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from RIP magazine, June 1992
[I loved the guys in Pantera, and they loved me. Brothers Darrell and Vinnie Abbott were just plain, down-to-earth guys and about as unrockstar-ish as you could get. (To say Darrell's murder in 2004 was a tragedy is a gross, gross understatement.) Phil was a regular guy too (just a bit wilder), before he got swept up in his drug troubles — drugs did a pretty nasty number on him for a while, which really sucked. I did this feature on Pantera mere months before they really hit the big time. You can tell it's early on in their careers because 1) Phil is living in an apartment(!) in Arlington, 2) Darrell is still being called "Diamond" Darrell instead of "Dimebag" Darrell and 3) they hadn't yet been nominated for a Grammy (my prediction about them getting nominated for Vulgar was a little off — it would be a couple more years before they received a nod from the industry). Also note the mention of VCRs — DVDs didn't exist yet and the web wouldn't become truly "world-wide" for a few more years. What makes me really proud of this feature, however, is the fact that I was right there, tape recorder in hand, when Down was being formed. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!]
There's a November chill in the Arlington, Texas night, but inside Phil Anselmo's apartment, things are warm and homey. And loud. Phil is playing me cuts from Pantera's new album, Vulgar Display of Power, at full blast. One moment he's singing along with himself on a brutally fearsome ditty called "A New Level," the next he's playing air guitar in imitation of Diamond Darrell's furious fretwork. The man can't control himself. "It's power groove in full effect!" he shouts over the din.
And he's right. Cowboys From Hell, Pantera's first ATCO disc, hit record stores fists first; and nonstop touring introduced the group to the metal hordes. Vulgar Display of Power takes the quartet into even heavier and more savage territory. "Mouth for War" slams and sways; "Live in a Hole" is deliberately slow and mean. Then there's the aptly named "Fucking Hostile," a frenzied injection of pure adrenaline that never lets up. This still young group is baring its fangs, pushing metal aggression to the cutting edge.
And what does the home of the frontman of heavy metal's biggest hope look like? Well, imagine your room at your parent's house, or your dorm room, with a little more square footage. The walls are papered with Phil's favorite groups — St. Vitus, Venom, the Misfits — and scattered over the rug and coffee table are weights, boxing paraphernalia, comic books and bottles covered in melted wax. Phil, like the rest of the guys in Pantera, is a fan, and he's as down to earth as the people who love his music. He cordially offers me a beer as I try to make friends with his cat, known as the Chick. Within a short stretch of time we're visited by his girlfriend and a neighbor, and the small party carries on into the wee hours. We scan various gore films ("What'd y'all think of that pit bull attack?" Phil asks, freezing the action on the VCR for a moment), and the fact that it's well past midnight doesn't stop Phil from having an extended phone conversation with a couple of friends from his hometown of New Orleans, Jim Bower of Eye Hate God and Kirk from Crowbar.
"I think I'm comin' to New Orleans, bro, for about two weeks, man, in December," he says to Kirk. "Hey, man, dude, let's do an album. Are you going to play guitar with Pepper? Me, you, Pepper, T. and Jim. And, dude, I want your album! I've got a roomful of fuckin' people that hate me right now. I'm sitting here having the best time of my life, and no one knows each other! No one in this whole room knows each other from hell!"
"I'm tape recording the conversation," I interject.
"It doesn't matter," Phil tells me, and it takes him probably another 15 minutes to wind down the chat. Now he's talking to Jim. "I want a fuckin' Vitus patch, man! Hey, dude, look, man, we're making a record — look, I'm serious, Jim. I want to get at least eight songs down and do 'em. And I'm serious. I'll get my mom to pay for it and pay her back."
Phil, guys from Crowbar and Eye Hate God, plus Pepper from C.O.C. as a side project? It sounds like the band from hell. I wonder if it's really gonna happen. Phil assures me that as far as he's concerned, it's a done deed. He slips Nekromantik into the VCR, and when I finally make it back to my hotel room at about four in the morning, I'm surprised that the movie's storyline of boy-meets-girl-meets-corpse doesn't give me nightmares.
It's a chilly November afternoon in Arlington, Texas, and my eyes are red from lack of sleep. Darrell, bassist Rex and drummer Vinnie Paul, however, are in worse shape than me. While I was over at Phil's, the three of them were out seeing a favorite local band, Billygoat, and their night didn't end until about dawn. Phil saunters in a while later. We've all hooked up at the recording studio where they're putting the final touches on their album, but it's clear that everyone should really be back home in bed. Rex informs me that he's "blistering hungover," and he looks it.
