Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (8 page)

Some of these trips would be weekend gigs and others would be week-long residencies, but no matter what the deal was, we played three sets a night with the first and third sets being covers and the middle one being original stuff. Because we were from the South, we inevitably gravitated toward playing blues riffs. Then we moved on to playing cover tunes of guys
trying
to play blues riffs. Some of the songs we were doing were typical Top-40 repertoire, too: the heaviest Dokken song you could find on their record, for example, just to draw the crowd, but we tried to limit that and focus more on classic rock and blues stuff or whatever was hot off the radio.

TERRY GLAZE

In these days most bands in the area were just like we were, except in almost every other case, those bands attracted an audience of mostly girls whereas we attracted young guys. Now, that’s not because we weren’t particularly good-looking, it was definitely because Darrell’s guitar playing gave us a unique identity which set us apart from every other band at the time. Another factor that made us so tight is that because we were in Texas, we got the chance to play long sets every night, maybe two or three hours, whereas in L.A. a band would get fifteen minutes. So if we fucked up, nobody cared and we knew we had another forty-five songs in the set to make up for it. At one point we played the Bronco Bowl in Dallas and it felt like it was something we were supposed to do.

Now that Darrell had started drinking, our relationship got stronger, and because I was spending a lot of time on his mom’s couch, we’d hang out a lot, as friends, when we weren’t playing gigs or practicing. While his brother Vinnie was asleep at night, Darrell and I would take Vinnie’s car, a ’69 Oldsmobile Cutlass, for a joy ride, and we’d call it, “Working it in big boy’s car.”

So we’d take this thing out on Monterrey Street and our thing in those days was to drive through people’s lawns and then peel out so hard that they’ve got no fucking lawn left, known as a “lawn job.” Laying the power down massively, taking out mail boxes, the whole fucking bit. The funny thing is that Vinnie never even knew we did it because we always put the car back in the same place for the next morning.

Dime and I used to fuck him over so bad it was stupid. Once, Dime and me drove to this gig way out of town in Shreveport, at least three and a half hours from Dallas. I’m hauling ass in that Cutlass going about ninety miles an hour, and by the time we’d gotten about halfway there, smoke is pouring out of this motherfucker from under the hood.

We pull over thinking it’s the radiator, which it was. But it was not only that because I knew I had already blown the heads in it on a previous lawn-shredding outing. So we open it up and this old guy comes over and shouts at the top of his voice, “Hey boys, stand back! You’re fixin’ to get burned!” This guy was straight out of
Green Acres
, the epitome of how people talk, and I can still hear that guy’s voice in my head today. “Fixin’” is a real local expression by the way, meaning that you’re about to do something or something’s about to happen, and I use the term all the time.

“Hang on, I’ll be right over there!” this old guy says, and when he comes over, he slowly takes his cap off, and then
boom
, the radiator blows. Vinnie’s Cutlass wouldn’t be going anywhere. We had to find a phone booth out in the middle of nowhere and call someone who was going to the gig and tell them what had happened so they could come out and get us.

BECAUSE OF OLD MAN
Abbott’s clout in the local music scene at the time, he could take us three to blues clubs to watch these blues legends who formed part of the resurgence of the late ’70s and early’80s, a band called Savvy, for example, who had their own grimy club downtown where your shoes would stick to the carpet.

He knew all these people because he’d done sessions with them, so we’d go along and watch how things are done, how to perform live and the whole bit. It wasn’t a Rock ’n’ Roll 101 course or anything like that, it was more a case of just going out and watching these cats jam. Even though Arlington was still a relatively small town, it still had a population of maybe two hundred and fifty thousand, so it was a whole lot bigger than the peanut town I came from, and consequently a much bigger pool of musical talent. These guys we went to see play were definitely some of the coolest dudes in town, and when you’re in your late teens—thinking about rock ’n’ roll and that whole darker type of image—these cats were just what I needed, because I definitely knew I didn’t want to play fucking Journey covers for the rest of my life.

TERRY GLAZE

Because we spent so much time around musicians and performers as teenagers, Darrell and Vinnie lived the rock star lifestyle from this very early age and it wasn’t an act: they actually lived it out twenty-four hours a day. They didn’t turn it off. I always wanted to be a performer who could go and do my show, and then come off and be a different person, but they were that person
all the time
. Kind of like the persona of a wrestler, you could say.

During the process of all the playing gigs and hanging out in local clubs, we continued to have pretty much free reign in the studio if the old man wasn’t booked, so we used that time to get the material down for these early records, which we sold from the trunks of cars or between sets of our live shows. Our debut
Metal Magic
came out in ’83—produced by the old man in his own Pantego Sound studio—with either Jerry or Darrell coming up with the ideas for songs.

