B00918JWWY EBOK

by Brown, Rex

  2003 continued with very little direct band communication at all. I ran into Darrell at a Motörhead show in Dallas a few weeks after that phone call, and he wouldn’t even talk to me. I’ll never forget the look on his face. I still have it in my mind. It was a horrible, terrible look but what could I do? I said what I said and couldn’t take it back.

  Vinnie and Dime were really hurt by what was happening and at a certain point they just said, “Fuck it, we’re going to start another band,” as if to say, “Fuck y’all.” I didn’t understand why that sentiment was directed at me, but when it was, that line was drawn in the sand. I was all for them doing their Damageplan thing, so I just said to Dime, “Do what you’ve got to do, man.” As I’ve said a million times: I wanted time away from all things Pantera.

  I SPENT THE REST of 2003 and early 2004 doing things that had absolutely nothing to do with Pantera.

  I was enjoying watching my kids grow and hanging out partying on my thirty-foot powerboat. I bought it back in ’98; it had a full kitchen, could sleep six, and was docked up at Grapevine Lake, also known as “Party Lake.” We’d go out there—take the kids, too—and one of my best friends was a dock mate, so we’d just say, “Okay, let’s go to the lake” and we’d head out there on a Thursday night and party until Sunday. The boat had flames painted on the back. I named it “The Hell Yeah.” Vinnie later stole that name for his band.

  PERIODICALLY I’D HAVE TO deal with communication from the Abbotts, Vinnie mainly, but all he would ever do was bitch about what Phil was or was not doing, so there was nothing really for me to do or say. Phil still wasn’t talking to us, but he was more than happy to discuss his plans with the press. It became obvious as 2003 dragged on that his intentions were different than what he’d initially said.

  We were in limbo.

  And while I was happy to finally have time to relax and spend time with the family, I had no way of predicting exactly what Phil’s longer-term plans were, particularly when he recorded a second Superjoint record and started intimating in the press that they were his main focus. I would rather he had talked to us about it.

  Phil had a different manager by then, and at one stage of this whole communication vacuum, his manager was calling me to get answers about Phil and his new band. I’d just say, “Fuck you, dude.”

  “Hey man, I’ll manage you, too,” he’d say.

  “What are you going to manage? There’s nothing to manage,” I explained.

  “Maybe I could get Pantera back together?”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re a fucking douchebag.” His name was Dennis Rider.

  What does it say about the state Phil was in when his own manager was coming to me for information?

  KATE RICHARDSON

  Superjoint Ritual were out on the Ozzfest tour in 2004 and we had a date in Dallas. Everybody else was being all dramatic saying, “Oh my God, Oh my God, what happens if they meet the brothers?” But Philip and I between us both thought, “Man, I really hope they [the Abbots] do show up.” Philip said to me, “I’d want to pull them into a room, give them a hug and say, ‘This is all bullshit, I love you guys. No matter what projects we’re working on, I love you.’” We were at first told that they never showed up at the show, but we later found that they did show up but people steered us all apart and, between security coordination or whatever, made it impossible for Philip and the Abbott brothers to see each other.

  We were now in the middle of a “he said, she said” bullshit thing in the media where Vinnie and Phil took increasingly personal cheap shots at each other in the music press. Darrell stayed out of the conversation mostly, but did allude to Phil’s ongoing drug issues in an interview with Guitar World, but only after being provoked earlier.

  I didn’t get involved at all. I said nothing whatsoever.

  It all seemed so childish to me and I felt that the only way to really reconcile would be for us all to be in the same room at the same time. However, Phil was still using, that much we did know, so I suspected that nothing constructive was going to happen until he got clean, and when that time came I was going to be the one who had to bring the two sides together to at least start discussing the future. Until all those components fell into place, I had decided that I was going to stay far away from all of playground name-calling.

  KIM ZIDE DAVIS

  My perspective is a little different from everyone else’s maybe, because I genuinely was stuck in the middle, particularly near the end. Rex and Philip’s take on how things went down is very different from Vinnie and Dime’s take, though, I do know that. It really came down to the lack of communication. The separation had gradually happened over the years. They had different interests because they were four different people, and Vinnie and Dime’s personal interests were more related to each other, as were Rex and Philip’s. So that put the rift right through the middle of the camp. Rex was definitely the peacemaker between Vinnie and Dime and Philip, because he could speak with Philip and Philip would listen, then Rex could take the information back to Vinnie and Dime. Rex was obviously not involved in heroin but neither was he involved enough in Vinnie and Dime’s partying, so that detachment made him the obvious mediator, almost by default. That had been his role for a long time because they were always on the road. He was the face-to-face middleman, whereas my contact was mostly on the telephone.

