16
BREATHING NEW LIFE
On the Road Again
“I’m looking for a dare-to-be-great situation.”
LLOYD DOBLER,
Say Anything
Chris Paluska wasn’t supposed to be Damageplan’s tour manager. He was happy to do it, since he had grown up a huge metal fan in Dallas, making Pantera a “pinnacle band” for him. He had followed the group from Cowboys from Hell on, so it “was quite righteous realizing I was going to be working with those guys,” he says. But he wasn’t supposed to be the group’s tour manager.
Bassmanagement, the Dallas-based management concern headed by Paul Bassman, hired Paluska in October 2003, not long after Damageplan joined the company’s roster. Bassman and Paluska had briefly worked together at Last Beat Records and had kept up their friendship after Bassman left to strike out on his own. At Bassmanagement, Paluska became the day-to-day manager for Damageplan, Drowning Pool, and Losa, an upstart band on Metal Blade Records that he had brought to the company. But working with the other two groups paled in comparison to the unique situation he found himself in with Damageplan.
“The first business meeting I ever went to with Paul, we went and met Vinnie and Dime at, I don’t know, Texas Land & Cattle or something,” Paluska says.
Some restaurant in Arlington. Dime had owed a small commission check to Paul. But instead of just giving him a check, he makes this whole presentation. They were there before us, and we sit down and we’re chilling out, ordering drinks and salads and lunch. When the waiter brings the salad plates, there’s one with a big plastic rat on it, with a big knife through it, and then the check sitting underneath that. There was a bunch of little inside jokes, with the rat and the knife and the check. He had to give Paul a little bit of money, and instead of having the accountant mail him this check, it’s this whole production that was just hilarious. Things like that happened day in, day out.
Though Darrell could still be counted on for a good fake rat prank and was never very far away from a black tooth grin, he had grown much more serious about the business side of his band, as Paluska would find out. He was still the life of the party. But now he knew the party could end at any time, unless he made sure otherwise.
“This was a pretty serious time for them,” Paluska says.
They had gone through that whole Pantera (basically) breakup, which for them wasn’t a breakup. It was just Phil kind of disappeared and wouldn’t talk to them for a couple of years, and those guys just kind of sat around not knowing what to do. So this was really their gusto. They were picking themselves back up, starting a whole new project. Man, those guys went back out on the road in a tour bus with ten guys, playing in clubs. They were really swallowing some pride, really trying to make something happen. So they were very motivated, especially Dime. I remember Vinnie commenting on Dime, just as far as, you know, Dime was always just the guitar player and would hang out on the bus, not really that involved with anything. But Dime was really involved with every little aspect. I mean, we’d have daily meetings on the phone and weekly meetings in person. He’d be there with his notebook, with a list of stuff that was longer than ours was. It was fun. It was encouraging. He was really driven and really wanted to make this happen. He was very motivated and tried to keep everybody as motivated.
Somebody had to keep everybody motivated, since the Abbott brothers and most of their road crew had taken the same tumble down the music industry ladder. Sound engineer Aaron Barnes and drum tech John “Kat” Brooks had been with the brothers forever. Pantera had been taken away from them, too. But no one ever stewed about it, least of all Darrell. Not once they were back out on the road, in front of their fans every night.
“Their main attitude was just to roll with it,” Paluska says. “One of Dime’s famous things was, ‘The highs and lows of rock and roll.’ Not that it was a low point for them, but as compared to where they were, it would be considered that for sure. It was talked about but it was never dwelled upon. It was the fact, and then the fact beyond that was, ‘We’re starting something new and we’re going to make it happen. We’re going to do whatever we got to do to get back where we were.’”
To that end, after New Found Power was released in February, Damageplan spent the rest of 2004 in a bus. As the year started to wind down, the plan was to do one more touring cycle before heading back into the studio to record a follow-up. Since the band had had a falling out with its previous tour manager, and since Paluska wanted the education, he decided to tour manage the last leg of Damageplan’s road dates. “I really had no idea what it was like out there and what everybody was going through,” Paluska says. “So I signed up just for the experience, to be honest. That was a one-time thing. It was the first time I had done any tour managing or anything like it.”
After what ended up happening, it’s safe to say Paluska will never do any more tour managing. He won’t even talk about the end of the trip, that last tragic stop in Columbus. But he can’t block out the entire experience either. He doesn’t want to. Up until that point, Paluska had been living his dream, circa Cowboys from Hell, getting the full Dime experience every day. He was getting paid not only to watch Darrell play guitar every night, but also to hang out with him before and after the show.
“It was awesome, because it was so incredibly consistent,” Paluska says. “It was absolutely unbelievable. I had heard reports of—you know, every band that’s toured with Pantera is, like, ‘Oh, the best live band in the world’ and this and that. Dime was just pure artist. Just pure talent. He’s not up there worrying about messing up a riff—that’s not even on his radar. Just pure, effortless, true talent. And it was completely consistent every night, no matter what the circumstances were the day before or that week. It was the same thing. It was beautiful, actually.”
