Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (16 page)

We had no A&R guy but we did have a guy affiliated to the label called Derek Oliver, but he wouldn’t even show up. He knew fuckin’ better. The room would have just told him to go fuck himself anyway. The bottom line was that management left us alone because they knew we were putting out hit records—selling ten thousand units a week—so they knew not to fuck with the formula by interfering in the studio.

TOWARD THE END OF 1993,
during the process of finishing
Far Beyond Driven
, we headed to South America for the first time and that sure was a fuckin’ trip. We flew all the way down to Buenos Aires and our first impression was that it was home to the most beautiful women on the planet, although we literally couldn’t get out of the hotel to see them because there always seemed to be five hundred kids sitting outside, day and night, amid tight security.

I wanted to go and see the city and on days off Vinnie and I would always go and play golf, so we needed security to take us where we needed to go. We deployed a decoy system. We had two minibuses: one would go this way and the other would go that way and everyone would usually follow the first bus not knowing that we’d taken another route in the second to go and play this little golf course. This place was unique because it had caddies—none of whom spoke English—and we had to walk the course, something we never did at golf courses back home.

We’d say, “Gimme a seven iron!” and the caddy dude would run over to us with a fucking two iron or something. “No, señor! I said a seven iron,” we’d say—a two iron is fucking hard to hit with anyway—but they’d still always try to tell us what to do, those caddies. This was our way of getting away from all the bullshit and back in those days it was usually me, Vinnie, and Sykes playing golf for fucking tons of money.

Phil and Dime weren’t really into that kind of thing. While we were on the links, they probably sat and got drunk in a bar, although Phil always liked to work out. Yeah, that was his deal. Dime, on the other hand, had a routine that was all his own. He would basically get up around 5 p.m., get something to eat, and then the party would start rolling all over again, every single day. So by the time we got back from the golf course, he had our shots already waiting.

The shows down there were crazy because they totally oversold them. There were no safety regulations, no fire codes, no nothing. We finished one show on that trip and went back to the dressing room for a while, as usual, and then we came back out while the crew was loading up, we saw these people sweeping where the audience had been.

There were a growing number of odd piles, five feet high all around, so we asked, “What the fuck is that?” There were so many kids there that it turned out these piles were black hair that they’d pulled out of each other’s heads during our show. They were packed in there so tight they were just ripping each other’s hair out! Crazy shit.

CHAPTER 11

YOU FAT BASTARD!

N
ot long before
Far Beyond Driven
’s release there was an issue with the cover art because, of course, we couldn’t put a picture of some chick with a big steel fuckin’ drill up her ass, you know? That was the original plan. Although the art department had brought the idea to us and we were all into it, for commercial reasons we had to sell out a little and soften the tone somewhat. So we changed it so that the drill was going through this guy’s head instead. That seemed to be okay. From the very beginning, Dime had pretty much taken charge of the art ideas for t-shirts, posters, and all that promotional stuff, so the rest of us did our best to keep out of it.

They—the record company—would send us all kinds of rough ideas and we’d look at one and say “okay,” but to me, all that mattered was the music. I couldn’t give a fuck less if the album had the pope on the cover. All I thought was that as long as the cover had the band’s name in the biggest letters that would fit on there, it didn’t really matter what else was there, with the exception of a picture of some chick on a fucking stripper pole—which the brothers probably wanted. That I wasn’t having.

WALTER O’BRIEN

It wasn’t that Dime didn’t have good ideas artistically—he did, but he didn’t have the technological expertise to execute them. I’m not even sure if the image they wanted was even a chick! But it was a huge drill going up
someone’s
ass. But I had to explain to the band that none of the major chains that were going to sell the record were going to let that picture slide. We could have made this band a lot more money if they had just followed efficiency and hadn’t tried to reinvent the wheel every time they did something. I always wanted the band to have full creative control over everything or at least up until the point that it was going to get an X rating and not come out. Walmart and other big chains said they wouldn’t carry the record if it had an “Explicit” sticker on the front, so we made an alternate version, which the band hated. I just said to them, “If you want to sell three hundred thousand copies and have explicit lyrics, that’s okay. But you have to be accepting of the consequences that you’re cutting your own record sales in half.”

When
Far Beyond Driven
eventually was released in March of 1994, it went straight to number one on the
Billboard
chart, which was fucking unheard of for a record this heavy and for a band like us who’d hardly had any radio or video airplay. Ironically, MTV’s
Headbanger’s Ball
documented our promotional signing trip where Warner Brothers gave us a Lear jet to hit twelve major cities in only five days to sign copies of the record for our fans.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Part of our job was to work with stores and record labels on marketing to the
Billboard
Chart and we knew that all the talk in the business that week was, “Which record was going to enter at number one? Was it Bonnie Raitt, Ace of Base, or was it the soundtrack for some rap movie?” It wasn’t even on anybody’s radar that Pantera’s album could be anywhere near that, so I went into the label and suggested the Lear jet idea for doing signings because we knew that the key to blowing up the charts was to sell as many records as possible in that first few days. That’s how it works. So when we were watching the numbers come in on the Tuesday following the signings, we said, “We might actually pull this off ” and then when the numbers came in it was like the pope had died. I was getting phone calls from everybody saying, “Pantera has entered the charts at number one?!” And we just went crazy. These guys thought they were a platinum act like Van Halen even when they were still playing in the Texas clubs, so they had self belief, and you need that. But when the fame really arrived with the private jets and the rest, it affected Phil and Rex most. Phil didn’t want to get in a private jet and he didn’t want to be seen getting into a limo, but after he tasted it for a while, things changed.

