Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (48 page)

VINNIE PAUL:
To us, heavy metal had to sound like a machine. The guitar had to have a buzzsaw sound to it, the drums had to have an edge to it, and Dime and Terry [Date] spent many hours getting the guitars “ass-tight.” My brother was a complete perfectionist.

REX BROWN:
We did 250 dates on the
Cowboys from Hell
tour with hardly any breaks at all. We had maybe a month off before we went back into the studio. Darrell and Vinnie were still at their mom’s house. Me and Phil were still broke, so I bought myself a bike. I’d ride up to this place that was like a 7-Eleven, and we knew a guy there who would leave us beer and sandwiches behind the back of the place so we had something to eat after we finished at the studio.

TERRY DATE (producer):
There were two things they wanted to do with
Vulgar
. They wanted it to be a little heavier than
Cowboys from Hell
. And they wanted to make the heaviest record of all time. They went in with that perfect combination of confidence and security.

REX BROWN:
Sometimes I thought that I’d played something real intense. Then we’d listen back and realize that wasn’t the case. So we’d come in and start punching in, which means you had to cut the tape [to edit the song]. I was playing the same stuff that Dime was, and that’s the reason that sometimes you don’t hear the bass. I’m playing just dead on the money with Dime and it makes the guitar seem like it has this lower frequency to it. That’s just one of the things that we were really focusing on, and that’s when we became the machine.

TERRY DATE:
We doubled and sometimes tripled Dime’s rhythm guitars, and he wanted the double to be perfectly tight with the first guitar. With songs like “Walk,” that meant every downstroke, every attack of the pick, and every palm mute at the backside of the riff had to be exactly on time with the first track. That took hours and hours.

REX BROWN:
When we weren’t working, Dime had pranks up the fuckin’ ass. We always wanted to stay and be a whole part of production, but we’d get so fucking stoned and be such jackasses that we weren’t really good at being ears late at night, and we’d have to leave.

VINNIE PAUL:
We used to play this game called “chicken brake,” where you grab the fuckin’ emergency brake. As soon as you hit it, the whole car came to a screeching halt. We’d do it in the streets of LA, down Hollywood Boulevard; you could be going 5 miles per hour and there would be a bunch of people walking and all of a sudden, “
scree-ee-ch
!” and it just scares the shit out of ’em. One time in Texas we were hauling ass down the highway in the pouring rain in Terry’s rental car, and all of a sudden Rex thinks it would be funny to reach over and hit the chicken brake. When he hit it I was doing, like, 60 miles per hour, and the car went into a 360 spin, and spun and spun and spun, and then it came to a stop in the middle of the highway. We both looked at each other pale white and went, “Okay, that didn’t happen,” and kept going. Later that night we went to a place called the Basement, and we were really ripped when we got back. We went through this neighborhood and ran over every fuckin’ mailbox there. I don’t know how we didn’t go to jail or blow the radiator out, but we pulled up in front of the studio. Terry comes running out and sees the headlights all busted out, the fucking front end was all bashed in. There was steam coming off the motor. He never yelled at us like he did that night. We were like, “Dude, just chill. We’ll make enough money on this record to pay for it.”

REX BROWN:
Everybody had a nickname in those days. Vinnie Paul was Riggs. They called me any number of things, just depending on the day, [including Rex Rocker]. Darrell called himself Diamond, then Dimebag.

RITA HANEY:
Philip is the
reason
why Darrell is named Dimebag. Diamond is the name he picked when he was thirteen or fourteen. But when Philip first joined the band, he and Darrell really connected. Phil moved to Texas from New Orleans, and he didn’t know many people at all—just the guys. And he smoked weed. Philip would always hit Darrell up, going, “Hey, man, you know where I can get some weed?” And Darrell would always give Philip half of whatever he had, which was two joints—about a dime bag. Vinnie and Rex always called him Dime, and it was one of those stoner moments. Darrell was bringing weed over to Philip, and instead of Dime it became Dimebag.

PHIL ANSELMO:
For
Vulgar Display of Power
, we stripped away all the raw, non-songs. Take “Cowboys From Hell.” I sang from the ravaged gut. But the interesting thing is, after going out on tour for
Cowboys
opening for bigger bands, after being the band that’s stared at, and not the main attraction, and fighting for recognition, I realized that, man, I am no different from any motherfucker out there in the audience except that I had a microphone in my hand. And if I had a microphone in my hand, I was going to speak the language of the people out in the audience.

While Metallica was becoming more popular than ever, former cofounder Dave Mustaine was falling apart. In 1992, stressed out by the sudden changes in his label and management, the mounting pressure of success, and the mainstream breakthrough of his former band, Megadeth’s front man came close to his own extinction. Then he found salvation.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
We had to cancel the tour because I was eating so many Valiums I was totally out of control. See, my wife didn’t like the smell of alcohol on me, but I was much keener than to be defeated by something as simple as the smell of alcohol. So I got Valiums. I took a bunch and overdosed, and my heart stopped. It wasn’t near death, it
was
death. All I remember was going up to Phoenix, driving out to a little place called Wickenburg. and then just laying down. I didn’t see a light or a tunnel or anything like that. The hospital actually called my wife to say I had died. After that, I started to improve my life and get things together, but I ended up going back to treatment two more times before quitting.

