Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (33 page)

BELINDA BROWN

I don’t think Rex was stable enough to make any decisions around the time of the funeral. For some of the guys their way of dealing with the grief and the loss was to all get together and start pouring shots to celebrate a life, so when people like Eddie Van Halen and Zakk Wylde had to do the official part of their duty at the funeral, they were hardly able to speak because they were so drunk, and it turned into the Zakk and Eddie show.

WALTER O’BRIEN

I wasn’t at the funeral. I kept begging Guy Sykes to let me know what the plans were because I knew I had these exams to take. I didn’t hear anything, and then on the Sunday, Kim called me and said, “Are you coming?” “Coming when?” I asked her and she said, “It’s tomorrow morning.” I just couldn’t get out of these exams, so I just couldn’t go and I’ve never stopped feeling bad about that. I spoke to Rex and he even said, “Listen man. We’d all love you to be here, it would certainly be good for you to be here, but honestly, you’ve got to think about your future and we are your past.” And that was pretty damn generous of him to say that. I’ve always kicked myself, but I had no choice.

Actually, I was pissed for years at Walter for not showing up for the funeral, as were lots of other people. He was a huge part of the Pantera family after all. Walter and I have reconciled recently, but it still pisses me off.

CHAPTER 20

THE AFTERMATH

L
ife got harder after Darrell’s death, there’s no doubt about that. I thought about him all the time and still think about him every single day and, even if my words here have been critical, I do have a lot of empathy for his brother. I need to say that. Life is a far less wonderful place without Dime in my life, and he was my best friend, for years, until we became estranged by circumstances. But that will never change how I feel about him as a human being.

As I said before, my wife Belinda and I had talked about getting out of Texas even prior to that awful night, so we made plans to move to Los Angeles, probably the dumbest place to get away to in retrospect, but I always have this burning desire to keep jamming. Public attention was already high, but after December 2004 it all became too much, and if you’ve read this far you know how I feel about keeping a low profile whenever possible.

Now I couldn’t even leave my house, which had also been broken into while my children and wife were inside the house. She had to scream at the top of her lungs in Spanish to tell this Mexican dude to get the fuck out. I woke up to see this guy standing there with a shotgun under his trench-coat—right in front of my big screen TV, and because it was such an old, well-soundproofed house, we hadn’t even heard this fucker get in. Scary shit.

We couldn’t even go to the fucking grocery store without being reminded of everything that had happened, as if it wasn’t already at the forefront of my mind.

My brother was gone and nothing would ever be the same. Not for me, not for any of us, but for me personally, his tragic death would merely signal the beginning of the incessant question: Why?
Why
?

I spoke to the police in Columbus sometime afterwards and got some kind of insight. From what they said the events of December 8, 2004, weren’t necessarily specifically directed toward Darrell. He was just unlucky in the sense that it was his band that happened to be there on the night this guy’s rage peaked. The police even went as far as to say that it could have been
any
of us—me, Phil, Vinnie, or Darrell—that got killed if we’d been there. This deranged anger was directed at
all
of us in Pantera.

Now, I don’t want to give the fucker that shot Darrell any more coverage than he deserves (which is none whatsoever), so I’ll leave alone any further thoughts and opinions I might have. This guy was a fucking nutcase. But what I will say is that the metal press did not help the situation in the months leading up to Darrell’s death. Dealing with band issues was our business and our business only, and while fans probably wanted some idea of what our plans were, to have it all play out blow by blow within fucking magazines and on fucking sites like Blabbermouth was not in any way helpful. These were real people and real fucking lives they were dealing with, not some heavy metal reality show for people’s daily entertainment. Let’s just leave it at that.

AT THIS POINT
I was thinking about putting a band together with my buddy Snake from Skid Row. He’d just started working for Doc McGhee’s management company, and I had known Doc for years since our days on the road with KISS, who he also managed. Whenever Gene Simmons was in Dallas he’d call me up and ask if I could fix him up at the Clubhouse. One night he called the house and left a message on the voicemail when Belinda was there, and when she told me she said, “Who’s Gene Simmons?” “That’s Gene Simmons from KISS!” I told her, and I still have his message. “Hey Rex, this is Gene. I know you have the hottest club in town and I want to partake of your party girls.”

While there were options to work on something new with Snake, one thing I didn’t expect was that Hurricane Katrina would reunite me with Phil Anselmo. Katrina hit in August of 2005, and when it did, it washed pretty much all the dope out of town. It was done. People were looting all the stores and shit, so if you were an addict, chances are your dealer didn’t have any drugs to sell you, because nothing could get in or out of the city for weeks. So you could say Phil got off dope by default and thank God he did, and when he says that he got clean, it’s true, but mainly because there were no drugs to be had.

I couldn’t get in touch with anyone for a month. I didn’t know who had made it out and who hadn’t. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t connected in some way to New Orleans even knew that. It was like a different world down there and was a genuinely scary situation. I couldn’t get ahold of Phil for three or four weeks, and the only person I made contact with was Kirk Windstein because he’d texted me (the only method of communication that was working) and told me that he was staying at his grandmother’s place on the outskirts of the city. It turned out that Phil’s house in town was completely ruined—the water came up right over his garage, so he lost most of what he had down below because it was built on stilts.

