Black Tooth Grin

Riders—a band’s list of wants and needs given to a concert promoter before the show—have been around so long they have become fodder for jokes and the stuff of legend. Surely, by now, everyone has heard the story of Van Halen and its “no brown M&Ms” demand, a request that neatly falls into both categories. The Smoking Gun Web site (www.thesmokinggun.com) even has a section dedicated to concert riders, a peek behind the curtain that is as entertaining as it is maddening. (For some reason, during Metallica’s 2004 arena tour, it was “very important that bacon be available at every meal and during day.”⁶ Also, the band and crew required seventeen dozen clean white towels at every tour stop, a number that is both seemingly random and exceedingly specific.)

“We got a call from the publicist saying that, well, Dime has agreed to do the interview,” Wiederhorn says, “but he’ll only do it if you provide him with, I believe it was, a fifth of JB or Crown Royal—I’m not sure exactly the brand; I think he drank Crown. And two six-packs of beer—I don’t know if it was Coors specifically. I don’t want to fuck it up, but I can’t remember. And then there was a long pause, and he says, ‘And they have to be cold, or he walks.’ It was pretty funny. I kind of wondered in the back of my mind, well, what happens if we come in with warm beers, or only one six-pack? But I didn’t want to take the chance of blowing the interview just in case he was serious.”

Wiederhorn had interviewed Pantera before, but Philip Anselmo—as he did onstage, and in most interactions with the press—took the lead. The rest of the band had quietly chimed in whenever necessary. Without much to go on, and given Darrell’s reputation as well as his preinterview stipulations, Wiederhorn wasn’t sure what to expect.

I was just wondering, before we went in, you know, if he’d be intimidating, if it would be a “How metal are you?” kind of game, or it would turn into a drinkathon. But, no, he was just a fun, free-spirited dude who came in and was, like, “Yeah, let’s rock this thing. Let’s have a good time.”

What struck me most, you know, was that he wasn’t really an angry guy. The music he played was so brutal and so vicious and so ahead of its time, but it didn’t stem from a rage or a difficult upbringing or frustrations. It really was just an all-out celebration, a real explosion of life. He played it like he lived it. He was all about having a good time and partying and making people laugh and being crazy. You know, he didn’t fit in with the mainstream society. He was certainly iconoclastic. But it wasn’t a resentful iconoclasticism—if that’s a word. It wasn’t a “Yeah, well, I’m different, so fuck you!” kind of thing. It was “Hey, take me or leave me, but this is what I’m all about. If you want to join the party, great, we’d love to have you.”

SINCE SLAYER’S Kerry King met Darrell and Pantera in 1989, he’d maintained a close friendship with the band, one that often spilled onstage, where he’d join Darrell on guitar for a blistering version of “Fucking Hostile.” While Pantera was recording Reinventing the Steel, King had a chance to commemorate his relationship with the band for posterity. Darrell called and asked if he would record a guitar lead for the band’s valentine to heavy metal, “Goddamn Electric.” He got his chance to do so when Slayer came to Dallas on the 1999 Ozzfest tour.

“I had a pretty tight schedule,” King says. “I played with Slayer and then I’d go onstage with [White] Zombie every night and play ‘Thunderkiss.’ I was flying out that night, to make things tougher. Pantera had a dressing room—even though they weren’t on tour, they had their own dressing room there—and set up a little digital studio in their bathroom. Had a half stack pointing at the couch that Dime was sitting on. He showed me where I had to play, and I’m, like, ‘Right here?’ ‘Yeah.’ So we just did a try at it, and Dime almost fell off the couch, screaming, ‘Don’t let him do it again!’” He laughs. “Because he dug it. I did try it again, just in case, but we stayed with the first one.”

King would get a chance to try it again and again when Pantera began touring behind the album. Since Slayer was also on the bill—along with Morbid Angel, Static-X, and Skrape (the tour was appropriately titled Extreme Steel)—King’s former standing invitation became a scheduled part of the act. Except now, it was expanded into a two-song cameo that saw him take the stage for “Fucking Hostile” and “Goddamn Electric.”

