by Brown, Rex
GUY SYKES
Judas Priest was one of several bands that Pantera toured with that they genuinely looked up to, so from that point of view the boys were like kids in a candy store. Pantera got along with everyone, simply because they’d spent so much of their early career entertaining the bar crowd, so they were always in a party mood.
DURING THE THREE-MONTH touring schedule, there were a few days in between where we had the chance to spend some down time together, which was something we had never done before. Vinnie and I got into playing a lot of golf, and whenever we had some time, we’d find a nice golf course and go play. That became our escape in future years, and as we earned more money, the stakes for these golf games with Vinnie and some of the crew just kept getting higher.
I have no idea who came up with this idea, but we decided to take a skiing trip on a day off—because Priest were on a night off or something that night, as I recall—and headed to the Swiss Alps. Now, I had been a good skier since I was ten or eleven years old, so I had no problem whatsoever with the whole deal, but none of the other guys had even been on skis before, and they had no fucking clue what they were doing.
Guy Sykes and I were the only two who could ski, and it was going to be a tough task to educate these guys how to just stay upright—far less anything else.
The first sign that the trip had been ill advised was when our sound guy Aaron Barnes—we called him “Johnny Ace”—could hardly put his skis on and when he did he hit a tree before he even got to the ski lift.
Holy shit, was this the level of uselessness that I was going to have to deal with?
Yep. And it would get a lot worse. I’m still amazed nobody died.
Somehow I got allocated the shitty job. My responsibility was to teach Dime and Philip to ski, which left Sykes to help Vinnie out. Without getting too technical, I wanted to try to explain how important the outside and inside edges of the skis were for stopping. Dime seemed to get the idea almost straight away because he used to ride skateboards and he had the feel and balance. A couple of rounds of coaching Dime the snow-plough and he’s ready to go skiing for the day, so I could forget about him.
Phil, on the other hand, did not learn so well. In fact it was worse than that: I’ve never seen the guy so petrified in my life. It wasn’t like the slopes we were going down were steep either; these were fucking bunny hills, and here’s Philip H. Anselmo—one of the most confident, intimidating singers in metal even at that time—shaking like a leaf with fear. In this situation he wasn’t such a tough guy after all.
Dime’s brother’s approach was different still: he was a fucking menace to society. His fat form dressed in a ridiculous parka jacket, I’d catch sight of Vinnie out of the corner of my eye, and he’d almost always be ploughing through gates, trees, families, leaving all kinds of destruction in his wake. It was like a cartoon and he had no idea how to stop. Vinnie Paul on skis was a man out of control, and more worryingly still, he seemed to have acquired a taste for this kind of action.
“Turn, you fucking idiot!!” I would yell at him, as he headed straight toward and flattened yet another innocent family without so much as an apology. Instead Vinnie just hauled himself to his feet and tried to get his skis back on again, but hadn’t figured out how hard that was when they’re pointing directly down the mountain.
... Crash!
He’s on his fat ass again.
The experience was killing me. I wanted to leave, or better still, go get a drink. It seemed the only way to relieve the stress of Vinnie’s constant collisions. So, halfway through the day we decided to get to the other side of the mountain where the bar was, but this involved hauling ass cross-country style and using T-bars to get uphill. You stand there and they pull your ass up the mountain. Sounds easy, but guess what? This was an idea that Vince just could not grasp and he spent most of the time rolling on the ground like a beached whale, right where people were trying to go up the hill.
Not happy with simply lying there, he’s actually trying to grab ahold of other people as they go past him as if to say: “Hell, if I’m not going up, I’m going to make damn sure you aren’t either.” Vinnie just couldn’t get the idea that these lifts do everything for you.
“See you later, fat boy!” we’d shout as we left him behind, trailing in our wake, pissing him off like hell.
Finally we get to the top and get a beer, and fat boy eventually joins us for the last run of the day, for which Vinnie had clearly held back his pièce de résistance.
After drinking a few beers and shots, I ski down, which was the first proper ski run I’d had all day due to having to look after these guys, and suddenly I see Vinnie speeding down toward another group of people.
I think: Where’s he going? … He’s not stopping.
Beyond the group of people, in Vinnie’s immediate flight path, is a fucking huge, orange sign that warned skiers about the imminent danger of skiing off the edge of this huge, fucking mountain. He’s like a giant Texan snowball, and he’s gathering alarming speed, As always, something got in the way, and after crushing another family, this fat fuck slams into a hospitality tent full of people. They weren’t amused. Vinnie didn’t care.
“Fuck you, Rex, skiing is bullshit. I won’t be doing this again, no Jack,” Philip said as he carried his skis down the hill, swearing that he would never be back. He was white as a sheet. He didn’t know how to stop and didn’t know how to slow down, so it turned out that “Mr. Unscarred,” as he called himself, was the biggest pussy on the hill and he would never, ever put on a pair of skis after that. This was a perfect example of how much of a contradiction Philip can be.
