Black Tooth Grin

The search ended when guitarist Scott Hill pulled out a copy of Cowboys from Hell. Bach hadn’t thought of Pantera much since Madam X played at Savvy’s. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” Bach wrote. “As the opening guitar riff to ‘Cowboys From Hell’ came out of the speakers, I knew we had found the band we were looking for to come on tour with us. This was like a new kind of Judas Priest meets ZZ Top meets Van Halen divided by Slayer equals its own kind of thing. I remember cranking the album and smiling to myself, ‘I cannot wait to help introduce this fucking band to North America!’ I knew they were gonna blow up huge as soon as the public at large got a chance to feel their power.”

Maybe it was the show on March 14 at Irvine Meadows²⁰ in California, when Pantera (in full makeup) joined Bach and his bandmates onstage for a cover of KISS’s “Cold Gin.” Darrell had taken the extra step of fashioning an ad hoc Ace Frehley costume out of empty twelve-pack boxes of Coors Light, wrapping them around his arms, legs, and chest. Or maybe it was earlier that night, when Judas Priest’s Rob Halford joined Pantera for blistering versions of “Grinder” and “Metal Gods.”

Maybe it was when Skid Row guitarist Dave “Snake” Sabo and Darrell got both bands permanently banned from a Philadelphia hotel. Which is generally the course of action a hotel takes when two men drop acid, and one of them (Darrell) slices up a fancy leather couch in the lobby with a knife. Or maybe it was the nights when they didn’t get kicked out of the hotel, and Bach and Darrell would stay up drinking and screwing around with Darrell’s four-track recorder. “Even at 7-8 A.M. with twelve hours of drinking in us, Dime was ready to do what he did best—create rock ‘n’ roll music like you never heard before,” Bach wrote.

Maybe it was the off-day softball game between the bands and their respective crews. (Bach claims the cinematic version of the game—which wound up on 1993’s Vulgar Video, claiming a thirty-three-to-three victory for Pantera—was the result of “some major Dimebag digital editing magic”: “Skid Row completely destroyed Pantera on the baseball field, by at least twenty runs, which wasn’t hard because they were all sporting the black tooth grin by early afternoon!”) Or maybe it was the outdoor gig in Missouri that felt like nothing more than a day off, since Darrell and Pantera hosted a barbecue in the sand in front of the stage during Skid Row’s set. “There I am singing ‘18 and Life’ as Dimebag squirts ketchup and mustard all over his beef frank,” Bach wrote. “As I get into the song, I look out at Dime looking straight into my eyes, offering me a hot dog, mouthing the words, ‘Duuuuuuuude! You want a bite of this delicious wiener, bro, c’mon!’”

Maybe it was the night Bach’s wife, Maria, and Darrell got into a drinking contest, knocking back thirty-three shots of tequila—thirty-three between them, according to Bach; thirty-three apiece according to Maria. “I think this is physically impossible,” Bach wrote, “but this was over the course of a full evening, and our tolerance was way up back then, so while I hope I am right and Maria is wrong about this, I must admit that if anyone could do this it would have to be Dimebag Darrell!”

Or maybe it was the day before the show in Vancouver. Just prior to that, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had noted that Skid Row was “already looking over its shoulder at opening act Pantera.” ²¹ Pantera’s new record, Vulgar Display of Power, debuted in Billboard’s album charts at No. 42, and Bach’s prophecy had come true: Pantera had, indeed, blown up huge.

PANTERA PLAYED almost two hundred shows supporting Cowboys from Hell, staying on the road for close to two full years. The only significant break from touring they had wasn’t a break at all. In the summer of 1991, just before leaving for Moscow and their Monsters of Rock debut, they spent two months at Pantego Sound writing and recording Vulgar Display of Power, again with Terry Date producing. The band was so tight at the time, personally and musically, they might have been able to do it in two weeks. As it stands, its construction was practically effortless.

Upon reflection, this record may have been the group’s pinnacle. Released on February 25, 1992, Vulgar Display of Power is by far the group’s best album and easily the most influential. (Korn’s Jonathan Davis credits Vulgar with turning him onto heavy music, and he’s not alone.) The disc’s cover—a fist violently connecting with a man’s jaw—was the perfect visual representation of the music.

