B00918JWWY EBOK

by Brown, Rex

  RITA HANEY

  Darrell was very good at recording things, phone conversations, etc., just like he did visually by carrying a video camera around, so there are conversations where Phil called the house throwing a complete fit, threatening to quit the band if he couldn’t release the Down record, and that Darrell and Vince had to call Sylvia at the label to fix it. Darrell called him right back and said, “Relax, what’s going on?” and Phil even said then, “I’m not trying to tour much; I just want people to hear my music.” Darrell and Vince called the label and said, “Okay, let him put it out. It’s not a big deal.”

  Let me say this though: My perspective was not, “I don’t want to be working with Pantera.” It was much more a case of “I want to do this Down record” because we’d been talking about this thing since’98 and it was widely discussed between all of us that the thing that Pantera needed most was time apart.

  But most of all, as always, I just wanted to jam.

  I had no idea how it would all unfold—how much we’d end up touring the Down record and the whole bit—I just knew that I needed to keep myself busy and pay the bills for my family. It was also refreshing, and that was what I needed at the time. One thing I do remember is a telling conversation I had with the president of the record label East/West Elektra, the label we shared with Pantera.

  I said to her, “We have one more song on this record that needs to be a single and it would make us very, very happy if you could do us the pleasure of doing this.”

  Of course I felt like adding, “We’ve only sold how many fucking records for you motherfuckers?” in reference to how many units Pantera had sold for our East/West label. But she said, “Honey baby, it ain’t never gonna happen. I just want a new Pantera record out.” Her name was Sylvia Rhone, and it was our record sales that had put her on the map in the first place, so all she was concerned about was her quarterly sales report.

  To me that said everything. She couldn’t give me the time of day but she wanted a new Pantera record? This woman didn’t care about what was going on within the band. She just wanted her sales figures to look good, and at that point I thought, “Okay, this ain’t fucking working.”

  WALTER O’BRIEN

  It probably didn’t help Rex’s position with the brothers when he went and played with Down. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it myself but I also felt that they should all be able to do what they want, as long as they all kept their eye on the fact that Pantera was the main thing. Rex clearly knew that, Phil clearly didn’t. It was Rex’s call and I definitely respected that he felt he had to keep working. But I felt that Phil was keeping his best songs for Down while giving Pantera all the loud, obnoxious stuff. Pantera were already the arena band, so I felt like saying to him, “Why not let Pantera go triple platinum and then you can go off and do any kind of hardcore side-projects that you want, but Pantera should always be the goal.”

  Down II was released at the end of March 2002, and we ended up touring for six or eight months out of that year—as I said, I just hadn’t envisioned that at all. Our own tour started in April, led straight into a spot on the Ozzfest cycle, headlining the second stage. This was a major opportunity to increase our growing fan base.

  I also didn’t expect that for almost the next two years, I’d be completely out of control with the drinking and on the way to petrifying my stomach, turning it to stone. The party never seemed to stop.

  At one point we stopped in Vegas for a couple of days on the way to the West Coast, and Pepper and I had a suite laid on by my buddies the Maloof brothers. We were drinking heavily and snorting up half of Peru, so I was completely fried by the time we got to L.A. I had alcohol poisoning, but we still played L.A. I didn’t want the whole mess of dealing with that fucking crazy scene. Whenever you go to L.A., every crazy fucker seems to come out of the woodwork looking for something. It’s renowned for being home to a lot of music industry hangers on, and that was something I wanted no part of. So instead I passed out and came to my senses the next day when we’d reached San Francisco.

  We get to the Fillmore where we were due to play that night, and I’m faced with an impossible situation. There was no booze on the bus.

  Nothing. Shaking like a leaf on a tree.

  Zero.

  And by this point I’m starting to seriously freak out. Desperation sinks in. I’m in one of those “I gotta have something” type of modes. I felt totally paranoid, probably because Pepper and I had done so much blow the last couple of days. I had to get myself straight, but there was just nothing there to get fucking straight with. So by the time we get to the side of the stage to sound check, I’m a nervous wreck.

