by Brown, Rex
Every single track we recorded had that certain something about it in a way that only the most vital albums can boast, and we all knew how good this fucking record was. There would be times when we were in the studio, like when “Walk” was coming together, and we’d be jamming on it with insane tightness. We’d look at each other in amazement and say: “Oh my God, how the fuck did we do that?”
It might sound like a cliché, but there really was magic at work with what we were doing on Vulgar, and we never again played and got along as well as we did at this time. Dime and I deeply understood each other as far as the chording, changes, and rhythm were concerned, and that in itself was a fucking amazing feeling, to be totally locked-in with your musical partner. Of course, Dime always knew exactly what he wanted to hear. He had that down to a tee. But sometimes I’d hear something from a bass player’s perspective and would go in and put in my two cents worth. When he was doing leads, my role was to figure a bass line that fit.
On Vulgar, the demand for total sonic perfection was what we were aiming at. We used to sit down together, turn everything off at the board except for all guitar channels and the bass channel, and listen to the tracks with immense concentration, pay attention to every detail. Sometimes I’d test my ability by playing along to the track, and sure enough I was always right on the money. That’s how tight we were, and we started calling this process “The Microscope,” and from that point forward, applied that level of scrutiny to everything we did. Yes, we were heavy and aggressive, but the finer details really mattered.
TERRY DATE
For the most part, the process for working on Vulgar was similar to Cowboys—except that Cowboys was a little more advanced when I came on board. With Vulgar, they had just come off a very successful tour and they had riffs figured out, they knew they wanted to get harder and more intense but the songwriting process was exactly the same: they were great at working in a very small garage studio. If you look at how music is recorded in bedrooms now, well, it wasn’t that much different for us back then because they were so comfortable working in Pantego, which, while very nice, is very humble compared to a studio in L.A. It’s not the equipment in the studio or the walls that matters, it’s how comfortable the players are, and they were very, very comfortable.
Although all the songs on Vulgar were super-heavy, it wasn’t heavy for the sake of it; they also had killer hooks. Listen to “Fucking Hostile” and you can hear that, despite how fast and heavy it is, it’s still just classic, good songwriting.
Not everyone shared our excitement. I will always remember the old man, who by this time had no role other than owning the studio space, but still thought of himself as our unofficial manager, coming in and hearing Philip’s distorted vocals on “Fucking Hostile” and saying in his usual super-negative way, “Son, boys, y’all can’t put that on the record, nobody’s going to listen to it!” He hated distortion.
“You can’t do it that way,” he would continue, and we just said, “Did you ever hear of Ministry, dude? Go fuck yourself, and leave us alone.”
He was like that about most things. If Phil shaved his head or some stupid shit like that, he thought we needed a fucking band meeting to discuss it. He was just one of these guys who wanted to limit us with his stupid little hillbilly ways and so he would say things like: “That’s not how country music was done, and you just can’t do that.” As if country music even fucking mattered to us!!!
We just said, “Fuck you, sure it can.” And we did it and it worked. We wanted to change the world with the music we were doing and that record did that. It definitely changed the game for a lot of fucking people.
BEFORE THE ALBUM was released, we went out on tour with Skid Row in January of 1992, went out there and slaughtered them every night. These guys had a pretty heavy record out, Slave to the Grind, and had just come off the road with Guns N’ Roses in Europe, so this was their very first headlining tour, with the craziest stage set-up I’ve ever seen in my life, just stupid with all the ramps and shit.
None of that concerned us. We just went out and did our thing night after night, and suddenly Phil had less of a “kill the world” vision and more of a “Look, here’s an opportunity of a lifetime, we can steal all these motherfucking fans” type of mentality. He was very much more congenial on that tour, and we were really having a good time, taking names and shit. We also had the chance to let people hear the mastered tapes of Vulgar while we were still waiting for the artwork prior to the release date a month or so after the tour began.
We were travelling in our first full-blown tour bus and we thought, “Wow, so this is what we’re going to be travelling in?” It seemed big time. We got our own bunk, which was a big step up from the motor homes we’d been out in the past, and there was also a driver so we didn’t have to drive anymore, although we sometimes did, just for fun. One time we were going through Canada and it was me and Dime in the front seats. We went through the border control and they said to Dime, “What citizenship are you, sir?”
“Regular, sir,” Dime said.
Dime wasn’t the most intelligent of guys, at least in an academic sense, although he did have his different ways of trying to appear that he was. I’d call him Socrates sometimes to piss him off because he’d come up with what he thought was a brilliant idea, but to everyone else it was so fucking stupid. He’d use these big words, and I’d just say “Yeah, okay, Socrates Plato.” But what he lacked in pure academia, he more than made up for in street smarts.
GUY SYKES
The tour with Skid Row broke Pantera in America, period—end of story. Heavy music in general was moving in different directions: you were either with Nirvana or Soundgarden in that genre, or you were moving harder toward Slayer and Metallica, and Skid Row was trying to move away from their hair band roots. On the Priest tour nobody had known what to expect: they got spit on, had shit thrown at them, and sold two or three t-shirts a night, but when we got on the Skid Row tour everything clicked. Pantera went out and destroyed Skid Row nightly, and that’s what launched them to the next level.