“THE HIGHS and lows of rock and roll”: Nothing summed up Darrell’s saying about the music business more than the recording sessions for Reinventing the Steel. After a disjointed few years that broke the long cycle of studio-tour-repeat, Pantera was recording again. But when they reconvened at Darrell’s home studio to lay down tracks for their ninth studio album, for the first time since Cowboys from Hell the forecast for Pantera was cloudy. While The Great Southern Trendkill did well enough by most bands’ standards, it was the group’s least successful album, in terms of both sales and fan reaction. Away from prying eyes, dysfunction had sprouted. The recording sessions for Trendkill and the touring behind it had started to slowly tear the band apart, with Anselmo becoming progressively more remote, in every possible way. Where once his mercurial personality had been one of Pantera’s prime assets, it was now arguably its biggest liability. Problematic, too, was the fact that, despite heavy music’s renewed luster, the strain of metal Pantera had perfected had mutated and metastasized. Many of the band’s students had now, in some instances, become the masters, or at least they were considered such by the black-clad recruits that had signed up for the Ozzfest army. The racks that housed Trendkill were increasingly crowded and foreign.

Though the marketplace had shifted in the years since Trendkill ’s release, the band members were, as ever, free from self-doubt and stubborn to a fault. Every record they’d released since Cowboys from Hell was released into a climate observers felt was unsuitable, yet Pantera had always prevailed. This time would be no different. Every negative was a plus. Trendkill hadn’t done as well as hoped? That only meant they had something to prove; they did better with a chip on their collective shoulder anyway. The masses had moved on to something new? That gave Pantera the advantage of surprise. The people wouldn’t know what hit them.

Instead, it was Darrell and Vinnie who were caught unawares. In early August, not long after one of the highlights of the Reinventing sessions—Kerry King’s one-take solo in an Ozzfest dressing room—came the lowest of the lows: Their mother, Carolyn Abbott, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Six weeks later, on September 12, 1999, she was dead.

The effect on the brothers was impossible to calculate. Their father, Jerry, had had a more active role in their careers, giving them a genetic head start, then providing them access to everything he had learned from a life spent in and around the music business. He had toured with Pantera during those early trips on the cover-band circuit, giving up his weekends to help the boys further their dreams. But it was Carolyn who had allowed them to have those dreams in the first place; she had given them the freedom to find their way. After the world took them away from her, she became a lighthouse in the chaotic storm of the road, a welcoming presence to guide them home. In a life that had been unpredictable since they were teenagers, Carolyn was one of the few sources of stability and comfort.

The Abbotts, though shell-shocked, managed to finish work on Reinventing the Steel without much interruption in the wake of Carolyn’s sudden death. Yet it was a wound that remained open long after. Friends say Darrell and Vinnie were unable, or unwilling, to really talk about her passing for years. In a way, that was practical. Dwelling too long in that place was antithetical to what they needed to do as bandmates rather than as brothers and sons. But it wasn’t healthy. Darrell, especially, had become un-moored by Carolyn’s death. The next few years, and what they would bring, certainly wouldn’t help change that status.

“It was like pulling teeth to get [Phil] down to the studio,” Vinnie said a few years later, in an interview with KNAC.com. “He didn’t like any of the material, and it was always just like this head-butting contest. It wasn’t like it was when we were just starting out, when it was all for one and one for all.”⁷

Buddy was working with Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor at the time, and he arranged for Ken and his fourteen-year-old son (who was attending his first concert), to come backstage. Darrell and Vinnie had their own pass, courtesy of Reznor. They had always taken care of Reznor when he came to town, making sure he got a hero’s welcome at the Basement and, later, the Clubhouse. Now Reznor was returning the favor.

“I never told Trent that Darrell and I were really close friends or anything like that,” Blaze says. “But Trent threw down. He sent limos out for them and stocked them all up and all that shit. He made the green room a Pantera room after dinner was done. They catered it just for Pantera. . . . I grabbed Darrell and took him back to see Trent. Trent, like, pissed his pants when I walked in with Darrell. He was, like, ‘You know this guy?’ Darrell goes, ‘Fuck yeah! Fucking known him all my fucking life, man!’” He laughs.

The Abbotts were happy to see Reznor again, but above all, they were thrilled to find that their old friend Pyro was there, with his son. “Darrell made sure my son got good treatment,” Ken says. “He was just such a gracious person. And Vince, too, you know? Vince was telling my son, ‘Your dad used to build our lights out of B-52 lights.’ And my son thought that was pretty cool.”

It was the first time both sets of brothers had been in the same room in years, since Buddy left Arlington and Pantera followed suit a few years later, breaking free from the constraints of the Texas cover-band circuit. It was not an entirely joyous reunion. The Websters hadn’t seen the Abbotts since their mother had died.

