Black Tooth Grin

Date, fresh off recording Soundgarden’s Louder than Love and Dream Theater’s When Dream and Day Unite, was able to get more out of Pantego than Jerry ever had. (In Jerry’s defense, the band gave their new producer more to work with.) Still, as much as Date’s production style would come to define Pantera’s sound, he wasn’t the first choice for the job. Max Norman, best known for his work on Ozzy Osbourne’s solo albums, was offered the gig but turned it down, deciding to work on Lynch Mob’s Wicked Sensation instead. While Darrell might have liked the idea of working with the man who recorded Randy Rhoads’s iconic guitar parts, in the end the right man got the job. Date immediately clicked with the band, and Cowboys from Hell was completed in a few short months.

Once the album was finished, Atco’s strategy for Pantera was as much of a no-brainer as Shulman’s decision to sign the group to the label. They weren’t Bon Jovi, or even Cinderella. With their rough-hewn look and sound,⁵ radio and MTV couldn’t be counted on to support the band. The playbook, as Shulman saw it, was right there in “Cowboys from Hell”: “We’re taking over this town.”

“Forget being in the position of running a company,” Shulman says. “I was just a major fan. They just blew me away. And I knew that they would do that to other people. So my key was for them to tour and tour and tour, and they did. And they went out there and they played places they had never even heard of before, in the States and also in Europe. When thirty people showed up, they told their friends and their friends and their friends, and they’d come back four months later and three hundred people would show up.”

Neither Darrell nor the other members of Pantera had to be coaxed by Shulman into hitting the road to play in front of a few dozen people. They had busted their asses all over Texas (and Oklahoma and Louisiana) so they’d be in the position to bust their asses everywhere else. They couldn’t do anything else and didn’t want to. The one job Darrell had held, besides teaching private guitar lessons, was at a Fotomat (thanks to Tommy Snellings). That had only been good for a laugh at his expense, as friends drove by the tiny Fotomat kiosk just to see Darrell in his uniform, with the hat he had to wear sitting on top of his unruly mop of curls. The rest of the group was of a similar mind-set. Heading out on tour, being in a band full time, worrying about nothing more than playing as hard and loud as they could, onstage and off, that was exactly what they wanted to do with their lives.

Their new schedule wasn’t much different from the one they’d maintained since 1982. It was, if anything, better, in that every weekday was like a Saturday night. Living out of a suitcase became the new norm. Christmas shopping at a truck stop off a deserted highway, as Darrell once did, is a telling scenario. They hit twenty-seven of the fifty states (and Washington, D.C.) and Canada, in many cases several times over, sharing bills with Suicidal Tendencies, Exodus, Alice in Chains, and Prong. At every stop, no matter if they were opening or headlining, breaking in a new audience or preaching to the choir, the goal was the same. It always came back to the same five words: “We’re taking over this town.”

“Sat down with some friends, drank some cold ones,” Darrell says during a video interview, describing a typical tour stop. His voice is higher and clearer in the clip, revealing little of the twanging, gravelly rumble he would later develop, caused by a decade and change of black tooth grins. “Flipped a coin. Came inside. Hanging out, man. Ran into all sorts of fuckers, man. Drank—7&7’s. Fucking stumbling around. You know that’s right.” He then tips his bottle to the camera and takes a big swig—before proceeding to fall off his chair and out of the frame, leaving behind only the bottom of his white high-tops.⁶

“The thing about the band: They were honest and true, but, boy, did they like to live the lifestyle, if you like, of hard, hard partying rockers,” Shulman says. “Backstage, before the shows and even after, I had to hang out and do their famous shots. They were standing straight and talking sense. Three or four shots and beers afterwards, I was on my knees.”

“That’s all that fuckin’ matters,” Rex Brown would later tell Metal Edge magazine. “All of the rest of the bullshit goes away. Twenty-two hours, that’s a lot of day to sit around. You sleep half of it, but those two hours onstage are the main focus of what you have to do.”⁷

More often than not, they made that time count. “There was no doubting the band’s energy or skill,” David Surkamp of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted after Pantera’s set at Mississippi Nights, as part of a three-band bill with Suicidal Tendencies and Exodus, on August 31, 1990. “My guess is that these Texas rockers will quickly work their way up the thrash-rockers totem pole.”⁸

WHEN PANTERA’S barnstorming brought them to Toronto on November 18, 1990, for a gig at the Diamond Club, it also brought them to the attention of one of their idols: Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, who was in the city prepping for his own band’s tour to support its latest album, Painkiller.

