19
CEMETERY GATES
A Raucous Farewell to a Cowboy from Hell
“He came to rock, and he rocked like no other.”
DEAN ZELINSKY,
Dean Guitars
“Do you want some candy, little boy?” I hold out my hand “while a woman wrapped in animal prints and topped by a novelty cowboy hat drops two pink Starbursts into it. “Vinnie likes the red ones, so I saved all of those.”
Dawn Bjornson has already handed out four bags of Starbursts tonight at the Arlington Convention Center—that’s her job. “I give candy in Vinnie and Dimebag’s name,” she explains. She used to do this at local Pantera shows, and then at Damageplan gigs after Vinnie and Darrell formed their new band in 2003.
The presence of strangers with candy—or, at least, this particular stranger—is partly why tonight’s event could pass for just another rock show. Then there are the few thousand fans who have been lined up since this afternoon, the ten-deep crowd bellied up to the bars, and the alternating chants of “Pan! Ter! A!” and “Dime! Bag!” There’s also the guest list: Eddie Van Halen and Zakk Wylde; Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, James Root, and Paul Gray; former Alice in Chains members Jerry Cantrell and Mike Inez; and Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares.
“It feels like we’re about to go and see Dime fucking rock,” says Ben Doyle, a friend of the Abbotts who worked as a bouncer at the Clubhouse. He’s having one last cigarette and shifting uncomfortably in his black suit. “Not even a month ago, I was backstage with him at Freakers Ball,” a concert sponsored by local radio station KEGL-FM. “It’s just insane. It’s absolutely insane that we’re here now, doing this.”
It’s been nearly a week since the murders in Columbus, giving Darrell’s fans enough time to move quickly through the five stages of grief and arrive somewhere close to “Party!” Considering he was buried earlier in the afternoon in a KISS Kasket, it’s safe to assume Darrell would have wanted it that way.
Not all of the mourners milling around the back of the convention center’s grand hall are in such a let’s-do-a-shot-for-Dime mood. A few, like Doyle, have come dressed in their Sunday best, but they stick our like narcs at a high school kegger. Many carry small tokens of affection: a handful of roses, a guitar magazine whose cover Darrell had graced. The stage is empty, save for Darrell’s legendary “Dean from Hell,” propped up under a spotlight. A guy walking around with a thick stack of photos of Dime flags down a TV news crew. “That says it all right there, man,” he says, pointing to an 8 x 10 image of the guitarist with his arms raised to the crowd. The cameraman dutifully captures it for the 10 P.M. news.
Everyone cheers up when the night’s ringleader, Dr. Rock, a DJ at the Clubhouse who’s known the brothers since the days when Dimebag was known as Diamond, takes the stage about thirty minutes late, sporting a white tuxedo and white sneakers. “Vinnie used to tell him, ‘Dime, you’re gonna be late for your own funeral,’” Rock says. “And guess what? He was.” This little anecdote kicks off a very special episode of Headbangers Ball.
The first guest, Nick Bowcott, sets the tone by announcing, “Let me get out my script,” before taking a slug from a bottle of Heineken. “I was lucky enough to go to a place I call Dime’s World on many occasions,” Bowcott says. “As a result, my liver is fucked. You know what? I regret not one sip. The guy made me puke on three continents, for Christ’s sake—Europe, Asia, and America. I’ve been hammered with that motherfucker in about eighteen states.”
The rest of the evening continues in the same vein: fond memories of Dimebag, usually involving prodigious amounts of booze and curse words. The prototype is Zakk Wylde and Eddie Van Halen’s tag-team eulogy, which features more false starts than a Courtney Love concert and the kind of rambling chemistry that just might land them their own VH1 reality show. Slipping onstage unannounced during Wylde’s tear-stained salute, Van Halen mumbles, “I thought there was gonna be a band to jam with.” Throughout their fifteen-minute speech, Van Halen constantly swipes the microphone from Wylde before he can finish speaking. (Wylde does get out one sentence in its entirety: “It’s all about family and it’s all about God, and without that, you ain’t got shit.”) Between shots of an amber liquid and nips from a bottle of wine, Van Halen completes very few thoughts of his own. However, he does bark one instruction four times: “Someone fucking EQ [equalize] this mike!” Aspiring guitar gods, take note: Even in mourning, require perfection from the soundman.
Van Halen gets it together long enough to play a cell-phone message from Darrell that somehow manages to be even more profane than anyone speaking on his behalf.
Later, Rex Brown slips onstage to deliver a few mumbled words. He is a shell of himself, if that. “Rex looked like an old ghost,” Terry Glaze would say later, and that pretty much sums it up. He is no doubt haunted by the tragedy in Columbus in a way few others are: There remained a bitter divide between Brown and the Abbotts when Darrell was gunned down. Though his visit to the microphone doesn’t appear to be part of tonight’s scheduled program—he just sort of stumbled out without much preamble—at least he was allowed to come to the service. Brown’s presence throws into even sharper relief the absence of someone else: Phil Anselmo. He is in town and has been for days. But Vinnie and Rita Haney do not want him here, under any circumstances. If Brown and the Abbotts were separated by acrimony, the chasm between Anselmo and the Abbotts was a fiery moat of hatred, thanks, not least of all, to the erstwhile Pantera singer’s inflammatory comments to Metal Edge magazine. So Anselmo suffers through the service alone, in a hotel room.
Though Van Halen and Wylde’s presentation is almost comical, and Bowcott’s testimonial is funnier in much more appropriate ways, the three-hour memorial isn’t without its moments of poignancy. Stepping onstage to a hero’s welcome, Vinnie grabs a life-sized cutout of his brother in one hand and a microphone in the other. “It’s been five fucking nights since this stupid shit happened and I ain’t heard it yet. I wanna hear it: Dime! Bag! Dime! Bag! Dime! Bag!” But he keeps his words short and bittersweet, finishing in tears. “The brightest and biggest star in Texas is shining tonight,” he says. “That’s my fucking brother Dimebag. Give it up!”
The crowd gets its moment of closure as well, during Cantrell and Inez’s acoustic performance of “Brother” and “Got Me Wrong,” two Alice in Chains songs. At the end of the latter, Cantrell lets mourners have their turn on lead vocals, and their emotions pour out as they belt the song’s final line: “Something’s gotta turn out right!”
Tonight, it did.
