by Brown, Rex
One night we were playing at Savvy’s club, which was still our regular gig, and a guy from some other band shouted his mouth off at Phil. Phil went outside and kicked the whole band’s ass without any help. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was a fuckin’ bruiser. Being from New Orleans and us being from Dallas meant that Phil immediately brought a new dynamic into the band. He’d had a different upbringing than we’d had in Texas, so he definitely brought the tough guy street smarts, and he was also as funny as hell. Really, really intelligent. The cat is brilliant at what he does. Even then he was one of the best writers I’d ever seen.
He’d been raised mainly by his stepfather and was heavily into horror movies from a very young age. Then metal caught his attention—it really turned him around. Back then he had this incredible, high voice. He could sing Rob Halford stuff and just nail it, and that’s what we were into because we felt that the high stuff would go great with all the riffing happening downstairs.
As part of our efforts to get noticed, we went to Hollywood and showcased our material everywhere—the Whisky, Troubadour, and Gazzarri’s—every place that we could possibly get in. Then we had a residency for a week in Phoenix and one in El Paso, Texas, trying to make enough bread just so we could put fuel in the vehicle and get back home. Whatever my kitty was from playing all these sets for a week, my bar tab pretty much took me out of the picture, even though I was still underage. It was pretty tight living.
SO WITH GIGS taking up nights and weekends, we’d spend the days just writing songs. The boys would get me and Phil, and we’d all go to the studio and start piecing stuff together. We probably already had two-thirds of the Power Metal record done by this point—certainly we had all the melodies—but Phil started turning us on to all kinds of different stuff that we hadn’t listened to before, because he turned out to be the biggest fucking metalhead of all time. He knew every fucking band there was to know.
Thrash metal was the big thing at the time, with bands like Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer all releasing killer thrash metal records in ’86 and ’87, and it seemed that if you didn’t have some kind of thrash element to your songs you were going to be left behind.
As closed-minded as the Abbott brothers were, they listened to the stuff that Phil put on in the vehicle and it would make a really big impact. They had no choice anyway. When we were driving, Phil was always in the front seat being the DJ and so bands like Voivod, Venom, Soundgarden, and a lot of Mercyful Fate—that kind of stuff—appeared on our radar and definitely influenced how we viewed our own sound, even if it only registered on a subliminal level. None of it was mainstream and nobody at any of the places we normally played would have known any of these band’s songs, but Phil’s more hardcore background was inadvertently steering us on to a much more extreme path.
Logically, with most of Power Metal already done, we decided to scratch the existing vocals and let Phil do what he did. As a result, and in contrast to what everyone likes to say, Power Metal is much heavier than anything we’d done before.
By this time we had bought a Ryder truck, had more gear, and also had a full-blown road crew working for us, so Vince and I used to take the old man’s car, a decrepit Pontiac Grand Prix, to gigs. Vince couldn’t drive to save his life and he always wanted to tow his boat behind the car when we went on the road, so that we could stop somewhere and go fishing. He would just run over shit and that boat would come off the back all the time, and we’d have to say to him, “Vince, look how the boat’s sitting now.” And it would be sitting sideways or backwards or something.
“Ohhh shit, well Goddamn; then I better roll it over!” That’s how Vinnie talks.
“Yeah that would be nice, if you want to keep the boat and save it,” I’d say. We then had to tie the boat down on the trailer so that it wouldn’t come off while Vinnie was driving.
We used that boat to do a lot of fishing and caught a shitload of bass. I remember we got lost once out in some body of water and Vinnie kept trying to direct us.
“Take a right. Take a right here,” he’d shout.
“Vince, you have no fucking idea where we are. It’s dark.” And there were these big stumps that stood up two feet out of the water, which of course we hit and the boat almost turned over many times. He was a bad-ass fucking drummer but a complete liability in many other ways, I’ll tell you.