Halford was watching MuchMusic (the north-of-the-border answer to MTV)⁹ in his hotel room and noticed Darrell being interviewed. What actually got his attention was Darrell’s black British Steel T-shirt. Then he started listening. “From what he was saying and the Pantera video that aired,” Halford wrote on his Web site in December 2004, “I knew right away that this man was a guitar god!”¹⁰

He immediately called MuchMusic and was soon connected with Darrell. They became fast friends. Before he hung up, Halford agreed to drop by the club Pantera was playing that night. By the end of his visit, he was sitting in with the band on a version of British Steel’s “Metal Gods,” a longtime fixture of Pantera’s set while on the cover-band circuit. “From that point on, [Darrell] and the rest of the band became solid friends,” Halford wrote. “My gut feeling was that this band would be huge.”¹¹

That rehearsal would come in handy later. Halford made an oft-bootlegged appearance onstage with the band at Irvine Meadows (now known as the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater) in Irvine, California, on March 14, 1992, performing another British Steel track, “Grinder,” as well as “Metal Gods.” In the video of the show, Darrell—ever the fan—looks as though Santa is at center stage with a sack full of Dean guitars and Crown Royal.¹² It’s a wonder he got through either song. (Or how he was able to rein himself in long enough to back Halford, along with the rest of Pantera, on a one-off recording, “Light Comes Out of Black,” that landed on that year’s soundtrack to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)¹³

By then, Halford had plenty of experience with Darrell and Pantera. After meeting the band in Toronto, Halford trusted his gut and invited Pantera to open the European dates of Judas Priest’s Painkiller tour in February and March 1991. “Many a night I would stand offstage and watch them tear up city after city, leaving everyone stunned by their intense performances,” Halford writes. “It was a thrill to watch and hear Dime invent and advance with his playing.”¹⁴

It was less thrilling for Darrell. Touring with Judas Priest wasn’t the problem. Touring with Judas Priest in Europe was. “Europe ain’t cool in any of our books,” he told Orange County Register writer Cary Darling in an interview in advance of Pantera’s May 15, 1991, gig at the Bandstand in Anaheim. “They’re just a little behind on everything over there.”¹⁵

“I remember them playing their very first gig in London, at the Marquee, when it was still going,” Derek Shulman says. “There was a good buzz out there. Kerrang! gave them four or five Ks on the Cowboys from Hell record. It was the most intense show I had ever seen in my life. I remember it now. The crowd was insane, and the band—they blew it apart. From there, I could see that this was going to be a phenomenon that wouldn’t go away. It was going to get bigger. Did I think it was going to be as big? Yes. I did. I just suspected that.”

Over time, Darrell would come to appreciate Europe.¹⁶ He got another crack at the continent relatively quickly, when Pantera was invited to take part in the Monsters of Rock Tour that rumbled through Western and Eastern Europe in August and September of 1991, featuring AC/DC, Metallica, and the Black Crowes. The band joined the bill for Monsters of Rock’s final date, a free gig at Tushino Air Field in Moscow on September 28 that attracted somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million fans, depending on whose estimate you believe.

As he and the band wandered the streets of Moscow before the show, Darrell seemed to have already started to soften his stance on overseas travel. Russian schoolchildren surrounded him, looking at him in wonder as he looked back with basically the same expression, each side charming the other. “Skin, dude,” he says to an angelic blond boy, trying to get him to return a hand slap. The boy finally does, and Darrell musses his hair like a father from a 1950s sitcom. Later, he sits in with a group of street musicians at a sidewalk fair, doing his best to strum a balalaika. “Tune this motherfucker, somebody,” he says good-naturedly, before giving up.¹⁷

Perhaps Darrell’s good cheer this time around had a simple source: the bottle of “peppermint whiskey mouthwash” he had brought from home. “Fake seal and all,” he says, noting the tape around the top of a bottle of Scope he had emptied and refilled with whiskey. “Gotta love it.”

HAVING THE front man of a group they had long loved and emulated on their side was something no one in Pantera, and no one at Atco, could have predicted. Receiving a leg up from a source they had already written off—MTV—was even less foreseeable. But it wasn’t an accident. Even better, it happened on Pantera’s own terms. It was all there on Cowboys from Hell. All they really needed was Darrell.

