Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (20 page)

“Oh, nothing, man,” he said, but it turned out that he was the guy who brought it—heroin—in that night.

Now in those days I had a personal car and driver for me, my sister, and the rest of my family, and they would take anyone wherever they wanted to go. We were making the kind of money that we could afford to have limousines drive us wherever the fuck we wanted to.

So after the show, just as my sister is heading home, it suddenly hits the radio wire: “Philip Anselmo, singer with the rock band Pantera, has overdosed on heroin,” and all I could think was, “Who the hell had
that
scoop?” It seemed that somebody knew quicker than they should have. Something about the whole night just didn’t seem right to me.

When I went into the dressing room, it was a scene of total chaos: Phil was fucking blue because he had shot up after the show. Paramedics were called in and there was nothing I could do, although what I really wanted to do was beat the living shit out of Phil. As a compromise I took my rage out on the dressing room. I started throwing bowls of chips and chili around to release my anger. It was sickening and I was fucking furious. How the fuck could he have done this? How could he put all of our livelihoods at risk like this?

WALTER O’BRIEN

I knew that Phil was maybe taking a little too much pot and drinking too much, but not in a million years did I ever think he’d be on heroin. I actually quit that night in Dallas because I’d had firsthand experience—not of actually doing the drug, but of someone close to me dying as a result of it. So I had promised myself that I was never going to be an enabler for any band’s drug problems or deal with any junkie. I had turned down some really great bands because I knew they were junkies, so I didn’t want any part of it. We had a band meeting that night and they wanted me to go to the hospital and talk to him, and I said, “I’m not going
anywhere.
I’m not going to see him, I don’t care and as far as I’m concerned, I’m here for you three guys for the next few days and then I quit.” I did believe strongly that there was no Pantera without Phil, just like there was no Pantera without any one of Vinnie, Dime, or Rex, but I didn’t want any part of this. Luckily they talked me out of it.

The three of us met that night while Phil recovered in the hospital. Then the next morning, the boys picked me up in Dime’s Cadillac, and we all went over to the hotel to confront the dude. He’d gotten out of the hospital already and had this girl with him who would die of an overdose shortly afterwards. It began to feel like there was some kind of dope plague going around.

We said to him, “What the fuck is this? What’s going to happen? This could be the very fucking end of everything.”

Walter was there with the other main management guy, Andy Gould, but neither of them did or said anything constructive. Because Walter had seen drug overdoses before, he’d just say, “Fuck you.” That was his way of dealing. Management was no help at all. The best thing they could have done would have been to immediately put Phil in goddamn rehab, cancel the tour until he was clean, and then we could have all continued with what we were doing.

But that didn’t happen.

Of course, when he was in front of us, Phil simply said, “I’m sorry, dudes. I really fucked up.” What else could he say? But his response to the fact that the overdose was now public knowledge was more of a problem.

For some reason Phil wrote a confessional letter about his near-death experience, a public statement saying, “I saw no shining lights” or whatever the fuck he said—it’s all well documented—and that was the dumbest thing he could have done, as far as I was concerned, because the moment he did that, he was labeled a junkie. Why would you do something like that? And why would management let him do it? They should have covered that shit up and that’s all there is to it.

“Dude, why? We’re
flying,
” I said. “Money’s through the fucking roof. What are you doing?”

Of course, Phil said it would never happen again, and we gave him the benefit of the doubt because when we examined the situation in the cold light of day, it wasn’t like he was in a coma every fucking day. Even we would have noticed that. In fact I suspect he actually hadn’t been using very long and had just been dabbling a little, but just happened to be unlucky and overdosed. Nobody’s perfect, and there certainly aren’t any saints in the business of rock ’n’ roll, so of course people are occasionally going to have problems.

DESPITE THE FACT
that we were willing to move forward after the fiasco that night in Dallas, I’d be lying if I said that the thought of getting rid of Phil didn’t cross our minds. But it only did so briefly and probably only as a knee-jerk response to what had happened, driven by our lack of understanding of and experience with what was actually going on.

Deep down, we knew that kicking out Phil would have been like ripping your heart out of your chest, or siphoning all the gas out of your car so that you can save the fucking car. There’s no gasoline to make that car run, so you’re keeping it for what? Totally pointless. We knew that to carry on without Phil would have been pointless, too. Even then and to this day he is one of the best front men in metal. Nobody commands an audience like he does, so we did carry on and after only one day off and our singer almost dead, Pantera was back and ready to hit Oklahoma.

THE MAIN PART
of the
Trendkill
tour featured three months on the road with White Zombie. While an element of trust had perhaps been lost after Phil’s overdose, that feeling mellowed out over time, because when you’re on tour you just have to get the job done no matter what. And in Phil’s defense and to his great credit, he generally held it together thereafter. If he was still dabbling with heroin, it didn’t affect the band.

JEFF JUDD,
one of my best friends since the early ’90s when he worked as golf pro on a couple of courses in Ft. Worth, had always been a good guitar player. He was a fan of the band since the early days and he’d reached a time in his life where he wanted something different—he needed a career switch—so I offered him the chance to come out on the road with me as my bass tech.

JEFF JUDD

Rex and I met through mutual friends and I’d played guitar since I was a kid. His bass tech had left after
Far Beyond Driven,
so he asked me to go out on the road. I didn’t have any kids at the time, so it all worked out really well. Everything was pretty eye opening at the beginning, but the thing that I noticed most was that everyone seemed to actually
want
to work for Pantera. We did everything together just like a big family and they took the best care of everybody. We
stayed
at the same hotels as the band did, whereas all the other bands we went out with crews stayed at the Holiday Inn. Rex needed a friend out there, no doubt about that. There was definitely tension, mainly between the brothers and Phil, and it seemed to me that Rex was in the middle of it all. I’d met Dime and the rest of the band at the very end of the process of recording
Great Southern Trendkill
and when they heard I was going out on the road with Rex, they said, “Oh well, that’ll be the end of your friendship.” But if anything, it only made our friendship stronger.

Six 8×10s, six 4×10s; the biggest selection of Ampegs ever! (Joe Giron Photography)

Samurai Rex! Somewhere in Japan. (Joe Giron Photography)

Me and Dime before a show. (Joe Giron Photography)

Photo session for
Power Metal.
Nice hair! (Joe Giron Photography)