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RIGHT ON THE EDGE

Rita Haney, Ride the Lightning, and Philip Anselmo

“Well, it looks like I finally found someone who likes to play as rough as I do.”

RAVEN,

Streets of Fire

In 1984, Pantera continued to be, as Terry Glaze says, a “guy band.” There was at least one girl who came to see Pantera. Specifically, she came to see Darrell. Her name was Rita Haney, and Darrell had known her since the third grade. Because her mother worked nights, Rita spent her postschool afternoons at the home of her aunt, who happened to live in the same neighborhood as the Abbotts. Rita and Darrell would hang out often, doing what eight-year-olds do. Mostly that entailed riding their bikes to an abandoned housing development known by the kids in the area as “the bike trails”; on their first ride together, she pushed Darrell off his bike. Again, doing what eight-year-olds do. They got over that and became best friends. They had their first concert experience together a few years later, going to see—of course—KISS in 1979.

“I remember he almost cried because he missed Gene Simmons breathing fire,” Rita remembered in VH1’s Behind the Music episode on Pantera, “because some old lady in the back behind us was all stoned, put her cigarette out in his hair.”

They fell out of touch soon after. Rita stopped hanging out at her aunt’s house, and she and Darrell lived in different parts of town. Music would bring them back together a couple of years later. Both fans of hard rock and heavy metal, they wound up at the same shows and partied with the same crowd. They renewed their friendship, and Rita became a staple at Pantera shows. But it was “just friends” for a long time. In fact, Rita regularly set up Darrell on dates with her girlfriends.

The situation would change one late night after a Pantera gig in 1984, when Darrell gave Rita a ride home. Playing guitar was Darrell’s first love, and it was probably his truest. In Rita, though, he had found another love, one that would last almost as long. He didn’t have to look very hard to find it. It was right there in the front seat.

“He tried to kiss me, and I was, like, ‘Weird, but I think I like you, too,’” Rita told Metal Edge magazine in July 2006. They officially became a couple on December 4, at a Malice show. “And we were together from then on.”⁹

 

TERRY GLAZE recalls the members of Pantera being rock stars, at least in their little corner of the world. They were the stereo-typical big-fish-small-pond band. How big? Rhonda and Timmy Riley, regulars at Pantera gigs at Joe’s Garage, named their daughter Pantera Frances Lynn Riley, which is simultaneously awesome and tragic. If nothing else, it speaks to the level of dedication Pantera inspired.

The group hustled to maintain that devotion, playing as much as seven nights a week and recording at Pantego when they could. The latter resulted in two more albums, 1984’s Projects in the Jungle and 1985’s I Am the Night. Like Metal Magic, both discs again showed that Pantera could deliver well-balanced collections of rock/metal and that Darrell already had a strong sense of who he was as a guitar player. But they didn’t do much else. While each was better than the last, neither could be described as groundbreaking or even stellar examples of the prevailing style at the time. They are patchwork, cobbled together from pieces of early Van Halen, Shout at the Devil-era Mötley Crüe, and about a dozen other things. On songs like “Forever Tonight” (off I Am the Night), you can even hear a bit of what Bon Jovi arrived at around the same time, thanks to Terry Glaze’s pop influence.

Though Jerry Abbott’s production is murky on all three albums, one thing already shines: Darrell. His playing isn’t inventive, and it doesn’t much resemble his latter-day style. What it lacks in originality is made up for by his impressive facility with his instrument. You can hear why he wowed everyone who happened upon him. His playing had the agility and the assurance of a man twice his age.

Still, as good as Darrell was with his guitar, and as hard as Pantera worked as a band, there was something holding them back from finding an audience beyond Joe’s Garage. Though they might not have known it at the time, at least consciously, it’s plain to see now. For them to succeed, someone in the band had to become “the Pete Best of Pantera,” as Buddy Blaze puts it.

The path they were on at the time may very well have landed Pantera a recording contract. It wouldn’t have taken them much beyond that. The odds are they would have quickly ended up back where they started, and they probably wouldn’t have received a second chance; few bands do. Pantera was good at what it did, but what it did was on the way out. No one could see the end of hair metal coming. It was fast approaching all the same.

