Black Tooth Grin

“Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.”

Ulrich Wild had no idea what he was signing up for when he agreed to come to Texas to help Terry Date, Pantera’s longtime producer, record the band’s eighth album, The Great Southern Trendkill. Wild had previously worked with Date on recordings by White Zombie and Deftones. None of that prepared him for sessions with Pantera, given the fact the band had decided to record the bulk of Trendkill at Darrell’s home studio, just a few miles away from the group’s original home base at Pantego. The studio had been built as nothing more than a place for Darrell to jam, but after some demos for the disc were recorded there, the sound—deemed “fuckin’ lethal” by Darrell—was too good to ignore. Plus, recording at home appealed to everyone, particularly Darrell, since, after all, it was his home.

“It’s pretty damned difficult to keep your dick hard on a song when you have to drive forty-five minutes to some alienating recording facility before you can start jamming on it with your band,” Darrell later explained to Guitar World’s Nick Bowcott.

And when you get there, you have to chill out and wait for everybody else to roll up. Then, of course, somebody’s bound to be hungry so you leave the studio to go eat. This leaves you feeling like shit when you get back, and you end up slamming some beers and lying around watching a TV show you’re not even interested in because your flame’s not hot. And all the time you’re waiting around to get inspired, you’re shelling out big bucks for the place. To hell with that, man! We can do all time-wasting stuff at my hut and it doesn’t cost us a dime. We’ve got a keg going, 50 bottles of whiskey, a pool table, a big-screen TV—inspiration can and does strike at any moment, and it’s easy to keep the fire going when all you’ve gotta do is walk to the bottom of the goddamned garden!¹

Given all the time wasting that actually happened at Darrell’s hut—or, to be more accurate, local strip clubs—it was probably better and certainly more cost-efficient for the band to record at its own studio. Wild arrived in town a few weeks before Thanksgiving in 1995. Apart from holidays, he stayed there until mid-March, before everyone decamped for Larrabee Sound Studios in West Hollywood to mix the disc.

“We could have probably recorded that entire record in a month,” Wild says, “but there were so many distractions.”

Why did it take so long? Look at Wild’s explanation of his schedule—and we are using the loosest possible definition of the word—when Date left him alone with the band for a little over a week, so he could record vocals with Anselmo, who had returned full time to Louisiana, at Trent Reznor’s studio in New Orleans:

Like, Dime, he wouldn’t even get up until 3 P.M., usually, and that would be the early time he was waking up. Usually it would be kind of between three and six. Because Terry was out of town, Dime took liberties with the schedule a little bit. We got kind of turned around, and Dime wouldn’t actually wake up until midnight.

He’d wake up at midnight, roll out of bed, drag everybody down to—what was it?—Babydolls, the strip joint, for last call, basically, for breakfast. Whoever remained there, at like 2 A.M., went over to Dime’s house until about five, six in the morning to party. And that’s when we actually finally ended up starting to work. So we finally started recording at, like, six in the morning until about eleven.

And then we decided—we meaning Dime; I was able to just say yes and go on with it—that we would go down to Babydolls for first call, for a nightcap.

We’d stay there until, like, one or so, and we’d come back and they would start fucking around—you know, he’d get these prototype guitars from Washburn, and he would customize them by just drilling holes into ’em, and spray-painting ’em, and, you know, chiseling ’em out, and just making some cute little drunken designs on there.

I would kind of skip out on that and start going to sleep. Because I’d have to wake up at, like three, four to at least make some phone calls and take care of some stuff—like buy tape or what have you—that we needed. You know, while the stores were still open. I didn’t have the leisure of getting up at midnight, like Dime did.

The sessions were rarely more structured when Date was in town, riding herd on the band as much as he could. Playing guitar and just playing, period, went hand in hand for Darrell, and that was part of the deal if you were recording, or doing pretty much anything else, with him. He didn’t pick up a guitar so he could have a job for the rest of his life. He didn’t keep regular hours, he didn’t have normal days, and that’s the way it had been since he was fifteen years old. Even when he was in high school—a period of time in one’s life dominated by routine—it had been that way.

The most dependable thing in Darrell’s life was his guitar, and even that didn’t dictate the course of any given day. Darrell could be almost bookish about guitar playing and guitars in general, and he spent plenty of quality time with his guitar almost every day, whether he was recording an album or recording on his four-track. When that actually happened, though, was anyone’s guess, was hard to predict, and tended to happen when it happened. Wild and Date had to be prepared to roll with everything else, and to roll tape when he was ready.