The best part for Paluska, though, was seeing how consistent Darrell was when he wasn’t onstage.
“It was nonstop entertainment, but all in a good way,” Paluska says. “There was never anything negative. Never any bad vibes. If he was having a shitty day, you never knew. He never brought his stuff that was bothering him out in the open. He wouldn’t walk into a room and bum the whole vibe out—you know, like people can get. It was basically the opposite. He was real concerned about fans; that was a big thing to [Darrell and Vinnie]. He was always just kind of, sadly, the Dime that everybody wanted him to be. I’m sure there was points where he was just flat burned out on being this rocker Dime guy. But he never disappointed. He was a complete blast.”
But making a habit of never disappointing anyone comes with a price when you’ve cultivated a reputation as a best-in-show boozehound. “You know what? That was one thing that I noticed that was starting to really become apparent to him as well,” Paluska says.
That’s kind of the icebreaker that every single fan could think of. They’d walk up to him with a shot. He doesn’t want to be the guy that’s, like, “Nah.” . . . He would never turn anybody down. There have been reports of him being such an alcoholic and such a lush. Yeah, he had fun and he partied, but a lot of it was just entertaining the crowd. Just keeping a good thing going with everybody that’s hanging around.
Dime was more approachable, just because he had that reputation, you know, of being a cool guy and he would hang out and talk to people. Vinnie is just as courteous, but he’s not as outgoing and he’s more kind of business-oriented. He was always there just the same, being just as nice to everybody, but Dime just kind of wore it and lived it.
HOWEVER IT looked or felt, Darrell wasn’t starting completely over. He still had his champions. He still won awards. He was still wanted on magazine covers. That’s how he crossed paths with Mick Hutson again.
Someone always wanted a picture whenever Pantera (and later, Damageplan) toured through England, and for more than a decade, Mick Hutson usually got the call. He enjoyed photographing the band, mainly because Darrell always made it easy for Hutson to get what he needed, knowing how to ensure he went home with two or three of those wonderful images that jump off the proof sheet. This was particularly true during a show at London’s Brixton Academy.
“I had the fish-eye lens on,” Hutson says. “He leans right over into the lens with the guitar, and he stayed in that position, playing right into the lens for ages while I shot a good few frames. It turned out really well. . . . He was just very aware of what made a good picture. His perception of always being drunk and being a bit of a fuck-up, I don’t think that was accurate at all, actually. I think he was very aware of what was going on all the time. He was still sharp, and I think he still recognized his performance and what he needed to do.”
But it was the last time he was in front of Hutson’s lens that sticks out the most in the veteran photographer’s mind.
10 Scenes like the one that played out that day tend to get dog-eared in your brain. Or, as Hutson puts it, “The memories of having a really, really fun time driving around London in the back of a stretch Hummer as he was getting
absolutely arseholed are quite vivid, you know?”
Hutson had been assigned to take the cover photo for Metal Hammer magazine’s awards issue. The shoot was scheduled for June 7, 2004, the day of the awards ceremony. The plan was to get together three of the winners—Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx (Spirit of Hammer Award), H.I.M. front man Ville Hermanni Valo (Golden God), and Darrell (Best Guitarist)—in the afternoon, before the festivities that night, and let the magic happen. Which wasn’t a problem. Darrell, for one, was so full of magic he could hardly stay upright.
To add to the fun, Metal Hammer had provided the trio with a captive audience. Besides Hutson, the stretch Hummer rented for the occasion also included a TV camera crew (meant to shoot Hutson as he shot Sixx, Valo, and Darrell) and one increasingly unhappy driver. Darrell never was one to let down a crowd, certainly not with two willing accomplices on hand, not to mention his favorite silent partner.
“They got progressively drunker and drunker and drunker until they started throwing these champagne glasses around,” Hutson says, laughing. “It just got wilder and wilder until champagne glasses are being thrown in mid-air, so I can take photographs of them smashing together. Then they started to stab the leather seats in the back of this Hummer—which didn’t go down well with the driver. We then parked up in this kind of car park just next to this park in London to do some shots of everybody hanging around outside the Hummer and all that kind of stuff. Dimebag got in [the Hummer] and tried to drive off, and he could barely stand at that point, which was quite funny as well.”
Darrell, fortunately, remained ambulatory long enough for Hutson to stumble upon one of those happy accidents photographers make a living off. Hutson corralled Darrell and Sixx into the same frame as a protestor in the park. The demonstrator was dressed in a monk’s habit and held a large homemade sign declaring that rock and roll was the root of all evil.
