Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (4 page)

I like to simplify it and say that I know the Ten Commandments—what to do and what not to—but I also believe that something higher and much greater than me has helped me get through the more traumatic side of a life in rock ’n’ roll. I’ve always believed that you have to fight for what you want in life, and God knows I did, but you also have to have the good graces of something spiritually bigger than you to give you that little extra assistance. I didn’t really realize all this until more recently, and occasionally I will get down on my knees and pray. Or I might just shut my eyes and take two minutes to take in the day; that achieves the same thing.

Despite how difficult life became, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that playing music and my unbreakable desire to do so is what put me where I am. I have always viewed my life as a musical journey, and while there are good and bad aspects in everything I have been through to date, I never would have had any of it without the upbringing that I had. So if my story is going to start anywhere, then it would have to be in Texas.

CHAPTER 2

DADDY BILL

T
he town of Graham, Texas, isn’t renowned for a whole lot of anything, maybe except that it’s one of the only towns in all of Texas that still has a drive-in movie theater and nowadays they even have a Walmart. It was mainly an oil and cattle town since its inception, and although we lived in one of the smaller houses in our neighborhood, we definitely had one of the nicer properties I’m told, although obviously I don’t remember.

CHERYL PONDER,
sister

Mother, Daddy, and I moved to Graham in ’57, and Rex was born in ’64, and at that time Daddy was working for Texas Electric in the downtown office. Our house was in a really nice part of town because that was important to my mother. I remember asking her why her car sat broke in the driveway for so long and she said that she chose to have a nice place to live over anything else. She was trying to teach me about priorities.

When I was three years old we moved to De Leon. This little peanut-farming town with a population of 2,000 is located maybe seventy miles due south of Graham in very rural Texas. My dad—“Daddy Bill” as he was known—worked for Texas Electric and the move was a promotion for him, and he now was responsible for the electrical grids of three towns in Northern Texas. My mother never really worked and by this point my older sister Cheryl had gotten married and had moved out of the family home to live with her husband Buddy in the Dallas area, leaving me, Mom, and Dad in our house. It was a regular, three-bedroom place, not too big but big enough, with a huge yard that was home to countless dogs over my childhood years.

It was definitely rural Texas, you couldn’t deny that. I remember walking to the end of the street and suddenly there were no more houses. Civilization stopped and was replaced by wild patches of watermelon as far as the eye could see.

One constant feature in the Brown household was music, and part of the varied soundtrack to my young life was my mother’s vinyl repertoire, which included a whole bunch of swing bands, Tommy Dorsey mainly, and other acts like the Andrews Sisters and Louis Armstrong. My mother would pipe this stuff
every day
through this annoying intercom we had throughout the house, even to wake me up for school. That really began to piss me off. Looking back now, it was almost as if I was being
force
-
fed
music. Music always seemed to be played by
someone
in the house, either by my mother or my sister, who fortunately left me all her Elvis and Beatles 45s after she moved to the city, so I really didn’t have a choice but to listen.

CHERYL PONDER

Music runs deep in our family. I really, truly believe that it’s genetic. Our grandmother went to college in the early 1900s and got a music degree, purely by playing by ear. As I’ve grown to know second cousins more recently, it turns out that their son is very interested in music and wants to be in a band.

My Daddy Bill loved music, too, mainly big band stuff as well, and to accompany that pastime he was what you might call a social drinker. I mean, who wasn’t in those days? I suppose it was because he’d grown up in the World War II–era where social drinking was an acceptable thing to do for middle class Americans. Basically it seemed like when they came back from the war everyone got fucking drunk and nobody really thought anything of it. Alcohol
was
a presence in our family tree though, and I later found out that while most of my relatives managed to function normally and hold down respectable jobs, quite a few were actually alcoholics. Apparently it’s genetic.

CHERYL PONDER

Our father was a wonderful father. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he was a better father than he was a husband, but my parents were young when I grew up, and when Rex grew up, they weren’t, and that gives me a slightly different perspective. Knowing our family like I do and Rex doesn’t, alcoholism runs rampant in both sides of our family tree. Mother drank socially, and both her brothers were alcoholics in later years, and that trait goes all the way back as far as our great-great-grandfather, who was also an alcoholic.

My parents were also proud Presbyterians and our family attended church regularly throughout my childhood, but because De Leon was such a small place, the only church denomination that was available was Methodist, so we just went there every Sunday anyway. But while my parents were religious in that they believed in good morals and living correctly, they definitely didn’t take it to the fire-and-brimstone level.From a young age—from the time I could walk and talk in fact—I was a ham. Anyone who was in a bad mood just needed to take one glance at my face and they’d have no choice but to laugh or at the very least smile. My sister tells me that whenever she used to visit for the weekend, when she pulled up in the driveway I’d always be standing there dressed up as something different: a cowboy, Superman, Batman, or frankly anything besides myself. I must have been born with a built-in need to perform.