He would have gone down as one of the all-time great metal guitarists for his work on Cowboys from Hell alone. Darrell guaranteed that before the record was half over: the stuttering, snarling pick work on the title track. And the iconic opening riff to “Cemetery Gates,” a crunching, squealing beast that sent thousands of suburban kids into their bedrooms to figure out what pinch harmonics were; the pledge of allegiance to Eddie Van Halen buried in the strutting riff of “Psycho Holiday,” which also tips its cowboy hat to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and yet doesn’t sound like either; the percussive, propulsive lines of “Domination,” a jackhammer performance that conjures the sound of Vince’s machine-gun double kick drum. Any one of these advanced heavy metal guitar by leaps and bounds. And they were all in the first thirty minutes of Darrell’s major-label career.

As for the rest of it, the plan was an organic stroke of marketing genius—selling the band without selling out. By committing to a nomadic existence, the band provided the right kind of demand. By hiring a young video director named Paul Rachman, they took care of the proper supply as well.

Rachman had grown up in the hard-core punk scene and was a filmmaker; he began shooting punk shows in New York City in 1980.¹⁸ In the late 1980s, a few years out of college, Rachman moved to Los Angeles and began directing music videos under the aegis of Propaganda Films, the video production company founded by, among others, Fight Club and Panic Room director David Fincher.

To me, with my background, having really been into hard-core punk and bands like, you know, Black Flag and all that—music was kind of changing in the early nineties. And when I heard Pantera, I was just smitten, because I really got it. You know, it kind of, like, ran in my blood the first time I heard Cowboys from Hell. At the time, a lot of rock bands in the early nineties were either trying to be alternative or, you know, the kind of tail end of the Sunset hair-metal thing was spinning to an end. You had this kind of new music, like Nirvana and all that fucking crap that ruined the music business in my opinion, Smashing Pumpkins and all that shit. And here came Pantera.

I worked with Alice in Chains a lot—you know, kind of followed the course of [them] becoming huge and rock stars and relying on managers, and it wasn’t the same thing. Vin and Darrell, they were kind of do-it-yourself guys, in a way. There was something very Texan about that. You know, We’re going to do it our way. And I understand that, too, because my dad, even though he was born in Brooklyn, moved to Lubbock in the early seventies, and he’s still there. I used to go to Texas a lot as a kid. So I kind of understood that about them.

Rachman flew to Dallas to spend a week shooting the band. He made the most of his time in the city, leaving with videos for “Cowboys from Hell,” “Cemetery Gates,” and “Psycho Holiday.” Much of his trip was spent at the Basement. Back then, it would have been unusual for Rachman to film the band anywhere else.

As the 1980s wound down and the 1990s began, metal bands basically had two venues to choose from in Dallas: the Basement and Dallas City Limits. Given the dearth of clubs, most groups performed at both, though where a band played the most determined its place in the local heavy metal community. Dallas City Limits was for the pretty boys, the ones for whom music was a means to an end, the guys who lived life as if it were a Poison song, who cared more about what being a band offers than actually being a band. Dallas City Limits was more about making the scene than making a sound. The Basement, on the other hand, had a faux-rock interior that belied the all-rock attitude of its patrons. The bands and fans that haunted the Basement were there for the music. (More or less: When the Basement closed in 1995 and was replaced by an Eckerd’s pharmacy, the running joke was one drugstore had replaced another.) As is so often the case with metal clubs, the crowd was predominantly male.

“It was definitely the full-on black T-shirt, no-poseurs, get-your-ass-kicked, serious-moshing type of crowd,” says Dale Brock, who booked the bands for the Basement and later served as manager. “Stage diving was just insane at that point. It was more or less allowed, before however many people died or got paralyzed for life, as the case may be.” By the time of Cowboys from Hell’s release, Pantera, which had started out as more of a Dallas City Limits-type band, was the Basement’s top draw. “They were turning away people at the door,” Brock says.

Pantera performed at the club often—at least until the size of the audience necessitated an upgrade to a larger venue—but they played there even more. Darrell and Vinnie were the welcome wagon for every hard-rock or metal band that swung through town on tour, and they usually took it upon themselves to bring every hard-rock or metal band to the Basement. No one ever knew who would show up with them. Maybe Marilyn Manson or Trent Reznor. Maybe Kerry King and Slayer. Only two things were for sure when the Abbott brothers came by the Basement: Everyone was going to drink and no one was going home anytime soon.

