Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (17 page)

WE HAD OUR TOURING ROUTINE
pretty well set by this point—from a day-to-day perspective at least. We’d drive overnight, rarely stay in hotels, which made sense because once you’re already comfortable in your bunk, why get up and get into some hotel that’s going to cost you another four thousand dollars per night?

In the early days we could use the showers at certain venues, work it that way, and when we had a day off, maybe we’d stay in a Howard Johnson, but once we had the budget to really make things happen, then of course we’d stay in the occasional five-star place. But we didn’t do Four Seasons–type deals. We preferred an accommodation that was a bit more homely.

We had a travel agent, Shelby Glick, who found us hotels with kitchens, so if we wanted to go to a market and then cook our own steak that night, we were able to do that. I would usually cook. In fact we carried some grills under the bus and we used to have impromptu barbecues. We’d invite other bands over and the whole bit. I’d throw down just
huge
pieces of meat so that there was enough for everyone.

So on the morning of the show—well, it wasn’t really morning for us, I guess—we’d start moving off the bus at two or three in the afternoon. Dime and I were usually the last to get going. We’d go into these places two days before the show in many cases, and I’d spent time sitting there with the lighting guys, making sure we got everything set up right. Then we’d do a pre-production sound check the next day to make sure everything sounded exactly as we wanted it to through the huge PA.

From there all we needed to do was tell our tech, “Look, I need a little more this or less of that,” but that obviously changed from venue to venue. Occasionally we would sound check, but only two times a week at the very most because we always pretty much knew what we were going to do in terms of sound.

I wouldn’t do much practicing before shows, certainly not in the latter days, and any preparation I did do would be centered on getting used to the weight of the instrument and doing all kinds of stretches. There would be a whole lot of water drinking going on and then, as I said before, a whole lot of booze going on after the water drinking.

Then, after the show the proper party started. Sometimes I just wanted to smoke weed, but the problem with weed is that it really fucks with your whiskey drinking. The quality and strength of weed has really intensified over the years since we started. Nowadays I can’t even smoke that hydroponic shit. I hardly ever partake if at all. But if I wanted to smoke back then, I’d just go back to the bus because I hate being around people when I was basically paralyzed.

We’d also eat dinner on the bus, and for me that was usually an entire tray full of vegetables, the kind you can get at the market, because I always wanted to keep my slim figure. Food was always an issue with all of us. We knew what we liked and we stuck with that, and regardless of how well-travelled we were becoming and how many opportunities we had to dine like kings, we always gravitated toward what we knew, sometimes regardless of cost.

WALTER O’BRIEN

They were never exactly what you’d call world travelers. They’d go to France and say, “Why don’t y’all have hot sauce over here?” They’d go to Germany and want spaghetti and get pissed off when they couldn’t get it. At one point Vinnie insisted that they wanted lemon pepper on their food over in Europe and the catering company only had citrus pepper. It’s the same spice, everything was the same, except it didn’t say “Lemon Pepper” on the bottle. So they ended up going behind my back and having one of the girlfriends ship a case of a hundred and forty-four bottles of lemon pepper overnight from Texas. And by the way, we ended up having to ship back a case minus two bottles at the end of the tour. They had no idea how to conserve money. I had it worked out that a tour to Europe could potentially make them $400,000, but when we got back it transpired that because of all the spending they had lost $200,000. They bitched at me, of course, that they were in the hole. “How could we have lost $200,000?” and I said, “You didn’t, you actually lost $600,000” They didn’t get it at all.

Being on the road was a war of attrition in every sense, and boredom was the enemy. There’s just nothing to do when you’re just sitting on the bus for fifteen hours, so inevitably it always seemed a good idea to crack open a cold one.

We also came up with games to play, and because we were now earning good money, the stakes were increasingly high. The guys in Biohazard taught us this dice game called
C-Lo
. There were three dice, and the tale of the tape is that you throw out all three and there’s a banker who calls a limit of, let’s say, a two-hundred-dollar max.

So someone rolls the three dice until you get a “number”; a number is when two of the dice are the same, and whatever the other one is, that’s your number—which then has to be beat. So if I throw a five out there, it’s a pretty good chance that I’m going to win everybody’s two hundred bucks that’s sitting around in the circle. We’d have pits of up to eight people at certain points so there was a lot of money changing hands at times. Because of the boredom on the road, we’d play this all the time. It was fun to do and everybody would sit around and drink beer and get some road camaraderie going. We’d get bus drivers, truck drivers—everybody would play. It could get ugly, too. When you’ve got a bunch of drunks gambling, you need rules, and everything had to be settled in cash on the night, just like guys on the street would do in the old days.

On one leg of the U.S. tour we had Type O Negative with us as support, and we partied with Peter Steele every fucking night. He was a gentle giant. He would come out and sing “Walk” with us every night, and he would physically pick me up sideways and put me up to the mic so I could sing into it. He was fucking hilarious. On that tour we started doing other crazy shit on the bus like sending a runner out for the biggest double-chocolate fudge cake he could find, and then we’d have bets on who could eat it in the fastest time, while Dime and I would pony up money. None of these big dudes, especially Big Val, our head of security, could resist trying to eat the cake—he was always trying. We’d watch him get about halfway through and he’d be turning green.