  James Hetfield just happened to be there at sound check and we were all like “Hey James, how’s it going?” During this time, Hetfield had just gone through nine months of living hell of his own and was brand-new sober. And predictably, Phil and he had a kind of “who’s got a bigger dick?” type thing going on—particularly as Phil had said that Metallica were a bunch of pussies onstage at some point previously.

  Then Grady our guitar tech said to me, “Rex, I’ve got a bottle downstairs” and thank fuck someone did. So I went and found it inside one of the stage cases. I tried to take a shot but I was shaking so much I almost poked out my eye with the bottle, and spilled whiskey all over myself. But it composed me and temporarily restored my senses, and we ended up playing a great show.

  Now I was really starting to feel the consequences of excess. And no wonder. We’d snorted most of South America during that fucking summer and in combination with all the drinking—waking up in the morning drinking sometimes—all this shit seemed to be crystalizing in my stomach. That’s what happened to Stevie Ray Vaughan apparently. He was allegedly dissolving cocaine into his whiskey, damaging his stomach lining in the process.

  The biggest problem was that it now seemed like I was out of control without booze. It got to where it took me at least a quarter bottle to get me straight, to take the edge off, otherwise I’d be freaking out while also dealing with all the psychological shit your mind plays on you. I’m damn sure the cocaine didn’t help, but the alcohol was my main problem and I think that a lot of my alcohol dependency can be traced back to when relations in Pantera became very stressful. Obviously I drank before, to a level far in excess of the norm, but the reason I became dependent on it to live was almost certainly stress related. The business I was in didn’t help either, because if you didn’t have a beer or a shot in your hand people thought you were sick. Ironically, I actually was sick.

  THE 10TH OF DECEMBER 2002 sticks out in my mind. I was lying in bed when I got a call at five or six in the morning. Down were going to Japan and I’m all packed up ready to go. Half the band was coming from New Orleans supposedly, but this call came from Sykes: “Phil’s not coming.”

  So I called Jimmy Bower, Down’s drummer, and they were sitting in fucking McDonald’s somewhere—the problem seemed to be that they didn’t have any dope. They had a twenty-hour flight to Japan and they didn’t know what they were going to do. I know what it feels like when you can’t get whatever it is that you need, so I understood that, but what made it worse (for them) was that when they did get to Japan, there was no guarantee that they were going to be able to find what they needed for the next seven days, so it was going to be a fucking living hell for everyone.

  So Phil just called the whole thing off.

  Japan trip cancelled.

  He wouldn’t even get on the fucking phone, and when he eventually did I could just tell that he was super distraught.

  I said to him, “Dude, you’re blowing a huge money deal here. We’re getting a shitload of money to play this one big-ass festival show.”

  But they were either just so dope sick or simply couldn’t find dope, but for whatever reason, Pepper Keenan just said, “Fuck this, I’m not dealing with you cats ever again.” We had to pay the deposit back to the promoter and would probably never get asked back to play in Japan again. />
  At this point I also told Phil that I was never jamming with him again until he was done with dope. And that wouldn’t be for another three years or so.

  CHAPTER 18

  LOST LOVE AND THIRTY DAYS IN THE HOLE

  Obviously the whole Down meltdown was a problem when I returned home. I started having repercussions on that front, because by then I couldn’t even find the fucking light switch, far less turn it off. The switch was stuck in the “on” position, and it was bigger than the house. I tried though, and managed to keep a handle on home life most of the time. When my wife was working I had no problem driving the kids to kindergarten or doing whatever was needed to take care of them without having a drink.

  The kids went to a Christian school from a very young age because we wanted them to have an early understanding of right and wrong, and it was around this time that I first went to a doctor and said, “Something’s not cooking. I’m waking up in the middle of the night, jittery as fuck. I need something to help me.” And so that’s when he first turned me on to Xanax to help with my anxiety.

