Black Tooth Grin

When it became apparent that Pantera’s break was, in fact, a breakup, years of mostly hidden dysfunction began spewing out in the heavy metal press, each nugget chronicled by Blabbermouth.net, the so-called CNN of heavy metal and hard rock news. Pantera didn’t dissolve immediately, cleanly, or at all amicably. Accusations from both sides filled the heavy metal press for some time. The band’s fan base was forced to choose sides and every account could be spun to fit each side’s needs—and often was, in intense debates that filled page after page of Internet message boards. It was never clear who was right and who was wrong, only that Anselmo and the Abbott brothers were both angry.

Pressed for details on what had happened between him and Darrell, Anselmo added, “He’s got a lot of resentment in his heart, and I don’t really know where it’s coming from. I’m not sure he’s mad at me at all, you know? He’s got a lot of personal issues in his life that he has to face, and once he does, I really, truly hope he becomes a better person—the beautiful person that I came to know and love.”

“It’s not the right time. One thing you’ve gotta understand is, with Pantera, I’ve always been the one to question things. I’ve always been the one to say, ‘Are you sure you wanna do this?’ ‘Are you sure this is right?’ And they listen to me, they hear me out. And by no means am I saying that I’m the brains behind the entire thing. But I am saying that when it comes to music, due to my knowledge and very natural connection to what the underground scene is, I had to enlighten them several times over. Without me, it’ll be real interesting to hear what they come up with.”⁵

In Revolver’s February 2004 issue, Vinnie said of Anselmo, “One night he would walk in and be a fucking animal. The next night, I’d walk backstage and he’d be lying in the corner and he’d say he was tired. I will never take anything away from that dude from when he was at the top of his game, but where he’s at right now, I think he’s much less than sub par at what he does. I have a hard time watching him when I see him on MTV talking about Superdope Ritual, or whatever they’re called, and he can’t keep his fucking eyes open.”⁶

Responding to the statement via SMNnews.com, Anselmo said:

I just hear a big and sad yellowbelly crybaby fuckin’ knowing that his meal ticket is in a different fuckin’ band, and [long pause] you would have to know those fellows to really understand where I was coming from—they’re scared of their own fuckin’ shadow. And, all that said, I wish them the best of fuckin’ luck. I still love ’em.

For Vinnie Paul’s information and anybody else who would like to know, I’ve been fuckin’ stone-cold sober for fuckin’ two years—I feel like a fuckin’ boy scout, for God’s sake. And fuckin’, you know—I can have a couple of beers, let’s get it straight.

Then Anselmo turned his attention to Darrell:

There was another thing brought up in that interview where Vinnie Paul said that he knows how to stop drinking, you know, and they can control themselves. And magically Diamond Darrell didn’t answer a fuckin’ thing. You know why that is? Because his fuckin’ friends have to carry him fuckin’ home every goddamn night—every night on tour, he gets carried to the fuckin’ bus. Now, you tell me—me fucking up one time in my life compared to his fuckin’ three thousand and seven. Give me a fuckin’ break, man!⁷

Darrell counterattacked in a Guitar World interview:

If you look at the home videos, you can see that I’m the same dude in 3: Watch It Go that I was in the first video shot some eight years earlier. And I still am today. I still have the same love for life in my heart, and my drive is still there for the same reason—the love of music, the love of playing guitar and the love of jamming for people and interacting with the fans. And my brother’s the same way.

Anyone who’s heard Phil’s recent radio interview, which is all over the Internet, or seen him hosting on MTV speaking three octaves down, hardly able to talk or keep his eyes open, knows what his real problem is. For some time now, he’s obviously been around people that accept that, as opposed to being around me and Vinnie, who have a different standard level. I tried to get through to him and help, because I truly love the dude, but it’s impossible to connect with someone in that state, and that’s when I became the enemy in his mind.

Some people like to compare hard drugs to people who like to party on alcohol. But look, man—one’s legal and one’s illegal, and there’s a reason for that. Sure, I’ve been a drinker since day one, and I ain’t perfect, but I’ve never missed a show and I’ve never played a half-assed one because of it. For the record, I’ve never, ever snorted cocaine, I’ve never, ever done crank, I’ve never, ever smoked crack, and I’ve never, ever done heroin. It just plain grosses me out. I’ve seen too many motherfuckers go down in flames because of that shit.⁸

AS DIFFICULT as it had been at times—with Anselmo off in New Orleans, devoting his attention to an ever-increasing assortment of bands—Darrell never wanted Pantera to end. He had enough money to let it go, but money wasn’t the point. It never was and never had been. The point was the music, being in a studio, on a stage, playing his guitar and making people happy, including himself. He wanted to do that with Pantera. Just like he always had. He’d spent most of his life in that band. As far as he was concerned, he’d spend the rest of his life there. He and Vinnie often talked about being the Rolling Stones of heavy metal.

