by Brown, Rex
Being on the road was a war of attrition in every sense, and boredom was the enemy. There’s just nothing to do when you’re just sitting on the bus for fifteen hours, so inevitably it always seemed a good idea to crack open a cold one.
We also came up with games to play, and because we were now earning good money, the stakes were increasingly high. The guys in Biohazard taught us this dice game called C-Lo. There were three dice, and the tale of the tape is that you throw out all three and there’s a banker who calls a limit of, let’s say, a two-hundred-dollar max.
So someone rolls the three dice until you get a “number”; a number is when two of the dice are the same, and whatever the other one is, that’s your number—which then has to be beat. So if I throw a five out there, it’s a pretty good chance that I’m going to win everybody’s two hundred bucks that’s sitting around in the circle. We’d have pits of up to eight people at certain points so there was a lot of money changing hands at times. Because of the boredom on the road, we’d play this all the time. It was fun to do and everybody would sit around and drink beer and get some road camaraderie going. We’d get bus drivers, truck drivers—everybody would play. It could get ugly, too. When you’ve got a bunch of drunks gambling, you need rules, and everything had to be settled in cash on the night, just like guys on the street would do in the old days.
On one leg of the U.S. tour we had Type O Negative with us as support, and we partied with Peter Steele every fucking night. He was a gentle giant. He would come out and sing “Walk” with us every night, and he would physically pick me up sideways and put me up to the mic so I could sing into it. He was fucking hilarious. On that tour we started doing other crazy shit on the bus like sending a runner out for the biggest double-chocolate fudge cake he could find, and then we’d have bets on who could eat it in the fastest time, while Dime and I would pony up money. None of these big dudes, especially Big Val, our head of security, could resist trying to eat the cake—he was always trying. We’d watch him get about halfway through and he’d be turning green.
Even when we went out for dinner and he’d already had a full meal, I’d buy Big Val another one and say, “Okay, dude, see if you can eat all this for this amount of money.” He was always up for a challenge, thought he was fucking Superman.
We’d do the same with hot sauce, see who could drink a whole bottle in fifteen seconds without throwing up. It was all just good-natured ways of trying to kill time on the road.
THE STAGES WE WERE PLAYING were probably forty feet wide by twenty deep, and Phil had a microphone cable that was fifty feet long, which allowed him to run from one side to the other. The security routine on tour was always the same: at five p.m. every show day, Big Val would sit down with his whole crew and say, “Look, this is the way it’s going to go. If a kid’s getting out of hand, don’t manhandle him, just get him out of the way. But make sure he’s safe.” Some of these kids were rebellious as shit and there’s just nothing anyone can do about it; Val understood that but he wanted the hired security crews at the venues to understand it, too. It seemed that some of these kids in the ’90s just wanted to go to a show to get their aggression out, and looking back on it now it was a hell of a lot of fun to instigate that kind of reaction. I’d much rather they did it there than on the street, that’s for sure.
WALTER O’BRIEN
Phil had this bad habit wherever we played of saying to the crowd, “Our stage is your stage”—kind of like Jim Morrison in the ’60s: controlled chaos—at which point there would be a near riot. He just wouldn’t get the hint that if someone got hurt, they were going to sue him and that it was going to cost him more money than he makes, and it got to the point where there was no controlling him. So thereafter, anytime I was backstage at a show and heard it go quiet onstage, my first thought was, “Oh, no, here comes a lawsuit.”
So during the show one night while we’re playing some open field in Buffalo, New York, this big, steroid freak, one of the security crew, decides to manhandle some poor kid who’s trying to climb the barrier that’s ten feet from the stage. He pushed him to the ground, face down in the concrete with his hands behind his back. Then he picks the guy up by his fucking hair and starts pushing him along, by which time Phil has seen what’s going on and is seriously pissed. So Phil—who can throw a fucking football like Drew Brees—launched his microphone and hit the security dude right on the back of the head and he fell to the ground. Suddenly, the promoter calls the show off and they lock-down the whole backstage area so there was no way we could get out. Phil then gets thrown in jail and the whole bit.
We all said to the police, “Wait, aren’t you missing the point here?” but of course Phil got the blame and it cost five thousand dollars worth of bail, all for standing up for a fan who was getting beat up. It was fucking crazy. This kind of shit wasn’t new either. It got to the point where I saw incidents from onstage and I just wanted to take off my fuckin’ bass and sling it. I felt like saying to these clowns, “These kids came to see us, not you, cocksucker.” It’s not like these security guys own these places; they get paid fuckin’ six dollars an hour to run security and then think it’s okay drive one of my fans in the dirt because he’s trying to jump the barricade. It was so stupid and something we just would not tolerate.
Phil usually controlled the crowd very well, but we had to stop our shows sometimes because of the security guys, not because of our fans. The upshot of it all was that Phil ended up having to go to court a year later after the trial was delayed three times, where he apologized (and pleaded guilty to an assault charge), got a fine, and was told to do a number of community service hours.
