Billboard has reported that the surviving members from Pantera, frontman Phil Anselmo and bassist Rex Brown, will be doing a massive tour across North America next year under the Pantera banner. It will be the first time the band has performed live since August 26, 2001.
“We are thrilled to be working with such an iconic band and bringing their music back to the fans.” – Spokesperson for Artist Group International
The pair have signed with Artist Group International as part of the tour. A spokesperson for Artist Group International released the statement, “We are thrilled to be working with such an iconic band and bringing their music back to the fans.”
Who will fill in for the Abbott brothers since both of them are no longer alive? Guitarist Dimebag Darrell was murdered on stage in 2004 during a show with the band Damage Plan, while his brother Vinnie Paul died of dilated cardiomyopathy and coronary artery disease in 2018.
Billboard’s report didn’t mention who would replace the Abbott brothers. It didn’t seem like it’s been confirmed yet, however, there has been some talk in the press over the last several years about guitarist Zakk Wylde replacing Dimebag Darrell.
“…it wouldn’t be Zakk Wylde. I guarantee you that.” – Rex Brown
Wylde has stated in interviews as recently as 2019 that he’d be up for doing a Pantera reunion but bassist Rex Brown shot down these claims. He told Eon Music in 2021, “It’s going to come up and it wouldn’t be Zakk Wylde. I guarantee you that. I’ve just put it out there so we can get on past it.”
Metal in the ’90s
The mid-’90s were a weird time for metal. Metallica went pretty commercial with 1991’s The Black Album. They later followed it up with their even more commercial record, 1996’s Load and had a full image makeover with shorter hair and more artsy album covers and videos. To some fans, it was a betrayal but that’s something Pantera fans could never say.
With each release, Pantera seemed to fly in the face of what was popular. Metal seemed to be irrelevant by 1996, they proceeded to write their heaviest record yet, The Great Southern Trendkill.
Having come off 1994’s Far Beyond Driven, an album that surprised many people by debuting at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts, The Great Southern Trendkill didn’t get much love from rock radio or a lot of attention from MTV. Some wondered, where could the band go?
“A lot of the discipline and structure we used to have went out the window.” – Rex Brown
Pantera began work on their follow-up in the fall of 1995, perhaps against their better judgement, but their record label wanted a new record. Bassist Rex Brown told Guitar World, ”We were all so burned out by that point. A lot of the discipline and structure we used to have went out the window.”
Pantera’s songwriting process up until this point saw guitarist Dimebag Darrell bring tapes of riffs to the band where they would proceed to write fully fleshed-out songs. Things were different this time around, according to Rex Brown.
“The riff tape was wearing out so we’d just go in there and all start playing.” – Rex Brown
Brown recalled to author Jon Widerhorn, “Dime used to bring a riff tape in and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we have to work with,’ and that wasn’t happening as much. The riff tape was wearing out so we’d just go in there and all start playing. It’s funny because kids go, ‘Goddamn, Great Southern was the best record you ever put out.’ And I go, ‘How could that be?’ Because it happened in such an off-the-cuff way. Listen to the bass part behind ‘Floods’. Straight off the cuff, man. That was straight on the floor. We didn’t even go back and re-record it.”
However, Dimebag told a different story when he was interviewed by Guitar World, revealing that some of the riffs off the album were old, including fan-favourite, “Floods”, which dated back to the club days in 1988 when he would improvise solo on stage, while some of the other guitar parts dated back to the early ’90s.
Following the band’s last tour, Dimebag Darrell built a studio in a barn in his backyard called Chasin’ Jason. He told Guitar World, “It started off as a jam room but then we decided to do our demos here, so we brought in some gear… The demos were so tough and lethal sounding that we were like, ‘Man! That’s almost it, right there.'”
“…we were making our most experimental record ever…” – Rex Brown
Not everything went smoothly in the makeshift studio though. Rex Brown recalled to Jon Wiederhorn, “He put up 3 walls and made a studio inside of it. It was quite an experience. We had built all these iso-cabs to get the sound down, but we had a huge phase control problem… There was a buzz going through the whole f—in place. And that on top of the fact that we were making our most experimental record ever, something that sometimes didn’t even have a coherent structure to it, made us all crazy.”
The band’s recording plans soon hit a wall. While Phil Anselmo was present for the demos, he was dealing with serious back pain. He wasn’t interested in going under the knife due to the 1 – 1.5 year recovery time, so he self-medicated, turning to heroin and painkillers. He soon became isolated from the rest of the band, setting up shop in New Orleans at Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studio, while the rest of the band remained back in Texas.
