Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (27 page)

I ALWAYS LIKED TO GAMBLE.
Gambled all the time when we were on the road and casinos were a big part of Pantera’s deal. Me, Vinnie, Dime, and some of the crew would hit them. But never Phil. He never gambled and hated those places. But if there was a casino within two miles of where we were, the tour buses often got diverted to wherever that was. I was really into playing craps for a while and I won around twenty-two thousand in one night, just sitting there playing. But like most gamblers, I didn’t always win. And unlike most gamblers, I’ll tell you about the times when I lost.

I knew the Maloof brothers, who owned casinos in Vegas, basketball teams, and the whole bit, because they went to school with a guy who I knew from a bar down the street from me called Hetfield’s. I got to know them pretty well, to the point that anytime I went to Vegas they would lay on a room for me somewhere. And by a room, I mean a real nice, huge suite. So my assistant and I took a trip to Vegas sometime during the Sabbath tour in ’99; we checked in at the Aladdin where they had a VIP kind of setting, planning to play on the marker I had there.

We went down to the tables at about seven in the evening and started playing on the five thousand dollar marker I had. At this point I’d probably had a couple of drinks but you could still just about read my signature. I immediately lose the five grand and think, “Okay, I’ve
got
to get back up again,” so what else can I do but take another marker out for the same amount.

Well this dollar-chasing went on until four or five in the morning, and when I woke up the next day, I got a bill under the door for twenty thousand dollars, and when I looked it over I could see that by the last of the five thousand dollar markers, you could barely decipher my signature at all. The reason for that was that we had taken breaks during the evening, had bottles of Crown Royal, champagne sent up to the room, so that had added to the markers and pumped up the overall bill. What now? I was in the hole for twenty grand after one bad night. Of course I didn’t have that kind of cash on me, but I also knew that casinos will normally allow debtors thirty days before they start getting stressed about getting their money back. I needed a plan and pretty soon I came up with one. It was risky, sure, and reliant on my luck turning from pure shit into solid gold, but it seemed to be worth a try.

Thankfully the bus driver on our bus also liked to gamble. Phil didn’t care because he was always wasted in the back, so me, the bus driver, and Phil’s assistant decided to go into all the Native American casinos along our route to try and win the twenty grand back. The tour was due to end up in Seattle, so I figured we had almost the entire West Coast from San Diego northwards to get lucky.

So the bus driver mapped everything out, got all the places located and in conference with everyone who was going to play, I said, “Look, here’s the plan. Everybody walks in with three hundred bucks. If you want me to bankroll you, I’ll bankroll you, but you have to pay me back the three hundred when we’re done.” Then I added, “We have
one hour
to play with three hundred bucks. If you lose it, you’re out.”

So after every show for a week and a half, we’d mosey out of whatever town we happened to be in, and go to one of these pre-identified casinos to put the plan into action. We were playing straight blackjack, strictly by the rules. We’d gotten ourselves a book that told you what to hit on, depending on what the banker is showing and what to do about it. It was basically a cheat-sheet of how to play the game strategically.

I set up the table like something out of
Ocean’s Eleven
. Every person had a specific job to do. I had a guy on first base, another guy on fourth, and I played the two middle slots. That way I figured we had all the options covered. To be as sharp as possible I eased back on the drinking too—only one drink an hour—so that way I was able to stay focused on making the system work. I also have to say that I might have enjoyed myself more.

Some nights we would lose, other nights I’d win big and on the odd occasion that we’d made enough in a session, we’d get up and walk before the hour was done. That’s called disciplined, scientific blackjack. So at the end of the trip having hit all these casinos, I ended up with twenty-seven thousand, eight hundred dollars. Enough to cover the Vegas marker and enough for me to go out and buy myself a Yz250 Yamaha dirt bike.

THE SABBATH TOUR
signified the beginning of the end for our head of security, Big Val. While he was always good at what he was employed by us to do, he started thinking that he was a rock god himself, as did quite a few of the crew by this point. We were always very close with the crew, like one big family most of the time, and when that’s the case it’s not unusual to have people take advantage of you and rip you off because they start to think they’re entitled to what you have.

Vinnie created a lot of these problems because he never did anything about anything. He’d just let things happen. Creating that kind of monster and hating confrontation like he did was a bad combination, particularly when it was obvious that someone had taken things too far like Big Val had. The breaking point came when we found out that he was making his own Pantera t-shirts with our fucking logo on them and planned to sell them front of house at shows. He wasn’t a celebrity, he was a fucking security guard, but I guess it’s inevitable and halfway acceptable to
think
you’re a star when you’re in a position like he was. But the line is crossed when a security guy starts using our name for his own monetary gain.

“What the fuck are we going to do about this?” Darrell asked me.

“What fucking choice do we have?” I asked him. “Make up your mind and do whatever you want to do.”

So Dime fired him. At least he finally saw sense and made the right call.

CHAPTER 16

SWAN SONG

B
y the time we went back into Dime’s studio to record
Reinventing the Steel
after the Sabbath reunion tour, everyone was pretty well burned out. The excess takes its toll on you and we were all really feeling it. Phil wasn’t happy, none of us were actually, and when someone walks in the door with a shit expression on their face it just takes the whole room down. What we really needed was a long time away from each other. Not just a few days or weeks, but a
long
time. You can only work and live that hard for so long before you start to feel it, but everyone else expects you to just put out a happy-go-lucky, good time record. That’s not the way it works. Every fucking band runs into that problem, especially the great ones, but ultimately we were four stubborn fuckers, man.

