by Brown, Rex
This was long before the days of Pro Tools or anything like that, so our approach was to play everything live on the floor, often without Phil’s vocals. So, if you wanted to play with a bass cabinet, which I mostly did, you still had to baffle stuff off with a 4 × 4 piece of wood or fiberglass—both of which serve to reflect the sound. Nowadays you wouldn’t have to do that, of course. Technology can get around that. You can just plug into a pod (basically a pre-amp) that modulates the sound and then sends the signal wherever you want it to go.
We’d all play on the floor while Vinnie was getting his drum track done, and just about every first take he did was the best. But because he was such a perfectionist, he usually ended up with twenty different drum tracks that he would endlessly analyze and say, “Well, I like how that part felt better there; let’s put that in there.”
Then he wouldn’t like that so they’d have to chop it back and forth while Dime and I would just be sitting there going, “Dude, this is fucking taking forever.” Vinnie’s drum tracks are what took most of our time in the studio. Plus, with a multi-reel recording system like we had, you actually had to physically cut tape with a razor blade, and know exactly where you cut it, then connect other pieces of tape together so that you can run it back and forth. It was a nightmare unless you happened to get it right on, and because Vinnie and Dime wanted to be so precise and technical, it would get to the point where we ran out of fucking razor blades and tape.
Because Vinnie had spent so much time in the studio with his old man as a kid, he was very technical-minded and already had a pretty good ear for what the sound was going to be like for the drums and guitar at least. But he didn’t know shit about bass and, back in the day, bass sounds weren’t really very noticeable anyway, particularly on heavy metal records. Because of our set-up, with only one guitar player with a huge sound like Darrell had, bass was an important feature of the makeup, albeit a real dipped sound (when the voltage output dips at high volume causing the sound to be compressed) that really added to the kick-drum. Bass was still sonically there, but it was always so hard to fit in with Darrell’s guitar. He always played with a little solid-state amp behind him and his signal path was fucking ridiculous.
I remember thinking his whole sound was just so overpowering. We often joked that if somebody else plugged into Darrell’s rig they could never sound like him. But if Darrell plugged into any other gear, he would always sound like himself. He was that unique.
His brother’s drums were overpowering, too, but for different reasons. Vinnie liked a lot of reverb because that was another sonic trend he had learned from his old man. There was an echo chamber underneath the drum platform and it was this huge spring that he loved the sound of, but sometimes I felt that it bordered on overshadowing the fucking song.
Dime always wanted me to play every riff pretty much as he did—sort of mirror it an octave lower—but as a trained jazz bass player, I wanted to incorporate more of an “okay, if you’re going to play way up high, we need someone on the bottom who’s going to syncopate with what you’re doing upstairs” type of thing. That was a major thought in the back of my mind. I didn’t want to always play what I played, but I was conscious of the fact that it’s easy, as a bass player, to step all over the melody. I just wanted a balance.
So while we all had a sense of what we wanted our individual parts to sound like, Terry Date’s job was to put it all together in a way that didn’t sound like four individual people, but like a tight-as-fuck band.
With most iconic records there’s always a moment that ignites the process, and ours was when Dime came up with the signature riff for the track “Cowboys from Hell” completely out of the blue. Of course at first we said, “What the fuck is this?” But as we gave it time and lived with it while driving around in the car for a couple of days, we realized it had this groove to it that suddenly gave us our own sound, something that we weren’t even conscious of trying to do. We just wanted to write the best songs we could and sequence them in such a way that would make a killer record, but this type of groove took us by surprise.
Technically, Cowboys’ title track is one of those box riffs, because you’re playing inside of a box. What I mean is that it’s basically a blues scale, something we’d all probably picked up on from watching all these blues players in the clubs with the old man. Sure, Darrell could play all the other scales he wanted—scales you’ve never even fucking heard of, too—but if you really listened to what his essence was, you’re hearing a lot of blues, just at a faster tempo.
Terry Date was very smart because whenever anyone was in the room, he’d have tape rolling. So even if we were just sitting there fucking with a riff and not doing anything formal, he would always be recording so that we could go back at a later date and listen to what we had. Back then we couldn’t afford to roll two-inch tape—or at least not like someone like Tom Petty, who does it from the moment he walks in the studio—but we’d always have something rolling, even if it was just a basic cassette, so we could go back and say, “let’s try this part” or “let’s change that part” as we built new tracks.
“Cemetery Gates” was written while Dime and I sat in the office playing on acoustic guitars, mine being some big, orange Kramer acoustic bass that someone had bought me. He had the major riff already worked out but the intro part was all me and him, and I ended up playing acoustic guitar and piano in the finished song, which added a little texture.
We pretty much just jammed through all the songs to get a feel for them and make sure the formula was right—the bridge was here and the chorus was there and the whole bit. Then we’d get down to the lead section and say, “Okay, Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we going to do here? Do we change chords?” But we could always work it out.