  Did I get addicted to Xanax, I hear you ask? Lots of people who take it seem to, but with me the answer was no. But I definitely found that it helped with the tension. Belinda was sympathetic to my situation, as far as taking care of the kids and everything else that we needed done was concerned, so that allowed me to just kick back and be myself at that point.

  But things gradually got worse. Of course they did.

  Xanax only eased the anxiety that my drinking problem created but didn’t address the root problem in any way whatsoever. Belinda and I were getting into disagreements a lot of the time, so I decided that the next move was to go into rehab. She wasn’t pushing me to do it, not at all. In fact if I’m honest, I went in for her sake—to save my marriage.

  I went to Jeff Judd’s place one night sometime in 2003, desperate to talk to someone about my problems with alcohol. “I can’t live like this anymore,” I think I told him. “I feel like I’m killing myself.”

  “Then do something different,” Jeff said.

  “Like what?” I asked him.

  “Why don’t you go into rehab?” he suggested. “What have you got to lose? You feel like shit right now, so how much worse can it be?”

  He was right. And if I didn’t like it, he and I made a pact that I was going to walk my ass out of there. So we agreed right then that I’d at least go in to see what it was all about, but before I did, Jeff and I sat and got totally hammered with a bottle of Crown Royal. Then I got the phonebook out and found a rehab facility that was literally down the street in Arlington that actually turned out to be a fucking mental health facility.

  JEFF JUDD

  We sat down there, fucking hammered, and the reception guy came out and put Rex through the whole interview deal, after which he said, “I need to take a breathalyzer sample.” So Rex does it and the guy looks at it and says “Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right back.” I said to Rex, “Dude, you blew the meter right off it!” Then the guy came back with another and he blows into it and the guy looks at it and just shakes his head.

  They must have given me some kind of sedative that night so that I didn’t have a seizure. When I woke up the next morning, I had to fall in line with all these fruitcakes. I looked around trying to get my bearings, and this girl came up to me who looked like she’d fallen face-first into a fishing tackle box.

  “Hi, I’m a cutter,” she said, pulling up her sleeve to show me the cuts, and she had twenty-one fucking earrings all over her face.

  “Where the fuck am I?” I asked somebody.

  “Oh, you’re at Millwood Mental Institute,” they told me. Well, this place was fucking wild. I thought, “This is not rehab, this is a mental institute and I’m not mental.”

  “I’m discharging myself right this fucking minute. I’m in the wrong fucking spot right now.” I went home and did more research, and found out that there were a couple of real facilities around, one of them close to home, so I checked myself into that place the very next day.

  I wanted to see what this concept of addiction is all about. I was genuinely interested in the process. I’m curious like that—it dates back to my childhood days of reading endless books—so I wanted the whys, the hows, and the whole fucking bit. Or at least I thought I did. The problem is, once you learn about the ways of addiction and the waves of addiction, well, then the party in your fucking head really starts rolling.

  All of a sudden you’re armed with too much knowledge and you use that information you have to try and outwit the problem. Of course the irony is that by doing so you are merely confirming your addictive issues. You can drive yourself fucking crazy thinking about being sober. For example, if I saw someone leave a half-finished beer on the table and walk away, that would really piss me off, probably because they could do it and I knew I never could.

  You also lie to yourself. Of course you do. That’s part of the process. You convince yourself that you can stop at any time, you think, “I’m in control of this and that” type of shit, but you can’t stop anything and, deep down, you know it. It’s called denial. Looking back now, I wish I had never gone looking for the information because it completely fucked with my head.

  But my first rehab got me healthy on a superficial level at least. I went in for around thirty days, they gave you the right foods to eat. You go to these classes all fucking day long and put up with a bunch of other idiots, fucking people who—while you’re there really trying to help yourself—they’re on their sixteenth fucking rehab. The way all that works is just retarded, but your head gradually turns and when the thirty days are up, you do feel better. Was it the end of my problems? No, but it was a start and also the start of a long process.

  JEFF JUDD

  He found a place up in Grapevine that was a pretty well-thought of facility, so he went up there, checked himself in for a thirty-day program, and when he came out he functioned amazingly and didn’t touch a drink for six months. He was physically healthy and mentally healthy. Everything in his life was kicking ass and all he drank was coffee, coke, and water. I thought he had it licked.