It would be wrong to say that Darrell drank more during this period, because he always drank more. The presence of alcohol in his life had long since elevated beyond the status of a regular visitor; by then, it was so closely involved in his day-to-day routine that it was more like his Siamese twin. But if the attendance and the amount of alcohol remained the same, the effect of the alcohol had changed. Friends noticed a growing darkness. The happy-go-lucky Darrell they knew wasn’t always so happy anymore. With Pantera’s future nonexistent, and his own future as a musician less than clear, he wasn’t feeling very lucky either. It put a strain on his relationship with Rita. Most of his other relationships, too.

“The move, the shift in and out of Pantera, certainly took its toll on him, and it certainly changed him to some degree,” says Larry English. He worked with Darrell for almost a decade at Washburn Guitars, but their relationship transcended business. “He had an anger in him that a lot of people would never have seen otherwise. That change promoted that part of him. He was already a big drinker, but there was a certain moroseness that seemed to take over at some point, that began to bleed through the initial phases of the drinking contests. Later on into the drink, there was a bit of moroseness there which wasn’t there before.”

No one could hold those moods against him. After all, Darrell had spent more than two-thirds of his life with “Pantera guitarist” in front of his name. He had spent half that time as a certified star, a bold-faced name, a somebody. The general public might not have recognized him as such, but the people that really mattered to him, the heavy metal community, did. He was King Dime to them, whether or not he had an album on the charts. Besides an adoring fan base, Pantera had given him platinum plaques, shiny toys, a big house on a nice street, and more. He had made Pantera, but Pantera had also made him. But that was Pantera guitarist Darrell Abbott. Would ex-Pantera guitarist Darrell Abbott fare as well?

Pantera was him. It was his life. He was watching the end of his life. He was watching the end of his friendships. These were guys who spent a hell of a lot more time with him than I did. Not only was it ending, but also Phil was talking smack about him—to the press, never mind to lots of people. It was painful. I liken it to a real bad divorce. We know that a bad divorce is a tragic family matter. It’s tragic. And usually what happens is there are people who are hurt by that action who never get over it for their whole life. Now we all know that and we all understand that. This is the case with Dime. It was an ugly, bitter divorce.

That period of time was very, very difficult for him. You know, he was a guy who certainly had his share of doubts, remorse, incredible levels of frustration. Sometimes he was hurt, sometimes he was mad. When he was mad, to me that was way better than being hurt. It was kind of like getting over it. He also needed a lot of assurance and reassurance that the road he was going down was going to be the right road.

Yet even with all of that doubt and anger and frustration swirling around him, threatening to envelop him, cover him in black like a Pantera concert T-shirt, Darrell was still, for the most part, Darrell. Even if it was just a front, a face he put on in public, he could still be the guy who did the cheering up, not the other way around. That said, he could never get too far away from his problems, because everyone else’s concerns, in some way, reflected back on his own.

I was kind of lost . . . and he spotted it. Everybody else was passing out except for me and him. He and I went on the porch. He goes, “What’s wrong?” He goes, “Something’s wrong, dude. I can tell something’s wrong. Tell me about it.” We started talking. He was telling me about how he needed something musical going again. We talked for quite a while on the back porch. He just really lifted me up. He was talking about how bad the Pantera breakup hurt him. It was just horrible. He was really touched by that. He goes, “No disrespect to you—because, I mean, you did great with your band and everything—but imagine being where I was and having that ripped out from under you.” They were on top of the freaking world, the metal world.

I called him the next day and left a message about bringing me up. I said, “Thanks, Dr. Dime”—I called him Dr. Dime. He had a way of making you laugh and bringing your spirits up.

