by Brown, Rex
The three of us met that night while Phil recovered in the hospital. Then the next morning, the boys picked me up in Dime’s Cadillac, and we all went over to the hotel to confront the dude. He’d gotten out of the hospital already and had this girl with him who would die of an overdose shortly afterwards. It began to feel like there was some kind of dope plague going around.
We said to him, “What the fuck is this? What’s going to happen? This could be the very fucking end of everything.”
Walter was there with the other main management guy, Andy Gould, but neither of them did or said anything constructive. Because Walter had seen drug overdoses before, he’d just say, “Fuck you.” That was his way of dealing. Management was no help at all. The best thing they could have done would have been to immediately put Phil in goddamn rehab, cancel the tour until he was clean, and then we could have all continued with what we were doing.
But that didn’t happen.
Of course, when he was in front of us, Phil simply said, “I’m sorry, dudes. I really fucked up.” What else could he say? But his response to the fact that the overdose was now public knowledge was more of a problem.
For some reason Phil wrote a confessional letter about his near-death experience, a public statement saying, “I saw no shining lights” or whatever the fuck he said—it’s all well documented—and that was the dumbest thing he could have done, as far as I was concerned, because the moment he did that, he was labeled a junkie. Why would you do something like that? And why would management let him do it? They should have covered that shit up and that’s all there is to it.
“Dude, why? We’re flying,” I said. “Money’s through the fucking roof. What are you doing?”
Of course, Phil said it would never happen again, and we gave him the benefit of the doubt because when we examined the situation in the cold light of day, it wasn’t like he was in a coma every fucking day. Even we would have noticed that. In fact I suspect he actually hadn’t been using very long and had just been dabbling a little, but just happened to be unlucky and overdosed. Nobody’s perfect, and there certainly aren’t any saints in the business of rock ’n’ roll, so of course people are occasionally going to have problems.
DESPITE THE FACT that we were willing to move forward after the fiasco that night in Dallas, I’d be lying if I said that the thought of getting rid of Phil didn’t cross our minds. But it only did so briefly and probably only as a knee-jerk response to what had happened, driven by our lack of understanding of and experience with what was actually going on.
Deep down, we knew that kicking out Phil would have been like ripping your heart out of your chest, or siphoning all the gas out of your car so that you can save the fucking car. There’s no gasoline to make that car run, so you’re keeping it for what? Totally pointless. We knew that to carry on without Phil would have been pointless, too. Even then and to this day he is one of the best front men in metal. Nobody commands an audience like he does, so we did carry on and after only one day off and our singer almost dead, Pantera was back and ready to hit Oklahoma.
THE MAIN PART of the Trendkill tour featured three months on the road with White Zombie. While an element of trust had perhaps been lost after Phil’s overdose, that feeling mellowed out over time, because when you’re on tour you just have to get the job done no matter what. And in Phil’s defense and to his great credit, he generally held it together thereafter. If he was still dabbling with heroin, it didn’t affect the band.
JEFF JUDD, one of my best friends since the early ’90s when he worked as golf pro on a couple of courses in Ft. Worth, had always been a good guitar player. He was a fan of the band since the early days and he’d reached a time in his life where he wanted something different—he needed a career switch—so I offered him the chance to come out on the road with me as my bass tech.
JEFF JUDD
Rex and I met through mutual friends and I’d played guitar since I was a kid. His bass tech had left after Far Beyond Driven, so he asked me to go out on the road. I didn’t have any kids at the time, so it all worked out really well. Everything was pretty eye opening at the beginning, but the thing that I noticed most was that everyone seemed to actually want to work for Pantera. We did everything together just like a big family and they took the best care of everybody. We stayed at the same hotels as the band did, whereas all the other bands we went out with crews stayed at the Holiday Inn. Rex needed a friend out there, no doubt about that. There was definitely tension, mainly between the brothers and Phil, and it seemed to me that Rex was in the middle of it all. I’d met Dime and the rest of the band at the very end of the process of recording Great Southern Trendkill and when they heard I was going out on the road with Rex, they said, “Oh well, that’ll be the end of your friendship.” But if anything, it only made our friendship stronger.
Six 8×10s, six 4×10s; the biggest selection of Ampegs ever! (Joe Giron Photography)
Samurai Rex! Somewhere in Japan. (Joe Giron Photography)
Me and Dime before a show. (Joe Giron Photography)
Photo session for Power Metal. Nice hair! (Joe Giron Photography)
Another day at the rodeo, touring Reinventing the Steel. (Joe Giron Photography)
Early days. (Joe Giron Photography)
Me and two jolly policemen, Tushino Airfield 1991.