CHAPTER 9
DANGEROUSLY VULGAR
Touring Cowboys lasted almost two years, although because it was all so new to us, it seemed like no time at all. We had very few days off, not even to do laundry, and the only real gap came in the summer of 1991, prior to an important phone call from Mark Ross.
He asked us if we wanted to go to Moscow to play a concert, which was going to be recorded for a video, and of course we said, “Yeah.” Because we had gotten so used to rejection in the past we said “Yeah” to most opportunities now and this one seemed a good one, although we didn’t know too much about where we were going other than that Russia was famous for vodka. But before traveling overseas, we went back into Pantego Sound with Terry to lay down drum tracks for what would be our next record. This was a very critical point in the evolution of music, particularly the kind of music we were playing, and things were definitely about to change in the coming months and year.
Nirvana and the whole grunge movement hadn’t quite taken over, but we’d heard the demo tapes for Nevermind because we’d had them played to us by Dale Kroeger from the band the Melvins. We all thought Nirvana were fucking great and we also loved Soundgarden. Then, on the other hand, you had Metallica, who came out with something overtly commercial like “Enter Sandman,” and while it didn’t completely change heavy metal, it certainly gave us a little opportunity to seize hold of an opportune moment in time when we most needed it.
Meanwhile Mark told us to get our gear packed and ready to ship so that we could be flown over business class. When we arrived in Russia, a translator and a bus met us. Well, the first thing we all notice is that there’s no neon light in Moscow—no signs or ads for anything—and the whole place is lit up by what looks like just sixty watt light bulbs.
WALTER O’BRIEN
Because the Russian federation had taken over only weeks previously, there was technically nobody to grant us visas or anything so we had to have letters from the mayor of Moscow, the President of Russia, and someone heavy in the army, explaining what this was so that when we got to the airport we had to convince them to let us in. It took a couple of hours of juggling and bribing this and that person to allow us into the country. It was pretty wild!
“What are all these people doing standing in line around the corner?” I asked the interpreter, seeing scenes I just didn�
�t recognize.
She said they were waiting for a loaf of bread and we looked at her in disbelief. We’d never heard of shit like that happening, anywhere. Moscow had only just gotten its first fast food restaurants, so there were lines outside McDonald’s and Pizza Hut because these people had simply never eaten fast food. This wasn’t the post–World War II era or something, this was the fucking ’90s!
WALTER O’BRIEN
What’s the thing you see a lot of when you’re driving around a major city? Restaurants, restaurants, and more restaurants. In Moscow there were no restaurants whatsoever. We did find what people referred to as “the one good restaurant in town” and when we got there it was like you were eating in somebody’s living room. It was a buffet and everything on the menu was cabbage. Cabbage with this, cabbage with that, fried cabbage, boiled cabbage. Which was fine if you like cabbage but of course this was Pantera so they said, “We want brisket barbecue, goddamnit!” which they didn’t have so we ended up living on McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.
When we got down to the tourist areas, Gorky Park and Red Square, places like that, the initial impression of back-asswardness was further confirmed. There were a bunch of black market stalls selling cassette tapes of just terrible recording quality, but the people thought this was great, which it probably was compared to how things had been in the past.
So that explained why before coming over, we were advised to bring two things: extra toilet paper and Levis—anything we had with Levi on it—because we were told we could barter with that stuff to get better deals on almost anything simply because these things—good toilet paper and jeans—just didn’t exist in Moscow.
WALTER O’BRIEN
The first thing I wanted to do was to go down to Red Square and see the place you’ve seen so often on television, but it was late at night when we got there. So we asked our translator if we could go, and they said, “It’s possible to go tomorrow.” In Russia that means “no.” So Rex and I went into the subway station and found our way to Red Square, where we wandered around, and people were coming up to Rex—they knew who he was.
We stayed in the first American hotel they ever had there, right across from the Embassy, and that was very strange also because it was not in any way luxurious. What must the shitty hotels have been like?
WALTER O’BRIEN
All the bands were booked in the Moscow Radisson, which wasn’t even due to officially open for another three weeks. And what happened was that there was a major state department meeting going on between the U.S. and Russia, and they were working out of the hotel, too. We went into a ballroom upstairs and it was set up with a hundred tables with a black phone and a red telephone on each one. The red phones were secure lines back to America. One time I was coming out of the elevator and Wolf Blitzer from CNN was walking out! There was a restaurant in the hotel which everyone recommended we ate at and it said on the board “Special Today: Meat and Vegetables,” so Rex asked, “What kind of meat is it?” so the guy behind the counter shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s meat.” Rex said, “But what kind? Beef? Pork? Veal? What is it?” and the guy again just said, “It’s meat.”
The next day they let us sleep in before they took us out to Tushino Airfield, which was the site for the concert. As we arrived, they were just starting to set the stage up and kids were already starting to camp amid a sea of old war planes, turret guns, and what looked like fucking space satellites, all of which were just laying out in a huge field. It was one of the most surreal sights I’ve ever seen.