If only he knew. The Metal Hammer award show hadn’t started; there would be plenty of wicked deeds yet to come. There had already been plenty of debauchery in the UK that week. Most of the bands scheduled to attend the Metal Hammer get-together—Damageplan, Slayer, Slipknot, Korn, Drowning Pool, the Brides of Destruction—had performed at the Download Festival in Donnington Park, Engand, the day before. By the time the photo shoot ended, Darrell wasn’t in the process of getting drunk. He was in the process of staying drunk.
Hutson had seen Darrell in that state often enough to recognize the various phases of his alcohol-induced metamorphosis. “Dimebag, he’d always go through different stages,” Hutson says.
At first, he was quiet. And then he would get drunk and he would get quite loud. And then he’d get to the point where he would start hugging you, saying he loved you, you were his favorite photographer in the whole world, all that kind of stuff. Then he would start getting really pissed off with everybody. He got a bit drunk and he was trying to start a fight with everyone. And then, generally, he would just fall into a heap. Definite set of stages of drunkenness. Almost quite shy at the start, and then quite loud, then really loved up, then getting a bit angry, and then just collapse. He always seemed to remember me, though, so that was fine. No matter what stage of drunkenness he was in, he always had to remember who I was.
So Hutson knew, generally, what was coming next. Specifically? No one could ever predict that. Even an expert in game theory would have had his hands full with that equation. When Darrell had a few (or a few too many), the outcome was always mutable, dependent on who and what was around him and what stage he happened to be in.
As the Metal Hammer shindig got under way, Darrell was rounding “really loved up” and heading toward “a bit angry.” By the time he took the stage to accept his Best Guitarist trophy, he was already there. Darrell slurred and mumbled his way through a short speech that was punctuated by his tossing the prize into the audience. From there, he made his way into the VIP lounge. He grabbed a Gibson Explorer off the wall—the guitar company had a display set up—and began bashing it against a table. To no avail, as it turned out.
“Dime, do I need to show you how to break a guitar?” asked his partner in crime from earlier in the day, Nikki Sixx.
“I got it, Sixx, I got it.” He did, finally cracking the guitar in two. With that, Darrell left the room, just as a flabbergasted Gibson representative entered. Sixx, a Gibson endorser, initially claimed responsibility for the act of guitar terrorism. It probably would have worked, too, had Darrell not returned and confessed, telling the fuming rep to “put your dick in your pants”—and the guitar on his bill. (This wasn’t the first time he had broken a guitar that didn’t belong to him. It was, in fact, a fairly regular occurrence.) Not long after, true to Hutson’s play-by-play of a typical Darrell drinking episode, he fell into a heap. “The highs and lows of rock and roll,” indeed.
Yet when Hutson looks at his favorite photo of that afternoon’s session, it’s difficult for him to spot the alcohol, to notice its effects. He knows they’re there; he just can’t find them.
“Even though he was probably the drunkest I’d seen him in a long time, he looks brilliant in this picture,” Hutson says. “He doesn’t look drunk in the picture; he looks totally, totally on it. And he looks healthy, which is another weird thing. He looks really healthy.”
DARRELL HAD other reasons to be happy during those last few months, beyond the fact that Damageplan was up and running and he was finally able to be himself again. Chief among those reasons was this: After meeting (and playing shows with) most of his boyhood idols—Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, KISS—Darrell finally had the chance to cross the last one off his list. Not exactly in the way he wanted to, but still. He had tried to do it right, of course, campaigning hard for a chance to open Van Halen’s 2004 reunion tour, so he and Vinnie could complete the set and put that Van Halen tour all-access pass next to the ones they’d collected from playing with Judas Priest, KISS, and Black Sabbath. It was not to be.
But when Van Halen came to Texas in Fall 2004, Darrell was onstage. That he was off to the side, out of sight of the crowd and without a guitar in his hand, was irrelevant. The show itself was just icing. The cake was this: He had met Eddie Van Halen for the first time, and during sound check, he had got to play through Eddie’s rig. He told Rita later that night, “If I died tonight, it wouldn’t matter, because I’ve done everything now.”
Only Ace Frehley and KISS had more to do with Darrell’s chosen profession than Van Halen, and the group ran a very close second. It might have even outranked KISS when it came to rating which band had more impact on Pantera as a whole, since the Abbotts had always modeled themselves after Eddie and Alex Van Halen, their guitarist-drummer-brothers predecessors. Darrell even had a recording studio built at his home because he wanted to emulate Eddie, who had long used his 5150 studio to record his namesake band’s albums.
Two decades later, Darrell was able to get backstage, and onstage with Eddie’s guitar in hand, because he was Dime. But when he was back there, he was Darrell Abbott again, teenaged Van Halen fanatic, finger-tapping his way through “Eruption” in his bedroom. Though fans and guitar magazines might consider Eddie and Darrell peers and colleagues, it was difficult for Darrell not to revert to being a star-struck kid in Eddie’s presence. Darrell was not one to take the idea of “hero” lightly, which is probably why he routinely gave his fans more than they required from him. He knew what it was like to idolize, and not money, status, or any other kind of success could erase that knowledge.