Vinnie Paul had called me a couple of days before Phil had and he asked me in general terms, “What are you doing?” And I told him, “I’m just here in L.A. trying to get a gig,” which was entirely true at that time.

Vinnie wasn’t doing
anything
after his brother died, but since then he and I had at least been on speaking terms. Then as I said, I get a phone call from Phil two days later and he’s crying, saying, “Man, I fucked up. I’ve really seen the error of my ways and I want to clarify that I am not on dope anymore, and that I really want you in my life again.” While I knew in my own head that Phil probably had no clue what he had done for the preceding ten years, crushing various people’s lives mainly, at this point I believed what he was saying and decided to take him back into my life.

He didn’t beg at all. That’s not his style; he assumed that I’d take him back, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t putting up with any of his shit if I did. It gave me comfort that his personality had changed since he had gotten himself clean, though. It took him a while, but he was back to what he does, in that it’s all about him. Everything was
always
about him, and soon it was as if the previous few years of hell had never even happened.

“I’m the King of Metal!” he liked to say.

“Well, if you didn’t have anyone beside you helping you, you were just another piece of shit.” That’s my opinion; Kate Richardson was with him throughout his battles with dope, and it’s no exaggeration to say that she’s the reason he’s still alive.

Anyway, when I told Vinnie all this, and that because of it I was considering working with Phil again, his first response was simply “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

Then he called two or three times over the next couple of days saying things like, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Dude, what are my choices here?” I asked him. “I can do all these soundtracks and try and get my foot in the door on this end, or go back and jam with Phil and deal with the twenty percent brilliance/ eighty percent nonsense equation.” Next I told him that I had opted for the latter, which included the decision to start writing another Down record, for which I organized all the management, booking agents, accounting—the whole grid.

RITA HANEY

Vinnie is a very stubborn person and he’s never changed ever since I’ve known him. Darrell had a term that he liked to use to describe him, and that was “Crystal Ball,” and it means that he believes in looking into a crystal ball and predicting what he believes to be the future and once you see it that way, that’s how you see it, whether it’s the facts or not. Vince was that kind of person.

Vinnie just didn’t get it at all. At this point it seemed that there was no possibility of Phil and Vinnie ever talking again, so you could say that this point in time signified the true end of the part of my life that was Pantera. There was nothing else to say to Vinnie because the path of my musical journey seemed to point toward being reunited with Phil; my life has always been about the music. I wasn’t being cold or in any way unsympathetic to Vinnie’s situation, not at all. I just knew that Pantera was no longer possible, not in indefinite hiatus like it had been, and I had to keep living my own life. I also felt incredibly lucky that I’d even had the opportunity to be in a band like Pantera—some people never get one chance—and now I was getting to live the dream all over again with Down. Who gets
two
chances like that?

CHAPTER 21

THE HOLLYWOOD EXPERIMENT

I
n the wider context of my life, there was another reason for getting out of Texas to see what L.A. had to offer. Warren Riker and I had started our own production company called PopKnot Productions, and he had a great place with a studio over near Burbank and was always having bands in there. I’d go over there all the time, and that kept my focuses firmly on the music.

We produced bands, did movie soundtracks, the whole bit, and it was the
ideal
place to record music. I wasn’t making much money from it yet, but we were at least starting to get our foot in the door as a little production partnership. I just wanted to get my head into something else anyway, and because Warren seemed to be having some success in L.A., it kind of made sense for me to see if I could achieve that, too.

Before we left Dallas, Kirk Windstein told me he wanted to do a new Crowbar record, so I said, “Fuck, let me produce it.” I wanted to try and get into that whole new realm of steering a project’s production, and I wanted Warren Riker to engineer it for me. In the end Warren wanted to take producer credit for it, but it was actually the other way around and I footed the bill for some of the costs.

So we went to a house in the uptown region of New Orleans, with a studio where we had recording gear, and did the tracks fairly quickly. I wrote roughly half of the songs and played a lot of good bass on it, too. We were living in that place while we were recording and we were also using coke at the time. I remember lines of it on the top of the grand piano we used for one of the acoustic numbers, as I was writing a lot on the piano at that time.
Lifesblood for the Downtrodden
was not only one of Crowbar’s best records, it was also the start of my trying to get into record production in partnership with Warren Riker.

I had been feeling isolated in Texas for some time, so I wanted to do something else while still being around the kids, to catch up for all these years when I’d been out on the road. So when we eventually moved to L.A. in the summer of 2004, we bought a big, family house out in Porter Ranch. It was a really expensive part of town and a new start.

At some point fairly soon after we moved, me and my buddy Snake Sabo from Skid Row rented a Lear jet with a buddy to fly to Vegas for the night, a less-than-an-hour flight East. Now, I hate scoring drugs. To me it’s the most pathetic, sleazy thing you can ever do. It’s terrible. I never got into that. If I went over to somebody’s house and they had some, of course I did it, but I never actually
paid
for drugs in my entire life.

So the following day back in L.A. after a mad night taking blow, I woke up and noticed that we still had vodka left, so I sat there and drank probably half a fucking bottle. I was completely out of control, and the effects of the previous night’s activities were wearing on me so heavily, yet I somehow drove my car over to Jerry Cantrell’s house in Studio City just over Laurel Canyon.