Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (5 page)

I have dim memories of us sitting on the couch in the afternoons watching golf together. He loved having me for company even though I clearly knew very little about golf. Something about the game must have permeated my psyche though and the Colonial tournament sticks out in my mind particularly—probably because it was played locally in Ft. Worth, and he stressed that very fact to me at the time. I know that he would have been really proud to know that his son would get invited to play in it in later life.

Even while he was very sick he would still drink Budweiser like it was going out of fucking style. So at the age of five I probably tasted my first beer, and as shocking as that might sound, that’s just how my dad was. He’d just slide me a sip of his beer when my mom wasn’t watching and I’d drink it. I can’t imagine that I liked it but at least I was giving my body plenty of year’s head start to develop a taste for it. For the record, I couldn’t imagine feeding my five-year-old a fucking beer nowadays, but back in the day that’s just how things were.

CHERYL PONDER

Mother had no idea how to become a widow or a single parent at the age of forty-seven, so along the way she’d made a lot of psychological mistakes, which she couldn’t redo. She knew it but she couldn’t go back and redo. I would call every other day to see how Daddy was, and if mother saw one little glimmer of what she thought was “Oh, he’s going to get better” then we all thought he was going to get well, and Rex got caught in the middle of all that. Back in the ’70s, I’m not sure if many people knew much about psychology, or at least how to tell a young child that his dad is dying.

Predictably—due to my dad’s poor health—most of the parenting and disciplining was left to my mother, although she had a few health issues of her own. She’d had polio as a child and while there were no lingering effects that could be clearly identified, when Dad got really sick she didn’t cope well at all and it triggered a central nervous reaction that impaired the use of her limbs. What that meant was that in order to take care of Dad while her mobility decreased, I got farmed out to stay with other people more and more, sometimes to people that I hardly knew.

Apart from grandparents’ houses on both sides of the family, one of my other favorite places to go was my uncle’s beach house place at Surfside, south of Galveston, because when I was there, I was basically there on my own, free to roam the sand dunes that stretched out for four hundred yards and free to get in the ocean and try to learn to surf, mostly unsuccessfully, I might add.

Strangely, even at this young age, I seemed to like fending for myself, scrapping to survive, and this was a trait I’d carry throughout my life. Whether it was because I had no choice or because I was a naturally independent type, who knows? Not only was it a way of protecting myself, but it was also indicative of a kind of single-minded drive that I would always possess. Yes, I was a small, skinny kid, but I always punched above my weight in every sense.

CHERYL PONDER

Rex was always full of it. He had a great little personality but he did pretty much exactly whatever he wanted, wherever he was. He thought he was independent from a very young age.

My dad passed away in January of 1972, almost exactly a year after his own father had passed, and I get the impression from what I’ve been told that it was a long and painful death. He was only forty-seven-years old. Young by anybody’s standards.

I was oblivious.

This is where it gets sticky for me. I’m not the kind to open up too much emotionally, and my dad’s passing is something I have never discussed with anyone, not even my mother or sister. I must have completely shut it out immediately because at that age I had no hope of coming to terms with what death actually meant, although I’m surprised about how much I actually remember about the events themselves.

On the day he died I was playing outside in the yard at the doctor’s house, the biggest mansion in town, as if it was any other day, and my mother came out to tell me that Daddy had passed. Although I was still very young, I can still vividly remember that the first thing my mother said was, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Of course I didn’t have an answer. I was a kid. I just kept playing…

CHAPTER 3

ON DOWN THE LINE

W
ith no father, and a mother who was struggling to cope both physically and emotionally, the road ahead could have been a grim proposition. I missed having my dad around of course, but because I had never experienced some of the things that kids experience with their fathers—learning to nail a curveball or how to catch a football—I couldn’t really say that I felt I missed out on that kind of fatherly input, because you can’t miss what you never had. All I do remember is that it seemed that people in the neighborhood took pity on me in an “Oh, poor kid. He lost his dad early” type of bullshit way, but I just carried on doing what kids do, playing in the street, riding around town on my bike, and the whole bit. Life’s got to go on…

CHERYL PONDER

Mother had the beginnings of a condition that’s related to muscular dystrophy, triggered—in many cases—by trauma. She’d had polio as a child but had never had any lingering effects of that, but after Daddy died she started falling for no reason. At that time she could pick herself up and do whatever she needed to do but as time went on, her condition got worse and she ended up having to go into a wheelchair.

After two and a half more years in De Leon, mother made the decision to move us to Arlington in June of 1974. It made sense of course. We were only ever in De Leon because of Dad’s job, so with him gone, there was no reason to stay because we had no other attachment to the place whatsoever. Apparently Mom briefly considered moving back to Graham, but it would have been hard without Dad and—perhaps more significantly—the city seemed a better move so that we could all be closer to my sister Cheryl and her husband Buddy.

Sometime after we left, my young life radically changed. While listening to music in my bedroom one night, I remember hearing the most fucking amazing sound emerging from my radio, and don’t forget, it was still only AM radio in those days. The name of the song was “Tush” and the band was ZZ Top, and when I heard this song, it immediately altered my outlook on everything. I held onto that feeling for dear life. Even as a young boy, I knew exactly what the blues was. I heard it being played all the time and in lots of different forms. I’d heard the Rolling Stones, who definitely had blues roots, and I’d also been exposed to the Beatles, who, while still having vague hints of blues hidden in the background, seemed to my ears much more like innovators within pop culture. But this was in a completely different and new style. ZZ Top was a new type of boogie, a new stomp, and I
really
dug it.