WALTER O’BRIEN
Management was on eggshells a lot of the time regarding what Phil was likely to do. We’d already had an incident on the Vulgar tour where I had to pay a guy off who was just looking for a quick buck lawsuit because he claimed Phil had assaulted him at a show in San Diego. In the end I paid him the five hundred dollars he asked for to settle even though we were ready to pay him fifty grand if we had to. He then told me that all he really wanted was five minutes alone with Mr. Anselmo, to which I said, “Trust me, you wouldn’t survive five minutes.” He’d then claimed that we were racists—despite later making racial references about me—so, when he’d been paid off by me personally with a cashier’s check, I couldn’t resist saying to him, “Not only are you a racist but you are also a fucking moron. I was prepared to pay you fifty grand to not go to court.”
Whether the incident at that the Buffalo show was in any way symptomatic of Phil’s spiraling frame of mind is hard to say. At this point in our ascendancy—approaching the highest point of our popularity as the biggest metal band of the decade—Phil’s relationship with the rest of the band was slowly but surely starting to become distanced. Not breaking down, not yet, but there was a palpable separation that I certainly noticed. He didn’t travel with the rest of us; he was on another bus with his assistant and his trainer who he always took on the road, so that diluted the unity we’d had on previous tours. Not just that, he was spending more and more time back home in New Orleans when he wasn’t either touring or in the studio.
TERRY GLAZE
I was in Los Angeles and Darrell called me and asked if I wanted to come and see them play at some outdoor amphitheater type place and I remember being just stunned at how powerful they were. I mean, we were pretty tight when I was in the band, but this was something different. It was almost frightening. I’ve never seen a crowd like it: everyone bought a t-shirt and everyone sang along to every song. I don’t know many bands that have fans that dedicated. I’ll never forget that Dime took a shit in a bucket while he was playing onstage. Actually squatted down, pulled down his shorts and took a shit. They tried to bill him for the cleaning but he insisted that if they did, he got to keep the bucket. In his eyes, the bucket was his.
After the show they asked me onto the bus to travel with them to Reno, Nevada, and that was when I met Phil for the firs
t time. He came up to me with a big smile and whispered in my ear, “I totally know why you bailed on these guys.” That surprised me, but at the same time I felt that he and I were the only two guys in the club. We knew what being in Pantera was all about, but he felt confident talking to me because he knew he was in control. He had found his place.
There’s no suggestion that his retreat was anything other than a reaction to fame or a simple need for privacy at this point but, looking back now, I suspect that this may have been the beginning of Phil’s drug problems. We all knew he was having a lot of back pain, but even though we continually told him to go and get it checked out by a specialist, it was a long time before he actually did.
I finally said to him, “I’m tired of hearing about your back shit, dude, why don’t you go to a doctor? We’ve got one right here in town, so why not go and get an MRI and see what’s going on with it?” But for a long time he didn’t do anything. “If you had a fucking cold every day for six months, wouldn’t you think something was wrong?” I asked him.
When he eventually sought medical advice he was told that the recovery period for back surgery could be more than a year—time off that he couldn’t tolerate—so he continued down the path of alcohol and other forms of pain relief to get him through the shows on the last leg of the U.S tour, which we did with Prong as our support.
But all that time Phil was always saying, “Oh, my back this, my back that.” Because of the rampant painkiller culture he came from, down in New Orleans, he used to take Somas—muscle relaxers—to relieve the pain. But we all know that people gravitate toward a heavier drug if they can’t get high off whatever they’re using at the time, and in his case ten of these Soma fuckers just wasn’t doing it for him.
WHEN WE WENT OUT on tour, we didn’t do little four-week trips; we’d be out there for a year or more. So when we eventually finished touring Far Beyond Driven in late 1995, we had a few months off back home in Texas, and during that time Dime and Rita bought a house out in Dalworthington Gardens. It was a traditional, family home, the kind you’d find in somewhere like Savannah, Georgia, but it was located in the worst place you could possibly buy a house, in my opinion.
First, it was way out in the sticks in the southern suburbs of Arlington, which was a pain in the ass for me, and second there were more fuckin’ cops per capita than they had people. As far as I was concerned it was not a safe place for a rock and roller to be.
But it did come with a huge, ready-built RV barn. This place was so huge you could have parked two buses in it. So Dime decided to use the space to build a home studio by constructing walls within walls so that the thing was completely soundproofed and wouldn’t fuck the neighbors up or contravene city codes. Of course, he didn’t do it himself—the builders did all that—but most of the organizing was done by the brothers, as it was, after all, Dime’s home.
