Black Tooth Grin

Giving further credence to this rumor was an incendiary interview Phil Anselmo had given to Metal Hammer for its December 2004 issue, in which he said that Darrell “deserves to be beaten severely.” ¹² Kat Brooks and Vinnie both mentioned the Metal Hammer piece when they were questioned by the Columbus Police Department that night. This, however, was probably unfortunate coincidence more than anything else. Gale reportedly said, “This is for breaking up Pantera,” before shooting Darrell, but his statement was never corroborated by anyone at Alrosa Villa, and investigators could find no evidence that Gale had read Anselmo’s interview. Clearly, Gale had not picked out Darrell Abbott at random. But what, exactly, had lit his fuse that night is a mystery. He hadn’t taken the gun with him to Cincinnati. Why now?

Also deemed coincidental by authorities was the date of the murders. Though the fact that Gale killed Darrell and the others on the same day Mark David Chapman had gunned down John Lennon outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City was certainly attention-grabbing, no one could prove it had played into Gale’s thought process—or lack thereof, as the case may be.

There are only a few scattered known truths about Gale’s activities and his frame of mind. The Beretta was a gift from his mother, Mary Clark. She had bought it for him for Christmas in 2002; she was proud of him for cleaning up his life—he’d had a drug problem in high school—and enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps. Clark had put the gun on layaway, and Gale had picked up the gun on December 9, 2002, when he returned home to Marysville, a small town twenty-five miles northwest of Columbus. “I’ll never, never be able to live that part down,” Clark told Columbus television station WCMH a week after Gale’s death.

Gale’s stint in the marines was cut short when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and honorably discharged from service on October 15, 2003. Though he was sent home with medication for the illness, Clark believed he was not taking the pills he had been prescribed. An autopsy would confirm he had no antischizophrenic medication in his system at the time of the shooting.

His demeanor earlier that day, at the Bears Den Tattoo Parlor in Marysville, would have substantiated that claim even without an autopsy. Gale spent a lot of time skulking around the Bears Den, even though customers didn’t appreciate the intense and intensely creepy conversations the hulking Gale would frequently try to draw them into. He didn’t fit in there, but then, he didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. At the shop, he was a beacon of quiet discomfort, trying to find something to hang onto, or someone to hang out with. His last visit to the Bears Den, several hours before the Damageplan gig at Alrosa Villa, was atypical, but not necessarily surprising.

Gale, as usual, was sitting in the tattoo parlor, flipping through a magazine. A thought occurred to him: He asked Bo Toler, the shop’s manager, if he could purchase a tattoo gun from Bears Den. Toler told him no, that only licensed tattoo artists were allowed to buy them. Gale returned to his magazine, until he happened to arrive at a page that sent him into a rage.

“You lied to me,” he screamed at Toler. “You said I couldn’t buy one of these”—he gestured to a picture of a tattoo gun in the magazine—“but it says here that I can!” He became more and more upset, hollering curses at Toler. He slammed the magazine to the floor and stormed out of the building.

DARRELL WAS able to enjoy one last Halloween party before leaving on a tour that never circled back home. With his long, dark hair, navel-brushing goatee, and camo-shorts-and-sneakers attire, Scott Minyard could almost double for Darrell, so for that particular Halloween shindig, he took the easy way out and completed the image. He dyed his beard pink and had an artist friend draw Darrell’s tattoos on his arms and legs. When he showed up to the party, he saw that Jeffrey “Mayhem” Thompson—who had long served as a roadie/bodyguard for Minyard’s former band, Slow Roosevelt, before signing on with Damageplan—had had the same idea. He, too, was dressed as Darrell. By that point, Darrell’s costume had, as Minyard says, “exploded on him,” so he was pretty much dressed as Dimebag as well. It made for an interesting scene later that night.

“I stepped outside to get some air, and the limo is backing up in Vinnie’s driveway, trying to turn around and get out or whatever,” Minyard says.