DAVE ELLEFSON:
I managed to get cleaned up from dope a year before that, but it was the hardest thing. I was like, “Fuck, I don’t even know if I ever want to touch my bass anymore.” That was scary, ’cause that’s all I had—my dope and my music. Fortunately, everybody got their act together and we continued making albums. We’ve had more second chances than any other band I know. We’re way beyond nine lives.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
My biggest problem was that I had all this success, but my life was not very enjoyable. I had a lot of self-doubt. I hurt from loneliness and anger, or I hurt because I didn’t have something I wanted, or I hurt because I was afraid I wasn’t going to keep something I had. I tried the whole religious trip and I found it really wanting. Then I went into this spiritual thing with the gurus and the Filipino priests laying on hands. And that was even more empty. Then I went back to going to church, and I went with a new set of ears. I started listening for the stuff that applied to me instead of the stuff I found fault with. My life started to get better. I attribute that 100 percent to finally having God in my life.

Sensing a changing of the musical guard, Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson left the band following the tour for 1992’s
Fear of the Dark
. Three live albums recorded during that cycle,
A Real Live One, A Real Dead One
, and
Live at Donnington
, were meant to signify the end of an era. Dickinson pursued a solo career, flew commercial airlines, fenced, and wrote books. He was replaced in Maiden by Wolfsbane vocalist Blaze Bayley, but with metal already on the decline, the last thing fans wanted to hear was a new Maiden vocalist.

BRUCE DICKINSON (Iron Maiden):
I thought, “If you want to, you can stay with Maiden, but things are sure not gonna change.” Or I could take a chance and go somewhere else. Potentially, I knew I could be facing the prospect of commercial oblivion, which didn’t scare me at all, because I’ve had a great career out of Maiden, which is more than anybody could possibly ask, and also I thought, “If that’s as far as I’m supposed to go in this lifetime, if that’s all I’m destined to do, then that’s fine with me.” But I wanted to find out.

NICKO McBRAIN (Iron Maiden) [1993 interview]:
[I] love the geezer—I’ve worked with [Bruce] for ten years. I’ll always be there for him, but I still feel hurt ’cause I know he don’t like the band anymore. At this stage, that ain’t fuckin’ cool.

STEVE HARRIS:
The reaction was disappointment, sadness, being pissed off—all at once! But we’ve all felt that he’s been doing so many different things, that something had to give eventually. The thing is that if he can’t give Maiden 100 percent, then we don’t want him in the band.

The tidal shifts in the music industry that made Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains the new leaders of heavy music inspired Pantera to rage like never before, and in 1994, the band’s slugfest
Far Beyond Driven
entered the
Billboard
album chart at number one, an indication that their loyal fanbase had grown. Along with mainstream success came the cash and recognition that allowed them to be more wild and destructive than ever.

VINNIE PAUL:
When all that alternative stuff started coming out, that’s really what propelled us into
Far Beyond Driven
. Before we even wrote a note, we went, “This album has to be the most over-the-top metal record ever made.” After
Vulgar
, everybody expected us to go the Metallica route and put out a “Black Album,” and we did the opposite. We even went more extreme and pushed it to another level. Bonnie Raitt and Ace of Bass were bummed the fuck out when that record entered
Billboard
at number one. The entire music world thought, “Who the fuck is this overnight sensation?” We went, “Fuck, we’ve been on the road for four years nonstop and we’ve got the best fans in the world, and they’re the ones that made this record number one.”

DIMEBAG DARRELL:
It’s kinda funny, I wear a giant razor blade around my neck, and a lot of people think it’s for crank or cocaine. I’ve never touched either of those things. I’ve smoked some dope, I’ve done some V’s, and I’ve drank millions of gallons of whiskey. But the cover of Judas Priest’s
British Steel
has a picture of a fist holding a razor blade, and that thing rearranged my whole way of thinking about a whole lotta shit. So my chick got me this necklace. Me and Vinnie never did cocaine or heroin. We drink booze. We get drunk, we fall down. We do stupid shit and that’s the end of it. Dude, I’m crazy enough already. I don’t need to fuck with that kind of crap.

VINNIE PAUL:
Some of the greatest music in the world was inspired by Jack Daniel’s, Crown Royal, marijuana. If you look at most musicians who were just outstanding and then they cleaned up, all their songwriting ability went away with it. Music sounds better to you when you got a buzz. You feel more creative and a little less inhibited to try things.

JOE GIRON (photographer):
They definitely relished hearing those stories later on about what happened to people who went out with them drinking. One night, one of the record company marketing guys ended up passed out in a field, and they were so proud of themselves for that. I think they got that tolerance from their club days, because they would play six nights a week every week. They were probably chugging ten or twelve shots a night.

PHIL ANSELMO:
Everyone knows there was a lot of sex. Everyone knows there was a lot of drinking. Everyone knows there was a lot of drunken sex. Yeah, I was single then, and there were some incredible times where I caught myself in the middle of a situation and I look around me and put my arms in the air and said, “I’m the fuckin’ king of the world!” I’ve had five women in bed at one time for long periods of time. Just group sex constantly. They used to call me “Manson without the Murder” because I had my harem. They would make my food and suck my cock and do whatever else as well as being with themselves. Ain’t nothing wrong with double chicks in bed that are down with it.

RITA HANEY:
I have so much respect for the strong person Phil was. Not his morals, because some of his morals were totally crappy when it came to trying to fuck everybody’s wife or girlfriend. But that’s kind of a New Orleans thing. Those dudes kinda did that, and it was okay. That bros-before-hos kind of thing.

BOBBY TONGS (videographer):
Occasionally, Vinnie would bring chicks on the bus, but me and Darrell always had girlfriends back then, so we didn’t get involved. But they’d get on the bus and act like they owned it, and we didn’t appreciate that. Vinnie would always pass out first, and then we’d have these chicks riding with us, and me and Darrell would have to sit there and listen to them all night. Finally they’d pass out, and usually they’d leave their shoes or something up in the front lounge. So we’d take their shoes and microwave them and bend the little buckles every which way. We’d fill the pockets of their jackets with chili or put a chicken wing in there. We’d be crying, laughing for hours, passing the camera back and forth and filming this shit.