  The whole point of rehab is that when you come out, you don’t drink. Not an occasional beer or a glass of wine with dinner. Nothing. So what triggers the process of starting to drink again, having gone through thirty days of trying not to? Well, with me, it was something like if my shoes were fucking untied, I’d have a drink. I’m serious. Any fucking thing would give me a reason to jump on the sauce and for the next couple of years I would go back and forth with the business of drinking and trying to quit, simply because I hadn’t made the decision to quit—for me. I’d made it for every other reason but me. The guilt alone will kill you.

  My wife and I had discussed the idea of moving out of Texas in 2003, but nothing had happened to make us act on that impulse. Maybe we both needed a change of scenery, who knows, but it was more complicated than you think, because I actually had four properties that I needed to dispose of before we moved anywhere.

  2003 WAS ALSO THE YEAR where communication within Pantera was at its most strained. Phil basically dropped off the map completely and wouldn’t answer anyone’s fucking calls, ours, management’s, or anyone else’s. I never talked to him but I was caught in the middle of trying to talk to him. Instead he went off and did the whole Superjoint Ritual thing and hardly told us he was doing it, and the rift between us got deeper and deeper to the point where I walked past him at a show somewhere and he didn’t even recognize me.

  WALTER O’BRIEN

  After the second Down record, it seemed like Pantera was no longer Phil’s priority, and it didn’t help that for the three years after Reinventing the Steel, Phil wouldn’t call anyone back. Not us, not the band, not anyone, and it got so bad that the only way to get any answers to anything band related was to pass a message on to one of his friends in New Orleans and they would then have to drive out to his house in the woods to give him it. He couldn’t g
ive his attention because he was going to be in the studio with Superjoint or on tour with Superjoint, or he was going to be wherever with whoever.

  “Phil and I are just tired of you guys being such fucking assholes. You think you’re being cool to people but you’re not.”

  That’s just an example of what I said. Yes, the phone call I made to Darrell sometime in 2003 is something I wish I’d handled differently. It was one of those late-night-and-loaded type of deals for sure, but I meant everything that I said in its lengthy duration: how I couldn’t stand all Vinnie’s bullshit, and how I needed a break from all things Pantera for a while. I was tired of strip clubs and all the associated crap that I was dealing with, so when you’re caught in the middle for as long as I was, sooner or later the levee’s gonna break, and it finally did, so I had to say what I fucking said.

  In the back of my mind there was more to it than that, though. I’d just had kids and wanted to see them grow, so the time off that I needed was going to fulfill that purpose also. But in retrospect I think I confided in the wrong person. I probably should have just told my wife or someone and vented it that way.

  I actually thought at the time that Darrell had taken what I said all right, but the next time I spoke to him it was obvious that he hadn’t. He called the next day and said, “That was pretty fucking harsh, man.” And I apologized—reminded him I was loaded—and that again, I just needed a break. But now there was a distance between us that I hadn’t felt before.

  RITA HANEY

  Phil had stopped answering the phone, and Darrell felt like he’d been stabbed in the back because Phil wasn’t doing what he said he’d do. They arranged a meeting in New York, but Phil didn’t show up and Rex was caught in the middle of it all. Rex called one night, really intoxicated and it lasted a good three hours. He said some pretty harsh things to Darrell, who was completely sober at the time, and I know they were drunk words but it did seem like there had been some animosity building up and it sounded like he had Philip in his ear, too. I’m sure he regrets a lot of what he said. Darrell was trying to pump Rex for information about what was going on because he couldn’t find out anything from anybody else. Phil would not answer the phone and wouldn’t say what he was really trying to do and this was when Darrell realized that they were in trouble. Maybe there was no more Pantera. Philip totally has barriers. You can’t just pick up the phone and call the dude; you usually have to go through a couple of people so that made it easy for him to shut himself away, especially in his compound, which at that time was still a heroin den.