B00918JWWY EBOK

by Brown, Rex

  So I went and found a little hotel there next to Zuma Beach that wasn’t too far from Paradise Cove.

  In the past we’d taken the kids down there and had a great time, but on this occasion Belinda and I drank entirely too much and things got out of hand. The police were called and the long and short of the story is that they took me to fucking jail at the Twin Towers in L.A., the craziest fucking place you could possibly go to jail at. Just the holding cells alone can accommodate thousands of people; you can get lost in there.

  I remember sitting there with my hoodie on, pulled tight down over my eyes because these people were so crazy I didn’t want to catch any fucker’s eye. Some dude got his nose spread across his face, just because he wouldn’t give another guy his sandwich. This was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Not just that, I obviously couldn’t get access to any fucking booze or the pain pills that helped me to recover from the damage that booze had caused, so on all fronts it was a fucking nightmarish experience.

  When I finally got out, I took a cab from downtown L.A. to my place in Studio City, and when I arrived the whole band was there in various stages of fucked-upness. I had around two thousand dollars’ worth of pain pills in the house because my stomach was really out of control, and Jimmy Bower had been taking them. Phil was out of his mind on something, and Pepper and Kirk were on blow, but they all decided that they were going to stage an intervention on me because they had found the stash of booze that I had hidden under the bed. They all wanted me to go into rehab, but they were missing the point on two counts: just because you relapse doesn’t mean you have to go into rehab every time, and also it wasn’t as if any of these guys could look at themselves in the fucking mirror with any confidence and say that they didn’t have problems that were at least comparable to mine. To me it was totally fucking hypocritical. Here’s these guys getting fucked up in my house, but I’m the one getting singled out for intervention. No wonder I eventually quit the band in 2011, but there were other reasons for that, too.

  My main problem at this point was that I was about to have seizures from alcohol withdrawal while I was in jail and that I also hadn’t taken any medication for at least forty-eight hours. These junkies sit there and say, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong, man. You have to climb the walls and get through it.”

  “Nope, you’re wrong again,” I said. You can’t just “get through it.” There’s a physical reason not to do that because you can actually die from alcoholic seizure, so I took two of each of the pain pills I had and washed it down with the half bottle of vodka that these guys hadn’t found in my house. If I’d waited another three or four hours, I’m not sure I’d be alive today.

  I needed to get myself straight again before we went out and toured the record, and this time I did it for one reason and one reason only: for me, Rex Brown. I checked myself into a detox place in Tarzana. In all honesty I knew better than anyone that I needed to go into rehab again, but I certainly didn’t relish the prospect of the detox process because that is always the worst part. It was my friend Steve Gibb that suggested this place as the best possible detox option for me.

  By the way, Steve is Barry Gibb’s (of the Bee Gees) son, and he was his dad’s guitar tech for a couple of years before going on to do his own music thing, playing bass in Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society for a while in 2000 and then guitar on Crowbar’s Lifesblood for the Downtrodden, a record I was involved with. I’d put Steve into rehab at a place called Promises on his own father’s request, and now I was asking him to return the favor. Problem was, there were no fucking beds available at Promises, so I had to find an alternative to get started with the detox process.

  So Steve recommended this other place in Tarzana and it was fucking nuts going through the detox process there, because in order to do it they had to put me on methadone, which is no fun at all, trust me. You’re basically there until you wake up and when you eventually do, you soon realize that you’ve got another fucking problem: they need to detox you twice. Throughout the whole time I was in there I was calling Steve and saying, “Dude, get me the fuck out of here and get me checked into Promises. There’s no way I’m staying here.”

  Promises is commonly regarded as one of the best rehab programs in the entire country, and it’s been used, often successfully, by every musician or movie star you can think of. There are secluded, private locations in Malibu and Mar Vista, as well as an outpatient rehab center in downtown L.A. It’s seriously expensive, as you can probably imagine, but their success rate was apparently very high, so I had it in my mind that they could put me through the whole detox process there, as well as doing anything else that they needed to do.

  I was in there for twenty-eight days, and Promises was the answer for me because it was the right program at a time in my life where I was really willing to commit to the process for my future well-being and not for any other reason. That’s the key to rehabilitation. Any other agenda only results in a waste of time and money where you end up like Ozzy, who’s been to so many rehabs over the years. The story goes that he walked into Betty Ford the first time and they told him, “We’re going to teach you how to drink properly,” to which he replied, “Okay, so where’s the bar?”

  “We don’t have a bar, that’s not part of this deal.” Until you get the message that rehab is intended to stop you from drinking, it’ll be a long road.

  Promises rattled my whole soul, and that’s not overstating it at all. The whole program was just insane. As well as a structured series of seminars, they’d also take us out to the Self-Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades—and this place was nothing but ponds and flowers, complete serenity, and that helped me tremendously. Then we’d go to Topanga Canyon near Malibu to do therapy and spend the day dealing with horses. You’re sitting there on a horse with this whip in your hand but you’re not whipping the horse; then depending on your body language you could make the horse go in any direction you wanted it to go. The first guy to try it got just nibbled to shit. Horses have a sense about people. In Texas, that’s called horse sense.

