Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (29 page)

In the beginning Vinnie was a good leader because he wasn’t as crazy as me and Dime were. He held onto it a little better than we did. He had a weird sense of humor in that he thought he was funny when he wasn’t, but he was never the kind of guy who’d sit around telling jokes. When he did make one it was usually the dumbest fucking joke you’ve ever heard in your life. He did a lot of the business stuff while we partied a lot, but as time passed he got into the partying, too, and we got tour managers to look after all the business.

So we all had our strengths and we had our weaknesses that combined to make Pantera the incredible band that it was. None of us was much worse than the next guy, but the process of living, sleeping, and shitting together two hundred days of the year for fifteen fucking years had really taken its toll by the time it came to tour
Reinventing the Steel
.

Something that may have added to the tension was the fact that we were all pretty intimidating people by nature, so the competition was always on among us. We also wore our emotions on our sleeves, too, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that Phil had his “Let’s pick on so and so today” mode, and if you were the one that got picked on, the insecurity might hit you.

Then when you throw in all the booze and weed and shit like that, it’s no surprise that those merely added to the paranoia—I’m
not
a paranoid kind of person by nature. Things even got physical on occasion. Plenty of times I had to pull Phil off Dime because Dime was drunk, but this kind of thing happens in every band. Four different personalities made up the overall dynamics of the band, and if they’d been the same, it would have been stale, boring dog shit.

So, you can see why we needed a break, but we got the opposite because new tour dates were being added and added. There seemed to be no end in sight. The tour seemed to go on forever. The financial offers were great, but because we felt like we were in a marriage that was going south, that just didn’t matter anymore. Something had to give sooner rather than later.

WALTER O’BRIEN

It had gotten to the point that nobody wanted to be around Phil anymore. Nobody. And that started affecting everybody to the point that Rex, Dime, and Vinnie were getting loaded because they didn’t want to deal with what’s going on, and at one point it looked like we were going to have three buses on the road—which the budget simply wouldn’t have supported.

I suppose the writing was on the wall as early as pre-production for the tour. Phil was out of his mind a lot of the time and there were moments in rehearsal where Dime and I would look at each other and say, “Dude, he’s singing a different song than we’re playing”—that’s how bad it got. When we actually got out on the tour, Phil killed it every fucking night, which is typical of him. He rose to the occasion.

We were following Slayer so we had to be spot-on. Phil knew what he had to do. You do not go on after Slayer and not be fucking
gold
. That’s one band that you just don’t follow if you don’t have it. But we had it and it was our show.

There were a bunch of other bands rotating on the bill, too—Morbid Angel and Static-X were two of them—but Slayer was a constant. Dime was real friendly with Kerry, but I never had the closeness that Phil and Dime had with him for some reason. I hung out with Tom more than anybody. He had his chick and his kids with him, but at the same time we’d all hang out every once in a while, get dinner, and shoot the shit. I got to know Tom through Rocky George of Suicidal Tendencies, who was a good friend of his and with whom we’d toured promoting
Cowboys from Hell.

So while the shows were good, the animosity backstage left something to be desired. Dime was on his own with Vinnie on the bus, and he was starting to hate being around his own brother. I’m sure he grew jealous of me because I’d moved out and no longer had to deal with it. I was in a shit mood most of the time and I found myself jumping down people’s throats at the slightest provocation—when I wasn’t doing that I drank more and more to numb the ill feeling. Drank
more
.

It got so bad that at one point Dime came to me and said something like, “Dude, how much do you think it would cost to buy my own tour bus?”

I just said, “You’re fucking crazy. It’ll cost way too much and if you’re going to do anything, you’d be better off trying to rent one for the rest of the tour.”

But he didn’t do that. He just drank more, too, in an attempt to block out all the bullshit.

RITA HANEY

Darrell got to where he was drinking more, almost to the point where he was hiding in a bottle. The issues with Phil were probably in the back of his mind but he didn’t realize it at that time. He just felt tired and that if they took a six-month break, everything would be okay. Nobody including him really wanted to face up to what was happening. Darrell would go from town to town hung over saying, “Man, I need a day off to rehydrate” but when he saw kids in the next town standing out there with a bottle of Seagram’s saying, “Dude, I’ve been waiting all year” he just couldn’t let somebody down.

WHEN WE FINALLY
got to the end of the first U.S. part of the
Reinventing the Steel
tour in Orlando, Florida, we did what we always did and threw a big party for the band and all the crew. We’d always get really shit-faced the night before we all went home. It was a Pantera tradition.

Well, on this occasion, we drank all night like always and then went to the airport the next day to fly home. Our production manager Chris Reynolds was the guy dealing with all the tickets and paperwork as we’re all standing in line. Well, he was such a mess from the night before that he fell flat on his face in front of the ticket counter. Flat. On. His. Face.

All of us were standing there watching in the first-class line and as soon as the airline staff made the connection that we were all travelling together they said, “Y’all are not getting on this airplane. In fact you’re not getting on
any
airplane today.”