RITA HANEY
I had my own place in town—bought it two years previously—and when Darrell came off the road he’d come straight to my place where we’d grill and hang out by the pool and that really got him thinking about having his own place. Darrell wanted somewhere he could write and he only had this tiny four-track room at his mom’s, which he’d finally outgrown. Dalworthington Gardens was the third house that we looked at, and I remember him looking at it saying, “Dude, this house is so big; I just don’t think I can ever fill it up.” Of course it took one tour of him coming home with all kinds of crap to fix that, so he bought it, and I transferred over there and sold my own place.
But what Darrell’s new place meant for the band as a whole was that we now didn’t have to book time anywhere to record, so in turn we basically took the money they guaranteed us for the next record—around eight hundred grand if I remember right—and spent it on that studio, from which I’ve yet to see any fuckin’ cash, incidentally. It was a huge house, six thousand square feet at least, and a place where we could all convene, but it took a lot of building time to get the place fit to record a Pantera record.
TERRY DATE
Aaron Barnes, Vinnie, and I spent a lot of time making wires and putting the studio together. The band had an early version of digital recording gear at that time and they wanted to use it to record the album. I hated it. I talked them into buying an analogue tape deck, which we brought into the control room, set it up, and the thing was humming like crazy. We could not figure out why, we did everything we could, until finally we found out that there was fifty thousand watt power cable buried under the studio. So we moved the deck into the recording room where the band was but, when the band’s recording, there tends to be a lot of Coors Lite going down and when something’s empty those cans get thrown. They’d end up on the tape deck quite a lot so I had to build a barricade around the tape deck!
As I said, getting there was kind of a haul for me because I was still living in North Arlington. Vinnie still lived with his mom. In fact neither of the boys left their mom’s house until they were thirty, but at least Darrell finally flew the nest.
I had just gotten married—in May of ’95—so I was kind of focusing on something else, but I still had to work and my wife Belinda knew that. My focuses were, “Okay, let’s get this shit done so I can go home. Let’s not sit around and get fucked up all night long and not get anything accomplished,” like we’d done on the last record when it took these guys six months to mix the goddamn thing. So while my head was elsewhere to some extent, I was still totally dedicated to the musical journey and where the next record, The Great Southern Trendkill, was taking us.
RITA HANEY
When Rex got married we were all kind of surprised. It was very quick. When Rex came off the road, he did a lot of things that Darrell and I had nothing in common with: we weren’t golfers, weren’t into the country club thing; we were still fans and into going out to dive rock bars and getting strapped up and that was something Rex never liked doing. We were in Hawaii when Rex proposed to Belinda. It happened on the beach and it was a fun night.
Being in a band and having a wife or girlfriend is a difficult balance for sure. I found an old calendar the other day, the kind you keep on your desk and write in the squares, and they were home in 1990 for thirty-eight days that entire year. I didn’t get to see them a whole lot, but after Vulgar, when they got their own tour bus, that opened up a few more options as far as wives and girlfriends going on the road. The guys were really set on being that “Band of Brotherhood” and they wouldn’t let relationships or chicks get in the way of that, so they were really careful how they structured that part of their lives. A lot of it was designated in that they would have something called “Chick Day” when all the girlfriends or wives would come out for that particular weekend so that everyone could be on their best behavior. I never really had to worry about that kind of thing with Darrell though because he was exactly the same whether he was in front of me or away from me; that’s just how he was. I probably got to go out more often than others and didn’t always have to go with the designated chick day. Everyone—including crew—went through a lot of women over time.
I can still remember the mental place I personally was in at the beginning of the writing process, and it really was a fucking cool feeling. Whenever I got off the road, I felt “I want to get as far away from you fucks as I can.” It was nothing personal. These guys were my brothers, but I had a desperate need to keep my work and home lives as separate as humanly possible.
Hell, I’d rather go home and listen to fucking Frank Sinatra than go out and spend a thousand dollars a night just for the sake of trying to be noticed in town like others like to do. That just wasn’t me at all and it never will be. I always needed the feeling of being grounded more than I had a desire to be seen. I had a totally different bunch of friends anyway and if we went out, we’d go out to the local hole in the wall bar rather than the clubs. I’d already played the fucking clubs for the early part of my career, so the last thing I wanted to do was hang out in them now. I had done all that shit
, so why would I want to do it all again?
I craved stability because I had never really had it. I was moved around so much when I was young and spent so many nights as a teenager on somebody else’s couch, it sometimes felt that my life was constructed on constantly shifting sand with no firm foundation. Now that I had the means and a solid relationship, I was desperate to address that feeling of insecurity.
I had this concept that I came up with about touring and the band, and I called it “The Light Switch.” When I was on the road or in the studio, I was working—and the switch was “on.” Then when I was at home and not working, the switch was “off,” or at least it was supposed to be off. Turning the switch off was a challenge.
RITA HANEY
When Darrell wasn’t with the band, he never saw the other guys. We all had totally different friends. Darrell would come home and totally detox—check in at the Rita Ford Clinic as he liked to call it. He didn’t always want to get out. He’d sit and watch forensics on TV, eat food, and we’d just get fat. Get larded up as he’d say.