(Joe Giron Photography)
Onstage at Monsters of Rock,
Moscow 1991. (Joe Giron Photography)
Red Square, Moscow 1991. (Joe Giron Photography)
The boys at Dime’s studio recording The Great Southern Trendkill. (Joe Giron Photography)
Christmas in front of Dime’s house at Dalworthington Gardens.
(Joe Giron Photography)
Rio. (Joe Giron Photography)
Taking a breather during the set. (Joe Giron Photography)
Early days; Bronco Bowl, Dallas 1985. (Joe Giron Photography)
Me, Dime, and dUg Pinnick. (Joe Giron Photography)
Saluting the fans, somewhere in America. (Joe Giron Photography)
Touring Vulgar Display of Power with the first Rex prototype Fernandes bass. (Joe Giron Photography)
Arcadia Theater, Dallas, during Power Metal days. (Joe Giron Photography)
Catching some surf; Gold Coast, Australia. (Joe Giron Photography)
In the studio circa The Great Southern Trendkill sessions. (Joe Giron Photography)
Me and my idol, Gene Simmons, in RIP magazine. (Joe Giron Photography)
Me jamming ballz-out … somewhere. (Joe Giron Photography)
Having a good time in Dime’s house. (Joe Giron Photography)
Touring Far Beyond Driven. (Joe Giron Photography)
At the Six Flags Over Texas amphitheater, 1985. (Joe Giron Photography)
One of the last of the good old days. (Joe Giron Photography)
Rex … just Rex. (Joe Giron Photography)
Touring Vulgar Display of Power. (Joe Giron Photography)
Somewhere in Europe. (Joe Giron Photography)
For my brother and friend, R.I.P. (Joe Giron Photography)
Touring Trendkill also took us back down to South America during ’97, this time touring with KISS, who were Dime and my heroes, and we were at the very top of our game. KISS were always a big-selling band down there and in that position where you want to make it count financially, they wanted the hottest opening band you can get and we just happened to be it at that time. We didn’t see much of the KISS guys except a couple of nights when we all went to the Hard Rock Café in Buenos Aires.
This was a no-booze tour for them because Ace was back out with them for the first time, so they didn’t go out much and neither did we, but while their reasons for not going out were driven by abstinence, ours were that we could cause utter chaos and carnage within the four walls of a hotel. So, we’d just go to the hotel bar or hang out in of one our rooms that had a bar.
I’ll never forget my room in Santiago, Chile, The Intercontinental. When I opened
the door for the first time, this dude dressed in a fucking tuxedo grabs my bag and starts putting all my clothes away in the closet while I’m thinking, “Who the fuck is this?”
Here I am in Santiago and I’ve got this killer room divided into all kinds of separate breakfast, living and sleeping areas, then another area that had a huge bouquet of fruit and a bunch of bottles of wine all set up for me by Warner Brothers, Chile and I’ve got this guy. What a fucking trip! After he’d put all my shit away, the guy’s still standing there.
So I called Jeff and said, “Dude, come down to my room. There’s this guy just standing there.” He goes, “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know; he’s just standing like he wants a tip or something,” I told him. So Jeff comes down and we both look at this guy and say, “So dude, what do you actually do?”
“Oh, I’m your personal butler,” the guy says, so I go, “Fuck! Well go get us a bottle of Jack Daniels and start pouring them. Pour them up, baby!” And that’s what he did. In fact he did anything we wanted. If we wanted to get something to eat, he’d just go and get it. He’d do laundry and the whole bit. It was fucking wild. We had a good time with this guy in the end and it turned out that all the other guys each had a butler, too.
JEFF JUDD
Rex’s room had a huge fruit platter that was three feet wide and piled up two feet tall with papayas, all kinds of stuff. Next thing Dime shows up with a rain stick, a three-foot long hollowed-out piece of wood with beads inside that makes a sound like rain falling. He sees the fruit platter and says, “Pitch one of those over!” and he swings at it and smashes it across the room. Then the baseball game was on. The room looked like a fruit salad. The walls, the ceiling, everything was covered, and this butler dude had gone by then, but we had his number, which we used when we needed the room cleaned up. All the picture frame glass was broken so we ended up taking all the glass out so they looked like pictures again. He washed all the walls down, took all the broken stuff away, and we gave him a hundred bucks and headed off down the road. We never even got a call on it.
We were getting a lot of attention on that KISS tour, so much so that during the KISS sets fans started chanting our name between their songs—“Pan-te-ra, Pan-te-ra!” that kind of thing. That really pissed them off. We’d climb up on the scaffolding so we could watch them play from the side of the show and the second time this chanting deal happened, I looked at the guys and said, “We’re down, we gotta go.” And then we left the gig.
IT’S NO SURPRISE that the South American fans dug us. We were on it as far as our live performance went. Really on it. Ferocious at times. I like to pride myself in the fact that I missed very few notes. And when I say “‘missed,” I mean misplayed, not hitting wrong ones; it’d be something about how my fingers attack a note, really miniscule details that nobody else could possibly notice. But I noticed.
