Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (7 page)

But this was still the Frisbee days for me. I wanted no part of the academic world. I felt like I was born to play rock ’n’ roll, not to learn material for another fucking jazz competition, so as strange as it might sound to have turned down a prestigious college, it was indicative of the kind of single-minded dedication to the vision I had for my true path in life: to live the life of a rock ’n’ roller.

CHERYL PONDER

I remember mother telling me that Rex was in this garage band called Neck and the Brewheads, and from what I remember he’d go there to practice, stay gone until all hours of the night, so at first it was very hard for mother to deal with because she was at home on her own and by one o’clock in the morning he often wasn’t home on school nights. Michael Kemp from the church used to come over to talk to Rex to try and show him that this was not the way to be a good kid. He probably felt that Michael turned on him when he sided with mother, but we all just wanted the best for Rex’s future. Mike said, “Rex, you are such a good musician. Let me get you a scholarship. I can get you a scholarship to any college in the country with your talent,” but Rex had no interest in that at all.

While I was doing my thing with Neck and the Brewheads and scrounging around every way I could to survive, the Abbott brothers were doing their own thing and getting a bit of a reputation in town. Little Dime was still only just learning the guitar, he could hardly even play fucking barre chords, but he steadily progressed until one summer in the early ’80s, somebody gave him Ozzy Osbourne’s
Blizzard of Ozz
and
Diary of a Madman
.

Dime then sequestered himself in his fucking bedroom for that entire summer, and when he came out he was a fucking virtuoso. It was that simple. His dad—who was left handed—had been helping him out, too, and not only could he play every note and chord that Randy Rhoads or Eddie Van Halen played, Dime could already put his own variations, his personality, on everything he played. It was this ability to improvise that made his guitar playing so plain fucking dangerous, even as a teenager. So whenever they had a show, I’d usually go along and hang out, and sometimes they’d get me to run the board and the whole bit.

TERRY GLAZE
(original lead singer for the first three Pantera records)

All of a sudden Darrell could play “Eruption” by Van Halen. It was just flowing out of him, completely naturally, and around that time they were putting on some guitar shows in Dallas. So this little, skinny kid with a giant afro goes to the first one, demolishes everybody, and wins a Dean guitar. We were all there and he out-dueled everyone; and then at the next competition, the winner won a Charvel strat and maybe a Randall half-stack, and Darrell won that one, too, and it was not even close. After that he was not allowed to be in any more competitions—so he became a judge. He also had one of the first Floyd Rose tremolos in Dallas if I remember correctly. We had only seen them in magazines or pictures of Van Halen, and we never really knew what it was. He found a guy in town that could fit one to his guitar so he took his Dean over there, the sunburst one, and put a Floyd Rose on there.

That was the year 1982 that everyone else graduated but because I skipped school, I didn’t make that graduation class. (I’d been too busy rolling joints and playing Frisbee, remember.) Instead I got a G.E.D., and under the rules it stated that I either had to be in school full-time or have a part-time job, or else the benefits my mother received because of my dad’s war veteran status would be cut in half.

Despite that, I jumped to junior college after lying about my age on the application form. Obviously they were always going to find out my real age and when they did, almost six weeks later, they kicked me out, saying, “Kid, you’re just too young,” even though I had the G.E.D., but I was always the youngest in every class because of when my birthday fell. Now what? I had to find some kind of employment, if for no other reason than to ease my mother’s anxiety for my future.

CHERYL PONDER

I’m not sure how much sway a G.E.D. would have nowadays but back in the ’70s it would probably get you into college after a couple of years sitting it out, but it was hard fought to get Rex to even understand that. Mother and Rex didn’t always see eye to eye, and in retrospect they both probably needed some kind of psychological help but neither one of them got it.

So, to supplement my gig income—which at that time came mostly in liquid form—I had all kinds of jobs, the first of which taught me how to adapt to opportunities that might present themselves in order to make money. I worked out of a kiosk in the middle of a parking lot where I was supposed to be working for Fotomat, but that wasn’t all I was doing.

You see, in those days I could buy these black beauties—speed—for sixty-five bucks and there would be maybe two thousand pills that I could sell for a buck each. So if somebody wanted to stop by and pick up a hundred, it was no problem because all I had to do was stick them in this little Fotomat roll-bag, void the ticket, and that was that. I used to sell acid out of this place, too, and if people wanted to come and get bulk, no problem, I’d sell them bulk. I made a fucking fortune as a little seventeen-year-old drug dealer. I’d leave for an hour to sleep or get high, come back, and there’d be guys beating on the doors and the windows, and all the while I was stoned out of my head. I worked at all these different Fotomat kiosks across county lines, and in most cases it was all about selling drugs, except when I was bored and I’d go through people’s pictures and shit—you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I saw.

I had a great stroke of luck when I found some pictures of Randy Rhoads taken in 1980—young as you could imagine—so I called Darrell at 261-2260 (his home number; I’ll never forget it) and said, “Dude, I’ve got this print you’re not going to fucking believe.” I pestered the fuck out of him until he took it off me—kind of a payback for loaning me their gear all those times—and I even fixed Terry Glaze and Vinnie up with jobs at Fotomat, too.

TERRY GLAZE

Working for Fotomat was a great job because when I worked there very few people would come by each day. I liked it because I was attending college so I could just sit in there, study, and get paid to do it.

In addition to selling all this kind of shit out of the kiosk, I’m also routinely swindling money off Fotomat by voiding tickets and pocketing the cash. I was a fucking hoodlum and in my mind it was all about survival. It’s no surprise that I had some crazy-ass customers coming to these kiosks, but they had to be low-key or I wouldn’t sell to them anymore. If I found out they were on the street talking they were fucked,
and
I’d charge them double.

