehicle and it would make a really big impact. They had no choice anyway. When we were driving, Phil was always in the front seat being the DJ and so bands like Voivod, Venom, Soundgarden, and a lot of Mercyful Fate—that kind of stuff—appeared on our radar and definitely influenced how we viewed our own sound, even if it only registered on a subliminal level. None of it was mainstream and nobody at any of the places we normally played would have known any of these band’s songs, but Phil’s more hardcore background was inadvertently steering us on to a much more extreme path.

Logically, with most of
Power Metal
already done, we decided to scratch the existing vocals and let Phil do what he did. As a result, and in contrast to what everyone likes to say,
Power Metal
is much heavier than anything we’d done before.

By this time we had bought a Ryder truck, had more gear, and also had a full-blown road crew working for us, so Vince and I used to take the old man’s car, a decrepit Pontiac Grand Prix, to gigs. Vince couldn’t drive to save his life and he always wanted to tow his boat behind the car when we went on the road, so that we could stop somewhere and go fishing. He would just
run over
shit and that boat would come off the back all the time, and we’d have to say to him, “Vince, look how the boat’s sitting now.” And it would be sitting sideways or backwards or something.

“Ohhh shit, well Goddamn; then I better roll it over!” That’s how Vinnie talks.

“Yeah that would be nice, if you want to keep the boat and save it,” I’d say. We then had to tie the boat down on the trailer so that it wouldn’t come off while Vinnie was driving.