Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (6 page)

Thankfully I had this one good friend then who I’ll call Jack and at times I needed him so God bless him. He was this huge black dude—biggest guy on the team by far—and for reasons I never really understood, he took me under his wing like a guardian angel. I think he had missed about five grades of school, but whenever I had any troubles during my junior high and high school days, Jack seemed to appear out of nowhere. I lost touch with him in high school when he got into some heavy-duty drug dealings and ended up in jail, so who knows where he is now. Actually, he may be one of those characters who’ll be in jail his whole life, but I’ll never forget him for how he always took my side.

CHERYL PONDER

Rex pitched for a little league team which my husband Buddy helped coach, and he also played football for the Lancers football team that might have won a championship of some kind at one point.

While sports were still holding my interest somewhat, I had started to listen to a lot of music. Pop culture was about to undergo radical change, and I could now pick up FM rock radio ’cause we lived in the Dallas Metroplex area where there was a bigger tower. I couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start exploring the radio dial.

Better still, because FM was stereo, the whole dynamics of songs just got bigger and more in your face. Bread were a big band at this time and got a lot of airplay, and then because of them I got into bands like America and James Taylor. After immersing myself into this acoustic style of music, I quickly worked out how to play most of the chords. Another turning point for me was when my cousins in Midland, Texas, played me Stevie Wonder’s
Songs in the Key of Life,
not the kind of stuff you’d imagine I would like, but it really left its mark from a songwriting and arranging point of view. I actually thought that record, in a weird way, was better than a lot of the Beatles stuff that my sister had introduced me to.

While my mom was supportive of me learning music—she bought me all the books and scribes to help me read music—she was also insistent that I made something of my life. Problem was, her idea of “making something” was getting a job. She had this ingrained attitude that if you didn’t finish out high school, you were doomed to spending your life as a ditch digger.

CHERYL PONDER

Mother and I wanted Rex to get an education. And I say “Mother and I” because I was very much part of watching him grow up, run away a couple of times, and just not do the things that any parent would want their children to do. Rex was so smart—so smart—but he just didn’t apply himself, and both mother and I were frustrated. My daughter Charlotte was only fifteen months younger than Rex and she was an excellent student, so I think there was a little jealousy there between the two of them because they were so close in age. We just wanted him to at least get his high school diploma and then he could go on and do what his music was going to do. Granted, the chance he took was one in a million and he succeeded but as a parent, it’s not what you would choose for your child because you have nothing to fall back on.

All I knew was that I had something in me that was going to drive me to do something with music. Something was taking me down this path, and I had no choice but to follow it and learn all I could along the way. My first guitar had these terrible strings that had never been changed. It sucked. I had calluses all over my hands but I never thought to get any new strings until someone told me that I should.

Unperturbed by substandard gear, I started taking lessons at the YMCA because it was cheap—ten dollars a month or something. I’d go in there and play whatever the teacher had for the day. He gave me a John Denver book of songs to take home, and when everyone came to our house for the holidays, I’d play all these songs and sing them, too, which is kind of embarrassing to think about now.

As a resource, the YMCA was effective because they had all the books and the chords readily available, but it seemed like with the guitar you had to change chords with every beat or measure. So I decided to pick up something entirely new: the
bass
guitar, even though I could already play piano, drums, and guitar pretty well, and my ability to read music was already off the map.

CHAPTER 4

REX, DRUGS, AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL

B
y the time ninth grade rolled around, my first class of the day was jazz band—that was cool—and the second class was English. Except I didn’t show up for English—I showed up at the park near my house instead. They didn’t do shit about truancy in those days so I’d just take off, burn one, and throw a fucking Frisbee around.

Now, a Frisbee was a key part of my teenage apparatus, and here’s why: You learn how to roll a joint on the Frisbee, get all the seeds out of it, and get rid of all the crap. Some Frisbees had a little recess where you could hide something inside, so you’d light the joint, put it in the Frisbee, and throw it to your buddy. He’d then smoke the joint and throw it back, and all of this is happening while everyone else was taking English class. This was
my
education.

If I decided to go back for the third class of the day it was algebra, a class I shared with Vinnie Paul Abbott. I’d known of him because we’d both been in All City bands and stuff like that—he in the drum line—so I’d been aware of vaguely who he was, not least because it seemed he’d had a full beard and moustache since he was about eleven years old. He was one hairy dude. He also had these huge, double canine teeth, and I’d go out to lunch with him from time to time, but at that point I thought of him as an acquaintance rather than a good friend. Though I guess we were friends in some ways—music taste being the main common bond—in other ways we weren’t.

There was, however, a significant advantage to this almost-friendship. Vinnie’s dad Jerry had the only proper recording studio in town that I knew of and was its sound engineer, He also wrote a bunch of country songs that he was always trying to sell. I think he’d done some songs for ABC Records back in the day. Through him and Vinnie, I got to meet his brother Darrell, who at that point couldn’t play the guitar to save his life. Darrell was a couple of years younger and he was just a scrawny little skateboard punk in those days.

By now I was listening to pretty much anything that was current, absorbing it all. Vinnie sat in front of me in algebra class and we soon got into talking about bands and players, usually while the teacher was talking, too. His big thing in those days was Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer and lyricist, and if you didn’t like what Vinnie liked, it was his way or the highway. He’d say bullshit stuff to me like, “Dude, Neil Peart ... he blows John Bonham away.” I still followed ZZ Top, of course, and then all of a sudden here comes bands like Bad Company, and when I got into them, my naturally inquisitive nature brought me
back
to understand Black Sabbath and Zeppelin, and where that all came from because that stuff was more progressive. To me, the first Zeppelin record sounded more like Jeff Beck’s
Truth
album, and Jeff was always one of my favorite guitar players.