"I stayed up till 7:30 drinking beer," he moans. "I haven't done that in a long time."
Someone turns on the TV in the studio's office, and the football game starts to bring everyone back to life.
I comment on Darrell's $1.19 ski cap (the price tag is still on it) and his beard, which is dyed, as I put it, "a fashionable shade of magenta."
"It's officially named the Rare Bird," he grins as he strokes the hair on his chin, "because over in Russia, this interpreter dude, he talked pretty good, but he still fucked up. He goes, 'Oh, your bird is red!' 'What? Hey dude, what are you talking about?' 'Oh, your bird, your bird is red, rare.' That's the way he was trying to say red. So it's a rare bird."
Getting to play in Russia with Metallica and AC/DC last fall was one of the highlights of Pantera's career so far, but the group's contact with the Russian people gave them a harsh brush with global reality.
"They still act like nothing really big has been accomplished," Vinnie informs me. "They're like, 'It's better, but we've got another 40 years to go before it's ever gonna be like it should be.' You know, in a way it's kind of sad to see how depressed and repressed all these people are, and how valueless their money is. If people think it's bad here, they're fucking crazy. They need to go live over there for a while."
The Russian trip, the Concrete Foundations Forum and a couple more gigs took two weeks out of Pantera's recording schedule, but that was fine with them. After all, Darrell informs me, Vulgar Display of Power was written "with a live situation in mind. That's what we're about — a live band with the fans."
Pantera's loyalty to their listeners can take on combative proportions. "The thing that's totally uncool," Darrell relates, "is when the music's just blaring, ripping, and everybody's totally chaotic, and there's some little kid that barely made it halfway over the barrier. You know, he's already just hanging over, and there's this huge steroid dude just muscling the shit outta him. We'll stop a song, and Phil will yell, 'Hey, you fuckin' steroid junkie, let go of the fuckin' kid!'" He laughs. "And the fans are like, 'Yeah, tell the motherfucker!'"
The guys were determined to translate this fighting spirit onto tape and, surprisingly, ATCO gave them free reign to do so. There was no pressure whatsoever from the label for Pantera to sound more commercial or to write a radio hit. "In fact, the label encouraged us to go the other way!" Rex asserts. "That's the way it is, and that's exactly the way it will get every album — heavier and heavier, until we're the heaviest band in the world!"
Of course, this doesn't mean that Pantera is all muscle and no emotion. Although Phil cites Carnivore and Sheer Terror as vocal influences, he also looks up to — take a deep breath and hold onto yourself here — Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde. You might even hear a bit of that sensibility on the haunting "Hollow."
"To be aggressive and all that stuff is fine and dandy," he shrugs manfully, "but to show a little depth, that's what makes you more flexible, which gives you that edge."
Despite his pugnacious demeanor, Phil has a hidden soft side. I listen, warmly amused, to the following confession. "I cried at, you know, what was that movie, Harry and the Hendersons, that bigfoot movie? I was buzzed, and I was watching, and this dude was beating this bigfoot thing in the face. Man, I started catching myself getting teary-eyes and stuff, and I go, 'Wait a minute! This is stupid! Let me put in Don't Go in the Cellar — something a little more along my line!'"
In any case, being in the studio's okay, but the guys would much rather be taking the new songs on the road already.
"I'm coproducing this record with Terry Date," Vinnie tells me. "I'm an engineer myself. So I did the drum tracks, and I sit right here every day, every night, till four or five in the morning. It gets old, it puts bags under your eyes, but it's gonna be worth it. I think this is gonna be the ultimate Pantera record." He's right, of course.
It's an unseasonably hot February afternoon in Los Angeles, and I get a phone call from Phil. He sounds tired but happy. That side project did happen over the holidays after all, and one track may wind up on an indie-label compilation album. "It's bad-ass," he says of the material.
Pantera just shot a video for "Mouth for War," and they're between two legs of a tour with Skid Row. I ask Phil how the Skids feel about having such a ferocious crew opening for them. "You can kinda see the change in their attitudes," he responds. "They come out and they play as hard as they can."
Since I've had a copy of Vulgar Display of Power for a while now, I tell Phil how impressed I am with it. In fact, I make a prediction that next year, at Grammy time, the album is bound to grab a nomination. I've been right two years in a row — I foresaw both Suicidal Tendencies and Motorhead being so honored. I can hear him in the background, telling the other guys on the bus what I said.
"Neither of them won, though," I remind him.
"That's okay, nominated's fine," he grunts.
Grammy or not, this year is bound to prove that the guys in Pantera are the new power kings of metal. And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of brutes.
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