Vulgar Display of Power opens with “Mouth for War,” one of Darrell’s finest amalgams of the techniques he learned sitting on the floor of his father’s studio, the 1970s heavy metal and hard rock that both started and stoked his fire, and the underground thrash records that completed his education as a guitarist. Though its genesis was a melody hummed by Anselmo, and though it’s equal parts Billy Gibbons and James Hetfield, it nonetheless mostly sounds like Darrell. Once again, he had simply dicked around and come up with a new lick. “It’s just a weird off-time riff,” Machine Head’s Robert Flynn told MTV.com, speaking for many others, “and the first time I heard it, my jaw dropped to the floor.”²²

From there, Vulgar further expands upon the dynamic that was set in motion when Darrell and Vince had begun jamming together a decade before, while perfecting the element that was introduced when Philip Anselmo joined the band. As photographer Ross Halfin puts it, “It was sort of like Anselmo wanted to be Henry Rollins and the others wanted to be Van Halen.” That idea was never more in evidence than on Vulgar Display of Power, with its inclusion of the atomic-punk metal of “Fucking Hostile,” perhaps Pantera’s signature song, and “Walk.” As such, if you take Anselmo out of the equation, it’s not wildly different from what Pantera did in its Terry Glaze-led incarnation.

“The music sounds almost the same; it’s just you took a girl singing [and replaced her with] a caveman singing,” Glaze says, with a laugh at his expense. “You listen to Vulgar Display—that’s my favorite record—and even though it’s got that real heavy sound, to me it’s still Van Halen. And that’s what all of us grew up liking the most. Van Halen III and IV. Those were the ones. And so when I listen to [Vulgar], I hear the influence of Metallica, but it just sounds like bad-ass Van Halen to me. And that’s what I always wanted to do.”

Atco had mostly left Pantera alone during the sessions for Cowboys from Hell, since no one was expecting any radio or video airplay anyway. The fact that it received both, however, changed the label’s attitude. During the recording of Vulgar Display of Power, Atco used a slightly broader definition of mostly. Upon hearing the album, the label sent someone to ask the band where its “‘Mr. Sandman’ track” was—meaning: Pantera’s answer to Metallica’s breakthrough hit, “Enter Sandman.” Atco likely wouldn’t have gotten its way regardless, but swinging and missing on the song title certainly didn’t help. After that, no one offered any other suggestions.

As it turned out, the label needn’t have worried. While Vulgar Display of Power did not, in fact, contain anything that would break quite as big as “Enter Sandman” had, it did have two songs (“Walk” and “This Love”) that came close enough, with a third (“Mouth for War”) not too far behind. And if the album wasn’t as successful as Metallica’s had been, it would at least become as significant, if not more significant: Charles M. Young complimented the album, somewhat backhandedly, in the July 2000 issue of Playboy, saying that it “set the standard for Nineties metal to come: Limp Bizkit, Korn, Tool, and all the others who dispense almost entirely with melody.”²³

That backhanded compliment would have been better applied to the band’s next album, the far-less-tuneful Far Beyond Driven. But if you disregard the last ten words of Young’s sentence, it still rings true. Vulgar Display of Power built a bridge of hard rock between everything that had come before and most of what would come next. The buzz that started with Pantera turned into a blare in 1994, which turned into a boon for metal in the late 1990s.

THOUGH DARRELL’S influence on hard rock and heavy metal would be writ large at the end of the 1990s, he was inspiring guitar players before he even really left the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Take Scott Minyard, for instance. To Minyard, Darrell Abbott was already a star, shining every bit as brightly as Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen. But to the aspiring guitarist, Darrell was even better, because he was right there. He wasn’t remote or untouchable; he was from Arlington, and so was Minyard. They shopped at the same guitar stores, went to the same clubs, saw the same bands, probably drank from the same bottles of booze. Darrell was a lot like Minyard, except he was a better guitarist. But he didn’t act like it.