“He never lost that,” Scott Minyard says. “He did evolve into somebody a little bit different, but he never lost that eighteen-year-old quality and love for music and love for fun—ever. There’s this one picture you gotta see—a friend of mine’s got an 8 x 10 of it—and it’s Dime backstage, and you can see it in his eye. He’s already made it—he’s already in Damageplan, he’s already done Pantera and succeeded. But he’s backstage at Van Halen with a Van Halen set list right there, and you could see him lit up like a little kid. And he never did lose that. He still had that fire. Most people lose it when they get up to that status. The frustrations wear you out.”
Darrell left Eddie a voice mail shortly after they met, expressing his gratitude and admiration. Eddie played the message for the crowd at Darrell’s public memorial service:
Ed, it’s Dimebag. Hey, man, just wanted to give you a fucking call telling you thank you so fucking much, man, for the most awesome, uplifting, euphoric, spiritual rock-and-roll extravaganza ever. That was fucking pure fucking insanity, man. . . . I just wanted to thank y’all so much for the awesome party. Everybody treated me so fucking great. Your fucking show was goddamn nothing but pure magic. Man! You’re playing your fucking ass off! Bad to the fucking bone. Loved everything about it, man. Uh, we got fucking wasted.
DARRELL COULDN’T go very long without someone offering him a shot, but the reverse was also true. If you were pulled into his orbit for whatever reason, unless you had a sobriety chip in your hand you’d have a drink in it. Fan, friend, journalist, whatever—everyone drank. People who hadn’t drunk in years would suddenly find themselves double-fisting black tooth grins. It was difficult, if not impossible, to turn him down. Not that many people wanted to.
Juliya Chernetsky, the former host of the metal-centric show Uranium on the Fuse network, had a typical introduction to Darrell. She was sent down to Arlington to interview Damageplan. She came back with a hangover and a new friend.
“It was very exciting, because at that point, I was doing what I do for about three or four years and had met absolutely everyone,” Chernetsky says. “As much love as I have for the scene, I didn’t freak out anymore [when I met someone]. I was fucking freaking out. I was shaking when I met this motherfucker. The first thing he says to me when I walked through the door was like, ‘Juliya! Come on in here and do a shot of black tooth! I won’t tell you shit till you get drunk!’” She laughs. “That was the first hello I got from Dime.”
Chernetsky spent the better part of a week in Texas, on the receiving end of Darrell’s brand of southern hospitality, drinking her way through visits to his home, the Clubhouse, his favorite restaurant, and plenty of other places no one involved can remember. She had a few chances to return the favor when Darrell would come to New York, on tour or some other music business.
“Dime would call and be, like, ‘We’re coming through town. Let’s fucking party,’” Chernetsky says. “And I’d be, like, ‘Right on,’ and start making arrangements, so that, you know, whatever was necessary was there. And then we’d go and get trashed.”
Somewhere between “right on” and getting trashed, Chernetsky managed to get Damageplan’s last interview—though no one knew it was at the time. On November 29, 2004, she questioned the band on their tour bus before a gig that night at New York’s Irving Plaza, the last date of the Devastation across the Nation Tour, a three-band bill that also featured Shadows Fall and the Haunted. Originally, Damageplan was set to return to Arlington after the Devastation tour wrapped up. But the band was offered a gig on the way home, and they needed the money. New Found Power was doing OK in record stores, but it hadn’t lived up to Pantera standards sales-wise. Since they were going to be home recording, it wouldn’t hurt to pick up an extra payday.
Chernetsky didn’t ask the band about that. There was no reason to. Besides, she was more fan than journalist, and a friend on top of that. So their conversation ranged from the price of Darrell’s cheap leopard slippers ($4.88—he still had the tag on them) to partying on tour (“I think it’s escalated,” Darrell noted) to various tattoo stories (including a gruesome recounting of Darrell attempting to give someone a Damageplan tattoo).
But one part of the Q&A would turn out to be somewhat chilling, or at least prescient, given what would happen shortly after:
Juliya: Do you think you could lose your respect or reputation as a guitar god? What would you have to do to do that?
Darrell: How could you do that? Once you cut your path you cut your path. I mean—dude, I’ll tell ya, anyone who rises above the fence, there’s always some dude on the other side with a shotgun trying to blow a couple of bullets at ya, you know? Jack-offs on the Internet or anyone who won’t show their face ain’t gonna come to the game and tell me to my face or anybody to their face. You know, they’re always gonna take cheap shots. But, no, man, every guitar hero I ever loved, I still go back to those old records ’cause, you know, haven’t been too many cats in a long time come along.