IT WASN’T the first time Darrell had found himself at a crossroads in his career. He had faced a period of anxiety after Terry Glaze had left the band and before they had hired Anselmo to replace him, and again when Pantera was trying to make the jump to a major label. Nothing, however, compared to this. He’d always had the confidence in himself and his band that things would eventually work out for the better, and he was right; they always had. Anselmo turned out to be a much better fit for Pantera than Glaze had been, allowing the band to explore its heavy nature in full. Whether by luck or design, the right label had come along and exploited the chemistry between the Abbott brothers and Anselmo and Brown to the hilt, laying the groundwork for Pantera to be the heaviest metal band to top the Billboard charts. It always seemed to work out perfectly for Darrell.

But that was when he had a band, a gang, someone to back him up against all comers. What he was up against now, then, wasn’t merely another bump in the road. It was more like the road was gone. The past had been rendered meaningless, the present had been turned upside down, and the future he’d imagined might never arrive. Darrell was nearing forty, and he was going to have to start over, more-or-less from scratch.

English had a vested interest in Darrell’s future, both as a friend and as a businessman. Darrell was his little brother and a big client. So for many reasons, he wanted to see him succeed again, to get back onstage again, to be happy and satisfied again, to sell records and, yes, guitars again. To that end, he asked Darrell to consider this: Was Pantera really done? Or had the band merely lost its lead singer?

I basically took the position that he really needed to consider what it would take to own the name Pantera, and what that meant from a legal standpoint, from an investment standpoint—my position always was Pantera is a brand, is a franchise, and if what you’re talking about is starting a new brand, that’s a tough road, that’s a long road, that’s an expensive road. I really kind of counseled him to put in some time and a couple of bucks into really figuring out that aspect of this change. To make the wisest possible financial decisions for himself. Because he was concerned about finances like everybody else, and he needed to be. It’s like being fired. You no longer have a company named Pantera that you work for, even though you did it your whole life. These were some of the issues that were weighing on him heavily, and we talked about them almost daily.

Had Pantera continued without Phil Anselmo, it wouldn’t have been the first band to carry on with a new front man. A number of Darrell’s favorites—Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest—had kept going after losing their singers. Had Pantera continued without Anselmo, it wouldn’t have even been the first time Pantera had carried on with a new front man either. Sure, the band had got exponentially more successful since Terry Glaze left back in 1986. Yet, while Anselmo was pivotal in that run of prosperity, Darrell’s guitar playing was just as much of an attraction. More than he even knew.

“I remember a story that Aaron Barnes was telling me once,” says Chris Paluska, who was part of Darrell and Vinnie’s last management team. “That was their lifelong sound guy. You know, he had to point out to Dime way, way, way late in Pantera’s career . . . he was, like, ‘Dude, you are the star of this thing.’ Not that the story is important, but just the fact that it almost had to be pointed out to Dime that he was a really big draw and a really big deal to this band so late in their career. That’s his mind-set: ‘All for one, one for all. We’re Pantera and that’s all there is to it.’”

“I think those days are done, man,” he said when Juliya Chernetsky from Fuse’s Uranium show asked him about the qualifications to be a guitar god. “Yeah, man, you just gotta be able to rip, man. You know? You gotta be signature, you know? All the great guitar players that I look up to, I think of Edward Van Halen, I see his guitar in my mind, I see the stripes on the guitar. I think of Zakk [Wylde], I see the bull’s-eye. You think of the Idol”—yet another one of his nicknames—“you see the fucking guitar shooting out, shapes and shit coming at ya, pink goatee going on. Just kidding. Ya’ll know I’m jacking you off about this Idol thing. Get that straight real quick, you know? . . . It’s a fucking joke.”

Whether he knew it, or admitted it, Pantera was arguably more Darrell’s band than anyone else’s—including his brother’s—at least in a spiritual sense. In a legal sense, one can never rely on the whims of the courts. But even in that arena, the Abbotts had a pretty clear case of ownership, since they predated Anselmo’s arrival in the group by almost five years and three albums. Why not keep the name?

If Darrell and Vinnie had not been stuck on the sidelines for so long while Anselmo’s silence kept them in perpetual limbo, they might have moved ahead under the Pantera banner. Doing so, however, would likely have resulted in a court battle. Since there was so much acrimony on both sides, it would have been a protracted and costly one. Darrell and Vinnie would have remained trapped in their quiet hell, while Anselmo continued to tour and record.

Starting a new band—or a new brand, as English says—probably cost them more in the long run than a lawsuit would have. Keeping Pantera going might have kept them in arenas and theaters instead of landing them back on the club circuit they had graduated from more than a decade earlier. It might have meant a few hundred thousand more in record sales.