Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (15 page)

As far as our buddies in Metallica were concerned, well we hardly ever saw them after this point. On the rare occasions we did, Lars would turn up backstage with fucking dudes like John McEnroe. It was crazy shit. They seemed to be going down their own weird path anyway, and by the time they released
Load
in 1996, and had cut their hair and were wearing makeup, Pantera were headlining fucking arenas all over the world, never hanging out with the so-called cool people—I don’t think our music was ever accessible enough to attract that kind of celebrity crowd, and I never had any big, famous people in my phone book.

Unlike Metallica, we didn’t have the hit records on the radio that were the likely draw for celebrity hangers-on. But we
did
always have loyal, die-hard fans—sweaty teenage kids—that could sell out arenas every fucking night of the week.

On the other hand, all the musicians would come to our shows because they knew it was likely to be a huge party. If there was a Pantera show in their town, they knew they had to come out, show up, and by God it was going to be full on. Crazy shit would happen and it was fun.

The Metallica connection was kept alive briefly when we went out with Megadeth as openers on their
Countdown to Extinction
tour. The only emotion I can attach to the experience is that they were bland to hang out with. Our bands were polar opposites. We were in our heyday of getting fucking wasted every night, whereas they were on their whole sobriety kick, so the two don’t exactly fit together. Dave Mustaine would sneak in bottles of Scope mouthwash or shit like that to drink, which seemed so dumb to me at the time. I felt like saying, “Just go down to the liquor store, dude, and get yourself a fucking bottle of something. Fuck it, don’t be drinking Scope!”

THE SUCCESSFUL TOUR
had a sting in the tail for me personally though. My mother Ann had been in a wheelchair for a long time, since her muscle condition had gone sour. One day she was trying to reach for a bottle of Dewar’s with a grab-handle, and she had an aneurism—fell out of the wheelchair and passed away immediately. I believe I was in Ohio somewhere and my sister and I knew that it was coming. We cancelled five days worth of shows and within a week I was back in Dallas putting my mother to rest. RIP Mom.

I had lost both my parents by the age of twenty-nine. But for me with my mom’s passing there was a sense of relief. Her body had just given out. She’d had private care for a year and a half, Medicaid was running out, and it was starting to cost my sister and I a lot of money. I wish she were still here now to see her grandkids, but she’s not and in the end her passing brought mixed emotions. On one hand it was a blessing and she was at peace, but at the same time I had lost my mother.

Ironically, the day after I put her in the ground, she got a Gold record for
Cowboys from Hell
in the mail. The same woman that told me that if I didn’t study at school I was going to be a ditch digger. She definitely would have been very proud of her son, though, and in any case, once we got popular she learned to respect that I had in fact made the right decision when I decided to pursue music.

EVEN WITH A SUCCESSFUL TOUR
for
Vulgar,
visiting places like Japan and having other life-changing experiences, I was still living in an apartment with John ‘The Kat’ Brooks, our drum tech, in North Arlington, a twenty-minute drive from the studio. That was the only part of town that I liked.

It was around this time I met my future wife Belinda through mutual friends who set us up. She wasn’t into the music scene and didn’t actually know who I was, other than I was in a band and had to play gigs. So in order to close the deal I bought a dachshund and said to her, “We still have to play gigs and someone’s gotta take care of this dog while I’m gone, so you might as well move in.” Which she did. I suckered her in with a wiener dog. So we moved into a high-dollar apartment in a gated community, and it was a real nice place to be.

CHAPTER 10

CONTROLLED CHAOS

W
e were on a break during late spring and the summer of 1993—God knows we had earned one—before we went into the studio to record
Far Beyond Driven,
which we started sometime in the fall of that year.

Things were a little different this time around because the old man had moved his studio up north to Nashville, built a place called Abtrax Sound, and the boys just couldn’t get enough of giving their old man money—so we all went up there, too.

He had moved up there to get some of the country music market that he couldn’t get down in Arlington. Also, because he had part of the publishing rights for
Cowboys
and
Vulgar
,
he
was getting paid what we were getting paid. (I’ll come back to what I did about all this later.)

TERRY DATE

In the past there were pieces of tracks that everyone would work on and then come together and listen to, but with
Far Beyond Driven
everyone was there all of the time and there were certain advantages and disadvantages with that. That’s the best way of putting it. It was a completely different vibe.

So, we’d go up there for two weeks, three weeks max, and stay at the Holiday Inn in town. This was the beginning of Vinnie Paul’s infamous strip club days. Of course at that time we’d all go in there and have a good time; it was a “bring your own beer” kind of deal, but he really got an unhealthy taste for it, and you’ll see how that plays out later.

The routine became well tested: we’d work for a while, take a week off and go back to Texas, and write all this material, which, like on
Vulgar,
was just pouring out of us. Dime and Phil were both on fire creatively, and the opportunities were increasing because everyone could see how big Pantera were getting. We were asked to put a song on a Black Sabbath tribute record called
Nativity in Black,
so we did a cover of “Planet Caravan” on which I played fretless bass and keyboards. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the rights organized, which is typical of how labels don’t want to give their band up, so it would become a bonus track on
Far Beyond Driven
. Good to know you’re being protected, I guess, but frustrating sometimes, too, when you want a song on a high profile record.

