Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (23 page)

So I called Jeff and said, “Dude, come down to my room. There’s this guy just standing there.” He goes, “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know; he’s just standing like he wants a tip or something,” I told him. So Jeff comes down and we both look at this guy and say, “So dude, what do you actually
do
?”

“Oh, I’m your personal butler,” the guy says, so I go, “Fuck! Well go get us a bottle of Jack Daniels and start pouring them. Pour them up, baby!” And that’s what he did. In fact he did anything we wanted. If we wanted to get something to eat, he’d just go and get it. He’d do laundry and the whole bit. It was fucking wild. We had a good time with this guy in the end and it turned out that all the other guys each had a butler, too.

JEFF JUDD

Rex’s room had a huge fruit platter that was three feet wide and piled up two feet tall with papayas, all kinds of stuff. Next thing Dime shows up with a rain stick, a three-foot long hollowed-out piece of wood with beads inside that makes a sound like rain falling. He sees the fruit platter and says, “Pitch one of those over!” and he swings at it and smashes it across the room. Then the baseball game was
on
. The room looked like a fruit salad. The walls, the ceiling, everything was covered, and this butler dude had gone by then, but we had his number, which we used when we needed the room cleaned up. All the picture frame glass was broken so we ended up taking all the glass out so they looked like pictures again. He washed all the walls down, took all the broken stuff away, and we gave him a hundred bucks and headed off down the road. We never even got a call on it.

We were getting a lot of attention on that KISS tour, so much so that during the KISS sets fans started chanting our name between their songs—“Pan-te-ra, Pan-te-ra!” that kind of thing. That really pissed them off. We’d climb up on the scaffolding so we could watch them play from the side of the show and the second time this chanting deal happened, I looked at the guys and said, “We’re down, we gotta go.” And then we left the gig.

IT’S NO SURPRISE
that the South American fans dug us. We were on it as far as our live performance went.
Really
on it. Ferocious at times. I like to pride myself in the fact that I missed very few notes. And when I say “‘missed,” I mean
misplayed,
not hitting wrong ones; it’d be something about how my fingers attack a note, really miniscule details that nobody else could possibly notice. But
I
noticed.

There’s nights where I might over-slide a note or two, too, but that’s no big deal, that’s just rock ’n’ roll. Then there’s nights when I might want to play kind of punk rock—not be as tight as usual—and there’s certain songs where you can get away with it and others where you can’t. I didn’t always want to be Mr. Tight Man and have everything sound the same night after night. Maybe that’s my lab band, freestyle mentality coming through.

Every night I was looking for a different challenge, too. Vinnie Paul was like a metronome, almost to the point where there was no variation, so I had to make up my own parts to make it entertaining, because if you play the same thing two hundred and something nights a year, it gets real fucking boring.

The actual sets we played on any given night mostly depended on Phil’s voice—where he wanted to go and what he thought he could do with it—and that was something we had to take one day at a time. So three hours before the show, we’d know more or less what the set list was going to be. I’d get in there in the late afternoon and work through the list with Phil to see how he was feeling, and then I’d bring in the boys and say, “How’s this going to work?”

Or on other days Vinnie and I would put something together ourselves based on where we thought Phil’s voice was, but usually everything hinged on him. Understandably, Phil had nights where he had problems with his voice, but any singer is going to have that, no matter who you are, and it especially happens to the great ones. But because he was so great, he had his own subtle ways of getting around any voice issues he might have had. Maybe he wouldn’t sing the top notes or not sing a particular note at all but either way, when you consider how many fucking nights we’d play, in the scheme of things he didn’t have many problems.

The Pantera set list also depended on which songs we’d rehearsed. At the beginning of pre-production we’d have a list of probably twenty-five songs that would form the bulk of our general rotation, but occasionally someone would say, “Tomorrow let’s do
this
song. Everybody think about it tonight, listen to it and then come in tomorrow and make it work.”

If we were playing a place two nights in a row, which we occasionally did, we’d have to change the set because we didn’t want to do the same thing twice for the kids who came to see both shows. That would have been cheating them. Depending on how things were going with a particular crowd sometimes we’d go off on different tangents, do little ditties so that we didn’t get stale.