“Dallas, Texas, Hollywooooo–ood…” You know how it goes and that to me was fucking telling. My first thought was, “Screw this; I want an electric guitar now. This is what I’ve got to do. Got to do.” Until this point, I hadn’t been the kind of kid that had posters of bands on my wall—I was much more into sports and shit like that—but that was all going to change. I was probably only eight years old at the time.

So, after we moved to the city and when I showed up for my first day at my new school, I was faced with total culture shock. Hell, I was used to having eight kids in my class—maybe ten—and now all of a sudden I’m in a 5th grade classroom with fifty kids, split over three partitions. It took a while to adjust, and as a result of feeling lost in the crowd, I started acting like the class clown to get attention while hopefully making some new friends.

CHERYL PONDER

The main reason for mother and Rex moving into the city was to be near my husband and I. I wanted to help mother with Rex, and the opportunities were better for Rex in Arlington.

Even at this age I would take anyone on. I was a scrappy little dude for sure. I had no fear whatsoever and because I didn’t, the bigger kids soon became my friends, but usually only after I’d tried to smash their skull in a fight. I had no problem tackling someone who was a foot taller than me, and lots of kids were in those days. I used to whoop some ass back then, as that was only way I could guarantee respect, and if things went wrong, I always knew I could run faster than them anyway.

I guess you could compare my approach to what it would be like going into prison for the first time, where you hit the biggest guy you can get your fucking hands on in order to get immediate respect. All the other inmates would say, “Fuck, this dude must be badass,” and would leave you alone. That’s how I had to live my life. Remember, I had no father, my mother would never re-marry, and while my sister’s husband Buddy would do his level best to fill the paternal role, I pretty much had to raise myself.

My mom
did
do her best, though, and she definitely wanted to instill good morals in me. She also wanted to get me into something that kept me occupied, so the local church—the First Presbyterian denomination to be precise—fitted both bills because it had a really good youth squad.
And
there were a lot of hot chicks there. I don’t know whether I went more for strictly religious reasons or for the interaction with chicks, but I’m sure you can figure that out.

Either way, I sang in the church choir and had a lot of other activities going on that were connected to the church. Mom wanted to keep me really busy with singing trips—camps where you’d go away for a week on a bus to sing in different cities, that kind of thing. We’d go to the Little Rocks, the Shreveports, all over the place really, staying with other families from other parishes. Then we’d do our little bit during their Sunday service, and usually I was singing lead in
something
, I was that good.

The choir director’s name was Michael Kemp, and when I look back on it, he really helped bring out my talent by making me feel comfortable singing in front of an audience and the whole bit. He wasn’t a father figure as such, but he was definitely a mentor and he saw the talent and probably already knew that I was going to be some kind of a musician.

This church was cliquey though. Not only was the size of its congregation large, it was also organized religion to the extreme—while I probably didn’t see the writing on the wall at the time, in terms of what organized religion actually was, I was aware that it seemed to be all about who’s got the most money, who’s got the best shoes or the biggest house, and all that. Maybe when you’re going through your formative years you don’t really pay too much attention to the wider issues of a subject like organized religion; other things seem much more important. There are enough school studies that you’re trying to deal with, so a class subject such as religious study was just one more on a long list I had to take.

CHERYL PONDER

The church had a very active youth group. In 1975, the church hired a new music director called Michael Kemp, and he and his wife had just gotten their degrees in music and moved to Arlington. He was just so talented and he put together a church choir with the kids, and our daughter Charlotte and Rex joined and immediately.

Michael took to Rex because he could see the talent that he had. The kids went on all kinds of trips, and Mike became increasingly proud of Rex, gave him more and more responsibility.

While you could hardly say that I was an academic genius in class, I did take my studies seriously but always with this underlying sense that the subjects weren’t going to be too relevant to my future career, almost as if I knew my destiny. Fortunately I didn’t have to try too hard and was a solid B-student—initially at least—because I always had this insatiable appetite for knowledge. I always liked to read books: history, geography, you name it, I read them. I still do.

Around the same time I got into junior high band, which was an important move in the right direction for my musical aspirations but a backward step for my academics. Of course I wanted to be on the drum line because that’s where all the good stuff was—the part of the band that was most fun—but they needed me somewhere else.

So they pretended that they needed some of the brighter kids in there or certainly ones that were more qualified than I was, which didn’t make sense because I played in the beginner band, the middle band, and the superior band, and was All City and All State in music, and that would continue until I was in tenth grade in high school. The “somewhere else” they referred to would soon be clear.

What they didn’t have were any tuba players. So they thought, “Shit, this kid weighs ninety pounds, let’s go ahead and strap this fuckin’ sixty-pound tuba on him and make him ride the bus with it and walk all the way up a hill with this thing to practice.” Naturally, I thought this was the dumbest thing ever—but it turned out to be the right choice because it was excellent musical training and I got good at it in a hurry.

CHERYL PONDER

Rex getting into the little school band as a tuba player was the most significant moment musically for him, other than the fact that we had all always enjoyed
listening
to music. But him actually learning to
play
an instrument was a big step forward.

Like most kids my age, I played baseball, excelling at pitcher and shortstop. I played soccer until I got tired of running after a ball, and I played football, despite being too small to initially get on the football team. What I did have in my favor was my dad’s legs. He held the record for the hundred-meter dash in the state of Texas for seventeen years, and I could certainly cover the ground and catch the ball. Eventually somebody pulled some strings somewhere and got me on the team, but the coach—who was a total dick—just made me be a towel boy or a water boy. That was a shitty role, and all the bigger kids would tease me by sticking my head down the toilet and flushing it, known as a “swirlie.” Who needs a head/mouthful of shit?