Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (45 page)

VINNIE PAUL:
We always felt like our musicianship enabled us to be more than just a thrash band. The groove thing was something we didn’t want to lose, even though we got heavier. We wanted people to be able to move to the music. Being from Texas, we were always fans of ZZ Top and bands that had big grooves.

DIMEBAG DARRELL:
I fit the kind of music I play. I’m rowdy, I like to tear into shit and drink shit and have a good ol’ time. I can’t imagine playing something laid back that didn’t fit who I am. I’m lucky I found myself. A lot of people don’t until the day they die. As for our Southern thing, everybody in Texas is laid back. There are places like New York where everybody’s in a rush to hurry up and get things done. That’s not good for your health—not that booze is either [
laughs
]. That more relaxed thing goes into the music. You can hear the bends, you can hear the Southern rock parts.

RITA HANEY (Dimebag’s longtime girlfriend):
Some of the things Dime would play off the cuff were amazing. There was always a song going on in his mind. Even when he brushed his teeth, it was to a song. I asked him one day, “What are you doing? You’re roughing your gums up pretty good.” He goes, “Oh. I’m brushing my teeth to Metallica’s ‘Whiplash.’”

With 1990’s
Cowboys from Hell
, Pantera reemerged as a vicious, razor-clawed beast. The album was a new kind of thrash—a bit of Slayer and Metallica crossed with a crushing Southern rock–tinged power groove. Songs like “Domination,” “Psycho Holiday,” and of course the title track were devastating and heavy, combining Anselmo’s love of hardcore and thrash with Dimebag’s ability to rip, squeal, and crunch.

PHIL ANSELMO:
The biggest thing was when I befriended Kerry King from Slayer [in 1988], at the beginning of their
South of Heaven
tour. Slayer played Dallas on a Saturday night, but they get there the night before when
we
had a gig. So that Friday, Tom, Jeff, and Kerry came to our show and got up and played “Reign in Blood” with us—well, not Tom because he had had a little bit too much to drink by then. Afterwards, Kerry and I exchanged phone numbers. He called out of nowhere a few months later. I didn’t even believe it was him. He’s like, “Well, fuck, how many Kerrys do you know?” He came down and we had a good time partying. Then he calls me again and says, “Hey, I want to come down, but I don’t want to do it for nothing.” I said, “What’s on your mind?” He said, “I wanna jam, man. You got a gig this weekend?” I’m like, “Fuckin’-A, man.” We built our set around a two-guitar player situation, which is something we had never done. We did “Reign in Blood,” “South of Heaven,” Judas Priest songs with guitar harmonies, and all kinds of shit. I know in my heart the fact that Kerry King came down and him and Dimebag Darrell jammed for hours and hours together was a
big-
time experience for everybody in the band—a major turning point.

VINNIE PAUL:
A lot of people think that [Phil] was the driving force behind the heaviness. That’s not true at all. My brother wrote the guitar riffs. I wrote the drum parts.

PHIL ANSELMO:
I showed them the fucking
path
, man. It would be a lie to say anything different. But I gotta say you can’t force-feed anybody anything. Dimebag came over to the first house I lived in Texas in early ’88 and I said, “Look here. This is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna smoke this bowl and you’re gonna sit down and listen to a song.” I put on the vinyl of “At Dawn They Sleep” from Slayer’s
Hell Awaits
. He sat there and stared at the turntable, and by the middle of the song that big curly head started to move a little and groove, and by the end of the song he’s like, “Damn, son, that’s badass!” Vince was more skeptical. He’s a look-before-you-leap kind of guy. Sometimes he would need a little shove.

REX BROWN:
We were writing almost continuously at that point. We’d sound-check at a place called Joe’s Garage, where we used to play every other weekend. We’d sit there in the club and write. The first three songs we did that way were “The Art of Shredding,” “Heresy,” and “Domination.” It took us six months to write those songs on
Cowboys
because we were so particular about every detail.

PHIL ANSELMO:
We wrote
Cowboys
from late ’88 all through ’89. The first demo had “The Art of Shredding,” “The Sleep,” and “Cowboys from Hell.” Very shortly after, we did “Psycho Holiday.”

REX BROWN:
“Psycho Holiday” is all about Phil. I was trying to get him out of town because he was a fuckin’ mess. We were all drinking way too much and his temper was out of control. He was getting in fights all the time and no one could calm him down. I was sitting there going, “Well fuck, man. We really need to send him home and let him chill a little.” I wrote on a pad “Psycho Holiday” because he was psycho and he was going on a holiday. I went, “Okay, Delta, American. What’s the cheapest flight we can get. Southwest?”

