Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (19 page)

Of course everybody knew where
my
house was, so they’d just throw beer bottles as they were driving past, shouting, “Huh huh, there’s where Rex lives.” If they’d hit one of my cars I would have gone up and made Vinnie pay for everything, that’s for damn sure. My dumb mistake was that I got him a used golf cart one Christmas, painted it all camouflage with a fucking rebel flag and shit. He’d come screaming through my yard and knock sprinkler heads out, and that’s when I said, “Umm no, I think it’s time to go.”

CHAPTER 12

GOING DEEP, HEAD FIRST

T
he Great Southern Trendkill
, from a musical sense, was all about further experimentation for us, and for a lot of our fans it’s their favorite record. But personally speaking it’s the record that was kind of lost on me. It’s not commercial at all—I get that—but from a
band
perspective it had some fucking great music on it, but just not to my particular taste.

When we started it, we had an important collective decision to make: Where were we going to go? Here’s a band that always says we’re going to get heavier and heavier, but how heavy can you possibly go without the sound completely malfunctioning? The answer? Fucking heavier still.

Trendkill
was done a bit more off the cuff than we’d tried before. We wrote in the studio, usually from a riff that Dime came up with, and instead of having, say, forty songs to choose from, we’d just focus on doing ten that were killer. Why spend your time on another thirty songs that aren’t ever going to make it?

WALTER O’BRIEN

Phil kept wanting to go heavier and heavier and heavier, which was strange because he was just as likely to put on a Journey album on the tour bus as he was a Cannibal Corpse record. His big thing was saying how Metallica had sold out and he didn’t mind going on stage saying that Metallica sucks and are a bunch of pussies. That was a problem when the other three guys in the band are asking me to get them on a Metallica tour!

Like before, Phil was in Texas for most of the writing process and we’d go in for two weeks until we became frustrated with one another and reached a point where we said, “All right, fuck it.” And at that point Phil would fly out, home to New Orleans. We’d take a breather, maybe for a month, and then all get together again to start the process over, unlike the very early days when we went in for thirty days straight until it was done.

The daily routine went roughly like this: we’d get up, go and have lunch, and then start putting stuff together. When we’d come up with something we liked, we’d call Phil in to listen to it. He always kept nighttime hours. He’d then put in his two cents and we’d change things around until we found something we all liked. As always we were extremely precise about how things sounded. Sometimes I would keep my original bass track if I liked it, but eight times out of ten I’d fix the bass tracks later, which is difficult because you don’t have that live feel you had when we were all playing on the floor.

I remember when we were doing the demos for some of the
Trendkill
tracks, and there was this bass thing that Vinnie didn’t hear when it came to the final tracks. It totally threw him off course. I ended up redoing it because he picked up something he didn’t quite understand—it was just a little piece of improvisation that I threw in at the last minute, but Vinnie said “No, you have to do it the way we did it on the demos.” That’s how rigid Vinnie was in the studio.

Despite any personal issues that Vinnie and I had or would have, we were always very synced in the studio. When we write, we pretty much go with the first idea that comes to us. We always relied on that gut instinct approach, so it would have been a mistake to start second guessing that because it had always worked to that point. Whatever drum lick Vinnie came up with, I just found a bass riff that went around it.

Not surprising, Terry Date claims he has six hundred hours of DAT tape from the
Trendkill
sessions alone, although I’ve never heard any of it.

Even as it stood,
Trendkill
was so difficult to play because we were playing lightning speed most of the time. This was thrash to the fucking ultimate. Metallica had taken loads of chances with what they were doing by releasing
Load
; when we were doing
Trendkill
we admired that, but I think it continued to push us in the totally opposite direction.

Personally, I like melodies over the top of heavy shit. That’s important. You can’t say that
Vulgar
didn’t have hooks and
Far Beyond
didn’t have hooks—they both did. But it was almost as if Phil went completely out of his mind with
Trendkill
, with his drastic vocal-and lyrical-style change. He’d also done the first Down record as a side project and done a few shows with them, too, and we all accepted that it was always going to be secondary to whatever Pantera was doing. Having said that, when I heard a few of the riffs off
Nola
, I said, “Oh my God, Phil, dude, save some of that shit.” It was that good.

WALTER O’BRIEN

With the first Down record it was always accepted that it was a temporary thing. Phil had the tapes; he was playing around in the studio; they sounded great, so we said let’s just put it out and do a short tour, then we’ll all go back to Pantera.

But it was obvious during the writing process that lyrically this record was headed down a much darker path, and if you’re asking me whether that was connected to Phil’s state of mind then I’d have to say probably so. The guy cut off all his fucking hair for one thing. I followed suit because my hair was down at my ass and I was just tired of it, but I think his reasons were altogether different. Not just that, he had started wearing wristbands and socks over his hands (presumably to hide something), so maybe his lyrics weren’t the only indication of bad things to come.

I couldn’t tell in his eyes that there was a drug problem, because I’d never been around anyone who’d been on heroin. But he would make these obvious gestures to me occasionally—hit his arm and shit like that, and I’d just say, “Really? You want me to join that club? Not interested, pal, and never will be.” I knew pretty much what he was doing, but I don’t think the other guys had any idea whatsoever. For the record, I never thought that alcohol and heroin would mix very well in my lifestyle. I thought it would have to be one or the other, and I chose alcohol.