I Am the Night, for the most part just another well-balanced collection of rock/metal, did mark a shift within the band, a subtle change, probably imperceptible at the time. It wasn’t a left turn so much as a blinker signaling that a turn was coming. Darrell and Vince had long been inspired by new sounds they were hearing in heavy metal’s underground, digging on the outrageous amounts of speed and volume on records that mixed punk’s aggression with metal’s chops. They began immersing themselves in the music of Metallica, Slayer, and other American bands that had a heavier, faster take on the genre. Darrell would do what he used to when he was sitting on the floor of Pantego Studio watching Bugs Henderson and Ricky Lynn Gregg record with his father, studying the riffs until he figured them out enough to try them on his own, then dicking around with them in his bedroom until he came up with something new.

Darrell had seen the light, but it was his friend Rick E. Warden who had his finger on the switch. Warden found religion in the early 1990s, becoming a born-again Christian just as Pantera was becoming a success. Obviously, it changed his life. But before that happened, he helped Darrell find something that would change the young guitarist’s life: Metallica.

Warden met Darrell not long after he had been banned from entering any more guitar contests. Darrell invited him to a keg party where Pantera was playing. Darrell was fifteen, and Warden was a year older. Warden had already seen more than his fair share of bands. He went to his first concert when he was twelve. It was a Foghat gig, though Warden might have remembered it as a Judas Priest show if his older brother, Jerry (the same Jerry Warden who later booked Pantera at a few of his generator parties), hadn’t made them late. He went to the first Texxas Jam at the Cotton Bowl in 1978.

Which is to say that Warden had plenty to compare Darrell to when he turned up at that keg party. While he was impressed by Pantera’s usual mix of covers, it was when they broke out an original, “Rock Out,” that he knew he was seeing something special. “Being a big-time guitar freak, I noticed right away that Darrell definitely had the touch, you know?” Warden says. “He had it. He happened to be a real cool kid, too, so we just hit it off and became buddies.”

Since they had both sold their souls for rock and roll, it’s likely Warden would have run into Darrell at some point, even if he hadn’t accepted that party invite. Later on, he became the manager of Pipe Dreams, a head shop that doubled as a record store; it was where everyone went to pick up the latest metal alnity radio station. He took over the Saturday night twelve-to-two metal show from his brother, who had been kicked off the air. “Being the squirrelly little brother that I was, I went right up and said, ‘Hey, I’ll do it,’” Warden says. “Kind of made my brother mad, because he was, like, hey, if they wouldn’t have had a replacement, they would have had to come crawling back and begged me to do the show.”

Darrell helped Warden out at both of his jobs, recording commercials for Pipe Dreams and doing show intros for KNON. “We just did them there at his house,” Warden says. “Squealing tires in the driveway and smashing bottles, you know, recording it and putting it all together.” They became closer during those times than at Pantera gigs and the inevitable after-parties. Working at the record store and the radio station also gave Warden a chance to introduce Darrell—and everyone else he knew—to Metallica.

I’m the first one that I know, period, that knew anything about Metallica, much less had a Metallica song that I was going around and playing for everybody: “Hit the Lights.” Dude, check out this, man—it’s Metallica. It had Dave Mustaine on guitar and James Hetfield singing. [Warden had first heard the song on the Metal Blade records compilation Metal Massacre.] Then when the Kill ’Em All album came out [in 1983], obviously I jumped right on that, and it blew us all away because it was smoking. It was some of the heaviest, most aggressive, pure metal, period. Darrell was blown away. We all were. It was a manifestation of everything that we wanted to hear in music at the time. No question about it. Kill ’Em All is probably the single most vital album to all of new American heavy metal music.

Vital though it was, there wasn’t much of a market for what Metallica was doing then, at least not in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A band like Pantera could maybe get away with a cover or two here and there, but for the most part, the club crowds wanted what they heard on the radio, or songs that sounded similar. “Even at that point, Pantera was already playing Sherman, Texas; Norman, Oklahoma; down in Houston; all over Dallas- Fort Worth,” Warden says. “But in order to play those clubs, even though Darrell was into heavier stuff, they still had to play a lot of goofy stuff, mixing Iron Maiden songs in with Loverboy. Definitely some Van Halen. They played ‘Jump,’ and Terry Glaze would play keyboards.”