When that ended, my mom got me a job placement at Texas Electric where my dad used to work. They had me doing the mail runs in a truck around the Ft. Worth area, after which I’d go home, sleep for two or three hours, and then we’d play the clubs until three in the morning. This went on for six months or so until I finally said, “I can’t do this shit anymore” and tried to find something else.

CHAPTER 5

12 O’CLOCK HIGH

D
arrell Abbott’s on the phone, he wants to talk to you,” my mom shouted from the garage door one night after I’d just gotten back from playing with my band Neck and the Brewheads.

“What does he want?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. He just wants to talk to you,” she told me.

It was eleven o’clock and my bass was still in the backseat of my car. I picked up the phone, and he asked me if I wanted to come to the studio and play some bass on some stuff. I was already baked—had already smoked about three joints and had drunk a quart or two of beer—but I got straight back in my car and went to the studio.

My mom probably shouted after me, “It’s eleven-thirty at night, you should be in bed!” She could never get me to stay home at night. But, of course, I was already gone, so I wouldn’t have heard her anyway.

When I got there they wanted me to play on three songs that would ultimately end up on the
Metal Magic
album and they were actively trying to get rid of their original bass player, a guy called Tommy Bradford, because he’d said he wanted to go in a different musical direction. So I just played naturally, did what I did, and we recorded these songs. I think that some of those originals actually ended up on the first record.

In my mind, Pantera made sense as a long-term deal because as good as we were, Neck and the Brewheads was really just a party band and all the boys were fixing to go to college anyway. But with the brothers I knew they were serious. We all had the same goal in mind and wanted to be the best that we could.

TERRY GLAZE

Vinnie and I had known each other from high school, and Vinnie was by the far the best drummer in the area. Me and my buddy Tommy Bradford, who played bass, wanted to put together a band and we desperately wanted Vinnie in it, but he said, “If you want me, you need to take my little brother Darrell also.” He couldn’t play too well at that time, but pretty soon he’d turn into a monster. We knew who Rex was, of course, because being such a small place, we’d heard that he played around town with his band. So when Tommy wanted to leave the band to do his own thing, we asked Rex to come down and do some overdubs on some tracks that would end up on the first record. Before Rex joined, we were basically a five-piece because we had a guy called Donnie Hart singing.

It was clear from the first session that I was their guy, or at least to me it was. They asked me to join properly on June 7, 1982. I was seventeen years old. I remember the day so well. They felt they had to lay down some basic ground rules: one, I had to quit smoking and two, I couldn’t drink, so when I walked into my first rehearsal as a band member, I had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and a six pack of Löwenbräu under my arm. That is the fucking truth and that’s how it all began.

Understand that the guys were really straight-edged in the early days, almost clueless when it came to drugs and alcohol. They didn’t drink, certainly never touched drugs, and hadn’t really opened their minds to music or the rocker lifestyle like I already had. All they wanted to do was play Def Leppard, which I was into as well. (
High ’n’ Dry
was just out, I think.) Because from seventh to eleventh grade I’d had all this musical experience and the best theoretical grounding possible for a young kid, I always had a perfect pitch. I could pretty much listen to a record—and when I say record I mean a track—and pick out exactly what needed to be played, whereas with other cats it could take them a long time to get something down.

TERRY GLAZE

I wanted to write songs and if I was going to do that, I was going to want to sing them, too. So Donnie Hart left and I became the singer in what was now the four-piece Pantera. Rex sang backing vocals, Vinnie sang a lot, too, but Darrell just stood there and your jaw dropped. Regardless of whether we were playing little country towns or city shows, Darrell was the guy that kept the people in the room. Even at that time I knew that I was in the company of someone truly incredible, and the cool thing about him was that he never tried to make you feel that he was so much better than you. He was just like a big kid.

So, you could say that I brought much more experience to the table than they did in terms of musical ability, and certainly some much-needed street smarts. There was payback though: they wanted me to play in fucking spandex, and at first I just totally refused to get into that slippery shit. I wanted to stick to my own style because I liked to think image didn’t matter. Then here comes all these bands that really relied on image, and I had to confess that when the first Mötley Crüe record came out I realized that all the leather actually looked really cool. So what the fuck, there I was soon enough borrowing my first pair of spandex from Dime. I didn’t like it but it was what we had to do to get in the clubs and establish any kind of attraction from the crowd.

RITA HANEY
(girlfriend of Darrell Abbott)

I knew Darrell before I knew Rex but I got to know Rex best around high school time, that’s when he came into the picture and he was wiry, feisty, and pretty rebellious. Darrell used to tell me all the time how he’d run into Rex in different places and Rex would say, “I’m going to play bass for you,” but at the time he had a broken arm from a skateboarding accident. Darrell just blew him off but when they did audition him, he showed up doing the exact things Darrell told him not to do!

Because we were young and hired the cheapest booking agents possible, we took any kind of gig we could get our hands on: proms, bar mitzvahs, whatever was out there. Initially we only played around Dallas but soon we’d be travelling up to six hours away to parts of Oklahoma and Louisiana to do more shows and because we weren’t old enough to get into clubs, Jerry Abbott (AKA “the old man”) would need to come out and (a) get us in and (b) try—in vain—to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Jerry would make Dime and me share a room, and that was a mistake because this is when I finally got Dime to check out drinking. We had this roadie who was of age and would buy us bottles of Jack, so we’d just shut the lights off and climb out the window to drink while the old man was asleep in the room next door. Now that Dime had started drinking, he steadily took it to a higher and higher level—good Lord did he ever.