  When I came out of rehab in 2007, Belinda and I (we were still separated at this time) had some pretty severe talks about life in general. As I said before, she wanted to move back to Texas—she couldn’t hang out West—and I was also at the point where I felt like I had outgrown L.A. My social life wasn’t the kind that really suited me. We’d go to all these clubs and hang out and that just wasn’t me, and there was a danger of me finding myself in a similar situation that I’d left back in Texas a couple of years earlier. I just was not comfortable standing there in celebrity-ridden clubs.

  After a lot of discussion and a little time, Belinda and I started getting our relationship back together. You always think the grass is greener on the other side, but she came back around and the truth of the matter is that I was still in love with her. It was as simple as that.

  So we moved back to Texas in August of 2007. I got my moving guys to collect all my stuff and put it in storage in a huge warehouse they had for which they only charged me seventy-five bucks a month, and then Belinda and I moved into a little-bitty apartment because I was on the road with Down pretty soon after we got back. Now that I was sober and taking care of business, the tension within Down had eased significantly, and they also must have known that to kick me out of the band would have harmed ticket sales for the tour.

  Soon Belinda and I decided to get a bigger place, and because the money was still coming in pretty good, we bought a large house in Colleyville. I had come full circle. Down III came out a month after we moved and got great fucking reviews and started selling substantial numbers on the back of that. It was a good record, but I like Down II better. I had an attachment to Down II that I didn’t have with this one because I’d done all my homework on it, got all the gear moved down from Nashville, and the whole bit, and for that reason I take a certain pride in it.

  While Down II was a great piece of music drawing from a bewildering array o
f influences, and a record that I had considerable personal investment in, its successor’s main strength and depth lay in its message. For all of us involved, Down III—Over the Under was about overcoming a whole lot of negative things that engulf us: personal tragedy, addiction, and Katrina being three of the most obvious. Sometimes you can’t control these things and so you’re faced with a dilemma: be angry and bitter, or take control and just get over it. We chose the latter. We wanted to put out a positive message to show that tough times could make us stronger.

  “On March the Saints” was the pivotal song on the record and the kind of song you’d want ten of on any record you ever make. It was focused and direct right from the point where Kirk Windstein came up with the riff and I added the bass line. Then Philip added vocals over the top and we had this monster hard rock song that celebrated the resilience of New Orleans in the wake of natural disaster.

  While Pantera’s bloodline was still intact because of the fact that two of its members were in Down, both Phil and I viewed Down as something completely separate, perhaps even more than it was when we’d started it as a side project back in ’98. While we understood that fans might also hope to see something of Pantera in us, that was something we tried to distance ourselves from. We both went through a lot after Darrell’s death—in different ways, too—and I personally felt that my musical journey had to keep moving forward, but still maintain a healthy amount of respect for the past.

  WE HIT THE ROAD with Metallica in 2008 as support on their World Magnetic Tour and that whole experience was significant for me for a few reasons. I’d just been through rehab and I know for a fact that James Hetfield went through hell while he was trying to address his problems. Pepper Keenan is one of James’s best friends, so he knows exactly how strong James had to be to deal with his issues.

  There are two James’s that I know and they run kind of parallel to each other. There’s the one that kind of doesn’t say a whole lot but when he walks in a room there’s a presence that makes you shut up. Then there’s a side to him that you only see when you sit down with him one on one, which I got the opportunity to do when we were on the road together.

  James and I became close because we’re in the same kind of fraternity, if that makes sense. I’m an alcoholic and he shared some of my issues, so we’d sit and talk and I got to know a completely new side of him. We’d talk every night about certain stuff—it didn’t have to be about recovery—but we continually bonded. We talked about the spiritual aspect of dealing with the kind of lifestyle that we’ve both endured and he became crucial to me being healthy. He’d be on a jet somewhere while we’d be riding eighteen hours on a bus to get to the show, but he and I would text each other back and forth to maintain the new friendship we’d created. I’d sit and watch Metallica every night from the same spot at the side of the stage, and at the same point in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” he’d come over and hit my hand and I’d stand there thinking, “This is the guy that I met over twenty years ago in Dallas and now they’ve sold a hundred million records.” I couldn’t believe that they had come full circle like this.

  While Pantera were on top of the world in mid- to late ’90s, Metallica were the band that everyone missed while they were doing all the Load and Reload stuff, and James himself had gone from being really distant and someone I really didn’t know to someone who was open and caring toward me. I was always respectful of him when I was around him and that’s something that a lot of people forget about. When someone’s geared up and about to get onstage in front of twenty thousand people, they need that kind of respect to allow them to go ahead and do their job. It can’t be party, party all the time.

  Despite being a control fucking freak, James is a very, very knowledgeable, down-to-earth person. He’s been in control from the very start despite Lars being the spokesman. You’ve seen the movie Some Kind of Monster? Well, what happened to Metallica was not dissimilar to what happened in Pantera, in that the tensions were caused by years of living, breathing, and shitting together. You could say that James had problems when that film was shot, but they all had fucking problems for the same reasons that we had. And as I learned finally, it doesn’t get any happier until you get yourself into a place where you make the connection between your health and your happiness. If you take care of mind, body and soul, everything else that comes is just a blessing.