When Darrell was ready, Wild learned something else about working with him that was unexpected: King Dime, the Idol, the man with the signature, dirty guitar tone, was still searching, still toying with his sound. Dozens and hundreds of guitar players tried to perfect their imitations of him. Darrell was trying to do it, too.

“The reason they put this studio together in the RV garage was that they could record on their own and keep a take from demo recordings if they were good and they wanted to keep ’em,” Wild says.

It’s hard to chase demo performances, you know? They’d record these demos and everything, and we’d listen to ’em and want to improve ’em and redo most if not all of it. Then it comes time to get the guitars down, and we’ve got the good gear now; Terry’s stuff is in. Dime says, “It’s not sounding the same.” “Well, what’s different?” It’s, like, we’re using the same heads, same guitars, same pedals, same everything. “Well, it must be the mikes.” No, it’s the same mikes. “Well, it must be the preamps.” Well, yeah, that’s the only thing that’s changed. So, we go from, like, the Focus Right pres and the API pres and whatever else good stuff back to the Mackie, because that’s what he used in the demo. So you plug it into the big Mackie board, like the 32-amp one that they were using for monitoring. And “It’s just not sounding the same. It’s just not sounding the same.” I was, like, “Well, you said you used the Mackie—which one did you use?” “Well, this little four-channel Mackie.” So we plug his guitar rig back into that, and use the Mackie preamps, the cheapest ones you could possibly find, and that was the guitar sound. It was far from worked out. . . . I don’t think you ever have anything really figured out forever, because you change. Your taste changes, your touring [rig] changes, your endorsers change.

One thing never changed: no one could tell Darrell what to do or not do. By this point in his life and career, he’d earned at least that much. Though he constantly worked to make himself a better guitar player and, beyond that, could hero-worship with the best of them, there were very few people who could tell him anything about what to do with a guitar in hand that he didn’t already know. After half a life spent in various bars and clubs, smiling his way through an endless stream of black tooth grins, giving his liver a pounding rarely seen outside of a mixed-martial-arts octagon, no one could tell him what to do with a shot glass in his hand either. He knew his body, his skills, his limits, his wants and needs (musically and otherwise) better than anyone. So he kept his own counsel on most things. He’d get the results he wanted, even if his methods were unorthodox. Banging out riffs and pounding shots were part of who he was. To get the former, you sometimes had to deal with the aggravation the latter all but ensured. It was usually worth the hassle.

“It was amazing what he was like with that thing strapped around him,” Wild says.

He takes [his guitar] very serious, and the visions that he had of what he wanted to accomplish with it. That was always very important. But it was also very important to him to have a good time doing it. He wasn’t really losing sight of it, per se, but it was frustrating at times to get him to work, because he was really living it up, you know? He bought a new Caddy—you know, it was just stuff like that. Terry got a phone call: “I need you to go into this room and fax me the insurance papers to this number.” It was, like, “Uh oh. What’s that all about?” Two or three hours later, he shows up with a Cadillac, right? And it’s customized already—it’s got the longhorns on it, the Coors cans wrapped around in the center. He found the button for traction control, to release it, and so he could do wheelies with his Caddy. So we’re not going to get anything done because it’s joyride time. He’s having a good time, but then he’s going to be happy and recording well for a few hours after that, so you know, what are you gonna do? For starters, you can’t catch him. He’s in a car and you’re on foot.

He always liked to live it up, and drinking was definitely a part of that. During the recording, everybody was always drinking, unless you were in AA. If it was known you were not drinking, that was the only reason you weren’t drinking. You know, there are all the drinking rules, like drinking out of turn. And the answer to everything was always “Have a shot.” You know, “I’m cold.” “Have a shot.” “I’m hot.” “Have a shot.” “I’m hungry.” “Have a shot.”

That atmosphere led to an interesting souvenir for Wild. He had shown up in Dalworthington Gardens with long ringlets, a hairstyle that mimicked Darrell’s to a degree, though it was a bit shorter. Being the new guy, Wild was promised an initiation into the fold, and one look at his head made it clear what that would be. Every day, Darrell would growl at him, “Yer hair’s coming off.” Wild fought them off by playing it cool, acting as though not only did he not care, but he actually welcomed the impromptu haircut. “That kind of took the wind out of their sails,” Wild says. “It wasn’t quite as much fun.”

But after another heavy night (and early morning) of drinking at Babydolls, Darrell and the band decided to finally go through with it. They sat Wild down in Darrell’s kitchen, turned on the video camera, and went to work.

“They started shaving a bald spot in the back,” Wild remembers.