  From the phone conversations that Darrell and I had on my birthday in 2004, then again in November of that year, it seemed as if we were both at least on the same page regarding what we hoped for in the future. Darrell and I had been friends since we were kids after all, and it seemed that despite how tense our relationship was at that time, neither of us was prepared to let go of the time we’d spent together, which meant something. Yes, there had been hurtful things said, but the reasons for that were more because of the generally tense situation than any personal issues between us. Hand on my heart I believe that.

  RITA HANEY

  I talked to Rex a couple of times before Darrell talked to Rex on his birthday, and he was trying to find out from me if Darrell had mutual feelings, which he did. So when Rex called, I asked Darrell if he wanted to talk to him and he said he did. Not just that, I think this could have been the start of trying to fix some things and to reach Philip. Darrell was still pretty angry though and didn’t want the blame to be focused on Philip. He wanted everyone to take their share of the blame. For all of them to step up. He said to Rex, “You know the only reason I’m talking to you right now is that we have history. You’re my brother and you lived on my couch.” He still loved Rex, no matter how angry he was with him.

  When you boil it down to basics there really was no blame to be leveled at any one individual. We all wanted to be working on something , to be making music, so if it was necessary for us all to go our separate ways for a while, so that we could all come back to Pantera refreshed when the time was right, then that seemed like the obvious way forward—and the only way to get back to where we once were.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE

  However delicate our relationship was throughout most of 2004, the events of the night of December 8 ensured that we would never know what the end result of the conversations might have been.

  KATE RICHARDSON

  I was at home and I don’t know what Rex and I were talking about, but we were on the phone together when the news about Darrell came in. One of our mutual friends who was a sound guy in the industry called me on another line, and so I told Rex what I was told. We were totally freaked out but we didn’t know at this point that it was fatal. We just knew that there had been a shooting and that Darrell had been shot. So we had to both get off the phone to get on the phone with other people in order to find out what was actually going on. What is really strange is that the previous night I’d had a dream about Darrell and in the dream I had to babysit him. It was bizarre. Philip and I always discuss any dreams we have, and when we were lying discussing it the ne
xt morning for two hours he lay there talking and reminiscing about Darrell saying, “Fuck all this bullshit. I have got to call that guy. I’m going to call him today.” Then people came over to the house and he never got the chance to make the phone call before we got the terrible phone call.

  WALTER O’BRIEN

  The lease on my office in Manhattan expired in 2003 and I knew then that my career in management was probably over so I went back to college to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism at Rutgers. At the end of 2004 I was almost in the last semester and had important mid-term exams. I was out having dinner with a bunch of friends, sort of mourning the [anniversary of the] passing of John Lennon, and then I started getting phone calls from everyone telling me about Darrell.

  I’ve said already that what happened that night not only shook me profoundly, but it also left an indelible imprint on every second of my life since then. Band tension created by years of close quarters living is one thing; the loss of life, particularly when that life belonged to one of the people dearest to me on this planet, is entirely another. In an instant, all the petty bullshit that had plagued us the previous few years seemed completely meaningless.

  KIM ZIDE DAVIS

  I got a call at around 10:16 p.m., which was roughly two minutes after it happened, and I was told that there was a shooting at a Damageplan show, and that Dime was definitely dead but they weren’t sure about Vinnie’s status or anything else at that point. I was in a state of total shock, so I can only rely on what my husband tells me, and that is that I sat on the couch and the phone didn’t stop ringing until about one in the morning, at which point he took my phone away from me, turned it off, and put me in bed. The details are all fuzzy. On the day of the funeral, I remember getting to Texas and going to the hotel where they had set up everything. It was really surreal because friends from all over the world were there, people we used to see, other musicians and people from the music industry who we didn’t ever see in Texas, far less all together in the same building. Everyone was in the same state of wondering, “How could this have happened to Dime?”

  A more immediate concern was the fact that the line that seemed to have been drawn in the sand between the band members meant that the funeral was going to be awkward territory, especially as far as Vinnie and I were concerned.

  For me it was that fear of the unknown—I just didn’t know how Vinnie was feeling because we simply hadn’t been communicating. As it turned out, the messages I was receiving were mixed at best. Obviously Vinnie was distraught about what had happened—we all were—but there was that contradictory aspect to how he viewed me that he just couldn’t hide, despite his sadness.

  He wanted me there, but he also felt I was in some way to blame for his brother’s death. Go figure. I really didn’t know where I stood, and if I didn’t know, Phil would have had no clue whatsoever about where he figured in the overall equation. I know Phil was flabbergasted by Rita’s threats about what she’d do if he came to Texas, but at the same time he was also very respectful of her wishes. However, we all knew where he was habit-wise, so for him to just show up would have been a terrible move.