  After you’ve been through all the shit that rock ’n’ roll takes you through and you get clean, sober, and start to recover from the disease, you really start to look at your life and say, “Thank you.” When you’re out there drinking and the whole bit, none of that “thankful” stuff matters. You don’t even stop to think about it, so you can lose yourself very easily in thinking you’re a god, and I say that from personal experience.

  Touring with Down was a completely different experience than it was with Pantera, particularly outside of the U.S., and the reasons for that were that I was much more open to new experiences than I had been when I was younger and because some of the other guys, Pepper Keenan in particular, wanted to get out of the hotel to go and visit whatever’s around that’s worth seeing. I would never in a million years have wanted to go to Tel Aviv when I was in Pantera because I had preconceived (and inaccurate) notions of what it might be like. Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. Turns out Tel Aviv is not unlike walking down a beautiful American beach. Like walking down Santa Monica.

  We cancelled the first time we got offered a chance to play there, but Pepper was so adamant we go that we took the next offer that came. The place we stayed at was nothing spectacular, but it was one block from the beach and I went surfing every day with Pepper. The surf was great, too, even though it almost killed me on the last day. There was an American restaurant and bar nearby, completely unexpected, right there on the boardwalk at the beach, and it was just perfect.

  CHAPTER 22

  SEVEN ’TIL SEVEN NO ONE KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN

  Despite being in a far different headspace than I’d been in for many years, I was still in a lot of pain in 2009 and 2010. I eventually couldn’t take it anymore and went to my doctor and said, “Doc, something’s really killing me. I’m in a lot of pain” and he jumped to an incorrect conclusion straight away by saying, “Well, Rex, you’ve got to quit drinking.”

  I told him the truth: “Dude, I haven’t had a drink in over a year.” So he goes, “Okay, let’s get a CT scan then,” but that didn’t show up anything, and neither did the initial MRIs. Finally I got turned on to doctors at the United Methodist hospital in Dallas by some friends of mine who’d heard of a trial procedure that had yielded a very high success rate. During a 3D MRI scan they finally established that my pancreas was full of stones, or polyps if you want to be more medically precise.

  The condition was called acute pancreatitis, and they told me that I also had some issues with my gall bladder and that it would have to be removed. It could have been the booze that caused all these issues, yes, but equally, this condition can occur in anyone between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, and I was right on the upper edge of that category. And it can be fatal.

  So they said to me, “Here’s the way it’s going to go. We’ll try to get as many of these stones from your pancreas as we possibly can.” So I went in about five times for non-invasive surgery. Then I got a rare form of ultrasonic treatment that blasted my stomach, again to try and dislodge some of these stones, but that didn’t work either. What next?

  We had been talking for a while about something called a Puestow procedure, in which they basically cut you in half; then they cut the pancreas in half, too, get all the stones out, and then you’re good to go, except for the gaping hole in your fucking stomach. I was in the hospital for three weeks and I had a team of five looking after me around the clock while I got this relatively rare treatment.

  When I got out of hospital after the treatment, I was only at the beginning of the rehabilitation process. I barely had a foot in the door. I still ha
d to go back for regular check-ups, and during one of them they found that they’d sewn me up with a surgical stint still lodged in there. This uppity dude said, “Hey, I’m the one that sewed you up.” And I’m like, “Great, but I’ve found out there’s a band in there that you forgot to cut.” So, I was in and out of there non-stop, pain after pain. I was taking a lot of fucking pain medication, and it wasn’t helping at all. The years of abusing my system had finally caught up with me, and it was going to be a long process to reverse the effects. Worse still, it looked like I was going to have to learn to live with a considerable degree of pain as my punishment.

  To deal with it, the doctors prescribed me oxycodone, which is an analgesic medicine derived from poppies, and it’s very heavy-duty shit. But it does help with easing the pain.

  The downside is that it also causes some side effects, and in my case the most common one was anxiety, something I’d been self-medicating for years as evidenced by my spiraling alcohol dependency. I was no longer advised to drink alcohol, so I continued taking Klonopin in order to combat the anxiety of not drinking, and the side effects caused by the pain meds. Sounds like a lot of medication, doesn’t it? Well, it is and I really need to be careful. The penalties involved with any kind of alcohol relapse had been doubled after the pancreas surgery. Isn’t it funny how life works.

  TERRY GLAZE

  Even when we were young—and maybe I shouldn’t say this—I always thought that it would be Rex that went first because I thought his body would give out. Whether it would be his liver, a heart attack, or whatever; but not in a million years did I think it would be Darrell. We all have those people that we look at and say, “They are the one.” And Rex was that guy within the band. The funny thing about Rex is that he remembers every fucking thing. Everything. I was talking to him the other day and I said to him, “Rex, didn’t we play a show somewhere when Carmine Appice got up onstage with us?” He goes, “Yeah, it was Cardy’s in Houston in 1984.” “What song did we play?” and Rex immediately said, “Bark at the Moon” by Ozzy. And I said, “How the fuck do you remember that?” But that’s typical of Rex.