B00918JWWY EBOK

by Brown, Rex

  CHAPTER 17

  THE DOWNFALL!!

  You’ve gotten this far in the book and you probably think I’m some kind of fucking angel. Sure, I’d cracked a few skulls in junior high, ripped off the guys at Fotomat, and rolled a few joints here and there, but that’s just what you’d expect from a rock ’n’ roller, isn’t it? Par for the course, I’d say. But what were we like as people?

  It’s pretty simple: Phil had had his problems, Vinnie pulled his occasional bullshit, and Dime was just Dime. By 2000 and leading into 2001, the band was hanging by the thinnest of threads and the slightest disturbance could have caused that thread to snap. It was a completely dysfunctional situation that had crept up and bitten us all on the ass.

  For me personally—and remember this is my book and a commentary of events from my perspective and mine alone—I didn’t really start getting concerned about any aspect of my lifestyle until I had to deal with the consequences of my actions. People have different ideas about what actually constitutes a “consequence,” of course—different levels of tolerance and the whole bit—but for me, consequences are things that make you sit up and pay attention because they actually impact your daily life.

  It could be related to health, family, the law, or finance, anything that impacts your life in a way that forces you to change your patterns. I always tried to stay away from the law as much as possible throughout my life. In general terms I don’t like putting myself in harm’s way, and when you break the law, that’s basically what you’re doing. I never ever felt I was above the law in any form or fashion either, which is something that can easily happen when you’re in the public eye.

  So up until this point, I didn’t really have to deal with any of the consequences of my drinking other than the hangover. I was on the road, living the life, and I never had any problems from the drinking until 2000 (also the year my twin kids were born), when I first noticed that I was having stomach problems, presumably from years of alcohol abuse. I was waking up in the middle of the night—on those nights when I didn’t have a mini-bar on hand—with the shakes, the whiskey jitters, the DTs, whatever you want to call them. These symptoms, in my mind, added up to a consequence.

  Mentally, alcohol was always on my mind, particularly toward the end of the band, but again, not enough to make me take any extreme measures. But it was creeping up on me. You see, alcohol gradually affects your central nervous system and before you know it, you’re at a point where you have to have it, even when you’re at home and outside the normal confines of your drinking, and that made the whole light switch thing harder and harder for me to turn off and be there for the kids. I could still just about take a day off booze, and as a compromise on some days I tried to not drink until five o’clock. But as they say, it’s always five o’clock somewhere.

  My lifestyle was such that I was used to being up until fucking four in the morning, and that doesn’t work when you’re at home with very young children. It meant that Belinda and I were living separate lives under the same roof when the kids were babies, and that’s when I began to feel isolated by my lifestyle—being a dad at home with kids should have been a feeling of pure joy.

  The truth is that kids change pretty much everything, including your close friends’ perception of you. I’ve thought about this for a few years now, but I really think that Dime was jealous of the fact that I had kids. I think he felt that they were now my main focus in my life as opposed to him, the band, or whatever, and I don’t think he was ever really comfortable with that.

  Phil’s approach to life was always fairly consistent for half a decade. He was all about extremes in every fucking thing he did. That’s how it is with him and it’s the extreme that gets him off. If it’s sport, he’s into boxing. If it’s horror films, it’s hardcore gore stuff. Black Metal records, Death Metal records, whatever; he’s just into the extreme edge of anything. In keeping with that type of personality, he also had an extremely sensitive side to him that he never ever presented publicly—other than in his lyrics—and because he and I lived together forever, I had seen it.

  Dime, putting aside his obvious musical abilities, was always a character and always gave you a run for your money. He was real witty, very charismatic, and always on the spot. On one hand he usually seemed to choose the right words to speak and on the other he’d sometimes make ridiculous comments because he had no idea what to say, and he did both in press conferences. Of course the blinking red light of the camera can make you say things that you wouldn’t normally say, so he and I both found it easier to turn into some kind of zombie and shut down rather than opening up. Sometimes journalists would rub us up the wrong way and that just made us want to shut down even more. Thankfully Vinnie was always happy to do the interviews.

  In the beginning Vinnie was a good leader because he wasn’t as crazy as me and Dime were. He held onto it a little better than we did. He had a weird sense of humor in that he thought he was funny when he wasn’t, but he was never the kind of guy who’d sit around telling jokes. When he did make one it was usually the dumbest fucking joke you’ve ever heard in your life. He did a lot of the business stuff while we partied a lot, but as time passed he got into the partying, too, and we got tour managers to look after all the business.

  So we all had our strengths and we had our weaknesses that combined to make Pantera the incredible band that it was. None of us was much worse than the next guy, but the process of living, sleeping, and shitting together two hundred days of the year for fifteen fucking years had really taken its toll by the time it came to tour Reinventing the Steel.

  Something that may have added to the tension was the fact that we were all pretty intimidating people by nature, so the competition was always on among us. We also wore our emotions on our sleeves, too, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that Phil had his “Let’s pick on so and so today” mode, and if you were the one that got picked on, the insecurity might hit you.