Metallica didn’t play Dallas or Fort Worth while touring behind Kill ’Em All, a package show with New Wave of British Heavy Metal band Raven (supporting its third album, All for One) that they called, in a synergistic move, the “Kill ’Em All for One Tour.” Metallica instead booked shows in Texarkana and Tyler. Warden made the trip to Texarkana and ended up talking about shared musical tastes with Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, a conversation they continued after Metallica played in Tyler.

“It wasn’t just cool for us. It was cool for James and Lars, you know, to meet these guys from Texas that were into all the same stuff they were into. You just didn’t run into that many people that were like that.” Warden told Hetfield and Ulrich about his friend Darrell and his band, Pantera. “I’m, like, ‘They play some poseur stuff, but you have to understand it’s just the way it is here in Texas.’”

That was beginning to change—or, at least, Darrell’s resolve to make it change was becoming steelier whenever he listened to Metallica’s second album, 1984’s Ride the Lightning, which was quite a bit.

“Dude, Darrell loved the Ride the Lightning album,” Warden says.

I mean, that was like the all-time—at the time it was just the best thing. There was nothing else out there that was even comparable to being as good as Ride the Lightning. Darrell used to come over to my house. By this time, I had a house and had a, you know, a rockin’ stereo. We had a PA system set up in the living room, and we had bands jamming in there all the time and stuff. Darrell would come over, and we’d get a little loose and stuff, and dude, he would just be, like, “Put on that Ride the Lightning again.” “Dude, we just listened to it.” I remember specifically telling him, “Here, take the album home with you and listen to it, man.” That’s all he wanted to listen to, over and over again.

Darrell kept listening to Ride the Lightning, and Warden kept talking about him when Metallica came back to Texas to promote the album. Warden’s friend Rita Haney—not yet Darrell’s girlfriend—helped him get some more alone time with the band. According to Warden, Haney hooked up with Ulrich on the Ride the Lightning tour, getting an invitation from the drummer to visit him while Metallica was in Arizona. (Haney would say she merely became friends with Ulrich and Hetfield.) She, in turn, asked Warden if he wanted to make the trip with her. “I’m, like, ‘I’m on my way. Let’s go,’” Warden laughs. When it was all said and done, Warden had succeeded in intriguing Hetfield and Ulrich. Soon, the duo would be headed to Texas, courtesy of two free roundtrip tickets Haney had received after she was bumped off a flight.

“Metallica was finished with the Ride the Lightning tour,” Warden says, “and they called and said, ‘Hey, where’s that Darrell Abbott guy? We want to check him out.’ And I’m, like, OK. So we called Darrell, we called Pantera, and we set up the meeting and for [Pantera] to play up at Savvy’s. They ended up playing up there at Savvy’s, man, it was at least three nights in a row, maybe five. They would go up there and play gigs at Savvy’s and then come home and play in the house and party all night.”

The party was just about over for Terry Glaze.

“That was a totally different game all of a sudden,” Buddy Blaze says. “And that’s really where Terry wouldn’t fit in. Darrell would actually get up and sing the heavier kind of stuff”—the band did a great version of Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” as a trio, with Darrell handling the vocals—“but that wasn’t Terry. That was definitely a different ballgame.”

“On our third record, they were going in that direction, and I didn’t want to do that,” Glaze says. “I didn’t want to play guitar-based music; I wanted to play song-based music. That’s why I always thought, you know, it worked good, because with Darrell’s music and my lyrics—the combination, we kind of added something, made something new. I didn’t want to go that heavy. I didn’t like it as well if the guitar was the main thing, like the Metallica songs.”

Less than a year after the release of I Am the Night, Glaze didn’t have a say in the matter anymore. He left Pantera in the spring of 1986. But it wasn’t only philosophical differences over the direction of the band that resulted in Glaze’s departure. It had to do, like so many disputes in the music business, with money.

Jerry Abbott had been Pantera’s manager from the beginning. There was nothing on paper, but there didn’t really need to be, not as long as the boys were playing places like the Aragon Danceland and high school proms. Even then, Jerry’s presence was a sticky subject, since it meant Glaze and Brown were always outvoted three to two. “The Abbotts never split votes,” Glaze says, “so what the Abbotts said is what happened.” When Pantera started to reach different levels of success, a sticky subject turned into a sticking point. Jerry Abbott had put a lot of time and money into Pantera, buying the band a PA system, recording all the albums, releasing them on his own label, traveling with the group. With bigger paydays on the horizon, he made a move to protect his investment and had a proper management contract drawn up.

