Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (30 page)

Phil doesn’t like to record until the fucking sun is down. He’s like fucking Dracula in that respect. Some nights he was on and some nights he was fucking fried. Despite that it took us only twenty-eight days to record the record, but they were rough days, I’m telling you. I even had to go to the hospital at one point, and that’s when the complications really started to show in my stomach. Things were much worse than they’d been.

I took a break at one point and went back home for two or three days to see the family, and I played all this shit for Dime over at Vinnie’s house and he loved it. They were fine about it, but they just didn’t know that we were going to tour for a year and neither did I at that point, quite frankly. I didn’t really want to either; I just wanted to make a record. Then Down were offered Ozzfest
;
you just don’t pass up shit like that. There was another factor that changed the tour plans: the record blew up when it came out. It was just one of those things. It hit a nerve with the metal community, and if people want to come and see you live, you’d be crazy not to go out there and make the best of it, so you can see how the Down thing just grew and grew.

More important perhaps, I was actually happy for once. Down was something new for me, for the first time in fifteen years. I just considered it to be part of my life, my musical journey if you will. I was actually pretty stoked by what was happening.

RITA HANEY

Darrell was very good at recording things, phone conversations, etc., just like he did visually by carrying a video camera around, so there are conversations where Phil called the house throwing a complete fit, threatening to quit the band if he couldn’t release the Down record, and that Darrell and Vince had to call Sylvia at the label to fix it. Darrell called him right back and said, “Relax, what’s going on?” and Phil even said then, “I’m not trying to tour much; I just want people to hear my music.” Darrell and Vince called the label and said, “Okay, let him put it out. It’s not a big deal.”

Let me say this though: My perspective was not, “I don’t want to be working with Pantera.” It was much more a case of “I want to do this Down record” because we’d been talking about this thing since’98 and it was widely discussed between all of us that the thing that Pantera needed most was time apart.

But most of all, as always, I just wanted to jam.

I had no idea how it would all unfold—how much we’d end up touring the Down record and the whole bit—I just knew that I needed to keep myself busy and pay the bills for my family. It was also refreshing, and that was what I needed at the time. One thing I do remember is a telling conversation I had with the president of the record label East/West Elektra, the label we shared with Pantera.

I said to her, “We have one more song on this record that needs to be a single and it would make us very, very happy if you could do us the pleasure of doing this.”

Of course I felt like adding, “We’ve only sold
how
many fucking records for you motherfuckers?” in reference to how many units Pantera had sold for our East/West label. But she said, “Honey baby, it ain’t never gonna happen. I just want a new Pantera record out.” Her name was Sylvia Rhone, and it was our record sales that had put her on the map in the first place, so all she was concerned about was her quarterly sales report.

To me that said
everything
. She couldn’t give me the time of day but she wanted a new Pantera record? This woman didn’t care about what was going on within the band. She just wanted her sales figures to look good, and at that point I thought, “Okay, this ain’t fucking working.”

WALTER O’BRIEN

It probably didn’t help Rex’s position with the brothers when he went and played with Down. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it myself but I also felt that they should all be able to do what they want, as long as they all kept their eye on the fact that Pantera was the main thing. Rex clearly knew that, Phil clearly didn’t. It was Rex’s call and I definitely respected that he felt he had to keep working. But I felt that Phil was keeping his best songs for Down while giving Pantera all the loud, obnoxious stuff. Pantera were already the arena band, so I felt like saying to him, “Why not let Pantera go triple platinum and then you can go off and do any kind of hardcore side-projects that you want, but Pantera should always be the goal.”

Down II
was released at the end of March 2002, and we ended up touring for six or eight months out of that year—as I said, I just hadn’t envisioned that at all. Our own tour started in April, led straight into a spot on the Ozzfest cycle, headlining the second stage. This was a major opportunity to increase our growing fan base.

I also didn’t expect that for almost the next two years, I’d be completely out of control with the drinking and on the way to petrifying my stomach, turning it to stone. The party never seemed to stop.

At one point we stopped in Vegas for a couple of days on the way to the West Coast, and Pepper and I had a suite laid on by my buddies the Maloof brothers. We were drinking heavily and snorting up half of Peru, so I was completely fried by the time we got to L.A. I had alcohol poisoning, but we still played L.A. I didn’t want the whole mess of dealing with that fucking crazy scene. Whenever you go to L.A., every crazy fucker seems to come out of the woodwork looking for something. It’s renowned for being home to a lot of music industry hangers on, and that was something I wanted no part of. So instead I passed out and came to my senses the next day when we’d reached San Francisco.

We get to the Fillmore where we were due to play that night, and I’m faced with an impossible situation. There was no booze on the bus.

Nothing. Shaking like a leaf on a tree.

Zero.

And by this point I’m starting to seriously freak out. Desperation sinks in. I’m in one of those “I
gotta
have something” type of modes. I felt totally paranoid, probably because Pepper and I had done so much blow the last couple of days. I had to get myself straight, but there was just nothing there to get fucking straight with. So by the time we get to the side of the stage to sound check, I’m a nervous wreck.

James Hetfield just happened to be there at sound check and we were all like “Hey James, how’s it going?” During this time, Hetfield had just gone through nine months of living hell of his own and was brand-new sober. And predictably, Phil and he had a kind of “who’s got a bigger dick?” type thing going on—particularly as Phil had said that Metallica were a bunch of pussies onstage at some point previously.