When we played the new Vulgar material on the road it just blew everybody’s fucking mind. Nobody said, “Oh well, that’s nice” or something equally noncommittal; jaws were dropping, and though we didn’t need that confirmation, we knew we were on to something huge.
WALTER O’BRIEN
Darrell had given us this really, really bad eighth-generation picture of a guy getting his face punched—all distorted like a bad photocopy. The label went and got a model with somebody punching him at a photo shoot and got the whole thing done up really nice, while also copying the spirit of what Dime had brought. Well, he got furious because he wanted to use the bad photocopy as the cover! We tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be done. He actually wanted to use the original picture he had for the album cover!
Of course we were right about Vulgar and the record debuted at number forty-four on the album charts, which was completely amazing, and from that point on all of our friends and peers in other bands were coming out and trying to equal or better what we had done. The competition was on.
Jerry Cantrell was a good friend by this time, and it soon became a competition between me and him to be the first to have a certified Gold album. Alice in Chains were always just that one step ahead of us though, and they had hit the fuckin’ jackpot with Facelift already, and would do even better with their next record later in ’92. I was like, fuck, here we are sitting on 300,000 sales—and that’s not bad—but Jerry had a Gold record and I was pissed!
While Vulgar wouldn’t be our best-selling record in unit sales, it was our most significant because of the era in which it arrived. Heavy metal was changing because of the whole grunge thing, so most metal bands either had to change their sound to fit the trend or risk being forced back underground and return to the club scene. Pantera was the exception in that we actually thrived in these seemingly barren times for metal, and while playing heavier music than most people
had ever heard before.
Despite our high profile and all the possibilities that were out there for us, fame and fortune would still be slow to arrive. Vulgar definitely got us on the ladder to stardom and to playing larger venues, so to return the favor that senior bands had shown us on our way up, we took out emerging bands with us on our headline tour—guys like Sepultura and Fear Factory who were trying to get their own thing going. Yeah, we now had the clout to sell out amphitheater-sized places, but we always respected where we came from and that was always one of Pantera’s best qualities.
As far as our buddies in Metallica were concerned, well we hardly ever saw them after this point. On the rare occasions we did, Lars would turn up backstage with fucking dudes like John McEnroe. It was crazy shit. They seemed to be going down their own weird path anyway, and by the time they released Load in 1996, and had cut their hair and were wearing makeup, Pantera were headlining fucking arenas all over the world, never hanging out with the so-called cool people—I don’t think our music was ever accessible enough to attract that kind of celebrity crowd, and I never had any big, famous people in my phone book.
Unlike Metallica, we didn’t have the hit records on the radio that were the likely draw for celebrity hangers-on. But we did always have loyal, die-hard fans—sweaty teenage kids—that could sell out arenas every fucking night of the week.
On the other hand, all the musicians would come to our shows because they knew it was likely to be a huge party. If there was a Pantera show in their town, they knew they had to come out, show up, and by God it was going to be full on. Crazy shit would happen and it was fun.
The Metallica connection was kept alive briefly when we went out with Megadeth as openers on their Countdown to Extinction tour. The only emotion I can attach to the experience is that they were bland to hang out with. Our bands were polar opposites. We were in our heyday of getting fucking wasted every night, whereas they were on their whole sobriety kick, so the two don’t exactly fit together. Dave Mustaine would sneak in bottles of Scope mouthwash or shit like that to drink, which seemed so dumb to me at the time. I felt like saying, “Just go down to the liquor store, dude, and get yourself a fucking bottle of something. Fuck it, don’t be drinking Scope!”
THE SUCCESSFUL TOUR had a sting in the tail for me personally though. My mother Ann had been in a wheelchair for a long time, since her muscle condition had gone sour. One day she was trying to reach for a bottle of Dewar’s with a grab-handle, and she had an aneurism—fell out of the wheelchair and passed away immediately. I believe I was in Ohio somewhere and my sister and I knew that it was coming. We cancelled five days worth of shows and within a week I was back in Dallas putting my mother to rest. RIP Mom.
I had lost both my parents by the age of twenty-nine. But for me with my mom’s passing there was a sense of relief. Her body had just given out. She’d had private care for a year and a half, Medicaid was running out, and it was starting to cost my sister and I a lot of money. I wish she were still here now to see her grandkids, but she’s not and in the end her passing brought mixed emotions. On one hand it was a blessing and she was at peace, but at the same time I had lost my mother.
Ironically, the day after I put her in the ground, she got a Gold record for Cowboys from Hell in the mail. The same woman that told me that if I didn’t study at school I was going to be a ditch digger. She definitely would have been very proud of her son, though, and in any case, once we got popular she learned to respect that I had in fact made the right decision when I decided to pursue music.
EVEN WITH A SUCCESSFUL TOUR for Vulgar, visiting places like Japan and having other life-changing experiences, I was still living in an apartment with John ‘The Kat’ Brooks, our drum tech, in North Arlington, a twenty-minute drive from the studio. That was the only part of town that I liked.