TERRY DATE

I tried to mix
Trendkill
at Dime’s place and it just wasn’t working, so I had to take it to L.A. to a bigger board to mix it. I was very stressed out. Four records with those guys—almost ten years, that’s hard. It’s a lot to keep up with. I got to a point where I felt “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” Vinnie knew the technology inside out, so it was becoming more a matter of who would make decisions, kind of like a referee. I needed a break at the very least and that’s really all there was to it. I got calls all the time throughout the last record because they were still friends and I wanted them to make the best record they could.

We all agreed on one thing though, which was that the best way forward for the band would be to create sort of an amalgam of all the best stuff we’d done up until that point and make a record that captured all those best elements. In some ways we wanted to go backwards, but in other ways we didn’t.

We wanted to rediscover the creative energy and unity we shared in, let’s say, ’93 or ’94, but we didn’t want the record to
sound
as if it belonged there. We wanted it to be fresh and have new energy, and for that reason the finished product sounds a lot different from the previous ones while still being unmistakably Pantera. We were also aware that you can’t have the same audience forever. We were all getting wiser and we knew that people grow out of that style of music. So we factored in the fact that our crowd was getting a little older—getting a little bit younger at the other end, too, and tailored our sound to accommodate that. One thing we never did was give in to any trend that may have been out there at the time, and I genuinely believe that’s why we had such an insanely loyal fan base. We always stayed true to ourselves and our fans respected that, and instead of getting softer as the money came in we stayed heavy all the way through. I can’t think of any other metal bands that were successful with that kind of manifesto.

When it came to producing the record, we’d decided that we were going to do it ourselves without Terry Date. Vinnie had already done the two new studio tracks for the live record, so we knew we could do it. We could probably have been doing it for years, but we always felt as if we needed a safe pair of ears like Terry’s to capture us on tape and to keep us grounded and focused on getting the process done.

So as well as it being time for a change of personnel, the fact that we wouldn’t have to pay four and a half points and a hundred thousand dollars to the producer was also appealing. Trust me, since we were kids we knew how to make records, so after
Trendkill
it was time to fly the coop because we knew how to capture the sound we made on tape.

We got an astronomical advance to do
Reinventing the Steel
, I can’t even remember how much it was, but basically it was all free because we were using our own studio and our own time. You see, record labels are like banks except you don’t pay interest. They’re contractually obliged to give you half the money up front and the rest when the record is delivered, so we just split it all four ways and did what the fuck we wanted with it. Took the money and ran.

This time we were working with a different type of gear and the whole bit. Had the bass up in the mix a lot more and we just went for a totally different tone. No Terry Date, just Vinnie and Sterling Winfield, the engineer, behind the board, and the sonic results were as streamlined as the payroll.

So we’d get down there with a very focused vision about what we wanted the record to sound like and I know we achieved that. You could say
Reinventing the Steel
was a literal reinvention of sorts because it retained our stamp, and was also a return to the sharper hooks of the past, but it did take a fucking long time to finish.

We’d get three songs done and then we’d take a couple of months off. I’d just had kids and, looking back on it now, that made things a little harder because of the whole light switch deal. I wanted to be in two places at once and that obviously creates conflict, although at that time it wasn’t impacting my family life. Not yet, but that was coming.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Trendkill
had sold well, yeah, but not as well as the previous two. At the start of
Reinventing
, I wasn’t happy either because I was really bummed that the band had been doing this since they were fifteen and now they were in this state of meltdown. I said to them a million times, “Guys, I can always go and get another job. You guys are Pantera. You got your shot and you’ve got the brass ring, don’t throw it away. You were that one in a hundred thousand bands that made it.” I felt that there was a possibility that they could be throwing it all away. The reason
Reinventing the Steel
took so long was because Phil wouldn’t go to Texas to record. And then it got worse and worse until Phil didn’t want to talk to Dime and then Dime got pissed at Phil; then everybody got pissed at everybody else while Kim and I were desperately trying to get them to communicate. Literally we’d call Phil and tell him what Vinnie said and then we’d call Vinnie and tell him what Phil said and so on. We were just trying to get the thing
made.

Gradually we got the record done, although it dragged on for months because of the disjointed nature of the sessions. Darrell was partying hard as usual, hanging out with everyone he could, whenever he could, all kinds of people, and one of them was the country singer David Allen Coe.

He was from Nashville, Tennessee, too, and they were two of the same even though I’m sure he didn’t know what to make of us Texas boys playing heavy metal. Whatever. He must have liked us because he eventually got us to play on one of his own records that came out sometime in 2006.

Darrell called me up one night and said, “Dude, you gotta come and meet this guy.” I went over to where they were and he’s got his shirt off and stinks like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. I felt like saying “Dude, take a shower. Deodorant,
anything.
”

He’s also covered head to toe in ink, so I stupidly said, “I like that ink man, looks really cool” and no sooner had I said that, he dropped his trousers to reveal the word
Danger
tattooed on his cock, vertically I think, although I didn’t look for too long.