WE ALL IMPROVISED
individually where we could and on the occasions when Dime decided to go off on one, it was always fucking awesome to behold from the other side of the stage. Me? I just laid down the low end and he could play anything he wanted to over the top, no matter what I had going on. Sometimes I’d get goose bumps from some of the stuff he did. Dime’s playing never ceased to blow me away, so much so that I’d occasionally go over and give him a kiss!

We’d usually critique right after the show. Ask questions like “What could have been better?,” “Was the tempo of this or that song right?,” or “Does this song fit in?” By that time we had so much adrenaline going that we could sit in the dressing room for hours afterwards, drinking and getting loaded. In later years when we had more space, Phil was usually in another dressing room, but the three of us would analyze every fucking thing over and over and that’s why we were always such a tight live band.

We refined our pre-show routine over the years, too. We’d have hospitality rooms, game rooms, all kinds of shit laid on for us, but apart from playing video games, reading a magazine, or watching football on TV, there isn’t a whole lot to do on show days once you’re at the venue. It would have been easy to get loaded, but for the most part, we started drinking usually an hour before the show. We’d have a few shots and the whole bit.

Then that hour turned into an hour and a half before the show, which eventually turned into two hours, and so on.

Then sometimes me and Dime would just get up in the morning, say “fuck it,” and just start drinking. And then when it came to getting up on stage
those
nights we’d somehow fly by the seat of our asses. How we did it I have no idea, but we played some of the best shows of our career in that state. I was never so fucked up that I didn’t know where I was or anything or was staggering around on stage, stumblin’ and grumblin’ as I like to call it, but there were a few nights where definitely I came off afterwards and thought, “How the fuck did I do that?” But there weren’t that many nights like that and I never ever missed a show. Amazing statistics when you consider how many fucking dates we played. I’m not saying every night was the best night we ever played, that’s not realistic, but Pantera at 80 percent was like another band’s hundred and fifty percent.

I REMEMBER MANY OCCASIONS
when Dime and I used to get off the bus in the morning when we pulled into a new town. He and I would be fucking
green
from drinking all night but it never even entered our minds not to play that night. On those days, “Here we go again, buddy,” was all I would say to him as we walked across the parking lot to the venue, arm in arm. We knew what had to be done.

WALTER O’BRIEN

When Rex had too much to drink he’d maybe get a little ornery but he’d also get really talkative. In fact he always wanted to talk to me at four in the morning, when I was exhausted and dead asleep. He’d want to spend three hours talking business and I would be feeling like saying, “Oh, my God, please leave me alone!” But at least he cared about his own career. Nobody else ever wanted to talk.

I got really fucking sick one night in Atlanta touring
Far Beyond Driven,
but it had nothing to do with alcohol. I had strep throat with a hundred and four degree fever and we were playing a place that must have been a hundred and twenty degrees. It was all I could do to just stand up. I was in the hospital before the show, got up, played the show, and went straight into an ambulance back to the hospital; that’s how sick I was and still we only cut the show short by fifteen minutes. That was the only stage time I ever missed.

MY DRINKS OF CHOICE
were beer and whiskey—although in later years I took a liking to red wine—and there would be nights where my bass tech would have a trash can at my side of the stage, just in case. Sometimes, I’d think, “Fuck it, Goddamn, I’ve got to catch up,” so I’d drink another beer real fast just before we went on and so the trash can was there so I could fucking chunk if I had to. And then I’d have another shot and be fine.

This was all Jeff’s job, as well as changing all the strings on the basses, making sure that all my amps are powered, all the hook-ups set up and the whole bit. And of course he kept my mini-bar stocked. I usually took about six basses on stage at a time and all I had to do was take the guitar I was playing off my shoulder, he’d hand me another, switch the wireless packs over, and I was good to go. Depending on where you’re playing, guitars and basses go out of tune a lot. If you’re playing in a fucking hockey rink—and we played in a lot of them—where they just board up the ice, it could be really cold and Jeff would be tuning my basses all night long. And if the venue’s really humid the bass necks would seem to bend.