And they started shaving up from the front a little bit. But they didn’t have the big clippers. They had, like, little beard clippers. It took forever. They started just chopping stuff off left and right, mostly in the back. They made two horns in the front with whatever was left and they spray-painted it pink, with that, you know, punk hairspray stuff. Then they made one big horn in the front out of the two horns, like a unicorn-type thing. And they singed that—that was pretty smelly. Eventually, they just laughed the whole thing off and gave up on the shaving of the head, because they didn’t have clippers and it was too much labor. They kind of left me looking like some really bad, awful version of Billie Joe from Green Day, with pink hair instead of green. And then they left for three days.

I was there trying to sober up for three days. Those were probably the only three days I didn’t drink, mind you, in that whole thing. Basically, I went down to Texas with them and I was drunk for—what?—four, five months.

Wild didn’t really stay in touch with Darrell and the band after Trendkill was finished. He’d see the group in LA when it was on tour, but mostly they’d send word back and forth through other bands. One of the groups Wild was recording would get a Pantera tour, and he’d tell them to say hello for him to Darrell and the guys. Someone else would come off tour with Pantera and head into the studio with Wild, bringing back Darrell’s regards. Though he didn’t see Darrell much after his Texan adventure, Wild always had a reminder of those months together.

“At some point, we were doing guitar overdubs,” Wild explains.

Dime was sitting there, listening, kind of chilling out. There was a pair of scissors lying on the [guitar] rack. He saw them, and was starting a sentence, and as he was saying what I was about to do, I was doing it: I just grabbed the scissors and then snipped off the top of his beard. Or the bottom of it, actually—the pink part. He was in the middle of a sentence: “I can’t believe you haven’t picked up these scissors and cut off my beard yet,” or something like that. It was such a weird thing, because we were thinking exactly the same thing: Cut off his beard. He was, like, “Can’t even be mad at the dude—I took his whole wig off.”

Darrell’s beard now sits in his studio, in a Ziploc bag. Tons of people have done shots with Darrell, and even more have personal little stories involving him. Ulrich Wild is one of the few, if not the only one, who can say he literally has a piece of him.

More than a few guitarists have approached Wild during recording sessions thinking he has something else: The secret. The formula. The right mixture of gear and studio wizardry to achieve Dime’s sound. “You worked with him,” they say. “What did Dime do?”

“The answer is always ‘If you were to take Dime and put him on your rig, he would still sound like Dime,’” Wild says. “‘And if I take you and put you on Dime’s rig, you would sound like you.’ You can’t sound like Dime, because it’s in the fingers and it’s in the heart. It’s in the soul of the playing, not just the gear. People neglect their right hand for picking so much and it’s so sloppy so often. It could very often use a lot of improvement. And a lot of the sound actually comes from the right hand, from how you pick and attack the strings and attack the instrument. Some people don’t want to hear that at all. Some people are very enlightened by it.”

THE GREAT Southern Trendkill wasn’t exactly a concept album, but there was definitely a concept behind it. “There was a huge resentment for the alternative scene that came up,” Dale Brock says.

That’s right when alternative had peaked and metal had died from the airwaves. That was, like, their retaliation: The Great Southern Trendkill. Thinking that they were going to change things back. . . . So many of the metal bands tried to change their sound, tried to be more alternative at that time, even Metallica. Pantera thought the world of Metallica, then they came out with a much softer, radio-driven album at that time, and they just totally called them pussies. Called them pussies onstage, called them pussies on the radio, just completely became enemies with those guys. But I’ve got to hand it to them: They didn’t change their sound. They stayed as aggressive as they always were, if not more, and they were completely on their own there for a while. They were one of the only bands doing it.

Other than a resolve not to change with the times, there wasn’t a unifying thread to the album. It was a much more eclectic effort than Far Beyond Driven, though it continued on the same downward spiral in terms of tone. If there was any thematic presence beyond the title, it was that The Great Southern Trendkill, in a way, acted as a survey of Pantera’s career up to that point. Darrell described it as being “almost like a best-of.” This was partly because he had resurrected some riffs that first surfaced during the making of Cowboys from Hell and Vulgar Display of Power, as well as others that had been born even earlier. Though their presence on the album seems to indicate otherwise, it would be wrong to suggest that he had run out of ideas. As long as he kept getting new guitars, he could keep figuring out new things to do with them.

“Every different type of guitar I pick up—electric, acoustic, twelve-string—brings something different out of me,” he said at the time. “That’s how [The Great Southern Trendkill’s] ‘Suicide Note Pt. 1’ was written. Washburn sent me a twelve-string acoustic and all of a sudden there it was—another influence and another piece of inspiration. I wrote that riff the very first time I pulled the twelve-string out of its case.”

