Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (24 page)

WE WENT TO AUSTRALIA
in late ’96 and the process of getting there was a complete nightmare. Vinnie, Dime, and the rest had already gone on before us, so I was scheduled to fly out with Phil, his assistant, and Big Val. So I get to LAX and in those days we had fans everywhere, so someone at the airport would always recognize me, shoot me into a little buggy, and say, “So, Mr. Brown, where would you like to go?”

On this occasion they put me and Big Val in a buggy and took us to one of these waiting lounges called something like the Admiral’s Club. We walk in there and I see Phil sitting with the comedian Don Rickles. So for the next couple of hours before we fly, he sits and gets scotch drunk with Don as our pre-flight entertainment. You can’t even imagine the crazy shit that was coming out of his mouth. I wasn’t drinking at the time, but Big Val had a shitload of Valium on him.

Predictably, by the time we got to our first class seats on Qantas Airlines, Phil was completely wasted. It was very high-end—champagne and caviar for the whole trip—and Phil’s looking around, panicking that we’re not sitting together and the whole bit. I asked some guy if he would move, but he just had to have his fucking window seat or something, so I just said, ‘“No big deal, I’ll just sit wherever I’ve been assigned.” I was just trying to be nice, but this guy was being a real fucking asshole about it for whatever reason.

Then Phil says to him, “You know what, you’re a fucking dick” and that just escalated things, and Phil started to become all paranoid thinking everyone was looking at him. “Fuck you, don’t look at me, fuck
you
, don’t look at me!” he’d say to everyone. Then he wanted to get his Walkman or something to use during the flight and they wouldn’t let him get into his luggage. “Settle down, dude,” I told him, “It’s really not that big of a deal.”

Phil had a history of being a handful on flights. We’d fly places and he’d kind of nod out, face down in his food. That happened all the time. So, I’d grab his head. “What the fuck are you doing?” he’d say. “Dude, I’m tired of looking at you with your face in a plate,” I’d tell him.

Meanwhile, downstairs in coach class, Big Val was throwing a fucking commotion about something—he couldn’t find his headphones or his seat wasn’t big enough, some stupid shit like that—so they ended up throwing us all off the plane. They got the cops in LAX to come and get us and the whole bit.

Back in the terminal we had to go all the way back through security. I had to put a call in to someone who could think of something fast that would get us out of this mess, but Sykes and them were already Down Under. I didn’t know who I could call. So as we’re going back through the security line, they find all this Valium on Big Val; they detained him and escorted us out of there. But Phil and I still had to find a way to get on another flight.

We had to get all the way across LAX—and it’s a huge fucking airport. We could see the United Airlines terminal straight across from where we were dumped off, but it was going to take forever to get all the way over there in a cab.

So we just started hauling ass across this field in the middle of LAX—it was probably part of the goddamn runway, who knows, and Phil didn’t have a suitcase either. He had everything in fucking
boxes
. For some reason that’s how he liked to do it, and it should be said that Phil is pretty eccentric in that respect. And he always had problems with luggage. On what seemed like every trip, everybody else’s bag would get through, but Phil’s wouldn’t show up. So he would just throw a fucking fit. I’m philosophical about that kind of thing, so I used to say to him, “Come on man, you’re still breathing. It’s not the end of the world.” So from then on he started taking boxes and carry-on shit.

I didn’t question it at this point either, I just thought, “You want to do your shit in boxes, do it in boxes. Fuck it.”

So I’m trying to carry his shit as well as my bags, and by the time we get to the United desk we’re both just covered with sweat. Not just that, I’d snapped a fingernail in half carrying Phil’s stuff, but because it was my right hand, I could tape it up and it wouldn’t be a problem for when I had to play a bass.

So we finally get booked on this plane in roach class but the problem was that it was going to fucking New Zealand and not Australia. When we get there, after too many hours of traveling, we find out that U.S. Customs had called New Zealand Customs, presumably to have us checked out for carrying drugs.

Now by this point I’m fucking
pissed.
I’d flown double-digit hours to the wrong country in coach class, when I
could
have been living in seventeen hours of luxury in a full-blown champagne and caviar wet dream that was pure intoxication.

That was a fantasy.

The reality was different. They took us into a room at the airport in New Zealand and stripped us fucking nude.

And it was a full strip search, rubber gloves up the ass and the whole bit. Phil and I weren’t carrying, so there wasn’t a problem for us. Big Val had all the Valium on him, and he was probably still detained at LAX!

