17

SHEDDING SKIN

Grinding a New Axe and the Birth of Krankenstein

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

TYLER DURDEN,

Fight Club

Unfortunately for Larry English, exactly as his job at Washburn had opened the door on a friendship with Darrell it closed it as well. Darrell’s contract with Washburn had run its course. Coincidentally, Dean Guitars had been resurrected, and founder Dean Zelinsky was back at the helm. Eager to make a splash, the company took dead aim at reacquiring the services of its most famous endorser. It offered him a contract and a hefty signing bonus to sweeten the pot. On top of that, he would be more-or-less coming home.

As it happened, Washburn wasn’t in a very strong bargaining position. English was no longer in artist relations, having taken a promotion to become senior vice president of business development at U.S. Music Corp., the company that owns Washburn as well as Randall Amplifiers, another product Darrell used and endorsed. On the face of it, the fact that his entire guitar-and-amplifier setup was produced by the same company might have made it seem as though Washburn was in better shape than it actually was. But Darrell’s relationship with Washburn had spiraled downward since English had left artist relations. While he was still close to English, he was no longer close to the company; he never connected with English’s replacements and never really understood why he wasn’t working with English anymore.

“It was such a big change,” English says. “You know, it’s no longer Larry. It’s somebody else. He just didn’t care about that. He spent all this time building this relationship. That’s all he knew about. What he said to me was, ‘I feel like I was fired.’ So this was a pretty traumatic time.”

Beyond that, Washburn also wasn’t prepared to offer Darrell a bonus to sign his contract. They never had on any previous resign, and starting now would just be setting a bad precedent, putting the company on the edge of a slippery slope. Had Darrell not already missed out on quite a few paydays thanks to Pantera’s interminable hiatus and eventual demise, Washburn might have figured out a way around the bonus. Had Darrell still been working with English, they might have come up with a compromise. He might have stayed just out of loyalty. But English wasn’t his guy at Washburn anymore, and Pantera wasn’t his band. He wanted and needed that lump-sum check.

Darrell decided to sign with Dean.

“We talked about it, and what had to happen in order to end the business relationship here, and how do we clean this up, and attending to all the business side of the relationship,” English says.

So we went through that . . . and that just changed the condition of our relationship. I can’t really remember if we spent any more personal time after that, but I don’t think so. I think the next time I saw him was in a coffin. That’s my loss. That’s the world’s loss, really.

Unfortunately, very unfortunately for the folks from Dean, what happened, happened. They, unfortunately, did not have as much time with him as we did. And when I say that, I mean they didn’t have as much time to enjoy the relationships, the creativity, the craziness. I feel for them in that they lost out. I’m sorry for me in that I would have liked continuing to be his friend and a person he relied on for forever. I feel bad for the rest of the world, for the people who didn’t get an opportunity to share with him, be around him. You can’t expect everybody in the world to have done that. The guys who did got a gift. And I was gifted many, many times, and I am thankful.

TOWARD THE end of his life, Darrell’s world was in a constant state of flux. He had changed bands, managers, and—maybe most important—guitar endorsements. Another huge development, at least as far as his equipment was concerned, was lost in the news of his switch from Washburn to Dean.

Darrell had used Randall amps since he was a teenager, when he won one—like much of his early gear—in a guitar contest. In fact, the thick and dirty sound provided by Randall’s solid-state amps was widely considered the bedrock of Darrell’s much-imitated guitar tone. Even by Darrell himself. “Gotta have that Randall Crunch!” he said in the liner notes for Cowboys from Hell.

“Solid-state amps are more in-your-face,” Darrell once told Guitar Player magazine. “I’m not going for soft sounds, and I ain’t lookin’ for no warm sound. For what I’m doing, I can’t get enough fuckin’ chunk! I won a Randall half-stack in a guitar contest when I was younger that had a natural nastiness to it. I knew that nobody had really grabbed a hold of that tone, so I built my sound around it.”¹¹

But when Darrell left Washburn, he left Randall, too, cutting all ties with U.S. Music Corp. He contacted several different companies, looking for a new supplier. Eventually, he settled on Krank, a relatively small outfit, because—as one of its owners, Jody Dankberg, remembers—he “connected” with them. Which should come as no surprise, since that’s how Darrell made most of his business decisions.

“It happened really quickly,” Dankberg says. “He called us, had us send him some amps. The next thing you know, he was out here a week later.” The visit is captured on Dimevision, Vol. I: Darrell tests his new amp by playing his iconic “Cowboys from Hell” riff. “Whooo! That’s it, brother!” He punches Dankberg’s partner, Tony Dow, happily on the arm, then sets off soloing. As if to prove the amp’s worth, his riffing sets off a car alarm. Shortly thereafter, Damageplan started its tour, and Krank provided Darrell with his backline. “It was a real whirlwind,” Dankberg says. “I only knew him a couple of months before he passed away. Everything came together really quickly.”

Darrell not only decided to endorse Krank amps, but he also invested in the company. Together, they made plans to design and manufacture what he called the “Krankenstein” amp. Dankberg was just happy to be involved. All of a sudden, one of the guys from a poster on the wall of his teenage bedroom was calling him on a regular basis.

“It was amazing,” Dankberg says.

He was a big hero of mine growing up, and so just to have a chance to even know the man was awesome. It was the coolest thing in my life. He was real smart and real serious. He knew a lot about business. He was a real straight shooter. Real honest. You could see why people wanted to do business with him, because he was a real good guy to know. He was real concerned with having a real credible product, something he could stand behind, especially as far as an amplifier goes, where people could actually use his product, as they were using his guitars and his pedals and all that type of stuff. He wanted the same thing with his amp.

DARRELL NEVER got a chance to see how his new relationship with Krank, or his renewed partnership with Dean, would work out. He had taken a chance and truly started over. He was on tour with a different band, playing different (if familiar) guitars out of different amps. It was a new beginning, but the end was near.