Pantera originated groove metal.
Guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, bassist Rex Brown, and
singer Phil Anselmo provided a soundtrack for the disaffected, and a loud one at that.
This is their tragic real-life story.
The members of Pantera were infamous for their hard-partying ways, particularly when they
were on the road.
Their tour rider was basically a virtual liquor store.
Backstage, the band demanded liters of whiskey, vodka, and bourbon, plus several cases of
beer and bottles of wine.
Their production office required liters of booze and a bottle of French wine.
Onstage, they demanded two cases of beer and two liters of whiskey.
These were nightly requirements for tours that could run 80 or more nights.
Some of the mayhem caused by such copious alcohol consumption was caught on film.
Mostly, though, it's the stuff of legend, handed down in stories told by the people
who were there and shouldn't be able to remember anything, but somehow do.
Rex Brown, for one, has gone sober, telling The Rock Pit,
"I quit drinking completely; I don't even think about it, and it's just amazing now."
Phil Anselmo might have been anticipating his eventual slide into drug addiction in
Pantera's 1994 song "Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks," when he sang about drinking and smoking all
day and having done everything but tapped the vein.
At the time, he was dabbling in painkillers, looking for a way out of his misery.
Years of thrashing onstage had left his back a mess.
He had a blown disc in his back, which damaged the cartilage around the disc, and playing
show after show damaged even more cartilage.
He sought medical help, but he discovered that the surgery to fix his back required
up to 18 months of recovery time, a commitment he was unwilling to make while Pantera was
at the top of their game.
Anselmo turned to heroin to numb his pain, and he developed a debilitating addiction
that nearly took his life.
In fact, after one show on July 13, 1996, he shot up too much of the drug and flatlined
for five minutes before paramedics were able to resuscitate him.
He later talked about the experience on VH1's Behind the Music.
"This nurse leaned over and said to me, 'Welcome back to life.
You overdosed on heroin.'"
The relationships between Anselmo and his bandmates were never the same after his 1996
overdose.
Vinnie Paul Abbott told Blabbermouth that, in the aftermath of that incident, Anselmo
separated himself from the rest of the band, riding in his own tour bus and only interacting
with the rest of the group just before showtime.
As he recounted,
"You never knew which Phil you were gonna get.
You might get the pitbull that we all knew and loved, or you might get some dude who
was completely whacked out on heroin."
In 2001, Pantera decided that a break was in order.
A planned one-year hiatus became permanent in 2003, as Anselmo cut off communication
with the Abbott brothers, Vinnie and Darrell, and immersed himself in side projects like
Superjoint Ritual and Down.
The rest of the group was left angry and disappointed.
The Abbott Brothers moved on to form Damageplan, Rex Brown eventually joined Down, and one
of the great metal bands of the 90s was no more.
There continued to be some sniping in the press, mostly between Anselmo and Dimebag
Darrell.
The back-and-forth reached a head in 2004, when Anselmo told an interviewer that Dime,
quote, "deserves to be beaten severely."
It was a comment that would widen the rift between Anselmo and his former bandmates,
a distance that would never be bridged.
In 2004, the Abbott brothers' band Damageplan released their debut record, New Found Power,
and headed out on tour.
It was their first time getting back in front of audiences in three years.
On December 8, the band took the stage at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio, and launched
into the song "Breathing New Life," as they had for 33 previous shows on the tour.
Dimebag Darrell was headbanging with his hair in his face, when 25-year-old Nathan Gale
calmly walked onto the stage, pointed his Beretta 9mm handgun at Dime's head, and pulled
the trigger.
The music stopped and a security guard tackled Gale, who kept firing.
The scrum ended when a police officer arrived with a shotgun and killed Gale, who had killed
three other people besides Darrell that night: a fan, a club employee, and one member of
the band's security team.
"It was like a real bad movie.
None of it seemed real whatsoever.
None of it.
None."
The unimaginable tragedy sent shock waves around the global metal community.
Metal heroes like Rob Halford, Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead, and Gene Simmons sent out
messages of support.
Darrell was buried in a Kiss casket and eulogized by his friend Zakk Wylde and his hero Eddie
Van Halen, who had the guitar he'd used to record the album Van Halen II placed in the
casket.
Any talk of reuniting Pantera likely ended on June 22, 2018, when Vinnie Paul Abbott
was found dead, likely of a heart attack.
He was 54 years old.
As was the case when his brother Darrell was killed, tributes from the metal community
streamed in as the news spread.
Among the artists that paid tribute from the stage were Poison, Puddle of Mudd, and Megadeth.
Abbott was laid to rest in a private funeral service.
Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons provided a Kiss casket to Abbott's family, similar to the
one that his brother was buried in.
For Rex Brown and Phil Anselmo, Abbott's death hit particularly hard.
Brown released a lengthy statement in tribute to Abbott two weeks after he died.
In addition to sharing condolences and personal anecdotes, he wrote of his friend's legacy:
"He changed the game.
He was the original for his generation, a generation that's still going.
Everybody wanted to play like him."
Anselmo initially posted on Instagram a simple picture of a candle without a caption, letting
his fans express their condolences in the comments.
At a public memorial for Abbott, Anselmo was seen in an 8-second video in which he said,
simply,
"Vince, I'll always have love in my heart for you, man.
Rest in peace."