“Man, when those guys would roll into the club, at first it was cool,” Brock says. “After awhile, it was like, ‘Oh no, here comes Vinnie and Dime. We’re gonna be here until five.’” He laughs. “Employees would groan. It was always going to be late. It was going to be after hours. No telling who they were going to bring. . . . Vinnie kind of had the rock star persona a little bit more. Dime was just always Dime. Loved everybody. ‘C’mon, let’s throw down,’ you know? The scummiest guys in the bar, who we hardly paid attention to, he’d come in and just be, ‘Hey, brother!’ He was just always that kind of guy.”

Whenever the Abbotts visited the Basement, the end result for all present was the same: a massive hangover. What happened before that was unpredictable, as it usually was when Darrell was around, and always is when alcohol is involved. And alcohol was always involved.

“Darrell would come in the Basement just shit-faced, and he was the bartender’s nightmare, because he’d get behind the bar, start slinging drinks, pouring shots into people’s mouths. Just, you know, whatever the hell he wanted. Completely illegal,” Brocks, says, laughing. “[Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission] or anybody would have freaked. Just come in, throwing beers at everybody, pouring shots. I tell you, the only time I have drank whiskey in the last twenty years was with those guys. You just had no fucking choice. There was not an option. This is going down your throat if we have to hold you down. You’d just never hear the end of it. That was all there was to it. Throw it down and hope it stays down.”

That policy led to plenty of good times, with the occasional off night thrown in for good measure. “Me and Rita got into a huge fight, and I was glad that Dime never really held it against me,” Brock says. His wife (another former Basement employee) and Darrell’s longtime girlfriend are still close friends. “She was shit-face drunk one night. I couldn’t even tell you what it was about. She was doing something in the club that she absolutely shouldn’t have been doing, whatever it was. And she just freaked out screaming at me, ‘I’ll get you fired!’ That whole bit and everything. And of course, Dime just kind of laughed it off when it came time.”

Darrell wasn’t really in a position to judge anyone’s behavior at the Basement. “One time, Darrell was so drunk he peed in the ice machine,” Brock continues, laughing. “Literally, walked in, dick out, peeing in the ice machine. It was, like, Aw, man!” He laughs again. “Needless to say, that thing had to be cleaned out. But there were probably a few disgusting drinks served that night. That was definitely one of the highlights.”

There were plenty of other highlights that happened in and around the Basement during the period when Pantera was using the bar as a makeshift clubhouse, and they didn’t (all) concern Darrell putting his dick in the ice machine. The most memorable, or at least the most important to Pantera’s career, happened a couple of years later, when MTV came calling. Headbangers Ball wanted to film an episode with the band after Vulgar Display of Power was released; the shoot took place at the Basement. Like they would do for any touring band, Darrell and the band showed the crew from MTV a good time at the club. Which meant drinking and strippers, both in abundance.

“We went to the Basement, and all I remember is that there were just so . . . many . . . girls,” Headbangers Ball host Riki Rachtman says. “That was the one [episode] in my life that I will always remember because there were just so many fucking girls. It was at your disposal. It was like you got to pick and choose. And my friend went with me—he was just, like, this big, fat Mexican guy—and he got to pick and choose! It was, like, for everybody! Every silly rock cliché you can think of? That was what that place was like.”

“Back then, in the early nineties, the whole thing about a live show [video] from bands like Metallica and everything, it was, like, big lights, big stage, you know?” Rachman says. “Live shows were like stadium things that people spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. When I look at ‘Psycho Holiday’ and ‘Cowboys from Hell’ today, just as a filmmaker, there’s so much more energy on that stage in those videos than any of those other bands could have dreamed of having.”

To capture that energy, Rachman filmed the band during its last local gig before Atco released Cowboys from Hell. He got into the show as much as the band and its fans did. “Those guys wanted a really raw, live, energy thing,” he says. “I shot it very much in the style like I did hard-core videos. Like, I was onstage with a camera.” But not for long: To properly capture the fury and passion in the room, Rachman repeatedly dove into the packed crowd with his little hand-cranked 16-mm Bolex camera.

The resulting trio of videos shoveled dirt on top of the coffin Cowboys from Hell built for the band’s spandex-and-hairspray days. They were as stark and visceral as wartime photography, and unlike anything on MTV at the time. They translated the experience of seeing Pantera live better than anything Atco could have dreamed up, and better than everything the band did after, including its 1997 album Official Live: 101 Proof. The videos also helped turn Anselmo into a star, spotlighting the muscular charisma he had developed, a stage presence that would bring to bear massive change in the archetype of the heavy metal front man.

