Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (14 page)

We wanted to explode.

Despite being signed to a big label, we still felt like we needed to silence a few doubters with whatever we released next. What helped a lot was that when Metallica dropped this big commercial record of theirs, they unwittingly gave us this big, fucking gaping hole in the market to fill. While we definitely did have firm ideas for how we wanted the record to sound, Metallica’s record confirmed to us that we were the band to take over the void they’d just left behind.

So when we actually walked into the studio to write them, the songs were just jumping out of us. It all seemed just so easy and natural. Consequently the
Vulgar
material was very well rehearsed even before our producer Terry came down to record them, and like
Cowboys
previously, we already had the demos down really well. We had a couple of bits and pieces left over from
Cowboys
and they became the tracks “Regular People” for sure and parts of “Hollow” maybe, but the rest of the tracks were completely fresh material. “Piss” was another track that I partly wrote at the time, but because the rest of the record was so strong, it just didn’t make the cut. We ended up using part of it on “Use My Third Arm,” which would later appear on
Far Beyond Driven,
but in 2011, “Piss” was released as it was originally conceived, on the 20th anniversary edition of
Vulgar Display of Power,
and I’m very proud of my role in it.

It’s hard to remember which track we started with, but once we got going it was just nonstop—with ideas flowing from us, and we increasingly realized that, with our grass-roots, heavy sound, we really were the band to fill the slot that Metallica had just vacated. We believed we had the right profile to occupy that position of theirs and it was our perseverance and sheer desire to make increasingly heavy music that allowed us to do that. It was all on our terms and nobody else’s. It wasn’t on Metallica’s terms or anything like that, and there also wasn’t a whole lot of competition at this particular point in the’90s, but I can’t think of many bands in our genre that, instead of going out of our way to appeal to an audience, made an audience gravitate toward
us
. That’s an important distinction to make, I think, because it’s such a rare thing in this world of following trends and fashions.

“A New Level” and “Fucking Hostile” were key songs in the process, and the fact they were so easy to do meant that we didn’t ever want that creative flow to stop. It didn’t seem like working, either. This was just living life while at the same time doing what we wanted to do, under no pressure whatsoever other than what came from our own unstoppable inner drive. Sometimes we’d sit in the studio until four in the morning, just coming up with different ideas while at the same time working on improving our overall performance level, which as a result of almost two years of live shows, was already as tight as a motherfucker.

As well as being more honed collectively, things had evolved for the band on individual levels, too. Phil’s vocal range was way broader than it had been on
Cowboys
and that definitely gave us more variation when it came to making the music heavier. He still had the ability to hit the high notes for sure, but because he was a little bit older, he was also developing a tougher voice that complemented what the rest of us were doing.

Every song started with a riff of Darrell’s, or something that Vinnie had, a drumbeat or rhythm pattern, or an idea from me or Phil. In some cases the idea process could just be something as simple as us going outside, smoking one, and seeing what happened when we got back in. Usually something did happen.

I definitely remember that when we did “A New Level,” there were all these weird chromatic chords that we hadn’t even tried before, and as it took shape it was like opening a book about something that you are really into, or better still, opening a Christmas present that you never thought you’d get in a million years.

Every single track we recorded had that certain something about it in a way that only the most vital albums can boast, and we all knew how good this fucking record was. There would be times when we were in the studio, like when “Walk” was coming together, and we’d be jamming on it with insane tightness. We’d look at each other in amazement and say: “Oh my God, how the fuck did we do that?”

It might sound like a cliché, but there really was magic at work with what we were doing on
Vulgar,
and we never again played and got along as well as we did at this time. Dime and I deeply understood each other as far as the chording, changes, and rhythm were concerned, and that in itself was a fucking amazing feeling, to be totally locked-in with your musical partner. Of course, Dime always knew
exactly
what he wanted to hear. He had that down to a tee. But sometimes I’d hear something from a bass player’s perspective and would go in and put in my two cents worth. When he was doing leads, my role was to figure a bass line that fit.

On
Vulgar,
the demand for total sonic perfection was what we were aiming at. We used to sit down together, turn everything off at the board except for all guitar channels and the bass channel, and listen to the tracks with immense concentration, pay attention to every detail. Sometimes I’d test my ability by playing along to the track, and sure enough I was always right on the money. That’s how tight we were, and we started calling this process “The Microscope,” and from that point forward, applied that level of scrutiny to everything we did. Yes, we were heavy and aggressive, but the finer details really mattered.

TERRY DATE

For the most part, the process for working on
Vulgar
was similar to
Cowboys
—except that
Cowboys
was a little more advanced when I came on board. With
Vulgar
, they had just come off a very successful tour and they had riffs figured out, they knew they wanted to get harder and more intense but the songwriting process was exactly the same: they were great at working in a very small garage studio. If you look at how music is recorded in bedrooms now, well, it wasn’t that much different for us back then because they were so comfortable working in Pantego, which, while very nice, is very humble compared to a studio in L.A. It’s not the equipment in the studio or the walls that matters, it’s how comfortable the players are, and they were very, very comfortable.

Although all the songs on
Vulgar
were super-heavy, it wasn’t heavy for the sake of it; they also had killer hooks. Listen to “Fucking Hostile” and you can hear that, despite how fast and heavy it is, it’s still just classic, good songwriting.