One day we were sitting in the studio, baffled by Vinnie, who had this one weird drumbeat he was working on. Then, for some reason Dime plugged in one of these new whammy pedals that Digitech had just come out with, the kind that allowed you to change the octave every time you moved your foot. And that’s how the songs “Becoming” and “Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills” came about—through simple, unscheduled experimentation.

I had used mostly Charvel basses up until this time, but I’d just gotten a deal with Music Man and was using their StingRay bass because I was really looking for a change. I knew the bass sound I wanted—a tone that would really pop out in the mix—but I just hadn’t found it yet. I had all these guitar companies sending me coffee table–looking guitars; basses like Warwicks would come in and I’d plug them in and they sounded like crap. I eventually called my buddy Rachel Bolan from Skid Row and said, “Hey man, can I borrow a couple of your Spectors? I really want to check out and see what those things sound like.”

I tried them on a couple of songs like “5 Minutes Alone” and after that I was a full-blown Spector fan. I had to have one and I’ve played them ever since. They cut through the mix a lot better. I’d always been a fan of Eddie Jackson from Queensrÿche, who also used them on their early records where you could really feel a bass punch come through. I really liked the tone that he had, but at the same time I was also trying to get some of my mentor dUg Pinnick’s sound, too. dUg ’s band Kings X were very influential for some of the more melodic material that Pantera wrote. It’s not easy to identify, but it is definitely in there. He’s also a big fan of us as a band and he was always on the sidelines cheering us along.

You have to remember that metal records don’t always show bass sounds in their best light. Obviously I was a huge admirer of players like Geezer Butler and John Paul Jones. In purely metal terms, I really didn’t like the sound that, say, Jason Newsted had in Metallica. To me it was just a bit “Ughhh.” Just not my kind of bass tone at all. Someone like Gene Simmons always sounded really bland to me, too, and then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got someone like Lemmy. Lemmy is just
Lemmy
. He’s one of his own, and while you can say you’re influenced by him, you’ll never ever get that tone.

Working on
Far Beyond Driven
I also decided I really wanted to try out a five-string bass so
Music Man
sent one over (this set a precedent for equipment) and I loved it immediately. Not only did it sound good, it also allowed me to go down a fifth and hit the lower octaves that just aren’t accessible on a regular four-string bass. This added totally different dimensions to the songs, almost like playing a new instrument, so maybe there was something motivating about playing one.

What we were all doing was experimental to some degree, but we also had these insanely catchy riffs to back it all up, like the ones that became “I’m Broken” and “5 Minutes Alone,” riffs that we would come back to and refresh after we’d lived with them for a couple of weeks of driving around Nashville in a rental car.

The first song we actually wrote for the record was “25 Years,” and I remember it mainly because Phil had these really fucked up lyrics that he was working on at the time about his father. When I first heard the horrible sentiments in there I said to him, “Dude, you just can’t put those lyrics down there, that’s your father you’re talking about.” To me it just wasn’t cool, but you couldn’t tell that dude what to do or not do, ever.

Three-quarters of the way through the process, we took everything out of Abtrax and moved the whole process to Dallas Sound Lab, which turned into a party every single night. By now Vinnie was heavily into taking ecstasy. It was just brutal watching him. I’d done it way back in the day when it was legal and good, not cut with speed and shit, but the stuff that was available in ’93 made you wake up the next morning with your back totally spazzing out.

Also, when Dime and I did it back in the old days, we were smarter about how we took it. We’d just break little
chips
off the pill, instead of taking a whole one all at once that knocks you sideways, because that way it’s easier to control the buzz. Vinnie took whole pills and the results weren’t pretty.

All my bass parts were pretty much done in Nashville, but the rest of the guys were doing various overdubs while Phil came in to finish some of his vocal refinements, although he was pretty much done, too, as I recall. So on the occasions when I showed up in the studio, there was basically just a party happening.

I’d say, “Well, this is nice. This is a fifteen-hundred-dollar-per-day lockout and you guys are sitting around playing pool and not doing fucking anything.” I was irritated that everything was taking so long.

TERRY DATE

There were friends around in the studio, I do remember that. I also recall having a hard time getting people focused and into the control room to record because it seemed like there were a lot of distractions. But there were
always
a lot of people around these guys, and maybe because I keep my head down and focus on the job in hand, I missed a lot of what was going on. A lot of Dime’s guitar parts were done at that time for sure and that was memorable. There was occasional talk of label issues but I had to eliminate all that kind of stuff and make sure that none of it affected the actual making of the record. I was just there to get from A to point B.

Basically we spent around $750,000 on that record—renegotiated the contracts with East / West record label and the whole bit—and by God we used every single penny of that, a lot of it on a bunch of bullshit, including paying for a bunch of hangers-on to party on our tab. It seemed like everyone came out of the woodwork when we went back to Dallas, and most of them seemed to forget that we had a fucking record to make, and that applied to Vinnie Paul, too. Progress was slow, and if I was frustrated by the delays, Terry Date was pulling his fuckin’ hair out a lot of the time.