PHIL ANSELMO:
Rex and I were living together at the time and I come back to the house after this vacation—which I really needed—and I looked next to the telephone and written there is “Psycho Holiday” scribbled out with all these flight times.
I
was the psycho. It became an inside joke, and Vinnie said, “Man, that’s a great fucking song title.” I guess I was fucked-up back then. I went through a big LSD phase. I quit washing my hair. I put peanut butter in my hair when I was tripping, and I didn’t take a fuckin’ bath for the longest time.

REX BROWN:
The noise at the beginning of the first song “Cowboys from Hell” was totally a Dime thing. That’s what he was hearing in his head. We made a loop of that crazy echo sound for Dime to play over. It was repetitious and very fuckin’ annoying for a long while. But he just played this thing called “in-the-box scaling,” and he got that from all the great blues guys we’d see recording at his dad’s studio. We wanted the song to be this anthem that said, “We are here to take over your fuckin’ town, so step aside or join in.”

PHIL ANSELMO:
“Clash with Reality” is a true story. We had a New Year’s Eve party on a Saturday night. We played on a Friday. After the gig, we went to a friend of ours whose mother owned an apartment complex. I guess in our minds that meant we could do whatever the fuck we wanted. Well, that proved to be false. . . . We showed up to this one-room apartment with about thirty fucking people. I walked straight into the bedroom and there was a Marshall half-stack there. I just turned that motherfucker on and started playing god knows what on “10.” The people next door were sound asleep. They fucking freaked out. Next thing you know the place is crawling with cops and Darrell and Vinnie are down on the ground. I was upstairs in this apartment and this cop told me to stay put or I was going to jail. I’m watching what’s going down in the parking lot, and I see this fucking cop whip out a steel baton and start beating Darrell.

RITA HANEY:
Darrell wasn’t fighting or struggling. He wasn’t like that. Phil came running from across the parking lot and kicked the cop off him. They both wound up going to jail that night. The cops were telling them they were gonna keep ’em, saying, “Don’t even worry about doing your New Year’s show.”

In 1989 after a chance meeting with an ATCO Records A&R man, Pantera evolved from an unsigned Texas group with plenty of firepower to a major label buzz-band with the marketing push to go global.

VINNIE PAUL:
Mark Ross, who worked under Derek Shulman at ATCO, was flying to North Carolina to see a band they signed called Tangier. Then Hurricane Hugo hit and they landed in Dallas. So Mark called up Derek and said, “Hey, I’m stuck here in Dallas. Are there any bands you want me to go see?” We had been turned down by every label on earth twenty-three times. Derek says, “I’ve been following this band called Pantera for three or four years. Why don’t you see if they’re any good live?” Well, I got a phone call from Mark Ross, and he said, “Hey, I’m from Atco Records. I need to see you play tonight.” I giggled because I’d met with so many of these A&R guys and was ready for the same old bullshit. I said, “Dude, we’re not really playing a gig tonight. We’ve got a birthday party that we’re playing for this chick at this Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth. If you really want to come see us, come by and check it out.” I kind of cracked up about it and told the guys that this dude was coming out. None of us took it seriously. We get to the party and I see this tall guy with curly black hair who looks really out of place. I go up to him and say, “You’re Mark Ross.” He says, “Yup, I just got here.”

PHIL ANSELMO:
To add to the ridiculousness of it, there were only about forty people there. We set up in the corner on this slick dance floor. The girl had her cake, and we did the birthday thing. The cake smashed all over the fucking floor and there’s icing, so it’s slippery as shit. We’re up there scared to take a step ’cause we thought we were gonna fall and break our fucking necks.

VINNIE PAUL:
We were killing, man, throwing down as hard as we can. About four songs into it everybody looks up and goes, “Hey man, he left. He’s gone.” We’re like, “Ah, fuck. I guess he didn’t like us.” So we just started drinking and partying, throwing birthday cake all over the place. Dime’s sliding all over the dance floor while we’re playing. Four songs later, Mark comes back. Everybody’s like, “Oh, shit. Get serious again.” As we get done he walks over and I said, “What’d you think, dude?” He said, “I loved it. It was incredible.” I said, “Well, why’d you leave?” He said, “I went out to the car to call Derek and tell him we’re signing you guys.”