The window comes down, and Darrell, in the backseat, is, like, “Scott! Get over here!” I’m, like, “What?” I couldn’t understand what he was saying; he was so drunk. He goes, “Hah-argh-har .” I go, “What? I can’t tell what you’re trying to say.” He goes, “Get in the goddamn car!” So I got in the car, and I was sitting, looking out the back window, and Darrell was right across from me. And right beside him was Mayhem. It was just us three in the back, and we’re all three Dimes. They were gonna take Dime home—it was time for him to go to bed—but all he wanted me to do was to hear the new Damageplan that was about to come out. They had a whole CD that he’d recorded. No vocals on it. But he wanted me to hear all of it, so we listened to it and blared it all the way to the house to drop him off, and the limo took me back.

It was the last time Minyard had some “Dime Time.” After “the bad stuff happened,” some of Darrell’s friends (including Minyard) went to the Candlelite Inn, a homey little restaurant in Arlington that Darrell and his family had been going to since he was shorter than most of the tables inside. Behind the cash register, there is a platinum plaque for Cowboys from Hell. When they came in, the owner, Chris Odell, recognized them as friends of Darrell. The hurt, confused look on his face matched the ones on their faces. He stared at them, arms out, palms upturned: “What happened?”

No one had an answer, and no one does still. All the people who met Darrell remember where they were when they heard the news—to them, it is a combination of the days when John Lennon and John F. Kennedy were shot—and none of them can make any sense of it.

It was especially tough for Minyard; he lost two friends that night. Before Jeffrey “Mayhem” Thompson was hired as Damageplan’s bodyguard, he had served in that same capacity for Minyard’s band, Slow Roosevelt. “We weren’t able to really pay Mayhem very much—we did every once in a while, when we could. Every time we’d get to the Curtain Club or anywhere in Dallas, and sometimes in Austin, here’s Mayhem, helping with equipment.” Mayhem even appeared on the cover of Slow Roosevelt’s last album.

“That was a real bad December,” Minyard says. He learned of the killings as he was leaving a Marilyn Manson gig; he received a text message that simply, frustratingly, read, “Dime’s down.”

At least Mayhem and Dime both were doing exactly what they loved to do. Dime was playing his guitar. I mean, he was back onstage and doing good—never felt it. Mayhem was doing what he loved to do, which was security for his favorite cats. . . . I was kind of thankful that the whole world kind of stood there and it was a big deal. It was huge. You would figure, just because it was metal and sort of underground to most of the world, that it would be just kind of shoved under as a bad something or other that happened in Columbus or whatever. But the whole world stood up.

Dale Brock didn’t find out until the next morning. An old friend called him around 7 A.M. to deliver the news, adding credence to the theory that anytime the phone rings before you wake up, it’s a call you don’t want to get.

“It was so senseless—he was the kind of guy that would have done anything for anybody,” Brock says. “Completely, completely senseless. I’ve had a hard time realizing he’s gone. The other day—my wife, she bartended at the Basement back then. She was great friends with them, went out on the road with them a few times; they all loved her. Probably six, seven months after, we were driving through Arlington and thought, ‘Hey let’s go by and see—.’ Had one of those moments. Yeah, it was a really rough day. I had to come home from work. Couldn’t deal with it. Terrible, terrible day.”

Like Brock, David Karon, who worked with Darrell at Randall and Washburn, didn’t find out until the following morning. It was a day he was looking forward to. Now it’s one he dreads.

“It was actually my birthday,” Karon says. “And I was supposed to get together with Darrell the next night. So it was pretty fucked up. I turned my phone off the night before, because I was celebrating with my girl, and she woke me up the next day and told me. It was pretty rough, especially being the birthday and looking forward to hanging out the next day. It was pretty crazy. . . . Calling all the artists I work with that are friends with him, making sure what the fuck is really going on, because at that time, there was a lot of rumors going around that other people were hurt.”

