The EM Poll

Hell on Stage

Jan 10, 2008 3:45 PM, By Jeff Perlah

           

An Interview With Pantera's Dimebag Darrell

The Abbott household must have been a noisy place back when Dimebag Darrell (known just as Darrell in those days) and his brother Vinnie Paul were growing up, because both started out playing drums. That situation didn't last, though; Vinnie's superior percussive skills caused Dimebag to reevaluate his instrument choice. "My brother kicked my ass, and I had to change over to the guitar," Darrell explains."We've had this rhythm thing going ever since. It's in the blood." Dimebag's instrument switch proved fortuitous-he's become one of the best-known guitarists in the world of metal, and his musical kinship with Vinnie is a major component of the explosive, no-holds-barred sound of Pantera.

As dynamic as this sibling duo is, Pantera wouldn't be nearly as ferocious without its two other members, testosterone-powered vocalist Philip Anselmo and agile-fingered bassist Rex Brown. On its newest album, Reinventing the Steel (Elektra), produced by Vinnie and Dimebag, the Texas foursome burns hotter than ever. Cuts like "Hell Bound," "Revolution Is My Name," and "Goddamn Electric" display a powerful new sense of musicianship while flashing back to the grooving force of Pantera's 1990 major-label debut, Cowboys from Hell, and its 1992 thrash-metal milestone, A Vulgar Display of Power. Given the band's reputation for raucous, high-energy live shows, it comes as no surprise that the tunes on Reinventing the Steel are perfectly suited for the stage.

Onstage caught up with Pantera during Ozzfest 2000, as the band members relaxed in their plush tour bus prior to performing at the sold-out PNC Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. Pantera's show would precede a headlining set by Ozzy Osborne (or "God," as Dimebag calls him). As the band members killed time before the show, Dimebag was holding court as usual. "Tonight, that motherfucker will be ringing like hell!" he said, referring to the packed amphitheater. "It's always an ass-whooping when it comes to Pantera."

The "cowboys from hell" didn't always work in such grand style. Before landing a major-label deal, the band spent years trudging through the indie metal world, releasing four now-out-of-print records (including Anselmo's debut, 1988's Power Metal) and performing in spandex and hairspray. "That's the way everybody dressed back then," Vinnie says. "I've got pictures of James Hetfield [of Metallica] wearing spandex. We were young kids when we started. We emulated our favorite bands, like Judas Priest, Kiss, and Van Halen. But we were also image-conscious and felt we had to dress the part to play the music. Then in the late '80s we realized, 'Those clothes and that hairspray and all that stuff isn't playing the music-we are.' So we dropped that angle and starting turning into what we are today."

These days, while many heavy acts blend metal with other genres such as hip-hop, techno, and even country, Pantera plays pure, unbridled metal. To gain a better insight into the band's take-no-prisoners live act, we spoke at length with Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul.

What songs on the new album do you find especially fun or challenging to play live? Dimebag: Probably every one of them, for somebody else-but not for us [laughs], because that's what we're geared for. But if I had to pick one, "Revolution Is My Name" has a lot going on: time changes, double lead guitar, a bunch of riffs. It's a nonstop chugger. But it's fun. It's like riding a roller coaster.

Vinnie: "Hellbound" is short but sweet, but it's a technically involved drum piece. "Goddamn Electric" is very challenging in the aspect of getting all the time changes and signatures down.

Is it hard to replicate your studio guitar work onstage? Dimebag: Pretty much everything I do in the studio, I make sure I can do live. We're a one-guitarist band, so I've got to cover my ass. I'd say the furthest out we went is The Great Southern Trendkill [1996], on which I layered stuff pretty heavily. There was more exploring going on, and you notice that we don't play a whole lot of it live. This new one [Reinventing the Steel] is stripped down to the bone. We wanted to get back to the raw, ass-kicking basics of it all. We usually put guitar elements like slurs, bends, and slides in the basic rhythm tracks, as opposed to my going back and overdubbing a pick scrape over this part while some other riff's playing.

So Reinventing harks back to an earlier Pantera era? Dimebag: Absolutely. We had time off between Trendkill and Reinventing, and we gave ourselves an overview and noticed that the Trendkill stuff wasn't coming across as powerfully onstage as Vulgar or Cowboys. On Reinventing, we wanted to grab the youth of Cowboys and the groove of Vulgar, but also the unstoppable extremities of Far Beyond Driven [1994], adding just a bit of the layered sound of Trendkill, and then reinvent ourselves. It's the one record nobody's given us any complaints about. We made everybody happy for a change [laughs].

How does the band come up with its arrangements? Dimebag: It usually starts from a guitar riff. I'm constantly carrying one of these little things [points to my tape recorder], because any time I sit down, something's going to come out and I'll forget it if I don't record it right on the spot. I have an accumulation of thousands of riffs, and I sifted through a bunch of tapes and picked out the best stuff for the new record. Vinnie comes up with stuff, too. He'll be playing the drums and go, "Man, that would make a great song-let's write something around it."

What distinguishes a Pantera arrangement? Dimebag: We still play lead guitar, we have a drummer who can play every tom, and a singer who really sings. Bands hardly ever play lead guitar anymore. Dude, back in the '70s, if you couldn't play the guitar or sing, you were nobody. Now music is so easy-all you've got to do is tune your guitar to an open chord and jump around. That's what sets us apart. And we're not afraid to carry around a heavy-metal moniker. It's who we are and what we do. A lot of bands have shied away from that-they've said, "Don't call us metal," and tried to change their styles. We don't bend, man. We do what's really in our souls, what our fans want, and what we're really good at, as opposed to trying to be something else. "I want to fit in with the times and the trends"-fuck all that shit! It ain't gonna happen, brother. I'd be bored, for one. And our fans would throw us the bird finger.

How do you communicate with one another onstage? Dimebag: The bird finger, if somebody fucks up [laughs]. We've been playing together for so long that we can look at each other and know what the other dude's thinking. It's like invisible waves shooting through the air.

Vinnie: If somebody's having a rough night, maybe we'll give him a little grin, like, "Hey, man, pick it up a little."