GUY SYKES

Our in-stores weren’t a thirty minute or one hour appearance at your local Tower Records; some of these were five and six hours, making sure that every single kid was signed. At this point in their career Pantera was a juggernaut, running on all four cylinders in every sense.

Touring
Far Beyond Driven
was going to be a huge deal, that much was immediately clear. When you have a number one record, everything changes on every level and folks who weren’t your friends before were going to want to be.

We were playing amphitheaters by then and playing in venues like that is just a numbers game as long as the seats are sold out, which ours always were. The real key is concessions, because that’s how you make your money, even on seemingly simple things like car parking.

We wanted every single kid that came to our show to also spend ten bucks on a t-shirt because when that happens, that’s when the really big checks start flying in. Everyone is satisfied. There’s no loser in that whole deal. Everything was paid for and the machine just kept building and building to the point where we were simply unstoppable. We felt we were indestructible and we destroyed a whole bunch of shit along the way. We found new ways of fucking shit up just for fun.

We were asked to join the Monsters of Rock bill and play a show in June in the U.K. Now, the sense of humor over there is a lot different and you’d hear the crowd chant, “You fat bastard, you fast bastard! You fat bastard!” usually directed at someone who was overweight. Well, I think
KERRANG!
magazine—probably the biggest fucking metal magazine in Europe at the time—put a cartoon picture of Vinnie Paul on the cover with that headline.

As you’d expect, Vinnie didn’t care for it at all and said he didn’t want to work with
KERRANG!
anymore. I said, “Look, you have to deal with this. I don’t care if your ego is bruised or not; this is their way of saying that they love you.” But Vinnie just couldn’t take it that way. He wanted to fight with one of the magazine journalists, which was strange because Vinnie historically did not like confrontation. And in any case, in my mind, if there was anyone who needed to be confronted it was his father Jerry; but at this time neither he nor Dime would even talk to their father.

The publishing rights had been a simmering issue since the
Cowboys
days, but the brothers were too chickenshit to call their own father, so they left me, the so-called lawyer, to do the intermediary stuff. It was really sticky and took a year to sort out.

I remember being on tour in Germany, trying to deal with all this crap, and it ruined more than a few days of what should have been a good time. Our lawyers were David Codikow and Rosemary Carroll, and they had pretty much put Nirvana on the map. Every Christmas there would be a big screen TV on our doorstep, a gift from the lawyers. It was the least they could do for us. David and I were involved in the bulk of the negotiations over the rights with Jerry. I’d get off the phone with Vinnie and Dime’s old man, phone David and say either “This is going nowhere,” or “Okay, now we’re making progress,” but the whole thing continued to be frustrating and took a lot of effort on both our parts.

My whole argument to Jerry was, “If you didn’t write these songs, why the fuck are you getting fucking paid for them?”

“Uh, because I signed the deal,” he would say. That’s just how Jerry was; he always took the psychological approach.

“Well, you’re not our manager anymore and you don’t write the songs,” I told him.

I tried to explain further, “It’s like Barry Bonds Senior throwing a ball to his son in the front yard, then wanting half of his fucking income.”

He’d signed a management agreement and now he wanted it to run in perpetuity, to which I just said, “No dude, this isn’t going to work. You might have two sons in this band but there are two other guys who will fight you to fucking death.” I also felt like saying, “You know, your own boys don’t even want to talk to you dude, how does
that
make you feel?”

Yes, as I’ve said I had some music business knowledge, but because I was the only one who did I was stuck in the middle of it all because the brothers wouldn’t deal with their father, and Phil didn’t have a clue about any of this kind of crap. After it was finally settled, the brothers didn’t talk to their father for many years. Dime eventually said, “Uh, I better get in touch with the old man,” probably around the time their mother got sick.

WALTER O’BRIEN

The money started coming in from
Cowboys
around ’94, so that’s what triggered Rex’s dealings with the publishing rights. There’s always a year or two delay before the cash really starts flowing, but when the contract with Jerry Abbott came in, we looked at it and none of the signatures on it were the band’s. Their names were there but the signatures weren’t theirs. The brothers didn’t want to go into a lawsuit against their dad, so we ended up settling for a lot of money, but I didn’t know what else we could do at that point. How do you tell guys to sue their father? I just thought it was really lame on so many levels. Rex really knew what he was doing, and we were always telling each other about the latest music industry books that were coming out, and he was right on top of that stuff.