It doesn’t make Karon feel any better that his friend finally made everyone stop and pay attention. “I’d rather no one know who he was. I think it was better when him and Vinnie were on CNN talking about Damageplan than being on CNN for his death. I would have rather them have a better PR agent.”

Based on her status as one of the most high-profile metal fans around, Juliya Chernetsky was forced into playing the role of PR agent for the entire hard-rock community in the wake of Darrell’s death:

The next day, my manager called me and said that CNN wanted to have me come on to talk about what happened and kind of like what this means to our scene and blah blah blah. So I went on CNN and this stupid little hair-sprayed blond bitch was, like, “So, well, you know, does this kind of thing happen all the time in your scene?” I fucking put that bitch straight. I was, like, “Dude, we don’t shoot each other, and the person that did this was out of his goddamn mind, and this is not the way it goes down in our scene, and this is not what we’re fucking about.” And then I had to do a Uranium thing, you know, where I kind of talked to the fans about what happened. As important as that is, and was at the moment, and I realize that it was important now that I look back at it, it was the fucking last thing that I wanted to do.

Chernetsky spent the hours after the murder trying to invent scenarios that made more sense than what everyone was saying had happened. “It was kind of like the World Trade Center situation, you know?” she says. “Like, ‘Maybe a wing clipped the building.’” But nothing would make it go away, and she was only left asking the same question everyone else was: Why Darrell?

“I truly feel that, of all people, this was the last person—the very, very last of the back page—that I would ever imagine anything like this would ever happen to, because I can’t think of a nicer, more happy-go-lucky, more loving individual that I’ve ever met,” Chernetsky says. “We talk about him all the time. I’ve always felt that he’s up there with Randy Rhoads, just fucking rocking out with a guitar.”

If that’s the case—and, if you believe in heaven, it probably is—then Darrell would probably consider his death worth it. He never would compare himself to Randy Rhoads, never would include himself in his company. But in death, the guitarists are inextricably linked.

“Unfortunately, he is the Randy Rhoads of our era,” Slayer’s Kerry King says. “He had a longer career, which we’re lucky to be a part of that, but . . . I was just talking to my wife the other day about, can you imagine if Randy Rhoads was still around? All the great tunes we would have heard? And, you know, Dime’s the same way: There’s tons of stuff he still had to give, to throw in the mix. We’re all losing out on a lot of killer tunes.”

King found out about Darrell’s murder as he was walking offstage after a Slayer concert in Billings, Montana:

I was just walking down the stairs and my tour manager he—I couldn’t even tell you the words he told me. You hear that, and you’ve just got off the frenzy of being onstage, and you think somebody’s fucking with you. But then I could see in his eyes that he was serious, and I’m, like, “What are you telling me here?” It’s surreal, and unfortunately, it was real. And then you get into all the speculation afterwards, like, “Oh, are you guys gonna raise your security?” I’m, like, “Well, yeah, we kind of have to,” but do I think it’s gonna happen to anybody—you know, like, somebody’s picking off metal guitar players or copycats. I really didn’t think that because, right away, you knew this was a guy with an issue. It wasn’t random. I mean, as much as it was random to you and I, to him it had purpose.

I wish we could have found out what that purpose was.

IN THE years following their reunion at a Nine Inch Nails show, Darrell and Buddy Blaze played an extended game of phone tag, their schedules never managing to align long enough for them to do more than talk to one another’s voice mail. That was their way, and always had been. Buddy thought he’d get plenty of other chances to see his friend, to talk to him, because he always did. The music business sent them their separate ways, but it also brought them back together.

In a way, though, they’ll always be together, thanks to the Dean ML that Blaze returned to its rightful owner.

“I’m honored that he took that guitar to the heights that he took it,” Blaze says.

