More Thoughts on a Mess...


I was thinking about this whole big deal between Phil Anselmo and his former Pantera bandmates Dimebag and Vinnie, earlier... it's just stupid shit, basically. I wonder if Pantera hadn't made two shitty albums in a row (101 Proof Live and Reinventing the Steel) if Phil would have still been so interested in doing all his side project stuff... I mean, yeah, Down was around for a while before the suckdom began, and I was fine with that, because they fuckin' smoke... but y'know... to be honest, Pantera had begun to fade away into the shadows after The Great Southern Trendkill, and well... they just weren't the same...

Everybody always talks about how awesome Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display of Power were... but to be honest, I absolutely love Far Beyond Driven and The Great Southern Trendkill way more than their predecessors... Sure the first two "modern-era" Pantera albums were incredible, but the latter two were probably two of the most underrated achievements in metal... Far Beyond Driven contains possibly the scariest & most wicked "metal" guitar solo, ever, in the song "Throes of Rejection," not to mention the fact that the album is just totally sick from beginning to end... and ...Trendkill is, again, a sonic feast all the way through...

And then, I also reminded myself of something - I played in a band in '96 and we always dug jamming on about twenty different Pantera covers for fun during practice... one of which was the song "Godsize." In that song, Phil sings, "I drink all day, I smoke all day, I took the Devil's breath away - I've done it all but tap the vein..."
In later years, I always found that line a bit of a mystery (and a little amusing (also in that he thought he was "becoming Godsize")), considering that the last time I saw them (in '96 in Dayton, Ohio with White Zombie, and then pretty much unknowns deftones (fuckin' rocked my ass off) and eyehategod), it was about a week after Phil O.D.'d "the first time" - and came out with that "I was clinically dead for six minutes" letter "of apology" where he admits he likes to ride the Horse and stuff... Had to wonder how long he'd been on the needle at that point... I mean, to have a song that says he doesn't shoot up, and then two years later to overdose and stuff. Just always kinda rubbed me the wrong way a little...

Regardless, I stand by my original statement that I hope everyone can get past the namecalling and babified whining about each other shit and get on with making good music... Of course Damageplan is gonna sound a lot like Pantera - it contains the guys that wrote all of Pantera's music and beats... and the new singer they have is a lot like Phil - which is fine by me... I mean, hell, they coulda got some choad like Kip Winger, or something (who was just here, playing at the retro hair band bar the other day - hoo...ray...)... Yeah, they're probably gonna play some old Pantera tunes, too... Again, that's fine... They've more than earned the right to. I mean, I've already seen Pantera do it, I've played a ton of their music in bands, myself, so I have no qualms with watching members of an old band play their old, glorious stuff... and Phil is certainly within his rights to just leave it all behind and never utter an old Pantera lyric again if he doesn't want to... but it still pisses me off that it had to end like this... I reported it on my radio show in early 2002, and no one believed me - even the guys in the band were trying to play it off like it wasn't true... but it was... and to go down like it did... well, it could have (and should have) been handled with a little bit more class between all parties, I think. Now, we're all stuck with a bunch of "he said, they said" garbage that isn't gonna change the fact that they're not a band, anymore...


Listening to: Fingertight - "In the Name of Progress" (2003)