  Looking back on it I feel bad that he never got any closure. Yeah, that really sucks. Being completely excluded and then having to sit there and not be able to talk to anybody must have been very frustrating, and that feeling must have only been heightened when his letters to Vinnie were completely ignored. To date, as far as I am aware, there has been no attempt by Vinnie to make contact with Phil since 2004.

  The source of Vinnie’s bitterness was an interview that Philip did with Metal Hammer sometime in late 2004. Phil’s exact comments were that Dime “deserved to be beaten severely,” and it was that comment that led to the public’s assumption that this was the catalyst that led to Darrell’s shooting. Phil said that the comments were fabricated, or at the very least taken out of context, but I have heard the tape recordings and I know what was said.

  But, if you’re asking me whether I feel that there’s a direct connection between the statement and Darrell’s death, I would have to say no way. You can’t speculate about the mind of a killer. And Phil was in no way to blame for what happened that night. The press just seized hold of his words and spun them to suit their own narrative goals. To me it was just a case of ill-chosen words combined with really unfortunate timing. But that’s no consolation to Darrell or those close to him. Knowing what Darrell was like, the only possible consolation for him was that he was buried with Eddie Van Halen’s guitar by his side in a KISS casket. Terry Glaze said at the funeral that if we’d told Darrell that he’d be buried with Eddie’s striped Kramer off the cover of Van Halen when he was seventeen, he would have probably said, “Okay, kill me now.”

  RITA HANEY

  I convinced Vinnie to let Rex come to the funeral. Rex showed up at my house before Vinnie even got home from Columbus, and I was mad at him but I just took one look at him and started sobbing, hugging, and crying. It wasn’t about those little petty issues anymore. Then I remember when Vince got home I told him Rex had come over and he was really mad. I said, “Darrell would want him here.” And I told him that Rex and Darrell had talked on the phone and so I convinced Vince that I wanted Rex to be one of the pall-bearers. Vinnie was resistant at first but then he said, “You know what, if that’s what you think, and that you think that’s right, then okay.” I voiced that I thought everyone should have the right to say their goodbyes to Darrell even if it was at separate times, because nobody wanted to see Philip, but Vinnie was dead set against that. He let me make the call on Rex, so I couldn’t deny letting him make the call for Philip. I didn’t completely agree with it, but what sold me on it was that for Philip to show up drugged out would have been so disrespectful and I had already heard that he was in a hotel room in exactly that state.

  KATE RICHARDSON

  We didn’t get on the phone with Rita until the day after Darrell’s death, and at that time Rita was telling Philip not to come. But we felt “How are we not going to come?” So we went ahead and went to Dallas, but that’s as far as we could go. We didn’t want to upset the family, but at the same time we felt that this was the time for everyone to have closure. In Philip’s mind this transcended all the miscommunication that had gone on over the previous months. When Rita was on the phone with Philip, she was telling him not to come, but at the same time other people are picking the phone up saying, “Why the fuck are you not here? You should be here right now.” And all Philip could say was, “Well, if the lady of the house doesn’t want me there, who the fuck are you to tell me to be there?”

  The funeral itself and the days that followed it were some of the most emotional days of my life and it’s hard to remember one moment from the next. It was almost as if I wasn’t really there at all but was merely looking in on the scene from somewhere else, but one thing I knew was that the pain I felt at the loss of my best friend was real. I was deeply upset, but I was also feeling two other emotions. The first was a real and growing fucking hatred for the guy who had done this to my brother, and the second was the constant, unanswered question of why this happened. I badly wanted to find out, but there were no obvious answers.

  KIM ZIDE DAVIS

  Rex was like I have never, ever seen him before. Physically he was standing there, but that’s all. Literally like he was on another planet. It was as if he had no way of grasping that what was happening was real, and I couldn’t really blame him in a lot of ways. I barely made it through myself, and I had just been Dime’s manager. I hadn’t been in a band with him for twenty-something years. I didn’t notice any inappropriate behavior on the day, probably because there was always crazy stuff going around the band and Darrell was the king of that, but a lot of people had been drinking heavily and when they eventually helped Rex out of the memorial service, it was clear that he was inebriated.

  KATE RICHARDSON

  This was all a really insane, fucking crazy time. Philip and I were both asked to not go to t
he funeral, but we went to Dallas anyway and were just waiting for approval to go to the funeral itself. We were planning on going but then people were starting to make death threats to get us to stay away. But we were in Dallas for a week staying in a hotel, and during that time we went over to Rex’s rental house and we spent a bit of time with him before the actual funeral. We didn’t go to Darrell and Rita’s house; we drove past a few times but didn’t dare go to the door. Rex was very confused and angry when he saw Philip, as everyone was. We wrote letters to Vinnie while we were staying in the hotel, and as far as I understand he has never actually opened them and the report back was that he had no intention of ever doing so.