Minyard felt comfortable enough to strike up a conversation with Darrell after a gig at Dallas City Limits in the late 1980s. He could have brushed Minyard off, and most people in his situation would have. He was on his way, after all. Local stardom had spread all across the Lone Star State. National fame, even international—it was next. Everyone was sure of it.

But Darrell talked to Minyard that night. In fact, he went one better. He always went one better, as Minyard and hundreds of other fans found out over the years. He pulled Minyard into his world. Soon enough, Scott Minyard was a member of the extended inner circle, the recipient of phone calls, party invites, and as many shots of whiskey as he could stomach—and some that he couldn’t.

What Minyard always wanted to do, from the first time he met Darrell after that show at Dallas City Limits, was to see his mentor at work in a recording studio. It wasn’t idle idol worship; Minyard was in a band, too, and wanted to get familiar with those surroundings. He hadn’t had the privilege, like Darrell and Vince, of spending his formative years in a studio. Minyard finally told Darrell about his wish not long before he told him something else, seemingly unrelated. During an impromptu house party at Minyard’s place, he rhapsodized over one of his favorite records at the time, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. Specifically, Minyard was a fan of “the sound quality, the mixing, the production,” he says. “It had sort of a classic recording sound; it’s not overpolished. And the producer was Terry Date.”

Minyard had already received a rough version of Vulgar Display of Power and fallen hard for it. So he was thrilled when, a week later, Darrell invited him to come over while he and the album’s producer worked on mixing a song from the disc.

They had a certain order and they decided to try it backward. You’re getting real good at that point, at the very end. . . . So they’re mixing the last one, and Darrell calls and says come on down at midnight. We went down at midnight, and he introduces me to the engineer. He goes, “Yeah, this is T.” He called him T—guy in a hat and glasses. “Hey, nice to meet you,” and everything. I had no idea who this guy was. Just one week ago I’m telling him how I like this guy’s engineering so much. He didn’t ever tell me that was Terry Date. He let me figure out myself. That’s the kind of jokes he played. So I got to sit with Darrell and Terry Date, listen to them mix “Mouth for War.”

Since Darrell could rarely sit still for long, mixing sessions were a chore for him. Bring up this track here. Move this one down there. So Minyard and Darrell—along with Bobby Tongs, a member of the crew who was almost always around—loaded up in Pantera’s tour van and set off into the early morning, leaving Date alone to finish the mix.

“We’re driving around, and he goes to Dalworthington Gardens—this is not when they lived there—and it was trash night,” Minyard says. “We’re blaring the Vulgar Display of Power stuff, and I’m just tripping out on everything. We’re driving around, and he’s pulling over and Tongs and him are getting out and getting trash. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff these people throw away,’ he says. ‘It’s unbelievable what they’ll throw away.’ He’s getting all of their stuff, like an old beat-up chair or whatever it was. He loved that stuff.”

That kind of occurrence wasn’t rare if you happened to be along for the ride with Darrell—literally and figuratively. It was-n’t easy to detect what, exactly, would flip his switch, just that something invariably would.

Everybody wants Dime Time. He was just plain fun to be around. He loved garage sales. When [he and Rita] first moved into this house over there in Dalworthington Gardens, this guy was helping him fix it up or whatever to get it ready. Painting and whatnot. Darrell was driving his Escalade with him in the car.

They see this garage sale and he backs up to the garage sale. He gets out and walks to the lady having the garage sale and he goes, “How much?” She says, “Well, for what?” And he goes, “All of it. I want all of it.” And she wouldn’t sell it to him.

She didn’t want to sell all of it to him. She was having fun having her garage sale or something.

Circa Vulgar Display of Power, he had transformed into the Dimebag character he would be known as the rest of his life, physically and otherwise. He had the long pink goatee; the razorblade pendant on a chain around his neck (a riff on the cover of Judas Priest’s British Steel); the dissolute-skater-kid wardrobe; the whole deal.