WHEN WE WEREN’ T GETTING LOST in the boat, Pantera was starting to gather this incredible fan base in town. We’d sell out every night and start making some pretty good dough playing places like the Basement, Joe’s Garage, Matlock’s, Dallas City Limits, and, of course, Savvy’s.
This was during what seemed to be a whole movement where people were getting into m-e-t-a-l music instead of pop-rock like Bon Jovi (we never covered their songs)—they even had to remodel Joe’s Garage to fit more people, and that became our home court. Yes, we still had the big, wild hair at the time, but that was just to look the part and get a foot in the door. Musically we were headed somewhere else, although I should mention that I definitely got more chicks wearing spandex and shit than I ever did after I started wearing simple shorts and a shirt.
So while our constant live presence was attracting a large local fan base, it was also grabbing the attention of other metal bands that came through town, which helped get our name out there. One night while Slayer were in town on the South of Heaven tour, they showed up at one of our gigs on a night off, and by the time the night was over, Kerry and Tom got on stage and started jamming on “Reign in Blood” with us. Next thing I know, Phil and Kerry are best buddies and Kerry’s sleeping on Phil’s couch. At one point I even thought that Kerry wanted to join the fucking band. That’s how intense it was.
Power Metal came out in ’88, our first album with Phil on vocals, and although a lot of people like to say that we were playing a glam style of music, I think that’s a total misconception. Although the image we portrayed may have looked like other hair bands, the music we were playing was much heavier and showed more of a thrash metal influence from bands like Slayer and Metallica. It was still funded by all of us—we paid for all the studio time at Pantego Studio produced by the old man. We all felt this need to move our career up to the next step because we were still selling records and merchandise from the back of the car, which was very DIY non-professional.
Despite that, the record would go on to sell a hard-to-ignore 40,000 copies on Metal Magic Records—our own independent label—and it was no surprise when the major labels started looking closely after that. With the import guys up in San Francisco and another importer moving the record for us, we finally started seeing some decent cash come in.
Having label interest, which we had, and actually having a record deal are two different things. Something that definitely hadn’t helped us actually secure a major record deal was that we had a really shitty lawyer, even though Jerry Abbott really thought he’d hit the fuckin’ jackpot when he found the guy.
The way I see it, the real reason old man Abbott hired him was that he could mislead the dude and secure the rights to some of our early publishing and later, our major publishing. It was soon clear to us that this guy was no good, kind of washed up, and he definitely wasn’t getting the point across as to what Pantera was all about. We kept telling Jerry that we had to change something—get another lawyer—because this guy wasn’t doing fucking anything for us, but looking back it seems clear that he had his own reasons for leaving things as they were.
The frustration was getting to us. We already had demos for what would later become Cowboys from Hell, had the thing pretty much in the can, and here we were trying to live this dream but the rejection began to get really monotonous. Every major label we talked to said the same thing: “No, we drop.” “No, we’ll pass.” “No, we can’t do this.” “Send us more material”—every excuse you can think of. We seemed to be getting nowhere while our peers were going everywhere.
Case in point, Metallica—who were roughly our age�
��would soon be out playing stadiums with Van Halen, but before they did, they came through town again while they were in the studio recording ... And Justice for All. Every time we got together with these guys, it just got dumber and dumber. We’d go out with them to a strip bar, and Lars would just pick someone out and say, “This is on your tab.” We barely had money to buy cigarettes, far less huge drink rounds. We were all still surviving on two hundred bucks a week at this time, and I remember going out to a tit bar with these guys and it was seven bucks a shot.
“Dude, we’re all fucking broke,” I told him, when his finger finally pointed in my direction to pay a tab which included several rounds of shots.
“This round is on you!” Lars said again, so Dime and I just walked out the door of this tit bar and left Vinnie sitting there.
On another one of these nights we were sitting outside some club and they were playing us their new record; there’s no bass on it and they’re laughing their asses off saying: “We got this new guy Jason and we’re fucking with him—we’re just not going to put his bass in the mix.” They were fucking howling about it and I guess they saw it as their way of harassing him.