  Then when you throw in all the booze and weed and shit like that, it’s no surprise that those merely added to the paranoia—I’m not a paranoid kind of person by nature. Things even got physical on occasion. Plenty of times I had to pull Phil off Dime because Dime was drunk, but this kind of thing happens in every band. Four different personalities made up the overall dynamics of the band, and if they’d been the same, it would have been stale, boring dog shit.

  So, you can see why we needed a break, but we got the opposite because new tour dates were being added and added. There seemed to be no end in sight. The tour seemed to go on forever. The financial offers were great, but because we felt like we were in a marriage that was going south, that just didn’t matter anymore. Something had to give sooner rather than later.

  WALTER O’BRIEN

  It had gotten to the point that nobody wanted to be around Phil anymore. Nobody. And that started affecting everybody to the point that Rex, Dime, and Vinnie were getting loaded because they didn’t want to deal with what’s going on, and at one point it looked like we were going to have three buses on the road—which the budget simply wouldn’t have supported.

  I suppose the writing was on the wall as early as pre-production for the tour. Phil was out of his mind a lot of the time and there were moments in rehearsal where Dime and I would look at each other and say, “Dude, he’s singing a different song than we’re playing”—that’s how bad it got. When we actually got out on the tour, Phil killed it every fucking night, which is typical of him. He rose to the occasion.

  We were following Slayer so we had to be spot-on. Phil knew what he had to do. You do not go on after Slayer and not be fucking gold. That’s one band that you just don’t follow if you don’t have it. But we had it and it was our show.

  There were a bunch of other bands rotating on the bill, too—Morbid Angel and Static-X were two of them—but Slayer was a constant. Dime was real friendly with Kerry, but I never had the closeness that Phil and Dime had with him for some reason. I hung out with Tom more than anybody.
He had his chick and his kids with him, but at the same time we’d all hang out every once in a while, get dinner, and shoot the shit. I got to know Tom through Rocky George of Suicidal Tendencies, who was a good friend of his and with whom we’d toured promoting Cowboys from Hell.

  So while the shows were good, the animosity backstage left something to be desired. Dime was on his own with Vinnie on the bus, and he was starting to hate being around his own brother. I’m sure he grew jealous of me because I’d moved out and no longer had to deal with it. I was in a shit mood most of the time and I found myself jumping down people’s throats at the slightest provocation—when I wasn’t doing that I drank more and more to numb the ill feeling. Drank more.

  It got so bad that at one point Dime came to me and said something like, “Dude, how much do you think it would cost to buy my own tour bus?”

  I just said, “You’re fucking crazy. It’ll cost way too much and if you’re going to do anything, you’d be better off trying to rent one for the rest of the tour.”

  But he didn’t do that. He just drank more, too, in an attempt to block out all the bullshit.

  RITA HANEY

  Darrell got to where he was drinking more, almost to the point where he was hiding in a bottle. The issues with Phil were probably in the back of his mind but he didn’t realize it at that time. He just felt tired and that if they took a six-month break, everything would be okay. Nobody including him really wanted to face up to what was happening. Darrell would go from town to town hung over saying, “Man, I need a day off to rehydrate” but when he saw kids in the next town standing out there with a bottle of Seagram’s saying, “Dude, I’ve been waiting all year” he just couldn’t let somebody down.

  WHEN WE FINALLY got to the end of the first U.S. part of the Reinventing the Steel tour in Orlando, Florida, we did what we always did and threw a big party for the band and all the crew. We’d always get really shit-faced the night before we all went home. It was a Pantera tradition.

  Well, on this occasion, we drank all night like always and then went to the airport the next day to fly home. Our production manager Chris Reynolds was the guy dealing with all the tickets and paperwork as we’re all standing in line. Well, he was such a mess from the night before that he fell flat on his face in front of the ticket counter. Flat. On. His. Face.

  All of us were standing there watching in the first-class line and as soon as the airline staff made the connection that we were all travelling together they said, “Y’all are not getting on this airplane. In fact you’re not getting on any airplane today.”

  So me, Dime, and Kat Brooks got Sykes to take us to the nearest fucking private jet place. They had those little jet joints all around the airports so you could just hop onto one of these small Lear jets at great expense. These weren’t full-blown Lears that you could walk around in; these things were small—had seats in them but no restrooms. We’d sent Katt on a liquor run so that we had something for the flight back to Dallas, and Dime and I got completely hammered for the duration. The only thing was that you obviously couldn’t take a piss in these things, so Dime and I just used cups, bottles, or anything else we could get our hands on until we could get off the plane.

  At the other end we had limousines waiting for us and they were allowed to drive right up to the plane on the tarmac. We just had to unpack our bags and we were good to go. It was full on rock star living even while the band was imploding around us.

  LATER THAT YEAR we played a couple of shows in Japan, came back to the U.S., and then flew out again in September to Dublin for the beginning of the European leg of the Reinventing tour, with Slayer as our support again.

  Then 9 / 11 happened.

