Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (18 page)

After the show they asked me onto the bus to travel with them to Reno, Nevada, and that was when I met Phil for the first time. He came up to me with a big smile and whispered in my ear, “I totally know why you bailed on these guys.” That surprised me, but at the same time I felt that he and I were the only two guys in the club. We
knew
what being in Pantera was all about, but he felt confident talking to me because he knew he was in control. He had found his place.

There’s no suggestion that his retreat was anything other than a reaction to fame or a simple need for privacy at this point but, looking back now, I suspect that this may have been the beginning of Phil’s drug problems. We all knew he was having a lot of back pain, but even though we continually told him to go and get it checked out by a specialist, it was a long time before he actually did.

I finally said to him, “I’m tired of hearing about your back shit, dude, why don’t you go to a doctor? We’ve got one right here in town, so why not go and get an MRI and see what’s going on with it?” But for a long time he didn’t do anything. “If you had a fucking cold every day for six months, wouldn’t you think something was wrong?” I asked him.

When he eventually sought medical advice he was told that the recovery period for back surgery could be more than a year—time off that he couldn’t tolerate—so he continued down the path of alcohol and other forms of pain relief to get him through the shows on the last leg of the U.S tour, which we did with Prong as our support.

But all that time Phil was always saying, “Oh, my back this, my back that.” Because of the rampant painkiller culture he came from, down in New Orleans, he used to take Somas—muscle relaxers—to relieve the pain. But we all know that people gravitate toward a heavier drug if they can’t get high off whatever they’re using at the time, and in his case ten of these Soma fuckers just wasn’t doing it for him.

WHEN WE WENT OUT
on tour, we didn’t do little four-week trips; we’d be out there for a year or more. So when we eventually finished touring
Far Beyond Driven
in late 1995, we had a few months off back home in Texas, and during that time Dime and Rita bought a house out in Dalworthington Gardens. It was a traditional, family home, the kind you’d find in somewhere like Savannah, Georgia, but it was located in the worst place you could possibly buy a house, in my opinion.

First, it was way out in the sticks in the southern suburbs of Arlington, which was a pain in the ass for me, and second there were more fuckin’ cops per capita than they had people. As far as I was concerned it was not a safe place for a rock and roller to be.

But it did come with a huge, ready-built RV barn. This place was so huge you could have parked two buses in it. So Dime decided to use the space to build a home studio by constructing walls within walls so that the thing was completely soundproofed and wouldn’t fuck the neighbors up or contravene city codes. Of course, he didn’t do it himself—the builders did all that—but most of the organizing was done by the brothers, as it was, after all, Dime’s home.

RITA HANEY

I had my own place in town—bought it two years previously—and when Darrell came off the road he’d come straight to my place where we’d grill and hang out by the pool and that really got him thinking about having his own place. Darrell wanted somewhere he could write and he only had this tiny four-track room at his mom’s, which he’d finally outgrown. Dalworthington Gardens was the third house that we looked at, and I remember him looking at it saying, “Dude, this house is so big; I just don’t think I can ever fill it up.” Of course it took one tour of him coming home with all kinds of crap to fix that, so he bought it, and I transferred over there and sold my own place.

But what Darrell’s new place meant for the band as a whole was that we now didn’t have to book time anywhere to record, so in turn we basically took the money they guaranteed us for the next record—around eight hundred grand if I remember right—and spent it on that studio, from which I’ve yet to see any fuckin’ cash, incidentally. It was a huge house, six thousand square feet at least, and a place where we could all convene, but it took a lot of building time to get the place fit to record a Pantera record.

TERRY DATE

Aaron Barnes, Vinnie, and I spent a lot of time making wires and putting the studio together. The band had an early version of digital recording gear at that time and they wanted to use it to record the album. I hated it. I talked them into buying an analogue tape deck, which we brought into the control room, set it up, and the thing was humming like crazy. We could not figure out why, we did everything we could, until finally we found out that there was fifty thousand watt power cable buried under the studio. So we moved the deck into the recording room where the band was but, when the band’s recording, there tends to be a lot of Coors Lite going down and when something’s empty those cans get thrown. They’d end up on the tape deck quite a lot so I had to build a barricade around the tape deck!

As I said, getting there was kind of a haul for me because I was still living in North Arlington. Vinnie still lived with his mom. In fact neither of the boys left their mom’s house until they were thirty, but at least Darrell finally flew the nest.

I had just gotten married—in May of ’95—so I was kind of focusing on something else, but I still had to work and my wife Belinda knew that. My focuses were, “Okay, let’s get this shit done so I can go home. Let’s not sit around and get fucked up all night long and not get anything accomplished,” like we’d done on the last record when it took these guys six months to mix the goddamn thing. So while my head was elsewhere to some extent, I was still totally dedicated to the musical journey and where the next record,
The Great Southern Trendkill,
was taking us.

RITA HANEY

When Rex got married we were all kind of surprised. It was very quick. When Rex came off the road, he did a lot of things that Darrell and I had nothing in common with: we weren’t golfers, weren’t into the country club thing; we were still fans and into going out to dive rock bars and getting strapped up and that was something Rex never liked doing. We were in Hawaii when Rex proposed to Belinda. It happened on the beach and it was a fun night.