I’m saying, “So where’s the bass?” and they just said, “Ha ha, it’s not on it.” There’s been a lot of debate and speculation about that issue over the years as to whether it was an intentional attempt to humiliate Jason Newsted, and we heard it straight from their mouths. They meant it.
HEAVY MUSIC WAS really changing in ’89. It seemed like there was this whole different brand of music appearing on the horizon that’d soon be labeled Alternative: the first Jane’s Addiction record, the live one; Faith No More; Voivod; and Soundgarden—all these kinds of bands who put out crushing records. So we absorbed these influences along with what we’d taken from what Metallica had done, and created our own thing.
CHAPTER 7
WE’RE TAKING OVER THIS TOWN
Mark Ross, an A&R guy who worked for Atco Records, was stuck in town sometime in the fall of ’89 because of Hurricane Hugo, so he decided to see us play. His boss, Derek Shulman, had already shown an interest in signing us, but he needed to know what we were all about live, so this seemed like a good opportunity to send one of his employees to see Pantera firsthand, and he certainly picked an unusual night.
We were playing a private birthday party in some strip mall in Dallas—certainly not our regular scene—and by the time we started playing, we’d all taken ecstasy. When Mark Ross turned up, the chick whose birthday it was had slipped on the birthday cake and there was icing all over the floor, and we were sliding around and dancing in it trying to have fun. Being on X makes you do goofy shit like that. Mark had seen that we didn’t take things too seriously. We wanted it to be badass shit, of course, and we took it seriously enough, but in between songs we were cut-ups and threw cake at each other like a bunch of classroom clowns.
Just a few minutes after showing up, Mark Ross left the place, at which point I turned to Vinnie and said, “He split, the dude’s gone.” After so many rejections, we were used to this same shit: rejection and people leaving. But then he came back.
The long and short of it is that over the next few months a bidding war would erupt over who was going to sign Pantera. Atco wanted us bad, and at the same time we were thinking about going with Roadrunner, but sometime in December Darrell turned up at my door holding a record contract from Atco Records, part of the Warner Music Group. That opened the door for us to go into the studio to record our first major label record Cowboys from Hell, a title that Phil came up with and which in all our minds suggested a kind of southern menace.
Our mentality was clear from the lyrics of the title track: “We’re taking over this town.” We felt like saying, “Here we are. Fuck you, and we’re going to destroy you, so if you don’t like it, fucking leave.” This was the kind of attitude we cultivated to survive. We were all, as individuals and a group, very single-minded and strong-willed about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go.
CHERYL PONDER
Mother was so proud of Rex when they signed a contract and of course she was so pleased that it was finally going to work out. But it wasn’t without a lot of sleeping on other people’s couches, particularly when he hadn’t been getting along with her. She was relieved that his decision to pursue music had finally paid off.
But understand this beyond a doubt: neither Jerry Abbott nor the idiot lawyer got us that record deal, but the lawyer certainly collected his fee, you can guarantee that. It was our hard work, dedication, and word of mouth that got us the break we deserved. Despite this, Jerry Abbott made sure he would collect ridiculous royalties on the back of our hard work. So I was really pissed that despite having signed our first major label deal, we were still getting shortchanged. Yeah, that happened to pretty much every band, I guess, but I was bummed out we were not the exception to that rule despite my best efforts to be as clued-in as much as possible about how the business side of things worked.
As part of the Atco deal, we also started a management relationship with Walter O’Brien and his Concrete Management Company that would guide us until the band disbanded in 2003.