  We were stranded in Ireland, and given what was happening in the world, Dublin didn’t seem like the best place to be for a bunch of high-profile Americans. Our hotel was two blocks from the U.S. Embassy and everybody’s tension was cranked up to eleven. All we could do was sit and watch British propaganda on Sky News, listening to their perspective of what was going on in the U.S., and it was truly frightening. I was in a suite with my living quarters on one side, and a TV room on the other side, and my room became a crew headquarters because I had the case full of booze that we carried around with us.

  We had stashes of bottles for days but it was still unclear what was going to happen. On one hand the band guys were thinking that we would be catching a flight home as soon as possible. But on the other, the crew set up the back line at the venue, as if we were going to start pre-production for the tour, because the moment a band does that, they are more likely to get paid by the promoter. Nothing was plugged in, none of the amps or speakers, but by setting it up and showing the will to play, the money is apparently safe.

  I got out of the hotel maybe one time in the two weeks we were stuck there because one of the security guys beat up our light guy, so it was my job to take the dude to the fucking hospital and everything. That was another great pain in the ass that I had to deal with.

  In my mind there wasn’t anywhere that was safe. When you have people flying planes into buildings, anything seemed possible. I have different theories on all that nowadays, but back then I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so it seemed most secure to just stay in the hotel. Of course Vinnie Paul and Dime wanted to go out every night and I just said, “Y’all are fucking crazy,” so again the camps were divided.

  WALTER O’BRIEN

  They were afraid of travelling around Europe at that time and I can’t honestly blame them. If any American band had a big target on their back, then it would be Pantera. Ideally they could have continued the tour—which Slayer did—because it was only America that you couldn’t fly into, but they didn’t and that’s all there is to it. Whether Pantera’s reputation in Europe was damaged as a result of bailing on the tour, we’ll never know.

  Eventually we got back home after a week in Dublin. We had to fly over the Arctic Circle and down through Chicago to Dallas.

  Pantera never played live again.

  There was willingness from me, Darrell, and Vinnie to start getting the next record together. But as I’ve said before, we all needed a break from Pantera. I preferred to be active in my time off and Phil was of a similar mind, but Darrell and Vinnie weren’t doing anything after we got back from Dublin, other than waiting for us to be ready to start working again.

  Seeing a good opportunity, I got on the phone with Pepper Keenan in New Orleans and started talking about getting the process for a second Down record off the ground so that at least I was doing something. Within a few days we had gear loaded onto a truck in Nashville to be taken down to New Orleans. I then got Kim Zide Davis at Concrete Management to get us a record deal, secure the publishing. By October we started recording in the studio with Warren Riker, the Grammy-winning producer/engineer and an acquaintance of Pepper Keenan.

  Phil’s main house was across Lake Pontchartrain on seventeen acres of land. He had a big, vacant barn there, and Pepper Keenan was really good at fixing things up. He’s one of those guys who wakes up in the morning and will build a fucking birdhouse or something, just for the fuck of it. He’s real crafty when it comes to shit like that. So he got a saw, bought planks of wood, some paint, and built a den with a bar in it that we called “Nodferatu’s Lair.” Phil would be nodding out all the time, so that’s why we gave it that name; the sign is still sitting there above the bar today.

  Phil had built a jam room on one side of his property, and Pepper and I built a control room when we first got in there with the gear. We took a whole wall out, the whole bit, to fit it all in. There was an upstairs apartment that had bunk beds in it, a full kitchen, and a pool table with couches all around. It was the perfect hangout pad. So that’s basically where we slept and ate—we had people bringing over food when we weren’t cooking on the grill outside. I grilled four or five times a week probably, that’s how much I was into it. These guys had never had chicken on a beer can before, a Texas thing that I’d perfec
ted over many years. I’d been doing all this stuff way before it was ever shown on TV.

  We’d take it in shifts to record, and we had an engineer there who slept in a tent outside on this little-bitty love seat. It was like a fucking M.A.S.H unit: whoever was up in the morning was good to go. So I ended up playing a lot of the guitar parts on that record as well as all the bass, because these other guys would stay up for two days whereas I went to sleep every night.

  Phil doesn’t like to record until the fucking sun is down. He’s like fucking Dracula in that respect. Some nights he was on and some nights he was fucking fried. Despite that it took us only twenty-eight days to record the record, but they were rough days, I’m telling you. I even had to go to the hospital at one point, and that’s when the complications really started to show in my stomach. Things were much worse than they’d been.

  I took a break at one point and went back home for two or three days to see the family, and I played all this shit for Dime over at Vinnie’s house and he loved it. They were fine about it, but they just didn’t know that we were going to tour for a year and neither did I at that point, quite frankly. I didn’t really want to either; I just wanted to make a record. Then Down were offered Ozzfest; you just don’t pass up shit like that. There was another factor that changed the tour plans: the record blew up when it came out. It was just one of those things. It hit a nerve with the metal community, and if people want to come and see you live, you’d be crazy not to go out there and make the best of it, so you can see how the Down thing just grew and grew.

  More important perhaps, I was actually happy for once. Down was something new for me, for the first time in fifteen years. I just considered it to be part of my life, my musical journey if you will. I was actually pretty stoked by what was happening.