So me, Dime, and Kat Brooks got Sykes to take us to the nearest fucking private jet place. They had those little jet joints all around the airports so you could just hop onto one of these small Lear jets at great expense. These weren’t full-blown
Lears
that you could walk around in; these things were small—had seats in them but no restrooms. We’d sent Katt on a liquor run so that we had something for the flight back to Dallas, and Dime and I got completely hammered for the duration. The only thing was that you obviously couldn’t take a piss in these things, so Dime and I just used cups, bottles, or anything else we could get our hands on until we could get off the plane.

At the other end we had limousines waiting for us and they were allowed to drive right up to the plane on the tarmac. We just had to unpack our bags and we were good to go. It was full on rock star living even while the band was imploding around us.

LATER THAT YEAR
we played a couple of shows in Japan, came back to the U.S., and then flew out again in September to Dublin for the beginning of the European leg of the
Reinventing
tour, with Slayer as our support again.

Then 9 / 11 happened.

We were stranded in Ireland, and given what was happening in the world, Dublin didn’t seem like the best place to be for a bunch of high-profile Americans. Our hotel was two blocks from the U.S. Embassy and everybody’s tension was cranked up to eleven. All we could do was sit and watch British propaganda on
Sky News
, listening to their perspective of what was going on in the U.S., and it was truly frightening. I was in a suite with my living quarters on one side, and a TV room on the other side, and my room became a crew headquarters because I had the case full of booze that we carried around with us.

We had stashes of bottles for days but it was still unclear what was going to happen. On one hand the band guys were thinking that we would be catching a flight home as soon as possible. But on the other, the crew set up the back line at the venue, as if we were going to start pre-production for the tour, because the moment a band does that, they are more likely to get paid by the promoter. Nothing was plugged in, none of the amps or speakers, but by setting it up and showing the will to play, the money is apparently safe.

I got out of the hotel maybe one time in the two weeks we were stuck there because one of the security guys beat up our light guy, so it was my job to take the dude to the fucking hospital and everything. That was another great pain in the ass that I had to deal with.

In my mind there wasn’t anywhere that was safe. When you have people flying planes into buildings, anything seemed possible. I have different theories on all that nowadays, but back then I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so it seemed most secure to just stay in the hotel. Of course Vinnie Paul and Dime wanted to go out every night and I just said, “Y’all are fucking crazy,” so again the camps were divided.

WALTER O’BRIEN

They were afraid of travelling around Europe at that time and I can’t honestly blame them. If any American band had a big target on their back, then it would be Pantera. Ideally they could have continued the tour—which Slayer did—because it was only America that you couldn’t fly into, but they didn’t and that’s all there is to it. Whether Pantera’s reputation in Europe was damaged as a result of bailing on the tour, we’ll never know.

Eventually we got back home after a week in Dublin. We had to fly over the Arctic Circle and down through Chicago to Dallas.

Pantera never played live again.

There was willingness from me, Darrell, and Vinnie to start getting the next record together. But as I’ve said before, we all needed a break from Pantera. I preferred to be active in my time off and Phil was of a similar mind, but Darrell and Vinnie weren’t doing anything after we got back from Dublin, other than waiting for us to be ready to start working again.

Seeing a good opportunity, I got on the phone with Pepper Keenan in New Orleans and started talking about getting the process for a second Down record off the ground so that at least I was doing
something.
Within a few days we had gear loaded onto a truck in Nashville to be taken down to New Orleans. I then got Kim Zide Davis at Concrete Management to get us a record deal, secure the publishing. By October we started recording in the studio with Warren Riker, the Grammy-winning producer/engineer and an acquaintance of Pepper Keenan.

Phil’s main house was across Lake Pontchartrain on seventeen acres of land. He had a big, vacant barn there, and Pepper Keenan was really good at fixing things up. He’s one of those guys who wakes up in the morning and will build a fucking birdhouse or something, just for the fuck of it. He’s real crafty when it comes to shit like that. So he got a saw, bought planks of wood, some paint, and built a den with a bar in it that we called “
Nod
feratu’s Lair.” Phil would be nodding out all the time, so that’s why we gave it that name; the sign is still sitting there above the bar today.

Phil had built a jam room on one side of his property, and Pepper and I built a control room when we first got in there with the gear. We took a whole wall out, the whole bit, to fit it all in. There was an upstairs apartment that had bunk beds in it, a full kitchen, and a pool table with couches all around. It was the perfect hangout pad. So that’s basically where we slept and ate—we had people bringing over food when we weren’t cooking on the grill outside. I grilled four or five times a week probably, that’s how much I was into it. These guys had never had chicken on a beer can before, a Texas thing that I’d perfected over many years. I’d been doing all this stuff way before it was ever shown on TV.

We’d take it in shifts to record, and we had an engineer there who slept in a tent outside on this little-bitty love seat. It was like a fucking M.A.S.H unit: whoever was up in the morning was good to go. So I ended up playing a lot of the guitar parts on that record as well as all the bass, because these other guys would stay up for two days whereas I went to sleep every night.