“Phil was going through a lot of mental distress and it’s all on that record.” – Vinnie Paul
Drummer Vinnie Paul told Jon Wiederhorn, “Phil was going through a lot of mental distress and it’s all on that record. You can feel the pain. You can see it. You can hear it and it affected all of us, no doubt.”
“…I was in a bad way.” – Phil Anselmo
Anselmo told the Do You Know Jack radio show his thinking behind recording separately from the band, “On a personal level, I wasn’t doing all that well because I was injured. I was making every rookie mistake in the world with pain medication and all that stuff, and I was embarrassed. I didn’t wanna see anybody, man; I was in a bad way.”
Anselmo’s bandmates knew what he was up to. Rex Brown noticed he was getting involved in harder drugs.
“That was the real start of the end.” – Walter O’Brien, Pantera Manager
Manager Walter O’Brien recalled in the book Reinventing Metal, “It was a constant conflict… It was like pulling teeth. By Great Southern Trendkill, he made Dime fly back and forth with the master tapes so he could add vocals and make musical suggestions. That was the real start of the end.
Phil wanted to stay in New Orleans. Communication fell apart. Cooperation was non-existent and the tone of the album is depressing and confrontational. To this day, I can’t listen to the album at all because of what went down during its recording and touring.”
The Great Southern Trendkill
Released in 1996, The Great Southern Trendkill made it clear that Pantera wasn’t going to dilute their sound and didn’t care whether people thought metal was dead or not. This was Pantera doubling down. It proved to be the band’s harshest album with Anselmo’s lyrics taking aim at the media and drugs and about a flood that wipes out humanity.
The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, moving nearly half a million copies before fading away. Billboard magazine wrote the album off as a commercial disappointment as it failed to match the success of the group’s previous effort.
“Pantera makes no excuses for what they do.” – Greg Thompson, Senior VP of Promotion
The label attempted to release “Flood” to rock radio in an effort to revive slagging sales. Greg Thompson, Senior VP of Promotion told Billboard magazine, “Pantera makes no excuses for what they do. From a promotional standpoint, we did everything we could to further their exposure. Pantera is like Phish, a lot of the group’s fanbase are not active radio listeners. Our job is to increase their base.” The album achieved Gold and nearly a decade later, it was certified Platinum.
The same problems that plagued the recording of the record came back to haunt the band on the road. At a homecoming show on July 13, 1996, at the Coca-Cola Starplex in Dallas, Anselmo suffered a drug overdose and was brought back to life by paramedics. Four days later, the singer issued a press release to the media. He told VH1’s Behind the Music he had an enormous amount of shame and relapsed a few more times since then with Pantera.
Anselmo referred to the album as a ‘dark horse’ record for the band and Vinnie Paul looked back and said he had trouble listening to the album, given the circumstances it was recorded under.
“They make church-burning Norwegian Satanists sound like Sunday school teachers.” – Moby
Moby defended the album, telling Classic Rock, “It’s so unrelentingly dark. The lyrics of ‘War Nerve’ are the most unrelentingly evil lyrics you can imagine. They make church-burning Norwegian Satanists sound like Sunday school teachers. It’s just that whole vituperative expression of anger and rage.”
Anselmo told the Do You Know Jack radio show, “The day we all arrived to meet up and go on our first tour for The Great Southern Trendkill, our road manager approached me and he said, ‘Phil, you know, man. Don’t expect sold-out shows, man. Heavy metal’s on its way out. Kids are listening to different stuff. And it’s gonna be rough. Don’t expect this. Don’t expect that.’ And I was, like, ‘Great! I appreciate the pep talk.’ But the best thing that remedied this bullshit diatribe was that he was dead wrong. That show — that first show — was packed to the gills, sold out, as were most of the other ones.”
“By the end, we were all completely worn out and we needed a break…” – Rex Brown
Rex Brown told Jon Wiederhorn, “I’m still not crazy about 2 or 3 songs on there but there’s still a lot of good stuff there. After we made the record, Phil got his [expletive] together and we toured. We were one of the biggest bands out there. We did the second Ozzfest, which was great money. We played through ’98 and then we did the Black Sabbath reunion in ’99. By the end, we were all completely worn out and we needed a break, but every time we tried to stop, something came up that we couldn’t turn down.”
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