There’s nights where I might over-slide a note or two, too, but that’s no big deal, that’s just rock ’n’ roll. Then there’s nights when I might want to play kind of punk rock—not be as tight as usual—and there’s certain songs where you can get away with it and others where you can’t. I didn’t always want to be Mr. Tight Man and have everything sound the same night after night. Maybe that’s my lab band, freestyle mentality coming through.
Every night I was looking for a different challenge, too. Vinnie Paul was like a metronome, almost to the point where there was no variation, so I had to make up my own parts to make it entertaining, because if you play the same thing two hundred and something nights a year, it gets real fucking boring.
The actual sets we played on any given night mostly depended on Phil’s voice—where he wanted to go and what he thought he could do with it—and that was something we had to take one day at a time. So three hours before the show, we’d know more or less what the set list was going to be. I’d get in there in the late afternoon and work through the list with Phil to see how he was feeling, and then I’d bring in the boys and say, “How’s this going to work?”
Or on other days Vinnie and I would put something together ourselves based on where we thought Phil’s voice was, but usually everything hinged on him. Understandably, Phil had nights where he had problems with his voice, but any singer is going to have that, no matter who you are, and it especially happens to the great ones. But because he was so great, he had his own subtle ways of getting around any voice issues he might have had. Maybe he wouldn’t sing the top notes or not sing a particular note at all but either way, when you consider how many fucking nights we’d play, in the scheme of things he didn’t have many problems.
The Pantera set list also depended on which songs we’d rehearsed. At the beginning of pre-production we’d have a list of probably twenty-five songs that would form the bulk of our general rotation, but occasionally someone would say, “Tomorrow let’s do this song. Everybody think about it tonight, listen to it and then come in tomorrow and make it work.”
If we were playing a place two nights in a row, which we occasionally did, we’d have to change the set because we didn’t want to do the same thing twice for the kids who came to see both shows. That would have been cheating them. Depending on how things were going with a particular crowd sometimes we’d go off on different tangents, do little ditties so that we didn’t get stale.
WE ALL IMPROVISED individually where we could and on the occasions when Dime decided to go off on one, it was always fucking awesome to behold from the other side of the stage. Me? I just laid down the low end and he could play anything he wanted to over the top, no matter what I had going on. Sometimes I’d get goose bumps from some of the stuff he did. Dime’s playing never ceased to blow me away, so much so that I’d occasionally go over and give him a kiss!
We’d usually critique right after the show. Ask questions like “What could have been better?,” “Was the tempo of this or that song right?,” or “Does this song fit in?” By that time we had so much adrenaline going that we could sit in the dressing room for hours afterwards, drinking and getting loaded. In later years when we had more space, Phil was usually in another dressing room, but the three of us would analyze every fucking thing over and over and that’s why we were always such a tight live band.
We refined our pre-show routine over the years, too. We’d have hospitality rooms, game rooms, all kinds of shit laid on for us, but apart from playing video games, reading a magazine, or watching football on TV, there isn’t a whole lot to do on show days once you’re at the venue. It would have been easy to get loaded, but for the most part, we started drinking usually an hour before the show. We’d have a few shots and the whole bit.
Then that hour turned into an hour and a half before the show, which eventually turned into two hours, and so on.
Then sometimes me and Dime would just get up in the morning, say “fuck it,” and just start drinking. And then when it came to getting up on stage those nights we’d somehow fly by the seat of our asses. How we did it I have no idea, but we played some of the best shows of our career in that state. I was never so fucked up that I didn’t know where I was or anything or was staggering around on stage, stumblin’ and grumblin’ as I like to call it, but there were a few nights where definitely I came off afterwards and thought, “How the fuck did I do that?” But there weren’t that many nights like that and I never ever missed a show. Amazing statistics when you consider how many fucking dates we played. I’m not saying every night was the best night we ever played, that’s not realistic, but Pantera at 80 percent was like another band’s hundred and fifty percent.
I REMEMBER MANY OCCASIONS when Dime and I used to get off the bus in the morning when we pulled into a new town. He and I would be fucking green from drinking all night but it never even entered our minds not to play that night. On those days, “Here we go again, buddy,” was all I would say to him as we walked across the parking lot to the venue, arm in arm. We knew what had to be done.
WALTER O’BRIEN
When R
ex had too much to drink he’d maybe get a little ornery but he’d also get really talkative. In fact he always wanted to talk to me at four in the morning, when I was exhausted and dead asleep. He’d want to spend three hours talking business and I would be feeling like saying, “Oh, my God, please leave me alone!” But at least he cared about his own career. Nobody else ever wanted to talk.