Keepin' It Real

With a career that spans a solid decade, boasts four platinum-selling records and an army of die-hard fans, Pantera has never been more on top of their game as they are today. This thunderous quartet — Philip Anselmo (vox), Dimebag Darrell (guitar), Vinnie Paul (drums) and Rex Brown (bass) — just can’t be stopped. And it seems as time marches on, so does the group.

Pantera’s most recent album, Reinventing The Steel, is a collection of songs as hard as anything they’ve ever released, containing every ounce of power and conviction the band has become known for.

This Texas quartet is currently blasting audiences from the main stage of the Ozzfest Tour, but before they hit the road, the Synthesis managed to catch up with Dimebag Darrell in Arlington, Texas — the group’s hometown — where he was preparing leave for the tour. Surprisingly enough, Darrell, king of assaulting metal guitar, is a Southern gentleman, expounding his ideas of truth and beauty in music in a frank and friendly manner, with a heavy Texas drawl.

It’s definitely just part of us, man, just like another arm or leg that we’re used to using, and if someone took it away, or if it ever wasn’t there, it would sure be a huge fuckin’ hole in our souls. We do what we do. We sing about realistic shit, and we just love to jam. We do it because we love to do it. We have a good time and that’s our main thing. It’s an outlet too, to some extent. I mean, I think music’s the most powerful thing in the world. If you want to get going, you can try poppin’ vitamins or workin’ out, but if you pop on, like, some AC/DC first thing in the morning, it’ll get you up and runnin’, brother, ‘till you get where you gotta go. And the right music will put you down at the end of the night, too.

Well man, we just know what our strengths are. We’re the fuckin’ kings of playing hard-assed and -edged, aggressive, honest heavy shit, you know? And the thought process, I guess, is more of a feeling thing. We start drinking, we start jamming, we start feelin’ something, we know we’re onto it and the magic starts to unfold, and — bam — before you know it, we got a fuckin’ Pantera hit on our hands.

After we did four records in a row, we did the live album Official Live: 101 Proof. We’d been out touring and we’d been recording live shows for quite some while, and we felt it was time for a live record. So we took some time off and mixed the live record and at that time we also did the home video three, Watch It Go, which was a shitload of footage that took some time to edit. And we still left a bunch of killer shit out. Anyway, man, so we were ready to go into the studio, but we got the offer for the OzzFest (’98), so we went out on that and had a blast. The next thing we knew, KISS was reuniting, the original Sabbath was reuniting and they were calling us to come play some of those shows. And man, when one of mentors call you, you just don’t pass on shit like that. And it kept happening, man. The Sabbath tour just kept getting extended and extended, and we finally finished the last one, when we started writing, and they went back out one last time, and we just had to say ‘damn, man, we gotta write a record.’ That was four years of non-stop touring. So we finally got to do the new record, and we wanted to set the shit straight and let everybody know we ain’t changed a lick; matter of fact, we got a little more potent over the years.

Yeah, and you know, there was a bit of consciousness on that end of the stick. After we’d written four records and we had that much time before we went in and recorded, we were looking at things like, ‘Damn, think of all the songs that the crowd really gets off on live. Which ones are the ones that always stand out off of each record?’ So we kinda rolled everything all into one — grabbed some of the youth off Cowboys from Hell, the groove power off Vulgar Display of Power, some of the insanity of Far Beyond Driven and some of the depth of The Great Southern Trend Kill. We kept all that weighing in the back of our minds. I mean, we didn’t go back and retrace any of that; we’d never make the same record twice. But a lot of bands just keep exploring, and the majority of bands are scared into thinking that they’re going to be old-hat if they don’t change their style to try to fit in with all the new trends and what’s coming through, you know? We’ve never been threatened by any of that stuff. We just kind of stick true to what we do, and that’s where our power lies. It’d be stupid for a band like Pantera to try to do anything else, and our fans wouldn’t go for it anyway.

To be honest with you, I really wish they weren’t so scared of us, man.

It tells me that the brutal truth hurts, and when you’re an honest band and you don’t kiss ass and you don’t play by everybody’s rule book, that they’re gonna be a little leery of ya’. They’re gonna be a little afraid of ya’. Although, radio has been real good to us lately on this record. If you’ve noticed, the heavy shit’s kinda coming back around, and their ears are a little more open to us.

Look, we got no problem with anybody. We’re just that one notch too heavy for radio to really blow us up or for MTV to be real happy with us. And hey man, what we do is for us and for our fans first and foremost, and if we ever let our fans down then we really don’t have anything, ‘cause we’d be letting ourselves down. Once again, it comes down to doin’ it for the right reasons. A lot of bands do it because this or that is gonna work or because somebody told them to do it this or that way, and that they were gonna receive this in return and they’re gonna sell eight million records, or whatever. It’s never been like that for us, man. We do it because we got it in our souls and in our hearts, and that’s what we fuckin’ believe in. There are so many different reasons to do it — the chicks, the dope, the success. It’s none of that for us.

[Laughing] Well, you know, brother, it comes with the territory. We don’t turn it all down.

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