“Primal Concrete Sledge” was one of the few songs that we didn’t have written and demoed before we got in the studio. It came off a drum pattern that Vinnie had and then the riff was built around it. Then we’d go section by section until it was all done, rough, punching everything on tape like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Then we made a copy and drove around listening to it for a day or two and that was the way that we decided if we were happy with what we’d come up with.
Getting the lyrics down for the record worked out pretty easily, too. We’d just give Phil the riff and he’d listen to the song and pretty much come back the next day with something. He’d ask for a few words or notes every once in a while, but the rest of it he did himself because, in that sense, he’s a genius. He was always writing. There was always a notepad and pen in his hands, and when he wasn’t doing anything else, he was writing ideas for songs and always took it, and everything else happening, very seriously.
I remember one night while we were making Cowboys when Phil came into the studio crying like a baby. His buddy Mike Tyson had gone down in Tokyo. Basically it looked like Tyson had gone over there, did a bunch of blow, didn’t train, and got his ass kicked. Well, for Phil it was like the world had ended.
“Fuck you all. Fuck every one of you motherfuckers,” I think he said.
“Dude, it’s a fucking boxing match,” I told him. Then I just sat there and laughed at how something so trivial matters so much to someone.
WALTER O’BRIEN
I was in and out of the studio while they did the record but only to listen and be excited about it and not to tell my band how to make a record. If I knew how to do that, I’d be making records myself! I trusted them and I trusted Terry, so I would just go in every couple of weeks just to make sure it was headed in the right direction. If I had problems, I’d let them know, but I never really had any problems.
Because we’d been organized and had everything demoed well in advance, Cowboys from Hell was probably done in a couple of months. We were already starting to go up to New York to showcase the band at places like L’Amour and the Cotton Club before the record was even mixed at the Carriage House in Connecticut. Going to our first real big mix was a trip, too, seeing
how that all went down. At the end of the day we were all just bawling like kids saying, “Wow, what an awesome record.” And so at last Cowboys was ready to go and so were we.
Our image was new and so was the music. So while I would always acknowledge the pre-Cowboys material as being an important part of my personal musical development, we, as a band did make a conscious decision to distance ourselves from those first four records. We definitely wouldn’t have been as insanely tight as we’d gotten without those tough formative years, nor would we’ve been as bombastic as live performers—we knew that—but when Cowboys came out we all decided, “Look, that was our past, let’s let it be.”
CHAPTER 8
EARLY TOURS AND ANECDOTES
Presumably to start immediately recouping their investment, Atco records wanted us out touring the record as quickly as possible, so even before the record came out in July 1990 we were out on the road in April, initially with Suicidal Tendencies and Exodus. Now that we had a foot in the door, it was time to start working.
WALTER O’BRIEN
I brought the band to a booking agent named John Ditmar, and I knew he’d be the guy to organize this and between us we used our contacts to get the band exposure. Normally metal bands would go out for eight weeks and then were done, but I said, “No, this band has got to work every day of the week for at least a year because that’s how you break a band.” You’ve got to play small places first and work your way up, not because you’re small, but because you want the fans to have that intimate connection—the kind that lasts a lifetime. So we’d tried to open for a bigger act but then we’d always go back and headline a smaller place and we rotated that; and we certainly weren’t going to pull the plug after eight weeks. Instead they played two hundred and sixty-four dates touring Cowboys from Hell in the U.S. alone…
We rode in something that could only be described as a fucking bucket of bolts. This thing was like a mobile home and it never stopped moving, day after day, night after night, except for the eighteen or so times that the fucking thing broke down along the way. For a lot of the time we didn’t even have working headlights, so one of us had to hold the wires together when we saw a vehicle coming in the opposite direction so that we’d be visible.
Forget beds, all you had to rest in was a chair that would lean back only just far enough to allow you to sleep on it. But you didn’t sleep. It was cramped, there was too much noise and it was a hundred degrees. The only time it wasn’t a hundred degrees was when it was a thousand degrees.
WHILE PHIL HAD UPPED his game significantly as a vocalist on the record, he was still trying to find himself as a front man, a true performer, so Suicidal Tendencies were great road mates for us. Mike Muir was a fucking huge influence on him, and I’m sure Phil would acknowledge that. Mike has this demeanor onstage that makes you not want to fuck with him, and Phil definitely wanted that same vibe. He saw the respect that Mike got because of it, so that’s where a lot of his tough guy front man shtick comes from for sure.
DESPITE THE BRUTAL LACK of comforts, this was one of the best tours we ever did as far as exposure was concerned, and we were also able to keep things much more simple than they would become when we became a much bigger band.
Sound check? Forget it. Writing down a set list each night? Fuck that. We just got up there and fucking ripped.
In lots of ways it was a culture shock because it took us to cities that we’d never visited before—most we’d never even heard of—and that forced us to grow up real quick. None of us had ever really left the roost before and we had survived on short, touring trips around the Southwest, places no more than a few hours from home, before returning to the familiarity of Texas. This time it was different. We were fucking miles from home, but we were so psyched to be out there that it just didn’t matter. “Fuck you all” was our approach. These motherfuckers were going to know that Pantera had been in their town, and we showed up in more than half of the fifty states and Canada while we were out on that first big tour.