Equally surreal probably—for the million or so fans that were reportedly there—was the line-up for the gig: A-list heavy metal and rock deities in fact. There was AC/DC, Metallica, us, and the Black Crowes, and all I can remember is this big fucking sea of people at this huge airfield and flags from every fucking country you could think of. Shows like this by Western musicians were previously unheard of in the Soviet Union (as it turns out the new Russian federation took over the country a couple of months after we left), so there was definitely the sense that for the audience we were a glimpse of the exciting future rather than the repressive past.
But even so, the backstage facilities were definitely from a bygone era. The dressing rooms were like fucking tents, just terrible, with only one little light bulb for light. There were no refreshments whatsoever, maybe just a basic case of water, so fortunately we’d brought over our own liquids, but none of that really mattered because the show itself was fucking unbelievable and one of the best pieces of publicity that could ever come our way, too.
Like I said, we had already started thinking about and laying down drums on the new tracks before we went to Russia, but the whole experience breathed new life into the process when we got back. This record was going to lay the hammer down hard, and be the heaviest statement of intent we could possibly come up with.
WHEN WE RETURNED from the Moscow gig, Metallica’s new record, the so-called “Black Album,” was all over the radio. We thought it sucked, of course—I mean we thought it was just terrible—we didn’t get the commercial sound of it at all and this made us even more determined to make our new record even heavier than anything we’d attempted before. It would be entitled Vulgar Display of Power. Our power.
At this point in our trajectory, despite the relative success of Cowboys from Hell, we still considered ourselves to be fairly small scale—and we were in a way, certainly in comparison to what we’d later become. From a critical-acclaim standpoint, things had definitely changed, but our lives hadn’t altered radically so we were still very hungry for fame and cash. We were still doing our own little headline shows while also supporting the bigger bands, but nothing huge was happening to boost our profile as fast as we wanted.
We wanted to explode.
Despite being signed to a big label, we still felt like we needed to silence a few doubters with whatever we released next. What helped a lot was that when Metallica dropped this big commercial record of theirs, they unwittingly gave us this big, fucking gaping hole in the market to fill. While we definitely did have firm ideas for how we wanted the record to sound, Metallica’s record confirmed to us that we were the band to take over the void they’d just left behind.
So when we actually walked into the studio to write them, the songs were just jumping out of us. It all seemed just so easy and natural. Consequently the Vulgar material was very well rehearsed even before our producer Terry came down to record them, and like Cowboys previously, we already had the demos down really well. We had a couple of bits and pieces left over from Cowboys and they became the tracks “Regular People” for sure and parts of “Hollow” maybe, but the rest of the tracks were completely fresh material. “Piss” was another track that I partly wrote at the time, but because the rest of the record was so strong, it just didn’t make the cut. We ended up using part of it on “Use My Third Arm,” which would later appear on Far Beyond Driven, but in 2011, “Piss” was released as it was originally conceived, on the 20th anniversary edition of Vulgar Display of Power, and I’m very proud of my role in it.
It’s hard to remember which track we started with, but once we got going it was just nonstop—with ideas flowing from us, and we increasingly realized that, with our grass-roots, heavy sound, we really were the band to fill the slot that Metallica had just vacated. We believed we had the right profile to occupy that position of theirs and it was our perseverance and sheer desire to make increasingly heavy music that allowed us to do that. It was all on our terms and nobody else’s. It wasn’t on Metallica’s terms or anything like that, and there also wasn’t a whole lot of competition at this particular point in the’90s, but I can’t think of many bands in our genre that, instead of going out of our way to appeal to an audience, made an audience gravitate toward us. That’s an important distinction to make, I think, because it’s such a rare thing in this world of following trends and fashions.
“A New Level” and “Fucking Hostile” were key songs in the process, and
the fact they were so easy to do meant that we didn’t ever want that creative flow to stop. It didn’t seem like working, either. This was just living life while at the same time doing what we wanted to do, under no pressure whatsoever other than what came from our own unstoppable inner drive. Sometimes we’d sit in the studio until four in the morning, just coming up with different ideas while at the same time working on improving our overall performance level, which as a result of almost two years of live shows, was already as tight as a motherfucker.
As well as being more honed collectively, things had evolved for the band on individual levels, too. Phil’s vocal range was way broader than it had been on Cowboys and that definitely gave us more variation when it came to making the music heavier. He still had the ability to hit the high notes for sure, but because he was a little bit older, he was also developing a tougher voice that complemented what the rest of us were doing.
Every song started with a riff of Darrell’s, or something that Vinnie had, a drumbeat or rhythm pattern, or an idea from me or Phil. In some cases the idea process could just be something as simple as us going outside, smoking one, and seeing what happened when we got back in. Usually something did happen.
I definitely remember that when we did “A New Level,” there were all these weird chromatic chords that we hadn’t even tried before, and as it took shape it was like opening a book about something that you are really into, or better still, opening a Christmas present that you never thought you’d get in a million years.