WALTER O’ BRIEN (Pantera’s former manager)
The band had reached out to me during the Power Metal days, well before the Atco deal, but I never really followed through on it at the time because they were basically a very different band. I had a connection with Atco because I’d gotten Metal Church out of their deal with Elektra and brought them to him. To cut a long story short, he didn’t want them but he did want Pantera, and he wanted me to manage them. I wasn’t all that thrilled and Derek said, “Yeah, but you haven’t heard this?” and he was referring of course to the Cowboys from Hell demo tapes. I was blown away and it sounded like the future of heavy metal. Mark Ross, who had seen them already, tried to get me to come down to Texas to see them live, and I hesitated for a few days. The night he was leaving he called me again and said, “Look, it’s your last chance, I’m leaving now for the airport and if you leave now you can still make it. If you don’t like them, I’ll pick up your airfare and your hotel bill.” I said, “You know what, I don’t have anything else to do and if you’re that serious, what the hell.” So I went down there and met him and the band beforehand at a place called Dallas City Limits, and the band was funny. The first thing Rex said was, “We want you to come onstage to do a cover of ‘Green Manalishi’!” He was totally kidding of course, but when I saw this band come out onstage and explode, I’d never seen anything like it. Rex and Dime were like alternating jumping as high as they could; Phil was climbing up the drum kit and flying in the air and by the second or third song I was literally on my knees at the side of the stage saying, “Please let me manage you.” I wouldn’t say we did a handshake deal but as far as I was concerned it was just a matter of paperwork. I was in. If they didn’t want me, that was another story.
Other than the fact that we were still using his studio, the old man was now frozen out of the deal. He was no longer our manager nor was he our producer, as Terry Date had been approached to look after the production after Phil and I had really gotten into what he did with Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love record. But Terry wasn’t our first choice or even our second.
PRONG HAD JUST put out a record called Beg to Differ, produced by Mark Dodson, and we all really loved the tone of it but we couldn’t get ahold of Mark for some reason. Then we thought about Max Norman, who did the Ozzy records, so he came down. Max was crazier than a fucking loon, drinking all the time, and he had this lazy eye so you never knew who or what the fuck he was looking at.
WALTER O’BRIEN
Max was going to produce this record, but his manager Ron Laffitte, who was a good friend of mine, kept dragging his feet and everyone wanted to get going into the studio right away. Here’s the thing: I knew that Max was holding out to produce a much bigger band than Pantera, but Max’s manager didn’t know I knew that. While all the delays with Max were going on, I
told the Pantera guys about Terry Date because I managed him also. So I suggested Terry go down for the weekend to see how it goes with the condition that if Max got back to me, Terry would have to step down. I did hear from Max’s manager—three days after he was meant to call me—but by that time we’d agreed that Terry was the guy, and in retrospect I don’t think Max and Pantera would have been a good match; they’d have been trading blows within minutes—and I love Max!
When Terry Date came down he fit in perfectly. He was hungry, kind of middle class like us, really knew his shit, smoked weed, and didn’t really drink that much—which was good because we needed someone to be in control and, more important, keep us in control. We used to say, “Terry, produce me a beer!” It was his job to make sure there was just enough beer in the studio.
TERRY DATE
I really have no idea about who in the band requested me but I got involved because my ex-manager—who I’d left six months earlier—called me up and said he had a demo tape from this band from Texas that he really wanted me to listen to, which was Cowboys from Hell. I listened, really loved it, and flew down to meet them in Dallas. To my recollection they knew pretty much everything by then and when I came in they were very organized except for maybe a couple of songs. Rex, Vinnie, and Dime would work out the stuff first of all, and then Phil would come in and make sure it fit into his world. That’s how they worked. I never felt limited by one guitar player and one bass player either; in fact when it’s that guitar player and that bass player it’s actually a luxury.
Pantego Sound is located in a little subdivision section of town just outside of Arlington, and when you walk in the door there are parquet floors everywhere. There’s a drum room on one side of the building and a huge main room, so we started by putting nothing but eight by ten plywood sections on the main room floor. We wanted to get it as bright and lively as we possibly could, but we felt that the room was kind of dead. It had to be right because, for a record that needed to clearly demonstrate our aggressive intentions, we desperately wanted that “attack” kind of feel.