Even when we went out for dinner and he’d already had a full meal, I’d buy Big Val another one and say, “Okay, dude, see if you can eat all this for this amount of money.” He was always up for a challenge, thought he was fucking Superman.

We’d do the same with hot sauce, see who could drink a whole bottle in fifteen seconds without throwing up. It was all just good-natured ways of trying to kill time on the road.

THE STAGES WE WERE PLAYING
were probably forty feet wide by twenty deep, and Phil had a microphone cable that was fifty feet long, which allowed him to run from one side to the other. The security routine on tour was always the same: at five p.m. every show day, Big Val would sit down with his whole crew and say, “Look, this is the way it’s going to go. If a kid’s getting out of hand, don’t manhandle him, just get him out of the way. But make sure he’s safe.” Some of these kids were rebellious as shit and there’s just nothing anyone can do about it; Val understood that but he wanted the hired security crews at the venues to understand it, too. It seemed that some of these kids in the ’90s just wanted to go to a show to get their aggression out, and looking back on it now it was a hell of a lot of fun to instigate that kind of reaction. I’d much rather they did it there than on the street, that’s for sure.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Phil had this bad habit wherever we played of saying to the crowd, “Our stage is your stage”—kind of like Jim Morrison in the ’60s: controlled chaos—at which point there would be a near riot. He just wouldn’t get the hint that if someone got hurt, they were going to sue him and that it was going to cost him more money than he makes, and it got to the point where there was no controlling him. So thereafter, anytime I was backstage at a show and heard it go quiet onstage, my first thought was, “Oh, no, here comes a lawsuit.”

So during the show one night while we’re playing some open field in Buffalo, New York, this big, steroid freak, one of the security crew, decides to manhandle some poor kid who’s trying to climb the barrier that’s ten feet from the stage. He pushed him to the ground, face down in the concrete with his hands behind his back. Then he picks the guy up by his fucking hair and starts pushing him along, by which time Phil has seen what’s going on and is seriously pissed. So Phil—who can throw a fucking football like Drew Brees—launched his microphone and hit the security dude right on the back of the head and he fell to the ground. Suddenly, the promoter calls the show off and they lock-down the whole backstage area so there was no way we could get out. Phil then gets thrown in jail and the whole bit.

We all said to the police, “Wait, aren’t you missing the point here?” but of course Phil got the blame and it cost five thousand dollars worth of bail, all for standing up for a fan who was getting beat up. It was fucking crazy. This kind of shit wasn’t new either. It got to the point where I saw incidents from onstage and I just wanted to take off my fuckin’ bass and sling it. I felt like saying to these clowns, “These kids came to see us, not you, cocksucker.” It’s not like these security guys own these places; they get paid fuckin’ six dollars an hour to run security and then think it’s okay drive one of my fans in the dirt because he’s trying to jump the barricade. It was so stupid and something we just would not tolerate.

Phil usually controlled the crowd very well, but we had to stop our shows sometimes
because
of the security guys, not because of our fans. The upshot of it all was that Phil ended up having to go to court a year later after the trial was delayed three times, where he apologized (and pleaded guilty to an assault charge), got a fine, and was told to do a number of community service hours.

WALTER O’BRIEN

Management was on eggshells a lot of the time regarding what Phil was likely to do. We’d already had an incident on the
Vulgar
tour where I had to pay a guy off who was just looking for a quick buck lawsuit because he claimed Phil had assaulted him at a show in San Diego. In the end I paid him the five hundred dollars he asked for to settle even though we were ready to pay him
fifty
grand if we had to. He then told me that all he really wanted was five minutes alone with Mr. Anselmo, to which I said, “Trust me, you wouldn’t
survive
five minutes.” He’d then claimed that we were racists—despite later making racial references about me—so, when he’d been paid off by me personally with a cashier’s check, I couldn’t resist saying to him, “Not only are you a racist but you are also a fucking moron. I was prepared to pay you fifty grand to
not
go to court.”

Whether the incident at that the Buffalo show was in any way symptomatic of Phil’s spiraling frame of mind is hard to say. At this point in our ascendancy—approaching the highest point of our popularity as the biggest metal band of the decade—Phil’s relationship with the rest of the band was slowly but surely starting to become distanced. Not breaking down, not yet, but there was a palpable separation that I certainly noticed. He didn’t travel with the rest of us; he was on another bus with his assistant and his trainer who he always took on the road, so that diluted the unity we’d had on previous tours. Not just that, he was spending more and more time back home in New Orleans when he wasn’t either touring or in the studio.

TERRY GLAZE

I was in Los Angeles and Darrell called me and asked if I wanted to come and see them play at some outdoor amphitheater type place and I remember being just stunned at how powerful they were. I mean, we were pretty tight when I was in the band, but this was something different. It was almost frightening. I’ve never seen a crowd like it: everyone bought a t-shirt and everyone sang along to every song. I don’t know many bands that have fans that dedicated. I’ll never forget that Dime took a shit in a bucket while he was playing onstage. Actually squatted down, pulled down his shorts and took a shit. They tried to bill him for the cleaning but he insisted that if they did, he got to keep the bucket. In his eyes, the bucket was
his.