RITA HANEY

I don’t think anyone realized Phil’s problem was as severe as it was, and I still believe to this day that back pain was an excuse to some extent, although I acknowledge the fact that he did eventually get back surgery. None of us wanted to see the problem, but in retrospect I look back and think, “God, how obvious was that?!” But, like all of us, I had never been around heroin so I didn’t know what to look for, but there’s no doubt that when Phil went back to New Orleans, his friends used him as the dope supplier because he had money and he was isolated when he was down there. This wasn’t the Phil that we knew, the “stronger than all,” the “far beyond driven” guy, and I think we all wanted to ignore the fact that he’d changed.

Phil
wanted
to be at home in New Orleans whenever possible—there’s no doubting that. It seemed as if personal isolation went hand in hand with his drug issues, but he was still focused enough to deal with his vocal tracks as well as he ever did. What helped a lot was he had somewhere to do his work away from the rest of the band—Trent Reznor had a really cool studio that he’d just built down in New Orleans. Every time we stopped there we’d always go to Trent’s place. We were hanging out pretty regularly—never toured together however—and Trent had made so much fucking cash from
Pretty Hate Machine
that he now had two different studios, both with SSL consoles, so there was sometimes a free console if Trent wasn’t using both.

So it was always a case of “If you guys ever want to track down here, come on down.” Phil took him up on the offer and Terry went down there to do the vocals, send them to us, and we’d either say “No” or just go along with the new direction Phil was heading in. Because we were apart, it made it difficult to have a conversation about the vocals, so to avoid wasting time, we’d occasionally say “okay” and move on.

TERRY DATE

Phil was becoming more distant. On the occasions I went down to New Orleans to do the vocals with Phil, I left my assistant in Texas with Pantera, and this was his first time with them to work on guitars. The first day I was gone, they put him down in a chair, super-glued his hair, dipped it in paint and then lit it on fire. That was his initiation. I took rough mixes of all the songs down and then we would just do one song every day. I’d go in mid-afternoon and Phil would come in on time every day with his lyric sheets written out, everything figured out with every line underlined that he wanted doubled. So it was really a quick process. I actually had him sing in the control room with me, standing twenty feet behind me with floor monitors and speakers in front of him. Then after a week or so I’d then bring everything back with me to Texas. and I’m sure there was some level of resistance because they wanted more singing and less screaming, that much I did know. There are always creative differences in any band.

Maybe it was because he was out on a limb from the rest of us and in the initial grip of heroin addiction, but Phil’s vocals sounded very different from any of the previous records. For a start he was doing a lot of double tracking and narration within songs. He would double-take one track, then come back with this other track, right behind it with these fast words, something that was almost impossible to replicate live. Then on the other hand he’d have an emotional, textured song like “Floods,” which was simply beautiful. I remember when Dime first brought it to me; I fucking loved it immediately. Then I tried to come up with a bass line that worked and that swing style bass synced with Vinnie’s drum pattern and became one of my favorite bass lines in our entire catalog.

RITA HANEY

The “Floods” guitar solo was something that Darrell used to play in the pre-Phil days, and he once made me a sleep tape, which I still have, consisting of ninety minutes of that solo, with all the harmonics, forwards and backwards, so that I could fall asleep to it. But once I figured out Phil’s lyrics and what they pertained to, I hated listening to it and it ruined the song for me. Obviously I got past that and I can now derive other things from the lyrics, but none of us realized that Phil had gone that dark and it was coming out in his lyrics.

CHAPTER 13

TRENDKILL
OUT ON THE TILES

W
e started touring
Trendkill
after it came out in May of’96, and we were all hitting it extremely hard. When you’re partying like that you really can’t tell what the next guy’s doing, so it wasn’t as if we were watching Phil and wondering what he was getting into, because it was full-on debauchery for all of us in our own way.

The boys had built “The Clubhouse,” a full-beaver strip club in Dallas with a loose, 19th hole golf-like theme. The place had all our records hanging on the wall and became a stopping point for almost every band that came through town. For Vinnie it was the culmination of his obsession—he now had his very own titty bar. I invested in it, too, and I’m glad I did because the return was three hundred percent. But apart from dealing with all the legal aspects in the planning process, I probably went in there only a handful of times. This was Vinnie and Dime’s deal and not the kind of place in which I ever wanted to hang, though I’m happy to have made money from it.

Part of the reason they wanted the place was to entertain
their
friends. At home, they had a completely different set of people who wanted to be around them all the time. You can’t criticize the brothers for it. That’s what they did. You can’t question what anyone’s doing when they do what they want to do. They had this other family that I wanted no part of, and that was their choice. To a degree I would allow people to hang around me, even use me, but it got to a certain point where I’d rather knock somebody out than sit and listen to their bullshit. And I did many times.

We were playing a show in Dallas, one of the first shows on that tour, in July. It should have been a raucous homecoming but it turned into something else. I remember the night well, not because of anything particular other than there was something weird going on in Phil’s dressing room, which was next door. I recall that all these crazy people showed up out of the woodwork and I just thought, “Well, this is kind of trippy.” There was always weed being smoked in Phil’s dressing room, heavily at times, so much that you’d get a contact buzz as soon as you walked in the door, but I wasn’t really smoking and drinking at this time. At that point I was kind of tired of it, so my memory of that night is as vivid as if it were yesterday.

I remember this one dude in particular hanging around—someone I knew from back in the Joe’s Garage days—and he’s looking at me with these red, glassy eyes saying, “Yeah man, what’s going awwwwwwwn …” doing this fucking head-shuffle thing and I rememberthinking , “Okay, let’s see what this is all about.” In my mind, I knew there was something amiss so I said, “Look, what the fuck are
you
on?” I asked him straight out.