Not everyone shared our excitement. I will always remember the old man, who by this time had no role other than owning the studio space, but still thought of himself as our unofficial manager, coming in and hearing Philip’s distorted vocals on “Fucking Hostile” and saying in his usual super-negative way, “Son, boys, y’all can’t put that on the record, nobody’s going to listen to it!” He
hated
distortion.

“You can’t do it that way,” he would continue, and we just said, “Did you ever hear of Ministry, dude? Go fuck yourself, and leave us alone.”

He was like that about most things. If Phil shaved his head or some stupid shit like that, he thought we needed a fucking band meeting to discuss it. He was just one of these guys who wanted to limit us with his stupid little hillbilly ways and so he would say things like: “That’s not how country music was done, and you just can’t do that.” As if country music even fucking mattered to us!!!

We just said, “Fuck you, sure it can.” And we did it and it worked. We wanted to change the world with the music we were doing and that record did that. It definitely changed the game for a lot of fucking people.

BEFORE THE ALBUM
was released, we went out on tour with Skid Row in January of 1992, went out there and slaughtered them every night. These guys had a pretty heavy record out,
Slave to the Grind,
and had just come off the road with Guns N’ Roses in Europe, so this was their very first headlining tour, with the craziest stage set-up I’ve ever seen in my life, just stupid with all the ramps and shit.

None of that concerned us. We just went out and did our thing night after night, and suddenly Phil had less of a “kill the world” vision and more of a “Look, here’s an opportunity of a lifetime, we can steal
all
these motherfucking fans” type of mentality. He was very much more congenial on that tour, and we were really having a good time, taking names and shit. We also had the chance to let people hear the mastered tapes of
Vulgar
while we were still waiting for the artwork prior to the release date a month or so after the tour began.

We were travelling in our first full-blown tour bus and we thought, “Wow, so this is what we’re going to be travelling in?” It seemed big time. We got our own bunk, which was a big step up from the motor homes we’d been out in the past, and there was also a driver so we didn’t have to drive anymore, although we sometimes did, just for fun. One time we were going through Canada and it was me and Dime in the front seats. We went through the border control and they said to Dime, “What citizenship are you, sir?”

“Regular, sir,” Dime said.

Dime wasn’t the most intelligent of guys, at least in an academic sense, although he did have his different ways of trying to appear that he was. I’d call him Socrates sometimes to piss him off because he’d come up with what he thought was a brilliant idea, but to everyone else it was so fucking stupid. He’d use these big words, and I’d just say “Yeah, okay, Socrates Plato.” But what he lacked in pure academia, he more than made up for in street smarts.

GUY SYKES

The tour with Skid Row broke Pantera in America, period—end of story. Heavy music in general was moving in different directions: you were either with Nirvana or Soundgarden in that genre, or you were moving harder toward Slayer and Metallica, and Skid Row was trying to move away from their hair band roots. On the Priest tour nobody had known what to expect: they got spit on, had shit thrown at them, and sold two or three t-shirts a night, but when we got on the Skid Row tour everything clicked. Pantera went out and destroyed Skid Row nightly, and that’s what launched them to the next level.

When we played the new
Vulgar
material on the road it just blew everybody’s fucking mind. Nobody said, “Oh well, that’s nice” or something equally noncommittal; jaws were dropping, and though we didn’t need that confirmation, we knew we were on to something huge.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Darrell had given us this really, really bad eighth-generation picture of a guy getting his face punched—all distorted like a bad photocopy. The label went and got a model with somebody punching him at a photo shoot and got the whole thing done up really nice, while also copying the spirit of what Dime had brought. Well, he got furious because he wanted to use the bad photocopy as the cover! We tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be done. He actually wanted to use the original picture he had for the album cover!

Of course we were right about
Vulgar
and the record debuted at number forty-four on the album charts, which was completely amazing, and from that point on all of our friends and peers in other bands were coming out and trying to equal or better what we had done. The competition was on.

Jerry Cantrell was a good friend by this time, and it soon became a competition between me and him to be the first to have a certified Gold album. Alice in Chains were always just that one step ahead of us though, and they had hit the fuckin’ jackpot with
Facelift
already, and would do even better with their next record later in ’92. I was like, fuck, here we are sitting on 300,000 sales—and that’s not bad—but Jerry had a Gold record and I was pissed!

While
Vulgar
wouldn’t be our best-selling record in unit sales, it was our most significant because of the era in which it arrived. Heavy metal was changing because of the whole grunge thing, so most metal bands either had to change their sound to fit the trend or risk being forced back underground and return to the club scene. Pantera was the exception in that we actually thrived in these seemingly barren times for metal, and while playing heavier music than most people had ever heard before.

Despite our high profile and all the possibilities that were out there for us, fame and fortune would still be slow to arrive.
Vulgar
definitely got us on the ladder to stardom and to playing larger venues, so to return the favor that senior bands had shown us on our way up, we took out emerging bands with us on our headline tour—guys like Sepultura and Fear Factory who were trying to get their own thing going. Yeah, we now had the clout to sell out amphitheater-sized places, but we always respected where we came from and that was always one of Pantera’s best qualities.