Darrell’s aversion to marijuana—at least in public—was well behind him. He could finally stop worrying about derailing his career. He had made it through a close call, relatively unscathed. On January 21, 1991, on tour supporting Cowboys from Hell, he was arrested in Santa Rosa County in Florida and charged with possession of marijuana, a first-degree misdemeanor, exactly the situation he’d once feared. But it turned out to be no big deal: He pleaded no contest to the charge on May 22, after he’d returned home from Europe, and it more-or-less went away. Unabashed, he took to sparking up onstage. There was always an opportunity to do so, since fans regularly tossed joints (not lit, usually) at the band. He could call himself Dimebag and not worry about painting a giant target on his back. He could blow up giant papier-mâché pot leaves with fireworks if he wanted to. (He did.) In general, though, life on the road was fueled by something else: “A vulgar display of fucking liquor,” as Darrell said.

In three years, Pantera had taken Darrell all over the world, from Canada to Denmark to Berlin to Akron to Barcelona to Santa Monica to New York to Italy to Atlanta to Washington, D.C., to Moscow to a few dozen other places. It was a heady time for Pantera, and for Darrell personally. For one thing, the boy who had pretended to be Ace Frehley in his bedroom mirror finally got a chance to meet his idol.

When Darrell appeared on the cover of the August 1993 issue of Guitar World, that should have been a big deal on its own. But that was nothing. What mattered was that on the cover with him were Skid Row guitarist Snake Sabo—and Ace Frehley. The photo shoot is documented on Vulgar Videos, and it’s interesting enough, as far as photo shoots go. Which is to say, it isn’t, really. What is particularly revealing is the moment when Darrell is introduced to Frehley. There is no sense of entitlement on his part, no trace of a mind-set that says, “Of course, I should be hanging out with Ace Frehley. In fact, he should be lucky to hang out with me.” Instead, he shyly asks Frehley to sign the photo he brought with him, a tattered shot of him as a kid in his full Frehley getup, blown up to almost poster size. “Now it’s fully set,” he says after Frehley autographs it. He later goes a step further and has the KISS guitarist sign his name on his chest as well; he immediately had the signature tattooed over for posterity.

That was just about the only time Darrell would come off as shy. You were more likely to find him shooting bottle rockets off the V-shaped headstock of his guitar, as if they were specifically built for that purpose. Vulgar Display of Power had sold more than five hundred thousand copies, giving the band its first gold album, and the tours were getting bigger and bigger. Darrell had a little bit of fuck-you money now. He could do whatever he wanted, and often he did, rumbling through life like Peter Pan at the wheel of a monster truck.

Though Darrell was just getting started having fun with his newfound wealth and success, at least in one respect, the party was over. Jerry Abbott sold Pantego Sound Studio as soon as the recording of Vulgar Display of Power wrapped, and he moved to Nashville, where he set up a new studio, Abtrax, and tried to make a go of it as a country songwriter.

“Really, from the day I met Jerry, he really wanted to be in Nashville,” says his former engineer, Jerry Hudson. “I guess a little bit of Pantera’s success helped him to finally be able to go up there. As soon as they finished Vulgar, he hauled ass. He was packing stuff up as they were finishing the album. And literally, as soon as they said they were done, he put stuff in a truck and he left.”

After their father left Pantego behind, the Abbotts returned a few times, once to deliver a gold album to Hudson after Vulgar Display of Power received its certification from the Recording Industry Association of America on February 9, 1993. (“We won’t go into the story of why I don’t have that anymore,” Hudson says.) The last time they came by they left behind something far less valuable.

“They brought this old yellow Ryder truck that was all done, I mean, just worn the fuck out, and parked it in front of the studio,” Hudson remembers. “They had a bunch of old speaker cabinets, most of them with the shit robbed out of them, and said, ‘Hey, man, if you can sell any of this stuff, fine’—and then I never saw them [there] again. I think the police came and hauled off the truck eventually.” And with that, Pantego Sound Studio’s role in the Pantera story was over, and so, for the most part, was Hudson’s. He would see the brothers one more time when he went to Nashville to visit Jerry Abbott’s new studio—a trip that, no one should be surprised, took a detour through some of Music City’s strip clubs.

But even that—not to mention their rising stature in the music business—didn’t change how Hudson saw the brothers. To Hudson they were and always would be the same kids drawing KISS logos on the walls of the control room. There was some truth to that.