While we were in Toronto, sometime before Christmas 1990, playing at a place called the Diamond Club, we caught the attention of Rob Halford, who saw us being interviewed—Dime wearing a British Steel t-shirt—on the TV in his hotel room. His band Judas Priest was also in town. I think he then contacted Darrell, came to the club, and next thing he’s up playing “Metal Gods” and “Grinder” with us on stage, songs we used to play when we were doing covers in the Texas clubs.
Soon after that, an offer came to go to Europe with Judas Priest, on that leg of their Painkiller tour, and by this time we thought we were pretty good at touring. It was three months of us and Annihilator sharing a bus, and at that time nobody in Europe really knew who the fuck we were. But we didn’t care. We were invincible and we would make them know who we were, right? We were eighteen swinging dicks on one bus, and it just wasn’t fun. A couple of them got their asses kicked a few times, but we got along all right, mainly.
PLAYING WITH PRIEST presented more problems than you would think because when you’re opening for a band like them, crowds get antsy to see the main act: they throw bottles of piss and whatever and sometimes they don’t give a shit about the support band, on principle. That wasn’t the case with Pantera, though. More people got us than didn’t. That’s how Pantera were—we raged so hard and sounded so good, they had to like us.
We were also so damn lucky but were too young and gung-ho to even realize. Here we were, a bunch of dumb-ass kids out of Texas playing places in Europe like the K.B. Hallen in Copenhagen, where real bands had played before us—Zeppelin, the Beatles—you know, the really big league, man, about which I’d read in books like Hammer of the Gods and shit like that. I loved reading about the drama of rock’n’ roll bands and what they did on tour, so these places actually meant something to me.
I JUST WISH I’d spent more time looking around all these towns—seeing significant landmarks and exploring the culture—instead of lying crashed-out in the hotel room, but you just don’t see that at the time when you’re young and new to the scene. Yes we wanted to take on the world when we were onstage, but we just didn’t dig Europe at all; it was really foreign to us. We were so used to having pennies in our pockets and going down and getting bean burritos at the 7-11. That’s basically the kind of shit we lived on: anything we could possibly afford. A sandwich here, a meal from some chick there, whatever, so it was really weird eating this food that we had never tasted before.
Here, they only gave us so many loaves of bread and so many pieces of cheese and meat; if you weren’t up early, tough shit. Dime and I used to roll out of bed at 3 p.m. and everything would be fucking gone so we ended up just drinking beer instead.
Of course Dime and Vinnie just wanted their mom’s franks and beans or their spaghetti cooked just like she normally cooked it, but you just don’t get that over in Europe. Phil and I were a little more open-minded, but it still took a lot of adjustment. You can only eat chicken fucking cutlets so many times in Germany after all. It tastes like the same piece of shit that you had the day before, and it’s the blandest-tasting food that you can ever eat. The same applies to England. I love shepherd’s pie and fish ’n’ chips, but is that all there is to fucking eat over there? Maybe I missed the other stuff or went to the wrong places, but there definitely seemed to be a lack of variety.
Although some aspects of the Priest tour were on a big scale because we were out with one of the biggest metal bands on the planet, don’t think for a second that we were throwing money around. We hardly had any. Once we’d fixed food and done our laundry, there wasn’t a whole lot left out of the fifteen-dollar-per-day allowance we were supposed to survive on. As always, there were perks here and there, but nothing major; we were always provided with beer for example, but we found out in the end that the truck driver had been fucking stealing it all for most of the tour so he truly got his ass kicked—almost lost his jaw and his eye sockets, and the whole fucking thing.
GUY SYKES (Pantera’s
tour manager)
The band invested their first advance check from Winterland [a huge merchandise company that had floated us twenty-five thousand dollars] on this tour, and this was back in the days when merch companies actually wrote advance checks, but they hated Europe. First of all there wasn’t a lot of money. Secondly, the crews of older school bands didn’t treat opening acts with much respect. So here we were: a bunch of guys who drank like we drank, and combine that with the fact that we were sharing a tour bus then, you can see how it was uncomfortable. In fact we only got two hotel rooms the whole three-month tour. The tour started in Copenhagen in the end of January 1991, so it was bitter cold and Europe pre the Euro. Different currency, different plugs, different everything so, from that aspect they didn’t enjoy it.
Despite the fact they were a huge band that we totally looked up to, the Judas Priest guys were good to us and there’s a reason for that. Not only did we respect them as our seniors, but we also were huge fans and had survived playing their stuff in the clubs, so to us it was like a dream come true to be out touring with them. Me and Phil played Ping-Pong with K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton every night and they would fucking kill us; those guys were good. It was weird playing Ping-Pong with your idols, but we soon realized that they were just regular guys, and totally full of shit. We didn’t see a whole lot of Rob Halford, though, he was pretty reclusive. But because Scott Travis was the only American in the band, we hung out with him a lot.