Then Grady our guitar tech said to me, “Rex, I’ve got a bottle downstairs” and thank fuck someone did. So I went and found it inside one of the stage cases. I tried to take a shot but I was shaking so much I almost poked out my eye with the bottle, and spilled whiskey all over myself. But it composed me and temporarily restored my senses, and we ended up playing a great show.

Now I was
really
starting to feel the consequences of excess. And no wonder. We’d snorted most of South America during that fucking summer and in combination with all the drinking—
waking
up in the morning drinking sometimes—all this shit seemed to be crystalizing in my stomach. That’s what happened to Stevie Ray Vaughan apparently. He was allegedly dissolving cocaine into his whiskey, damaging his stomach lining in the process.

The biggest problem was that it now seemed like I was out of control
without
booze. It got to where it took me at least a quarter bottle to get me straight, to take the edge off, otherwise I’d be freaking out while also dealing with all the psychological shit your mind plays on you. I’m damn sure the cocaine didn’t help, but the alcohol was my main problem and I think that a lot of my alcohol dependency can be traced back to when relations in Pantera became very stressful. Obviously I drank before, to a level far in excess of the norm, but the reason I became dependent on it to live was almost certainly stress related. The business I was in didn’t help either, because if you didn’t have a beer or a shot in your hand people thought you were sick. Ironically, I actually
was
sick.

THE 10TH OF DECEMBER 2002
sticks out in my mind. I was lying in bed when I got a call at five or six in the morning. Down were going to Japan and I’m all packed up ready to go. Half the band was coming from New Orleans supposedly, but this call came from Sykes: “Phil’s not coming.”

So I called Jimmy Bower, Down’s drummer, and they were sitting in fucking McDonald’s somewhere—the problem seemed to be that they didn’t have any dope. They had a twenty-hour flight to Japan and they didn’t know what they were going to do. I know what it feels like when you can’t get whatever it is that you need, so I understood that, but what made it worse (for them) was that when they did get to Japan, there was no guarantee that they were going to be able to find what they needed for the next seven days, so it was going to be a fucking living hell for everyone.

So Phil just called the whole thing off.

Japan trip cancelled.

He wouldn’t even get on the fucking phone, and when he eventually did I could just tell that he was super distraught.

I said to him, “Dude, you’re blowing a huge money deal here. We’re getting a shitload of money to play this one big-ass festival show.”

But they were either just so dope sick or simply couldn’t find dope, but for whatever reason, Pepper Keenan just said, “Fuck this, I’m not dealing with you cats ever again.” We had to pay the deposit back to the promoter and would probably never get asked back to play in Japan again.

At this point I also told Phil that I was never jamming with him again until he was done with dope. And that wouldn’t be for another three years or so.

CHAPTER 18

LOST LOVE AND THIRTY DAYS IN THE HOLE

O
bviously the whole Down meltdown was a problem when I returned home. I started having repercussions on that front, because by then I couldn’t even find the fucking light switch, far less turn it off. The switch was stuck in the “on” position, and it was bigger than the house. I tried though, and managed to keep a handle on home life most of the time. When my wife was working I had no problem driving the kids to kindergarten or doing whatever was needed to take care of them without having a drink.

The kids went to a Christian school from a very young age because we wanted them to have an early understanding of right and wrong, and it was around this time that I first went to a doctor and said, “Something’s not cooking. I’m waking up in the middle of the night, jittery as fuck. I need something to help me.” And so that’s when he first turned me on to Xanax to help with my anxiety.

Did I get addicted to Xanax, I hear you ask? Lots of people who take it seem to, but with me the answer was no. But I definitely found that it helped with the tension. Belinda was sympathetic to my situation, as far as taking care of the kids and everything else that we needed done was concerned, so that allowed me to just kick back and be myself at that point.

But things gradually got worse. Of course they did.

Xanax only eased the anxiety that my drinking problem created but didn’t address the root problem in any way whatsoever. Belinda and I were getting into disagreements a lot of the time, so I decided that the next move was to go into rehab. She wasn’t pushing me to do it, not at all. In fact if I’m honest, I went in for her sake—to save my marriage.

I went to Jeff Judd’s place one night sometime in 2003, desperate to talk to someone about my problems with alcohol. “I can’t live like this anymore,” I think I told him. “I feel like I’m killing myself.”

“Then do something different,” Jeff said.

“Like what?” I asked him.

“Why don’t you go into rehab?” he suggested. “What have you got to lose? You feel like shit right now, so how much worse can it be?”

He was right. And if I didn’t like it, he and I made a pact that I was going to walk my ass out of there. So we agreed right then that I’d at least go in to see what it was all about, but before I did, Jeff and I sat and got totally hammered with a bottle of Crown Royal. Then I got the phonebook out and found a rehab facility that was literally down the street in Arlington that actually turned out to be a fucking mental health facility.

JEFF JUDD

We sat down there, fucking hammered, and the reception guy came out and put Rex through the whole interview deal, after which he said, “I need to take a breathalyzer sample.” So Rex does it and the guy looks at it and says “Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right back.” I said to Rex, “Dude, you blew the meter right off it!” Then the guy came back with another and he blows into it and the guy looks at it and just shakes his head.