Buddy, who had remained the closest to the family, was on tour in Europe with Nine Inch Nails when it happened. Ken had long since passed out of the Abbotts’ lives. He lived in Pantego, not far from Darrell’s new home in Dalworthington Gardens, so he’d run into Darrell and Rita every now and again. But their encounters were more the result of coincidental trips to Costco than actual planning. Carolyn and Kitty Webster, once best friends and “Pantera mamas,” had drifted apart over the years, as Carolyn’s life had gone in a different direction once her boys could provide for her, instead of the other way around.

None of the Websters knew about Carolyn until it was too late. “My mom called me up one day and she said, ‘Buddy, Carolyn Abbott died,’” Blaze says. “And I go, ‘Oh—my—God.’ I was kind of pissed, because she died of cancer, and I’m, like, ‘How could Carolyn have cancer and not call my mom?’ Because we were kind of like family. But the thing is, [with] Pantera and Nine Inch Nails and whatever else I was doing, our schedules weren’t always the same. I might see those guys five times in a year, and then I might not see them for two or three years. That’s kind of how it worked out. We did a lot of drinking that night. We shed some tears over Carolyn privately; then we had fun.”

“I just went to Trent and I said, ‘We’ve got to give that one to Darrell,’” he says. It was in many ways the perfect gift for Darrell, a man who appreciated the beauty in broken things more than most and who had remained more-or-less the same teenaged rock-and-roll fan throughout his life, despite everything he had accomplished. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I agree.’ So I said, ‘Go sign it up for Darrell and I’ll go ship it out to him.’ That was the last time I talked to Darrell, when I sent that guitar to him. Because I didn’t tell him I was going to do it and it really, really freaked him out. ‘Dude, that’s going on my fucking wall! That’s the baddest motherfucking thing I’ve ever seen in my whole fucking life! Oh my God!’”

CONTRARY TO its title, Reinventing the Steel wasn’t so much a reinvention of Pantera’s sound as it was a rediscovery. “We wanted to get back to the raw, ass-kicking basics of it all,” Darrell said while on tour with Ozzfest in 2000. “We had time off between Trendkill and Reinventing, and we gave ourselves an overview and noticed that the Trendkill stuff wasn’t coming across as powerfully onstage as Vulgar or Cowboys. On Reinventing, we wanted to grab the youth of Cowboys and the groove of Vulgar, but also the unstoppable extremities of Far Beyond Driven, adding just a bit of the layered sound of Trendkill. . . . We made everybody happy for a change.”

But could they make everyone happy? Since so much time had passed between Pantera albums, and since their last release, The Great Southern Trendkill, had been something of a letdown, there were legitimate questions to answer. A different style of metal, with bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit at the forefront, was in vogue. “Can [Pantera] reclaim their old territory in a new millennium when they sing ‘Yesterday Don’t Mean Shit?’” Playboy ’s Charles M. Young wondered. “I predict they can. It’s good shit, particularly in the production, where they nail the details.”⁸

It was an accurate prediction. No matter who was ruling the charts, Pantera’s fan base proved to be stronger than all. Reinventing the Steel, like The Great Southern Trendkill, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, and the band continued to be booked in the biggest venues. Pantera remained a success. They had weathered Anselmo’s drug problems and the personality conflicts among the band. They had withstood plenty of pretenders to the throne. They had done it all their way, never bowing to trends or compromising their approach to fit in with someone else’s marketing plan. They were one of the last true metal bands, and proud of it.

Bands hardly ever play lead guitar anymore. Dude, back in the seventies, if you couldn’t play the guitar or sing, you were nobody. Now music is so easy—all you’ve got to do is tune your guitar to an open chord and jump around. That’s what sets us apart. And we’re not afraid to carry around a heavy metal moniker. It’s who we are and what we do. A lot of bands have shied away from that—they’ve said, “Don’t call us metal,” and tried to change their styles. We don’t bend, man. We do what’s really in our souls, what our fans want, and what we’re really good at, as opposed to trying to be something else. “I want to fit in with the times and the trends”—fuck all that shit! It ain’t gonna happen, brother. I’d be bored, for one. And our fans would throw us the bird finger.

They didn’t have to worry about that. Their record sales may have dropped off some after the commercial high of Far Beyond Driven, but they were still one of the most dependable bands at the box office. After a decade atop the metal world, there didn’t appear to be an end in sight.

“This is a band that can only stop itself,” the Indianapolis Star’s David Lindquist foreshadowed after the band’s March 18, 2001, gig at the city’s Pepsi Coliseum. “In 10 years, Pantera won’t be subjected to the type of comeback in which it plays embarrassing mop-up dates in 1,000-seat nightclubs.”⁹