VINNIE PAUL:
We were huge fans of Ozzy’s
Diary of a Madman
and this band Malice, and they’re all produced by Max Norman. So we thought we
had
to have Max Norman. He flew to Houston to see a gig, and he loved the band. We were ready to go. But our recording budget only allowed for $30,000 for the producer. About two days before we were supposed to start with Max, he got offered $50,000 to do Lynch Mob. He calls us up and said, “Guys, I gotta take this. I need the money. I’m out.” We were like, “What the fuck?” So Mark Ross goes, “I got this guy named Terry Date who just finished doing Soundgarden and Overkill.” We were like, “Man, I don’t know.” He said, “Well, let’s find out.”

REX BROWN:
Me and Dime would sit there with Terry and do what we’d call “the microscope.” We’d turn everything else off on the tracks except for me and him and a kick and a snare. That’s the way we’d make sure every guitar and bass note was picked the way it should be. That’s how we got that real tight sound.

PHIL ANSELMO:
The last song we wrote for
Cowboys from Hell
was “Primal Concrete Sledge,” and we did that in the studio in ’90. Vince came up with that drumbeat and then Dime added the riff around the beat. It was the sound of us really discovering ourselves, and as good as the rest of
Cowboys
was, it really paved the way for us to develop musically.

DIMEBAG DARRELL:
We were in Texas, and we heard “Cowboys from Hell” on the local radio station. It was a trip, man! My first tattoo said “Cowboys from Hell.” I thought to myself, “Well, fuck, man, even if I’m fifty years old I’ll be able to look at the tattoo and say, “I made it that far at that one point, dammit.”

PHIL ANSELMO:
We were on a mission, man. There were some slim crowds in some bleak cities in places like North Dakota, where nobody had heard of us. There would be people just sitting at the bar tables, and I would charge them and kick their fucking tables out from underneath them and scream in their fucking face. They were not getting out of there without remembering us one way or another.

REX BROWN:
We wanted to be feared—be as brutal as we could possibly be. When the four of us walked in somewhere it was always like an old saloon—the Jesse James gang was there. That was one of the things we worked on. Being those bad guys wearing black, just like the lyrics of [“Cowboys from Hell.”]

In 1990, just as Pantera was about to blow up, original heavy metal madman Ozzy Osbourne was working on songs that would escalate him to a level of popularity he hadn’t experienced since the death of Randy Rhoads—thanks to the addition of nineteen-year-old New Jersey shredder Zakk Wylde, who played with Ozzy for much of the next two decades and continues to front his own band, Black Label Society. With Wylde’s songwriting help, Ozzy crafted some of the most popular music of his career. The quadruple-platinum 1991 album
No More Tears
featured the Grammy-winning “I Don’t Want to Change the World” and the hits “No More Tears” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” As successful as the pairing with Wylde was, the nineties were a tumultuous period personally for Ozzy, who was back to the excesses and indulgences that got him dismissed from Black Sabbath.

ZAKK WYLDE:
This guy Dave Feld saw me playing in some shit hole in New Jersey called Close Encounters. He said, “Hey man, have you ever thought of auditioning for Ozzy?” He goes, “My buddy Mark Weiss is a legendary photographer and he just got done shooting them.” He said, “Take some pictures of yourself and record some shit, and I can get it to Mrs. Osbourne.” I had nothing to fuckin’ lose. I was working at a gas station, mowing lawns and teaching guitar. So I put together a cassette of me playing “Mr. Crowley,” “Crazy Train,” and “I Don’t Know,” and playing classical guitar. My sister took some Polaroids of me with the Instamatic camera on my parents’ porch and sent them to him. Then Ozzy was up in the city and they called me up to meet him, but I ended up missing him because he went out drinking with André the fucking Giant and got blitzkrieged. They were out all night. I was like, “Man, that sucks.” I would have just liked to get an autograph. Next thing you know, I got a call from Mom [Sharon Osbourne]. I thought it was one of my friends putting their mom up to it. She was talking to me and I was waiting to hear my fuckin’ friends laughing in the background. But she just kept talking. She said she wanted to fly me out to Los Angeles to audition. Next thing you know, I’m in Los Angeles. I jammed and when Oz walked into the room I was like, “Aw shit, it’s fuckin’ Ozzy!” I had just seen him with Jake at the
Bark at the Moon
tour at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Ozzy goes, “Where have I seen you before?” He goes, “Have you lived out here?” I went, “No, I’m from New Jersey.” He went, “I know I’ve seen you before.” He said my picture was the only one he picked out of all those fuckin’ thousands upon thousands of boxes of audition tapes. He said, “I looked at the picture and I said, “Oh, look at this little kid. He loves Randy Rhoads. That’s how I remember seeing you.” I auditioned, and after that Mom was like, “We gotta get your passport because we gotta see if you can write with Ozzy.” Then they wanted to see if I could play live.