After another short flight from New Zealand, we finally got to our hotel in Australia. I called Vince and said, “Fuck Val, he’s fired, man.”

I thought he should have handled the situation better—that’s what we pay him to do—but Vinnie wanted him (a) because he hated confrontation of any kind and (b) because he needed a security guard. He was right about the second part, probably. We
all
needed a security guard when it came to controlling the crowd at shows, and Val was admittedly really good at that. Although he flew out a couple of days later, nobody really spoke to him and this was the beginning of the end for Big Val. He was starting to think he was a bigger rock star than us.

DESPITE THESE PROBLEMS,
I liked Australia as a place to visit, but it seemed like their economy was always in the shitter, almost to the extent that it cost us money to go and play there, even though we knew we’d most likely get it all back in future record sales. But we just felt that if we were going to be over on that side of the world, we might as well hit everywhere we could, so that included New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and also wilder places like Seoul, Korea.

THERE WAS A NEAR-RIOT
at one of the gigs we played in Australia. We came out after a show in Sydney and the fans were all over this parking garage outside. There were thousands of people. It was fucking insane. Should have made a video out of it, that’s how killer it was. Apparently they’d charged at a barricade fence, knocked it over, and spilled into this parking lot, just to get closer to us.

JEFF JUDD

We were in Japan on the
Trendkill
tour and we found this toy store that was six stories tall. Bobby, a band assistant, and I go in there and we buy these battery BB guns that shoot plastic pellets. We go back to Rex and the guys and they said, “We gotta have us a war here with these guns.” We had an entire floor of the Hilton, so we get these things charging and go to dinner. After we got back after a few drinks, we pick these guns up and Rex fires the first shot at a beer can that was sitting on the counter and this thing splits the can in half. We were like, “All right, this is not a game anymore.” Then Dime starts shooting out all the wine glasses in the wine bar that served the floor of our hotel, then the pictures get riddled up, then all the light bulbs got shot out. There was glass everywhere. By the morning, all our bedrooms are shot up. I’ll never forget Dime calling down to the front desk, putting on a Japanese accent asking for light bulbs. The guy at the desk asked him what kind he meant, and at that point Dime said in his Texas accent, “Goddamn hundred-watters son, they look better when they blow!” So, they sent someone up and Dime wouldn’t let them in the room because of all the damage. The final total on all of it ended up being about seventeen thousand dollars, and it ended up being a big deal as well as a big disrespectful thing there. The promoter—the same guy who first brought the Beatles to Japan—ended up having to write a letter to the consulate and we were banned from every Hilton in Japan.

TOURING
TRENDKILL
was a fucking blur, man, a
total
blur. On the way back from wherever we were last—maybe Japan—we stopped off for a break in Maui. We often did this kind of thing on the way back from overseas trips, and Hawaii was a favorite of mine because I’d proposed to Belinda there back in ’94 and I loved surfing.

We were meant to stay there for seven days and the wives were going to come out and join us for some of that time, but me and Dime ended up staying there for two and a half weeks. We had rented cars but never used them; we just stayed at the hotel. They had shuttles to little islands, and Dime and I made our own little spot on the beach and sat there chilling. We’d get up at about one and have a drink and a sandwich or whatever. It was a perfect escape.

SOMETIME DURING ALL THIS,
Jerry Cantrell had sent me a tape of about eleven songs that he wanted me to play on. Me, him, and Sean Kinney, and my first thought was, “Yeah, this is exactly what I need.”

Here was a chance to broaden my horizons a little bit while also getting away from all the Pantera band issues. Of course I’d known Jerry since ’87 and was a huge Alice in Chains fan, so I went up to Sausalito, California, for about a month, rehearsed, came home, and then went
back
there to record a bunch of tracks which were going to be produced by Toby Wright, who’d worked on a couple of Alice in Chains records.

Well, it wasn’t long before I got into a fight with Toby.

He’d keep saying shit like, “Oh, you can’t play it like that,” to which I replied “Dude, Jerry invited me down to play so I’m going to play whatever the fuck I want to, understand?”

Scotty Olson was Toby’s engineer on the project, and he’s just a sweetheart of a guy—he played guitar in Heart for years—and he made me feel comfortable because he’d worked with our producer Terry Date in the past. So because I felt like he was an ally, my attitude to Toby was very much like, “If you don’t like it, get the fuck out of the room. I’m going to lay my shit down and that’s the way it’s going to go.”