All we did was practice and write songs, so it’s no surprise that by the time we were eighteen we were as tight a live band as you could get. It was all new to us, having the freedom to use Jerry Abbott’s studio, and it was so exciting. Someone would say, “The studio is free next Thursday, let’s go!” It was a great training ground for all of us to learn our craft. Some bands have goals to be the best band at their high school or the best band in their city; we never thought like that. We always thought that one of these days we’ll be on tour with Van Halen. We didn’t want to be the local band, we wanted to be the biggest band in the world, and so our vision was much bigger than most other bands. We played the Bronco Bowl in Dallas one time and it just seemed like that was what we were supposed to do. We even had a full-blown stage show produced by a guy we called “Pyro” who—you guessed it—did pyrotechnics. We didn’t reserve the big show for special occasions either, we did it every night.

Then we just
kept
writing songs, either in the old man’s studio or we’d rent a warehouse somewhere to rehearse in until we got kicked out. As well as rehearsing and playing gigs, I was also the kind of guy who liked hanging out at the lake. I was a lake person. I’d get out there and throw Frisbees, pick up hot chicks and the whole bit. Everybody wanted to jam at six o clock on Sundays, so I’d always show up full of booze after spending the day at the lake.

I suppose I felt like I didn’t really need to practice and that the only reason I thought I was there was for everyone else in the room’s benefit. Learning something new took me no time at all. I did it all by ear and knew all the notes. But I always feared that despite my natural ability, my reluctance to rehearse might just make the brothers turn round one day and say, “Okay, we’ve had enough.” They lived to practice. I didn’t. I lived to enjoy myself and play music while doing so, so there was a potential conflict.

Thankfully, it never came to that, and in 1984 we did our second record,
Projects in the Jungle
, again produced by the old man in his studio. Of all our early stuff, I really dig this one. We were evolving as musicians and
Projects
was exploring the direction where we wanted to go and also provided a big, upward learning curve. It was mostly all our own compositions, but occasionally the old man would bring a song in for us, and we’d just adapt what he had to fit our own version of what we wanted to do, so he was entitled to some songwriting royalties for some of these earlier tunes. I mention this only because royalties would be an issue later on down the line.

Although I didn’t initially make the connection, my newfound business know-how helped. I was also doing everything I could to learn about the business side of the music industry, in order to minimize the chances of getting screwed over in the future. Because even I knew that getting fucked—usually by your manager—came with the territory of being a musician.

So whenever I had spare time sitting in the studio I read
Billboard
magazine and any interesting music industry–related book I could get my hands on, articles that told you how to protect yourself and the whole bit. Every musician needs to know the kind of stuff I was reading, how all the pie charts work when it comes to songwriting credit. I actually think it really pissed off the old man because he knew I was fucking learning a lot, and maybe stuff he didn’t want me to know, too. He even started calling me “The Lawyer.”

While our live performances became steadily tighter and more accomplished, musically the band was becoming influenced by different shit, too. Even though our material still had a loose, pop sensibility to it, the riffs were steadily getting harder and heavier. Listening to Metallica back in ’83 and ’84,
Ride the Lightning
changed everything and so began a whole new step in the evolution of heavy metal. Their first record had turned our heads in a heavier direction, but the progression to
Ride the Lightning
was huge and certainly influenced our next studio recording,
I Am the Night
, released in 1985.

TERRY GLAZE

We all drove to see Metallica play in some college in Tyler, Texas one time. We even wore our spandex! It was like playing in a big cafeteria and we ended up booking a show in that same room at some point in the future. I was the only one with a credit card, and the next morning I found out that everything had been put on my card. We also did a show in Houston playing with Megadeth, and I think that they actually approached Darrell to go and join their band but Darrell wouldn’t go if Vinnie wasn’t included in the deal, which is kind of ironic given that in high school it was Darrell who was the throw-in on the trade package!

Sure, we were getting into heavier music but we still knew that the only way to get gigs locally was still to dress up—hair sticking up near the ceiling and the whole fucking bit—and appease the club crowd, because these were the people that were allowing us to survive. You could argue that our early look stifled our progress to some degree, but the counterbalance was that it allowed us to be seen by many more people than we might otherwise have been. Definitely a good tradeoff in retrospect, and we always put on the best show we possibly could.

WHEN METALLICA’S
Master of Puppets
came out in ’86, I remember being completely blown away by it when we listened to it for the first time at the Abbott house. They had a pretty nice turntable in there and goddamn it we played that record over and over again while I just sat on the couch in awe. Metallica still had a melodic sense and they also wrote really great, complex songs, whereas with Slayer—who would also get popular in ’85 and ’86—we looked at that and said, “Yeah, well that’s cool, but not really the direction we want to go.”

TERRY GLAZE

We were all listening to Van Halen, Def Leppard, and stuff like that, but Darrell and Rex were the ones that discovered Metallica and they started going in that direction. I kind of followed but I felt with that kind of music, the guitar was the hook and the vocals were secondary. I liked songs that you could wash your car to where the vocals were the hook, but the band direction was going away from that to a place where the song was driven primarily by guitar hooks. I thought the strongest songs we did were where Darrell and I combined. He might take one of my songs and make the guitar parts better but generally our sound got progressively heavier as a wider range of bands influenced us.