“I had an attorney look at it, and I was advised, do not sign this,” Glaze says. “I said no, and I was basically told, ‘You sign this contract or you’re out.’ I have a letter at home. I just felt like I couldn’t have him as my manager when he was their dad. He was always going to be on their side, and I didn’t feel comfortable with that. That’s the nicest way I can put it; I could say lots of other things. But I’d probably do the same thing if it was my kid.”

Glaze’s departure from Pantera turned out to be the right move for all involved. Glaze formed a new band, Lord Tracy (originally called Tracy Lords), that scored a major-label deal before Pantera did, releasing Deaf Gods of Babylon on UNI/MCA in 1989. With Glaze gone, Darrell was free to fully develop his boozy, bluesy, bruising take on metal, which would make over Pantera into cowboys from hell and him into King Dime.

If Glaze had signed the management contract, “Pantera would in no way have become what they became,” Buddy Blaze says.

If they did succeed, with that being one of the criteria, you would have to look at it as, you know, they would have been a competing hair band, the way I see it. I really don’t understand how they would have not just disappeared, other than Darrell being an amazing guitar player. To me, it would have just been a vehicle for Darrell to get a real gig. And that’s not putting Terry down at all. To me, it was inevitable that Darrell was going to be a star. It was inevitable; he was too good to be denied. My instinct, my heart tells me Pantera would have never been as big if Terry was in it. I honestly don’t think so.

Pantera didn’t find someone to replace Terry Glaze right away, nor did they immediately drop the glam look. They tried out a couple of new singers—Matt L’Amour and David Peacock—but neither stayed around long. Even Glaze came back and played a show at Savvy’s with them. “It was really good,” he says, “but I didn’t want to go back to the way it was.”

The man who had preceded Glaze in Pantera, Donny Hart, came back, too.

“To be honest with you, Donny Hart looked like he was going to be the real candidate,” Warden says. “Donny Hart was the one that, out of those three, stood the best chance. The problem with Donny Hart was that his singing style was more in the vein of, like, a Geoff Tate. He was a good singer, a real good singer; he could hit those Queensryche Geoff Tate notes all day.”

It was a frustrating time for Warden and other Pantera fans. “It was really a situation where, you know, who was the person? Who was going to do it?” Warden says.

They obviously knew that they had to find a singer. They knew that they had a challenge ahead of them. But it wasn’t, on their part, a down-and-out, bummed-out time. For the rest of us, I can say for myself personally, yeah, it was a bit of a bummer. Because you’re going, “I’ve seen Eddie Van Halen. I’ve seen Randy Rhoads. I’ve seen all these guitarists. And that guy is as good as all of them. What’s the deal? How come we can’t get a singer that comes close to comparing or can make this thing come together?” They were never bummed out about it. Bummed out would be too harsh of a term for anything you would ever put on Darrell. Darrell was the epitome of, you know, everything bounced off of him. Life was just a carnival to him. There was never a dull moment with Darrell. Even back before they were famous. I mean, it was from the time he woke up until the time he went to bed. He was into something, doing something. Nothing slowed him down. So they were very professional. They knew that they had a challenge ahead of them and they took it on. It worked out, obviously.

It started to work out when Philip Anselmo, an eighteen-year-old kid from New Orleans who was fronting his own dolled-up band, Razor White, called Pantera up in late 1986 and changed everything. They’d heard of Razor White before; every time they rolled through Shreveport, someone was telling them to check out the group—mainly its singer. They brought Anselmo to Texas, and just like Rex Brown, he left his initial meeting with the band as a member of Pantera.