So, being a huge Zeppelin fan by then already I’d say, “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?” And then the teacher would interrupt our vital debate and bust our asses for talking in class.

“Brown, Abbott! Pay attention!”

Incidentally, the reason I have no ass at all nowadays is because I was paddled every fucking day. Remember when they’d drill holes in the back of the paddle to make it sting like shit? Well, I got a lot of that treatment. But after a while you just
have
to just start laughing, which of course they hated, so they’d say, “Do you want two more?” “Go ahead, I have no ass anyway, and you’re probably gonna break my pelvis so it doesn’t really matter ...” I’d reply, so my ass was never the same after that.

Soon, Led Zeppelin’s
Physical Graffiti
record led me down a new and chemical path. I had this friend who used to get balls of opium, and we’d sit with a hot knife over a stove with hash and opium listening to that record nonstop while catching this killer buzz. This would be my first real experience with drugs, and when I did it I took a whole lot of them. There were no half measures. Then I took acid and that was just wild, and I knew I’d found a whole new me. We did blue-dot or paper and I got hallucinations that I couldn’t get from smoking pot, and they would last for eight to twelve fucking hours. Better still, all the music we were listening to seemed to be
enhanced
by the drugs, songs like Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” already a trippy song, but while high on drugs it took me to another planet. This stuff and my sister’s Beatles albums were the perfect soundtracks to my acid trips.

The evolution of rock music interested me almost as much as listening to it or playing an instrument. It might sound strange but it was almost as if I knew that I was going to be part of the rock scene one day, so it made sense for me to want to understand how and why I would arrive at that final destination.

To me it all started with the Delta blues, with someone like Robert Johnson. From there you can trace it through to Howlin’ Wolf, Chicago blues, and I know that step skips a lot of time and a lot of great blues players who were out there, but that’s the general progression as I heard it. So you could say that the origin of rock and roll comes from the Mississippi Delta all the way through Chuck Berry to English bands like the Beatles, the Stones, and Zeppelin to where we are now. But it began in America, in the South.

I say all this for good reason apart from offering my view of the development of rock music. It always irritated me in later years when people referred to Pantera’s sound as being “southern,” as if that was something unusual. And musically speaking, the only thing “southern” about us was the fact that we happened to be from Dallas. As I’ve illustrated,
all
rock music originated from the southern states, so I always felt that Pantera’s sound was misidentified. You couldn’t label us or call us anything in my opinion; we just took our place in the line of rock music evolution.

In later life I learned to appreciate why being from the South affected our behavior. People are actually nicer and open doors for you down there, and I think a lot of that’s because of how we are raised. I always carried that southern pride with me into every situation, and the misconception that the South is just a bunch of rednecks shooting guns is just plain wrong.

As my musical knowledge and appreciation diversified, so did my dress style—or more accurately, my
anti
-style. I always wore camping gear or the kind of attire you wear when you’re climbing up a fucking mountain, which I often did on those Church outings. Jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirts, headband … that was what I liked to wear. Kind of that whole grunge look, but long before the grunge movement even existed.

I was singing (before my balls dropped, that is) and playing bass by this time in my first real band called Neck and the Brewheads, and we played around town covering stuff like the Stones, Zeppelin, a little bit of Rush—whatever was on FM radio at the time. Our drummer’s brother used to play in the band Cactus, so that was part of our repertoire, too, because the kids could really relate to it.

We were playing for all the hippies. There was still that hippie hangover from the ’60s, people hanging out and smoking grass, and that was definitely the crowd who gravitated to our shows. The ’70s was a strange, transitional decade, and a lot of people were into that disco shit, so it was initially hard to get people into what we were playing. That was the year before I really got into heavy metal in a hardcore way—Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Motörhead—and we just played backyards and keg parties.

Here in Texas, someone would get permission to use an open field on somebody’s land and they’d have a bunch of people over and fifteen kegs of beer. We were the most popular party band in town at that time; sometimes we’d get paid cash and other times the deal would simply be “give us all the beer we can drink and a hit of acid and we’re good.” Either option was just fine with me.

The Abbott brothers were two of the only kids in town with a proper PA system, because their dad had bought them one. Our singer also had a PA, but he would never show up to practice, so Vinnie and Darrell would let me borrow their board or mics or whatever, as long as I brought it back to the house the next day. They were always cool about letting me borrow the PA when they weren’t using it. Their mother Carolyn would say, “Yeah, Rex, you can take it now. They’re gone somewhere, doing something.” So I had access to free gear whenever I needed it.

They had started their own band with Terry Glaze, Donnie Hart, and Tommy Bradford, and called it Pantera. The name doesn’t have any deep significance. It was the name of a really fast car and also Spanish for “panther,” that’s all there is to it. It’s just a cool name that hopefully people could identify with. They were actually pretty good but were mostly just playing in a garage. But when they did play shows, their crowd was completely different from my band. They played for all the yuppies. While Neck and the Brewheads were playing Zeppelin, Stones, and Nugent, Pantera were playing Loverboy—that was the difference at this point. Two
totally
different worlds.

By the time I’d reached the eleventh grade, my musical ability was of such a sufficiently high standard that I was being recruited by North Texas State University, one of the best musical schools in the entire country. They had probably the best lab band there ever was. Lab—short for “laboratory”—is a type of experimental jazz where you interpret Charlie Parker or any of that kind of stuff. Some great musicians have come out of that school, and they actually offered me a scholarship to attend.