Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera by Rex Brown

our efforts to get noticed, we went to Hollywood and showcased our material everywhere—the Whisky, Troubadour, and Gazzarri’s—every place that we could possibly get in. Then we had a residency for a week in Phoenix and one in El Paso, Texas, trying to make enough bread just so we could put fuel in the vehicle and get back home. Whatever my kitty was from playing all these sets for a week, my bar tab pretty much took me out of the picture, even though I was still underage. It was pretty tight living.

    SO WITH GIGS taking up nights and weekends, we’d spend the days just writing songs. The boys would get me and Phil, and we’d all go to the studio and start piecing stuff together. We probably already had two-thirds of the Power Metal record done by this point—certainly we had all the melodies—but Phil started turning us on to all kinds of different stuff that we hadn’t listened to before, because he turned out to be the biggest fucking metalhead of all time. He knew every fucking band there was to know.
    Thrash metal was the big thing at the time, with bands like Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer all releasing killer thrash metal records in ’86 and ’87, and it seemed that if you didn’t have some kind of thrash element to your songs you were going to be left behind.
    As closed-minded as the Abbott brothers were, they listened to the stuff that Phil put on in the vehicle and it would make a really big impact. They had no choice anyway. When we were driving, Phil was always in the front seat being the DJ and so bands like Voivod, Venom, Soundgarden, and a lot of Mercyful Fate—that kind of stuff—appeared on our radar and definitely influenced how we viewed our own sound, even if it only registered on a subliminal level. None of it was mainstream and nobody at any of the places we normally played would have known any of these band’s songs, but Phil’s more hardcore background was inadvertently steering us on to a much more extreme path.
    Logically, with most of Power Metal already done, we decided to scratch the existing vocals and let Phil do what he did. As a result, and in contrast to what everyone likes to say, Power Metal is much heavier than anything we’d done before.
    By this time we had bought a Ryder truck, had more gear, and also had a full-blown road crew working for us, so Vince and I used to take the old man’s car, a decrepit Pontiac Grand Prix, to gigs. Vince couldn’t drive to save his life and he always wanted to tow his boat behind the car when we went on the road, so that we could stop somewhere and go fishing. He would just run over shit and that boat would come off the back all the time, and we’d have to say to him, “Vince, look how the boat’s sitting now.” And it would be sitting sideways or backwards or something.
    “Ohhh shit, well Goddamn; then I better roll it over!” That’s how Vinnie talks.
    “Yeah that would be nice, if you want to keep the boat and save it,” I’d say. We then had to tie the boat down on the trailer so that it wouldn’t come off while Vinnie was driving.
    We used that boat to do a lot of fishing and caught a shitload of bass. I remember we got lost once out in some body of water and Vinnie kept trying to direct us.
    “Take a right. Take a right here,” he’d shout.
    “Vince, you have no fucking idea where we are. It’s dark.” And there were these big stumps that stood up two feet out of the water, which of course we hit and the boat almost turned over many times. He was a bad-ass fucking drummer but a complete liability in many other ways, I’ll tell you.

    WHEN WE WEREN’ T GETTING LOST in the boat, Pantera was starting to gather this incredible fan base in town. We’d sell out every night and start making some pretty good dough playing places like the Basement, Joe’s Garage, Matlock’s, Dallas City Limits, and, of course, Savvy’s.
    This was during what seemed to be a whole movement where people were getting into