We’ll always be linked forever with that deal. But it was enough to know him. It was really humbling—after Darrell died, Dean [Zelinsky] sent me video that he had. Juliya from Fuse made some tribute to Darrell and they sent me a copy of that. I mean, a bunch of people sent me things, and it was kind of blowing my mind because, within two weeks of him dying, there’s, like, four different interviews where he’s talking, and he mentioned me in every interview. To know that I was in his thoughts toward the end—and of course, he never knew that was going to be the end—it’s kind of humbling. Honestly, he was like my little brother. I always looked at him that way. I was devastated when we has killed.

THE MORNING after Darrell was killed, Ross Halfin posted the following on his Web site:

Woke up to the news about Dimebag Darrell—I took quite a lot of pictures of him, he wasn’t the most intelligent human being, but he WAS always nice which counts for a lot in this business. . . . He would always try to get you to do a shot of Jack Daniels with him. I’ll put up some photos of the Cowboy From Hell.

“I got, like, two hundred e-mails saying, ‘Motherfucker! Ass-hole! How dare you!’” Halfin says.

You know, I wasn’t saying it in a bad way. I meant it in a genuine way. Look, he never pretended he was the most intelligent human in the world. But the point I’m trying to make is, for a guy who was very blue-collar, he was a very nice guy. I never liked his management. His whole management around him were like really protective, keep you away, and make sure you don’t do this. But if you actually ran into him, it was, “Hey buddy, you can have whatever you want.” He was the nicest guy. And he was like that to everyone. I never saw a really bad side of him. I think, truthfully, his brother Vinnie had a complex. He was always sort of in his shadow. But Dimebag was a genuinely happy guy. He was happy to do what he did. He was happy to be where he was. He was happy that he could play the guitar. And he was happy that they were successful.

Halfin is right. Darrell was as genuine and straightforward as rock stars come. That is, perhaps, the main reason he became one in the first place. Darrell never really cared about being cool or hip or cutting edge. Pantera titled one of its records The Great Southern Trendkill specifically so people would understand their stance on the matter. They didn’t give a shit what the prevailing fashion happened to be, Darrell most of all. That’s not to say he zigged against this trend and zagged against another. After he and the band made the transition from their glitter-dusted early days to cowboys from hell making vulgar displays of power, the rest of their development was a straight line. They didn’t really change after that.

Darrell never changed, not after he picked up that cheap Les Paul copy for the first time. He just wanted to play his guitar and live his life as loudly as possible. He just wanted to be himself, and being himself was more than enough to make him a star. He enjoyed the status and worked hard enough to attain it and maintain it, and he did it on his own terms. Some bands make it because they have a good sense of which way the wind will blow. When Metallica finally gave in and openly courted a new audience, Darrell and the rest of the band called them on it. (And looking back, wouldn’t Metallica have fared a bit better if they had chosen to embrace Ozzy instead of Perry Farrell? Discuss.) When the Seattle sound was predominant and former metalheads started wearing flannel and whatnot, Pantera said, “Fuck you, we’re cowboys from hell, by way of Arlington, Texas”—and it worked. Other guitarists started adopting an anyone-can-do-this slacker aesthetic. Darrell’s guitar playing became more intricate and willfully virtuosic. It was fast and loud and cutthroat, but it was skillful, expert, and learned above all else.

While his guitar playing was complicated, Darrell wasn’t. He knew his business, and he practiced intently and intensely, but he wouldn’t have made it if his instincts weren’t so sharp. He just knew. That was the thing. People say he was born to play guitar, and that’s true. But what gets missed in the telling is that he was also born with the innate knowledge of what to do with his guitar once he figured out how to play it. He and the band worked hard, but they didn’t get where they eventually got because of a plan. They got there because their plan amounted to, “Let’s rip it up and keep ripping it up, and eventually people will come around. And if they don’t, who gives a shit, as long as the beer is cold, the amps are loud, and there’s someone who wants to have their ass kicked by a bad-ass riff.”