“I picked him up from the airport in this drug dealer’s ’77 Corvette,” Brown remembered in 2007, during an interview with Decibel magazine. “He was fresh out of high school, a real cool dude. Anyway, I took him over to Vinnie and Dime’s house, where we smoked and took slugs off a bottle of tequila. The rest is history, as they say.”¹⁰

The new version of the band played its first show in January 1987. “The chemistry clicked like a vice grip,” Anselmo wrote on his Web site in January 2005. “We hit it off like four bad motherfuckers could. Perfection. Dime, Vince, and Rex could play fucking anything. You pick the style, they could pull it off. So in reality, we had to find out where our musical hearts lay strongest. After short deliberation, our intention was to be the most devastating ‘hard-core-heavy-metal’ band in the world.”¹¹

With Anselmo out front, they were well on their way. Pantera released Power Metal in 1988, again on Metal Magic, after an abortive deal with Gold Mountain Records. “They wanted to change our style and make us sound like Bon Jovi, which is not quite up our alley,” Darrell told Metal Forces magazine in a June 1988 interview. ¹² Pantera remained signed to Gold Mountain until August 1988 but never officially released anything on the label.

Power Metal only hinted at what was coming next: “On that album, Phil sings more like Rob Halford or something,” Warden says. “You’ve gotta understand, when we first heard Phil sing, we thought we were looking at the next Rob Halford. We didn’t know we were looking at the first Phil Anselmo.” No one did. Anselmo didn’t write any of the lyrics on Power Metal, and the band was still shaking off its glam roots. The album even featured a song, “Proud to Be Loud,” written by Marc Ferrari of the standard-issue 1980s hair-metal outfit Keel.¹³

But, again, there were definite hints as to where the band was headed. As far as the band was concerned, it wasn’t too far away from where it had always been. “Darrell has always been chunking those riffs out from the start,” Brown told Metal Forces. “I mean, it’s not like all of a sudden we’ve turned around and started riffing out like this. But now with Phil in the band we’ve got a chance to make those riffs fully happen instead of having some gay singer over the top of them!”¹⁴

Everyone seemed to like this extracrispy version of Pantera better than the original recipe. Even Glaze, the “gay singer” Anselmo replaced, couldn’t deny what Anselmo brought to the band. Plus, he was happy that there was finally someone else out there he could relate to. Someone who knew what it was like to be in that band.

“I met Phil at a guitar show,” Glaze says.

He was a skinny little dude, with long hair. And then right after I get out of Lord Tracy, they were on their Vulgar Display tour, and I went to the show. I went back. I saw Phil. By this time [almost six years later], he has the shaved head, monster muscles, you know, huge wrestler dude. He walks up to me and puts a hug on me. It was, like, you know, him and me were the only two in that club. The only two singers that totally understood. He was, like, “Dude,” and I said, “I know.” Phil’s a really talented guy. I know he’s had a lot of ups and downs, but man, that guy’s really talented. Darrell was, you know, the soul of that band. Every one of them, to me, owes everything they have to Darrell. But at the same time, you know, Phil was it.

Warden echoes that sentiment but adds something else. It’s something he also said to Darrell not long after Anselmo joined Pantera.

“I will preface this by saying that, one on one, Phil was one cool mug,” Warden says. “We’d smoke dope and hang out and chill and just talk about politics. I mean he was a cool guy. He really was. But the problem with Phil was, when you took cool-guy Phil and put him in the established Pantera scene, he became evil-punk Phil. It would drive me nuts. . . . He’d wear his Venom black-metal shirt, you know, and, rarrrgh, do the devil sign, that kind of stuff. You’re, like, ‘Dude, come on, man. We’re real, dude. We’re just into sex and drugs and, you know, every now and then we’d [get pissed off about] a corrupt politician.’”

“There’s no need to have head trips and stuff,” Warden continues.

But the thing was, Phil was actually a little ahead of the game, because at that time, it wasn’t real popular to be the total evil metal guy. Now, it’s totally cool to be the total evil metal guy. I can tell you this: I told Darrell, in Phil’s presence—knowing that Phil was hearing, purposely so Phil could hear; it wasn’t behind his back, it was in front of his face. I said, “Darrell, even though Phil’s going to be your ticket to fame, he’s going to be your demise. I mean there’s no way that this isn’t going to come back on you. Look at him. He’s an evil punk, man.”

I didn’t see it as clearly then as I see it now, but my opinion is, Phil is the epitome of a Crossroads experience. You ever seen that movie? Yeah, I think Phil had a meeting [with the Devil] at the crossroads and he signed on the dotted line.