by Brown, Rex
“Dallas, Texas, Hollywooooo–ood…” You know how it goes and that to me was fucking telling. My first thought was, “Screw this; I want an electric guitar now. This is what I’ve got to do. Got to do.” Until this point, I hadn’t been the kind of kid that had posters of bands on my wall—I was much more into sports and shit like that—but that was all going to change. I was probably only eight years old at the time.
So, after we moved to the city and when I showed up for my first day at my new school, I was faced with total culture shock. Hell, I was used to having eight kids in my class—maybe ten—and now all of a sudden I’m in a 5th grade classroom with fifty kids, split over three partitions. It took a while to adjust, and as a result of feeling lost in the crowd, I started acting like the class clown to get attention while hopefully making some new friends.
CHERYL PONDER
The main reason for mother and Rex moving into the city was to be near my husband and I. I wanted to help mother with Rex, and the opportunities were better for Rex in Arlington.
Even at this age I would take anyone on. I was a scrappy little dude for sure. I had no fear whatsoever and because I didn’t, the bigger kids soon became my friends, but usually only after I’d tried to smash their skull in a fight. I had no problem tackling someone who was a foot taller than me, and lots of kids were in those days. I used to whoop some ass back then, as that was only way I could guarantee respect, and if things went wrong, I always knew I could run faster than them anyway.
I guess you could compare my approach to what it would be like going into prison for the first time, where you hit the biggest guy you can get your fucking hands on in order to get immediate respect. All the other inmates would say, “Fuck, this dude must be badass,” and would leave you alone. That’s how I had to live my life. Remember, I had no father, my mother would never re-marry, and while my sister’s husband Buddy would do his level best to fill the paternal role, I pretty much had to raise myself.
My mom did do her best, though, and she definitely wanted to instill good morals in me. She also wanted to get me into something that kept me occupied, so the local church—the First Presbyterian denomination to be precise—fitted both bills because it had a really good youth squad. And there were a lot of hot chicks there. I don’t know whether I went more for strictly religious reasons or for the interaction with chicks, but I’m sure you can figure that out.
Either way, I sang in the church choir and had a lot of other activities going on that were connected to the church. Mom wanted to keep me really busy with singing trips—camps where you’d go away for a week on a bus to sing in different cities, that kind of thing. We’d go to the Little Rocks, the Shreveports, all over the place really, staying with other families from other parishes. Then we’d do our little bit during their Sunday service, and usually I was singing lead in something, I was that good.
The choir director’s name was Michael Kemp, and when I look back on it, he really helped bring out my talent by making me feel comfortable singing in front of an audience and the whole bit. He wasn’t a father figure as such, but he was definitely a mentor and he saw the talent and probably already knew that I was going to be some kind of a musician.
This church was cliquey though. Not only was the size of its congregation large, it was also organized religion to the extreme—while I probably didn’t see the writing on the wall at the time, in terms of what organized religion actually was, I was aware that it seemed to be all about who’s got the most money, who’s got the best shoes or the biggest house, and all that. Maybe when you’re going through your formative years you don’t really pay too much attention to the wider issues of a subject like organized religion; other things seem much more important. There are enough school studies that you’re trying to deal with, so a class subject such as religious study was just one more on a long list I had to take.
CHERYL PONDER
The church had a very active youth group. In 1975, the church hired a new music director called Michael Kemp, and he and his wife had just gotten their degrees in music and moved to Arlington. He was just so talented and he put together a church choir with the kids, and our daughter Charlotte and Rex joined and immediately.
Michael took to Rex because he could see the talent that he had. The kids went on all kinds of trips, and Mike became increasingly proud of Rex, gave him more and more responsibility.
While you could hardly say that I was an academic genius in class, I did take my studies seriously but always with this underlying sense that the subjects weren’t going to be too relevant to my future career, almost as if I knew my destiny. Fortunately I didn’t have to try too hard and was a solid B-student—initially at least—because I always had this insatiable appetite for knowledge. I always liked to read books: history, geography, you name it, I read them. I still do.
Around the same time I got into junior high band, which was an important move in the right direction for my musical aspirations but a backward step for my academics. Of course I wanted to be on the drum line because that’s where all the good stuff was—the part of the band that was most fun—but they needed me somewhere else.
So they pretended that they needed some of the brighter kids in there or certainly ones that were more qualified than I was, which didn’t make sense because I played in the beginner band, the middle band, and the superior band, and was All City and All State in music, and that would continue until I was in tenth grade in high school. The “somewhere else” they referred to would soon be clear.
What they didn’t have were any tuba players. So they thought, “Shit, this kid weighs ninety pounds, let’s go ahead and strap this fuckin’ sixty-pound tuba on him and make him ride the bus with it and walk all the way up a hill with this thing to practice.” Naturally, I thought this was the dumbest thing ever—but it turned out to be the right choice because it was excellent musical training and I got good at it in a hurry.
CHERYL PONDER
Rex getting into the little school band as a tuba player was the most significant moment musically for him, other than the fact that we had all always enjoyed listening to music. But him actually learning to play an instrument was a big step forward.
Like most kids my age, I played baseball, excelling at pitcher and shortstop. I played soccer until I got tired of running after a ball, and I played football, despite being too small to initially get on the football team. What I did have in my favor was my dad’s legs. He held the record for the hundred-meter dash in the state of Texas for seventeen years, and I could certainly cover the ground and catch the ball. Eventually somebody pulled some strings somewhere and got me on the team, but the coach—who was a total dick—just made me be a towel boy or a water boy. That was a shitty role, and all the bigger kids would tease me by sticking my head down the toilet and flushing it, known as a “swirlie.” Who needs a head/mouthful of shit?
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 tow
er. 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
By 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.