It was around this time I met my future wife Belinda through mutual friends who set us up. She wasn’t into the music scene and didn’t actually know who I was, other than I was in a band and had to play gigs. So in order to close the deal I bought a dachshund and said to her, “We still have to play gigs and someone’s gotta take care of this dog while I’m gone, so you might as well move in.” Which she did. I suckered her in with a wiener dog. So we moved into a high-dollar apartment in a gated community, and it was a real nice place to be.
CHAPTER 10
CONTROLLED CHAOS
We were on a break during late spring and the summer of 1993—God knows we had earned one—before we went into the studio to record Far Beyond Driven, which we started sometime in the fall of that year.
Things were a little different this time around because the old man had moved his studio up north to Nashville, built a place called Abtrax Sound, and the boys just couldn’t get enough of giving their old man money—so we all went up there, too.
He had moved up there to get some of the country music market that he couldn’t get down in Arlington. Also, because he had part of the publishing rights for Cowboys and Vulgar, he was getting paid what we were getting paid. (I’ll come back to what I did about all this later.)
TERRY DATE
In the past there were pieces of tracks that everyone would work on and then come together and listen to, but with Far Beyond Driven everyone was there all of the time and there were certain advantages and disadvantages with that. That’s the best way of putting it. It was a completely different vibe.
So, we’d go up there for two weeks, three weeks max, and stay at the Holiday Inn in town. This was the beginning of Vinnie Paul’s infamous strip club days. Of course at that time we’d all go in there and have a good time; it was a “bring your own beer” kind of deal, but he really got an unhealthy taste for it, and you’ll see how that plays out later.
The routine became well tested: we’d work for a while, take a week off and go back to Texas, and write all this material, which, like on Vulgar, was just pouring out of us. Dime and Phil were both on fire creatively, and the opportunities were increasing because everyone could see how big Pantera were getting. We were asked to put a song on a Black Sabbath tribute record called Nativity in Black, so we did a cover of “Planet Caravan” on which I played fretless bass and keyboards. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the rights organized, which is typical of how labels don’t want to give their band up, so it would become a bonus track on Far Beyond Driven. Good to know you’re being protected, I guess, but frustrating sometimes, too, when you want a song on a high profile record.
One day we were sitting in the studio, baffled by Vinnie, who had this one weird drumbeat he was working on. Then, for some reason Dime plugged in one of these new whammy pedals that Digitech had just come out with, the kind that allowed you to change the octave every time you moved your foot. And that’s how the songs “Becoming” and “Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills” came about—through simple, unscheduled experimentation.
I had used mostly Charvel basses up until this time, but I’d just gotten a deal with Music Man and was using their StingRay bass because I was really looking for a change. I knew the bass sound I wanted—a tone that would really pop out in the mix—but I just hadn’t found it yet. I had all these guitar companies sending me coffee table–looking guitars; basses like Warwicks would come in and I’d plug them in and they sounded like crap. I eventually called my buddy Rachel Bolan from Skid Row and said, “Hey man, can I borrow a couple of your Spectors? I really want to check out and see what those things sound like.”
I tried them on a couple of songs like “5 Minutes Alone” and after that I was a full-blown Spector fan. I had to have one and I’ve played them ever since. They cut through the mix a lot better. I’d always been a fan of Eddie Jackson from Queensrÿche, who also used them on their early records where you could really feel a bass punch come through. I really liked the tone that he had, but at the same time I was also trying to get some of my mentor dUg Pinnick’s sound, too. dUg ’s band Kings X were very influential for some of the more melodic material that
Pantera wrote. It’s not easy to identify, but it is definitely in there. He’s also a big fan of us as a band and he was always on the sidelines cheering us along.
You have to remember that metal records don’t always show bass sounds in their best light. Obviously I was a huge admirer of players like Geezer Butler and John Paul Jones. In purely metal terms, I really didn’t like the sound that, say, Jason Newsted had in Metallica. To me it was just a bit “Ughhh.” Just not my kind of bass tone at all. Someone like Gene Simmons always sounded really bland to me, too, and then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got someone like Lemmy. Lemmy is just Lemmy. He’s one of his own, and while you can say you’re influenced by him, you’ll never ever get that tone.
Working on Far Beyond Driven I also decided I really wanted to try out a five-string bass so Music Man sent one over (this set a precedent for equipment) and I loved it immediately. Not only did it sound good, it also allowed me to go down a fifth and hit the lower octaves that just aren’t accessible on a regular four-string bass. This added totally different dimensions to the songs, almost like playing a new instrument, so maybe there was something motivating about playing one.
What we were all doing was experimental to some degree, but we also had these insanely catchy riffs to back it all up, like the ones that became “I’m Broken” and “5 Minutes Alone,” riffs that we would come back to and refresh after we’d lived with them for a couple of weeks of driving around Nashville in a rental car.
The first song we actually wrote for the record was “25 Years,” and I remember it mainly because Phil had these really fucked up lyrics that he was working on at the time about his father. When I first heard the horrible sentiments in there I said to him, “Dude, you just can’t put those lyrics down there, that’s your father you’re talking about.” To me it just wasn’t cool, but you couldn’t tell that dude what to do or not do, ever.