Being in a band and having a wife or girlfriend is a difficult balance for sure. I found an old calendar the other day, the kind you keep on your desk and write in the squares, and they were home in 1990 for thirty-eight days that entire year. I didn’t get to see them a whole lot, but after
Vulgar
, when they got their own tour bus, that opened up a few more options as far as wives and girlfriends going on the road. The guys were really set on being that “Band of Brotherhood” and they wouldn’t let relationships or chicks get in the way of that, so they were really careful how they structured that part of their lives. A lot of it was designated in that they would have something called “Chick Day” when all the girlfriends or wives would come out for that particular weekend so that everyone could be on their best behavior. I never really had to worry about that kind of thing with Darrell though because he was exactly the same whether he was in front of me or away from me; that’s just how he was. I probably got to go out more often than others and didn’t always have to go with the designated chick day. Everyone—including crew—went through a lot of women over time.

I can still remember the mental place I personally was in at the beginning of the writing process, and it really was a fucking cool feeling. Whenever I got off the road, I felt “I want to get as far away from you fucks as I can.” It was nothing personal. These guys were my brothers, but I had a desperate need to keep my work and home lives as separate as humanly possible.

Hell, I’d rather go home and listen to fucking Frank Sinatra than go out and spend a thousand dollars a night just for the sake of trying to be noticed in town like others like to do. That just wasn’t me at all and it never will be. I always needed the feeling of being grounded more than I had a desire to be seen. I had a totally different bunch of friends anyway and if we went out, we’d go out to the local hole in the wall bar rather than the clubs. I’d already played the fucking clubs for the early part of my career, so the last thing I wanted to do was hang out in them now. I had done all that shit, so why would I want to do it all again?

I craved stability because I had never really had it. I was moved around so much when I was young and spent so many nights as a teenager on somebody else’s couch, it sometimes felt that my life was constructed on constantly shifting sand with no firm foundation. Now that I had the means and a solid relationship, I was desperate to address that feeling of insecurity.

I had this concept that I came up with about touring and the band, and I called it “The Light Switch.” When I was on the road or in the studio, I was working—and the switch was “on.” Then when I was at home and not working, the switch was “off,” or at least it was
supposed
to be off. Turning the switch off was a challenge.

RITA HANEY

When Darrell wasn’t with the band, he never saw the other guys. We all had totally different friends. Darrell would come home and totally detox—check in at the Rita Ford Clinic as he liked to call it. He didn’t always want to get out. He’d sit and watch forensics on TV, eat food, and we’d just get fat. Get larded up as he’d say.

I was totally fed up with paying so much money on rent, so Belinda and I bought a new house in North Arlington, way up north, right down the street from where our apartment used to be, off Brown and Green Oaks.

It was a good, safe neighborhood on a big hill with a bunch of really nice but relatively modest homes, and I got this place for a fuckin’ steal of a price. We were told that the whole area used to be owned by a Chinese guy who had a bunch of different stores in town, but he ended up torching his house while his family was in it, so they always said the place was kind of cursed.

I fixed up our place myself and enjoyed doing it, that’s the kind of thing I
wanted
to do when I was home. Light switch “off” stuff, you know? I tore out all the carpets and put in wood floors. Then I put in Saltillo tile all the way through it and just made it my own home. When you walked out in the backyard it was all little bay palm trees with impeccable landscaping, gazebos, and the whole bit. I built a bar in the back with thousands of dollars of timber and it was domestic bliss. That place was killer!!!

Then a year later, Vinnie moved around the corner …

There was a piece of property up there at the top of the hill and Vinnie liked it. Because he’d been living with his mom, I felt for sure that he’d just go somewhere down in South Arlington close to her. But instead he bought this huge piece of land that wasn’t suitable for a home because of the pitch. But he liked the neighborhood.
My
neighborhood.

Remember, Vinnie didn’t have any kind of style or sense of class, none whatsoever, so of course he built a house that looked like it should have been in Malibu, not Arlington, Texas. It looked fucking stupid, and to make things worse he also got really fucked over during the construction process. The project manager bailed on him halfway through the whole deal, and then the contractor also screwed him over bad. Worse still, he ended up having to put in thirty or forty thousand dollars of retaining walls because it was literally a ninety degree angle to get up to his house, so people used to roll their cars off the side of the hill just trying to get there. When I was bored I used to hit golf balls with a seven wood up toward his house, break a few windows and the whole bit, and if he’d been hitting back at me, he would have been hitting a nine iron down, so that should give you an idea of the elevation difference between our properties.

From then on I saw more of Vinnie, and having him around was like having the crazies move into the neighborhood. He was all gung-ho about it, too, he wanted this big party house, and so he had people over at his place every fucking night.

There was an incident at Vinnie’s house when the Dallas Stars brought back the 1999 Stanley Cup. One of our songs became the PA intro to all the Stars home hockey games, and because Vinnie was a fan, he had become friendly with some of the players. Now, I wasn’t there but I’m told that at first they all drank champagne out of the trophy. Then it went to Crown Royal, then vodka next, and then it went in the pool. It was a unique pool, too, because Vinnie appropriately had the Crown Royal logo tiled on the bottom.