Black Tooth Grin

The Abbott Brothers Concoct a Damageplan

—original title of Metallica’s Kill ’Em All

“You know, everybody’s got a crystal ball when it comes to stuff like this, and mine is no better than yours,” Larry English says.

All I can say is Pantera was a “made” group. They were made guys. The new guys in the Abbotts’ new band were good guys and certainly talented guys, but I can’t say that the world was going to accept the new lead singer and the new bass player and go on as normal. I think that’s a real stretch. A lot of their fans are tough. All fans are tough. They love you, but they’re very tough inside of that love. My crystal ball does not automatically say that they would have ended up in the same place. In fact, I think not. They were older guys. It’s like starting all over. I mean Darrell started it in his twenties. Now he’s going to start it all over in his forties? Pretty tough.

English’s crystal ball wasn’t alone. Very few people expected Darrell and Vinnie to again approach the heights they had reached with Pantera. Some, like rock photographer Ross Halfin, don’t even qualify it as much as English does. “Not a chance,” Halfin says of the idea. “It was very unique with Anselmo. Whether they liked each other or not, it worked. Whether they liked Anselmo or not, he was a great front man. They never would have made it.”

But no one had really expected a metal band from Arlington, Texas, to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1994, when metal looked to be on its way out. The Abbott brothers were used to overcoming adversity, used to convincing all doubters, and more important, used to churning out bone-crushing riffs together. So they kept doing it.

After deciding to start a new band—while drinking beers and watching the New England Patriots beat the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl XXXVIII on February 1, 2003—Darrell and Vinnie began recording demos at Darrell’s home studio. The music that emerged from those probative sessions would have been familiar to most Pantera fans—there was no mistaking a Dime riff—but it was more of a descendant of the duo’s now-previous outfit rather than a clone. There was more melody involved in some places; more malady present in others. It was, truly, the sound of a new band, one that would (hopefully) be palatable to the brothers’ existing fan base, while (again, hopefully) maintaining its own reason to exist. Darrell would later describe the fresh start as an opportunity to “bust it open a little more and just broaden it up, go for the Baskin-Robbins thirty-one flavors instead of the one.”⁹

There were no vocals, but that would change when Pat Lachman, a guitarist who had played with Halford and Diesel Machine and a longtime drinking buddy of Darrell’s, heard the demos and immediately wanted in. Though he had never fronted a band before, Lachman proved to be a natural for the role. Rounding out the new group was Bob Kakaha, a Dallas tattoo artist. Thanks to his monstrous bass tone, and possibly due to his tongue-tripping last name, Kakaha quickly earned the handle Bob Zilla from the brothers.

Though Lachman and Kakaha were worthy additions to the lineup, there was no mistaking that this band was the Abbott brothers’ show. After all, the news that Rob Halford’s former guitarist was in a new band did not inspire breathless, terribly punctuated Internet chatter, and Kakaha’s musical résumé was far less interesting than his tattoo portfolio. Lachman and Kakaha were simply the two guys who facilitated the triumphant return of Darrell and Vinnie Abbott. That was the idea. The band—now known as Damageplan—signed a deal with Elektra Records later that year. New Found Power, at one point rumored to be the name of the new band, would instead be the title of the group’s debut album, released on February 10, 2004.

With a reason to have a guitar in his hands again on a regular basis, the moroseness and frustration that had marked Darrell’s unplanned hiatus melted away; whatever anger was left was channeled into the songs with self-explanatory titles like “Fuck You” and “Blunt Force Trauma.” His occasional dark moods were replaced by his own newfound power, a sense of motivation that he had lacked even in the Pantera days. Now that Darrell was back in the game, he wasn’t happy merely playing; he wanted to win again. “Oh, he was definitely fired up,” his friend Scott Minyard says.

“You know, he was a bit of a perfectionist, and he was working very hard on integrating this new band, getting the music to be where he believed it needed to be in order for him to feel proud of what he was doing,” English says.

And that took some work and a lot of investment on his part, in terms of time and energy, which he obviously was very willing to give it. But it didn’t happen overnight. He put a lot of work into it. I, as a friend, was always supportive and, you know, looking for that hit, that hook, for that thing that made the new band a shooting star. When it came to the company, when they first went out on the road, we made them big banners for the sides of their buses. As a company, we tried to be involved and offer support for the new band.

But internally, you know, he had a lot of challenges. He was coming from Pantera. This is a brand, a franchise that in his world of metal was a difficult one to replace. They made their decision to push forward and depend on their own personalities, their own recognition, and their own capabilities and somehow try to meld the new band together and get to their fan base and see if they would accept the new band in place of the old band.

Very difficult.

Getting to their fan base meant hitting the road. That meant swallowing their pride and reacquainting themselves with smallish clubs they hadn’t played in more than a decade.