One of our dogs was called Reddy Kilowatt—not exactly a normal dog name, I know, but he was named after the mascot used for electricity generation in the United States, and there’s a picture of me with him somewhere where I’m dressed up as the Lone Ranger. And I did these things because I always wanted to be noticed. Fortunately, my dad’s parents encouraged me to express myself. They lived just a half hour away in Ranger, Texas, and my grandparents, while very, very strict people, were also extremely influential on my early life and encouraged me to try anything I wanted to do. After all, I was the last of twenty-six grandchildren on both sides of the family, so it seemed that because they knew they’d probably never get another chance to be grandparents, I got special treatment.

Dad was diagnosed with cancer of the sinus cavity in 1971 and we had a maid to help my mom after Dad got sick, and she was called—brace yourself—“Nigger” Georgia. That’s the name I always heard being called in the house. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? No wonder I’ve had problems with that word ever since. I grew to resent it because I didn’t feel that it was proper. I didn’t realize this as a kid though—it wasn’t until much later in life that I came to know what that word truly meant, but that’s just what my mother said—she made it sound like a term of endearment: “Nigger Georgia this, Nigger Georgia that.” Nowadays I will never use the words “nigger” or “faggot,” nor will I allow them to be used in my house. In my eyes, they are the foulest words imaginable.

I’m not trying to say that my mother was a racist—she definitely wasn’t, but there were just very few black families out in the peanut farming areas at that time, and to talk like that was just how the South was back in the sixties and early seventies. Even at school you could see it: some of the water fountains were clearly marked, “Colored Only,” which seems unbelievable in modern times, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still there in some of the really back-ass places.

Because my dad was ill, it was easier for my mother to help him if I wasn’t around all the time, so I was always being shuffled off to spend time with other people, especially my maternal grandmother, who lived in downtown Ft. Worth. Well, she was quite a woman, let me tell you. Back in the day, she and her brother Jack lived in Thurber, Texas—right on the county line—one of the only places you could get liquor back in the ’30s and ’40s post-prohibition days. That was where all the juke joints were back in the day, in hard-living towns like Strawn, Mingus, and Thurber. My grandmother used to play the piano down at the front in the silent movies that were shown in these tough little towns in the Texas countryside.

She used to tell me stories about when, back in those days after prohibition, she and her brother Jack—who played standup bass—had a band. When they were up on stage performing, everybody in the audience got so drunk that, when they didn’t like a song, they’d just throw a fucking beer bottle at the musicians in protest. So the only way to stop being hit on the head by a bunch of beer bottles was to hang chicken wire around the stage area, like some kind of crude barricade. I’m sure some missiles still got through though. These places were rough, and you can probably still find dives like this in some outlying parts of the state.

She lived in this huge Victorian home with another elderly lady. I can still remember the place like I was there last week. Isn’t it weird how places stick in your head from when you’re a kid, but you can’t remember seemingly more important things for shit? The place she lived in was divided into a bunch of apartments, and her place was on the second floor.

My grandmother was an amazing person in many ways, but her complete immersion in music influenced the young me most—she was certainly one of the primary reasons that I became interested in playing it. She was so delicate and one of those people who had a natural talent for everything musical. As a five-year-old I used to sit on her knee while she played piano, absorbing every sight and sound in complete fascination. As if to confirm that I might have been a musical instrument aficionado while still in the womb, I even remember the piano itself. It was one of those stand-up types—don’t ask me the
exact
model. She would just sit there and casually play along to Joplin and Charles Mingus—cats like that—as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and that added more to the amazing mixture of music styles that I was being exposed to as a child.

AT THIS TIME,
something my young head didn’t fully grasp was just how sick my dad actually was. You don’t analyze it when you’re young, I don’t think. In fact I suspect all of us—Dad included—were in denial about just how bad things were, and I think all of us felt that if we didn’t talk about it, it somehow wasn’t there. But it was there. And because Dad was worried that he’d lose his job if his employers found out how sick he was, and that he might not be able to fulfill his daily duties, his ill health was never really discussed, and especially not outside the four walls of the Brown household.

So as a young kid, I’d happily go off to school while mom would drive him to the city for treatment, and I guess I just thought that he was in the hospital getting better when actually he was dying, his body systematically eaten up by cancer. Back in the ’70s there wasn’t the technology available to catch cancer early enough to stop it spreading like wildfire—they just dealt with it when they found it, often too late. And when they
did
find it, all they had at their disposal was chemo or radiation, so Dad had to stay in the hospital in the city, getting dosed with one or the other. I remember going to visit him and because of how sick it made him feel, the only food he could taste and enjoy was fried catfish washed down with Budweiser, so we would always sneak some in there for him. Sounds like a weird combination I know, but it was all he seemed to want.

CHERYL PONDER

Daddy was diagnosed in April of 1971 and had extensive and immediate radiation for six weeks, which didn’t seem to slow it down much. Because it was cancer of the nasal pharynx, it seemed to be hard to contain. Then in the summer of the same year he had another biopsy and it was still spreading.

Although I was young and he was sick for most of the time I knew him, my dad and I did have a close bond. When you consider that my sister is seventeen years my senior, it’s easy to see why, too. Because Cheryl and I had basically grown up in two separate generations of our parents’ lives, and he just adored me, even though I suspect I was one of those mistakes after they went to the country club and got drunk one night.