In Darrell’s view, he was only then coming into his own as a lead guitar player. That might have struck some observers as an odd way of thinking, since his guitar tone and his trademark techniques (like pinch harmonics, the squealing sound he picked up from listening to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and perfected even further) had long been lionized. But there is more than a little truth there.

When he was younger, Darrell’s approach to his guitar was much like that of any kid with a new toy: He wanted to see everything it could do. That he idolized players like Eddie Van Halen and regularly squared off in top-this challenges with other guitarists only reinforced this approach. As he got older, there was a shift. He had matured, if only with a guitar slung over his shoulder. Darrell learned that sometimes the best thing a guitar player could do was not play. “Jerking off all over the neck,” as he said, was fine for winning contests and impressing colleagues. But it didn’t always serve the song, which meant it didn’t serve the fans, which meant it didn’t belong.

“I think it’s the subtleties that really add to the depth of our material,” he said, “much more so than having some outrageous lead guitar jack-off in every damned song!” It’s difficult to imagine, given his indulgent nature, but Darrell had discovered the value of restraint.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the band rated self-control as highly. On July 13, 1996, after a triumphant homecoming gig at Dallas’s Starplex Amphitheatre, as part of Pantera’s co-headlining summer tour with White Zombie, Anselmo overdosed on heroin, an accidental by-product of his attempts to numb the crippling back pain that had resulted from years of intense live performances. The singer would later claim to have been dead for “four or five minutes.” “There were no lights, no beautiful music, just nothing,” he said in a statement issued shortly thereafter—yet he recovered quickly enough to perform at the band’s gig in San Antonio two days later. But things weren’t the same after that.

Things hadn’t been the same in the Pantera camp for a while, in fact. Behind the scenes, Anselmo had been distancing himself from the rest of the band, another by-product of his secret dalliance with heroin. Onstage, Darrell, Vinnie, and Rex found they were distancing themselves from Anselmo’s between-song vitriol, ad hominem attacks on whatever came to mind. The distance was quite literal during Trendkill’s creation, when Anselmo stayed home in New Orleans to record his vocal tracks. It was becoming increasingly difficult to lure Anselmo away from his hometown. He had even started another band, Down, with a few of his fellow New Orleans residents: Corrosion of Conformity guitarist Pepper Keenan and Crowbar’s rhythm section, drummer Jimmy Bower and bassist Todd Strange. The group released its debut, NOLA, in 1995, supported by a brief, thirteen-date tour.

None of this bothered the other members of the band too much then—“Phil’s a musical guy and he likes to stay busy,” Darrell explained—but Anselmo’s wandering eye would eventually tear the house asunder and involve Pantera’s legacy in an ugly custody battle. At the time, his drug use was the bigger problem. Though he successfully kicked his habit, the damage had already been done. He had built a wall around himself, one that was never fully demolished. Anselmo had done more than alter his own chemistry; he had changed that of the band as well. That Pantera retained its drawing power spoke more to the strength of its fan base than the strength of the group. It’s the kind of situation that makes people wonder what might have been.

“When all the trouble started with Phil and the band, I think they were still trying to reach an even higher level of potential,” says their former boss, Derek Shulman.

Because they were always constantly changing and looking to do new things and being more extreme, more heavier, and different. They were just brilliant players, too. That was the other thing. Apart from everything else, their musicianship was unbelievable. Dimebag was an unbelievable player. And Vinnie—I’ve never seen a double-kick played so rapidly in my life. It was almost like a machine gun. And Phil was an extraordinary star, with charisma from hell. And Rex was a solid bass player. It was one of those dynamics you see in these classic acts like The Who and all that stuff.

IT’S A bit difficult to consider an album that debuts at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, rises as high as No. 2, and sells almost five hundred thousand copies in its first six months in stores as a disappointment, but that’s what The Great Southern Trendkill was, at least commercially.

When it was released on May 7, 1996, EastWest had merged again, this time being subsumed by the Elektra Entertainment Group, which brought together four labels (EastWest, Elektra, Asylum, and Sire) under the same umbrella. Since Far Beyond Driven had debuted at No. 1 and had sold close to a million copies, the new conglomerate had high expectations for The Great Southern Trendkill.

Label chief Sylvia Rhone held out hope, even after the album fell out of the Top 200 altogether. “The marketplace changed a little bit on them,” Rhone told Billboard in its November 9, 1996, issue. “But they’re the kind of group that will come back. Over time, [the album] will sell over a million units.”²

It did. On August 17, 2004.

By the time Pantera played its first gig together (seen here) at a now-defunct club in Dallas called The Ritz in 1982, Darrell was already beating grown men in guitar contests.