More than a decade and a half later, Rachman still believes those videos, most notably “Psycho Holiday,” hold up as well as or better than anything he ever did in his stint as a video director. (After helming clips for the likes of Alice in Chains, the Replacements, Sepultura, and Roger Waters, he quit in the late 1990s to focus on a big-screen career.) But Rachman—who would work with the band again on the stylistically different video for “Mouth for War,” off Vulgar Display of Power—remembers the collaboration more than the product.

They were very different. Phil’s attitude was all about the energy and keeping it real and just being, like, as truthful as you can be to the audience. Vinnie, as the producer, was really into the technicality of the music. A certain integrity was important to him. And Darrell was actually the most fun to work with. Because he had the true kind of rock-and-roll spirit. I don’t want to call it “rock star spirit,” but he had a glow about him. Where it was this balance between being, you know, a great guitar player and really caring about your band and your music and your fans having a good time. Kind of balancing all of those things. It was really an art.

He didn’t have to try to be a rock star, because he was one. You know what I mean? He was a natural. With all the bands I worked with, not so many people were naturals like that. I’m trying to think back, like who was a natural—gosh—it’s, like—you know, Roger Waters.

In the early nineties, there were a lot of opportunities for rock. Labels were signing a lot of bands. Everybody was looking for the jackpot. Everybody was kind of, like, worried about becoming a rock star. Darrell didn’t worry about that.

PAUL RACHMAN also had a hand in another part of Pantera lore: Cowboys from Hell: The Videos. Released on April 2, 1991, it collected Rachman’s videos, along with professional and amateur footage of the band onstage and off. Rachman served as director for the project, but it was really Darrell’s baby. Darrell filmed anything and everything, a habit that he began in the early days of the band and never shook. Not that anyone wanted him to. Atco, in fact, gave him a camera when it sent Pantera out on the road.

“I remember working with Darrell a lot on that, talking to him a lot on the phone,” Rachman says. “Darrell actually was the one in the band who really was handling the video camera a lot. This is kind of the early days of bands taking Hi-8 cameras on the road with them. Darrell was the one shooting a lot. He was the one who logged everything. They sent me hundreds of hours of tapes.”

Darrell didn’t merely document the usual scenes of the band hanging out backstage, drinking and goofing off with friends and fellow bands, although he did do plenty of that. Much of what ended up on tape could have been a prototype for MTV’s Jackass, a full decade before anyone had heard of such a thing. There were don’t-try-this-at-home-kids stunts, pranks and practical jokes, dick and fart jokes, fireworks assaults on anyone who happened to be around, and, naturally, copious amounts of alcohol.

One of the best sequences in Cowboys from Hell: The Videos is a playful confrontation with Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen outside a hotel on tour. Darrell serves as both cinematographer and director of the scene, prodding one of the members of the crew into attempting to give Malmsteen a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts.

The brief scene was typical of Darrell’s take on life: Nothing was to be taken too seriously, and nothing was to be taken for granted. Never act like royalty, but treat everyone else like they are. While someone like Malmsteen wasn’t fond of anyone deflating his air of superiority, whenever anyone tried to put that same kind of atmosphere around Darrell he was the first to wave it away.

“He loved taking the piss out of rock stars,” Buddy Blaze says. “Where he’s picking on Yngwie about the donuts—that was Darrell. That was Darrell all the time. Before he was famous he was like that. He didn’t change after he got famous. The only thing that changed was how many cars and how big the house got and things like that. But that should. He earned it.”

The prefame Darrell on display in Cowboys from Hell: The Videos utterly lacks pretense. He is clearly thrilled to be getting paid to do what he would have paid to do. He even seems to revel in the mundane duties of a touring musician. When the band visits J.J.’s Ear Candy in Carson City, Nevada, for an autograph signing, Darrell doesn’t look like he’s suffering with a smile as he greets fans like long-lost friends. Nor does that appear to be the case when they drop by the studios of a Reno radio station—Z-Rock, KZAK-FM (100.1)—later that day to chat with a portly DJ in a Cosby sweater and a mustache that even a veteran 1970s porn actor might roll his eyes at. As Z-Rock plays “Cowboys from Hell,” Darrell sings along and air-guitars as fiercely and happily as he would onstage.