by Brown, Rex
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.
We saw Metallica when they supported Raven in ’83 or ’84, but never got a chance to meet them. Rita Haney—a chick who was always hanging around Dime—did know them, so then in ’85, when they came back through town with W.A.S.P and Armored Saint, we got to hang out with them. I remember being completely in awe of them and their music because they were doing exactly what we hoped we could do. That experience really had a big impact on me and Dime in particular. Even at that time Hetfield was the kind of guy who you just let talk—very, very serious and you got the sense that there was something grilling upstairs but you were never sure what it was.
But he and Lars let Dime and I jam with them at Savvy’s on a few songs from their first record, and from that point the friendship was set. Let’s just say that jamming on some Metallica tracks with these guys made me think that we, too, could reach that kind of level and break out of the Texas scene into something way bigger. They were our idols, and remember, they were nowhere near the band they would become when they really blew up. But even at this stage they had a street-wise attitude to being on the road that we really admired and the various levels of debauchery that it involved.
They had a chick in every town that they nicknamed “the Edna’s”—someone they were fucking on every trip—and because we knew an “Edna” in our town, that was our standing joke with them from that point on.
We also ran into Marc Ferrari of Keel at a show somewhere, and when he heard our demo tape he went on this mission to help promote us with a view to getting us signed. That’s how we got the word around. It really stuck with him and whenever he had a break from tour he’d take a two-week sabbatical to help us out. His enthusiasm really put a foot in the door for us whenever we went out to L.A., because he knew all these guys like Tommy Thayer and the guys from Black ’n Blue. Ferrari would make sure he handed out plenty of our cassettes so that our music was heard by as many people as possible. Distribution was the issue with the early records. Yes we had an importer trying to get the word out there but because the records were produced independently, they were expensive for the fans to get a hold of; but despite that we still managed to move around 25,000 copies of I Am the Night.
ME, A BLIND DATE, and Rita Haney were all fixin’ to go up to San Francisco to try to hang out with the Metallica boys. So we rented a car and set off—Dime, who was still pretty brand-new when it came to being away from home, ended up chickening out, leaving me and the two girls to go up to San Francisco without him. We never made contact with the Metallica guys, but we hung out a few days, took a bunch of drugs, and I puked all over every inch of Golden Gate State Park. I still have the photographs to prove it.
We also got to see a record dealer called Import Exchange, who handled the import and export of our records up until that point. They already handled other metal artists like Metallica and Anthrax, but the purpose of going in person to see them was simply to say, “Here I am; what have you done for me lately?” Otherwise it’s hard to know whether they’re actually doing anything for you or not. Luckily it seemed that they had actually done something because we were starting to see a little bit of cash from record sales coming in.
When we got back, we needed to make a decision on who was going to be the band’s singer going forward. Terry Glaze was a pretty good songwriter, had that high voice and the hooks, but that wasn’t the direction we were going in. He was also trying to finish his college and we were kind of tired of him trying to be fucking Dave Lee Roth, so we needed a replacement. Dime did this thing with Terry where he’d leave a boot in his guitar case as if to say, “I gave him the boot,” but Terry never did work out what it meant.
TERRY GLAZE
I was attending college while I was still in the band, so one thing wasn’t affecting the other at that time, but I was getting tired of the way that the business structure of the band was playing out, and I knew that was going to be an issue later on. The Abbott’s had three votes—the old man and the brothers and they would never ever split their vote on anything—so I knew I was never ever going to have any say on band issues. So if my commitment could be questioned near the end it was because of that and the fact that I didn’t really like the super-heavy direction it looked like we were headed in. The last night we played together was in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it was a very strange end. We got up onstage, played a great show and then afterwards, that was it. No “Hey, man, all the best” or anything; we just parted ways.
We tried out a bunch of other guys as singers for a few months but none of them were what we wanted, until a booking agent of ours suggested we get in touch with a guy called Phil Anselmo out of a band called Razor White, a metal band who’d been out touring like we had but with more emphasis on states like Mississippi. Vinnie got him on the phone a couple times and then said to us, “Look, I’ve been talking to this guy and we’ve got to at least try him out. He sounds really cool; he’s got this Bon Jovi–type pitch to him.” To which I thought, “Oh, fuck.”
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1986 and we still had shows to play that year, one of them on New Year’s Eve in Shreveport. So I talked to Phil on the phone and we all agreed that he should fly out and try out for the band.
By now I had moved from my position on the Abbott couch and was living in a place with a bunch of drug dealers who were raking in so much cash I didn’t have to pay them any rent. They had an extra bedroom and were buying us equipment as well, kind of like sponsors, so if things worked out with Phil, he’d have a place to stay right away. I should say that I had no part in their drug business; I just lived high on the hog with the money it was bringing in.
RITA HANEY
Rex had spent a lot of those early days at Darrell and Vinnie’s house, sleeping on the couch, and their mom Carolyn definitely saw Rex as their third son. His mother was sick and his father had died at a really early age, so he didn’t really have a lot of family in his life, except the boys and their mom.
On the day Phil was due to arrive in town, one of the guys I was living with loaned me his bright red ’77 Corvette Stingray so I could go and pick Phil up at the airport, and that definitely made an impression. I wanted it to turn his head. Phil must have definitely thought, “Wow, this is a fucki
ng trip.”
We took Phil and his bags to the house and told him this is where he’d be staying for a little bit (which ended up being two years), then that night I took him to rehearse in the front room of mama Abbott’s house. Vinnie and Dime’s folks had been divorced since back when the boys were in junior high, so they lived with their mother Carolyn in a small place in Arlington that became Pantera headquarters. We kept all our stuff in the garage and we had also bought a trailer, and I’d have girls over and bang them in there, which was kind of cool back then.
So, that first night with Phil we set up a PA, where we had a bottle of tequila—my drink of choice at the time—and a joint, and jammed like we’d been together for an eternity. Everything clicked right off the bat. Phil had just turned eighteen.
CHAPTER 6
THE KID FROM THE BIG EASY
Eighteen or not, Phil Anselmo was a bad ass. Even at that age he was the kind of guy that you knew the moment he walked in the room not to fuck with him. He and I stayed in the drug dealer’s house for two years until it became too hot. The cops eventually came and busted the place, thankfully after we’d both moved out. I moved in with my girlfriend, Elena, who was becoming my first real love, and Phil shared a place with some other friends but he always had that chip on his shoulder—something to prove all the time—and he would never back away from a confrontation.