60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Walk”—Pantera

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Bring your electric guitars and join us as Rob dives into the world of heavy metal when taking a look back at Pantera’s certified head smasher, “Walk.” Later, Sean Fennessy joins the show to discuss what ‘Extreme Championship Wrestling’ has to do with Pantera. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Sean Fennessy Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm pretty sure that roundabouts 1995, as a hapless 17-year-old amateur guitar player with a cheapish-black Gibson epiphone and vague rock star dreams, I paid five American dollars for a magazine that promised to teach me how to play this song. Brain Stew by Green Day from their 1995 album,

Insomniac. At this time, I had an after-school job. I made 5.25 an hour, bagging groceries, corraling shopping carts, and ineptly flirting with various ladies in the floral produce and seafood departments of our local grocery store. Minimum effort for minimum wage. That's $5.25 before taxes. I surrendered an hour of my teenage life, the spoils of my youth, 60 minutes of my prime toiling in the paper or plastic trenches just to exchange that money for a copy of either guitar world or guitar player. I don't care. I got no brand loyalty to either magazine. Every month along with features and interviews and gear reviews I didn't care about that used terminology I didn't

understand. Every month these guitar magazines would pick four to six popular rock songs and transcribe them. Full musical notation, guitar tabloyal. sacred texts. You too can learn to play. What? Alive by Pearl Jam. Wish you were here by Pink Floyd. Are you going to go my way? By Lenny Kravitz. Connection by Elastica. Perhaps even silent lucidity by Queensreich. Great songs. All. Valid ambitions. All. Useful transcriptions. All. And then there's this shit. I did switch to the Godzilla soundtrack version. of Brain Stew. Yes, thank you for noticing. This is the superior version of Brain Stew. You can tell it's the Godzilla version due to the randomly inserted Godzilla Roars, which were not, for the record, transcribed in this magazine. That might have been worth five bucks, actually. This is an insultingly easy song to learn to play on guitar. That's my point. Great song, the Godzilla version especially. I got no beef with Brain Stew. I very much got beef with myself at 17. exchanging hard currency for professional written documentation of an insultingly easy song to learn to play on guitar. To quote the great stand-up comedian and donut enthusiast Mitch Hedberg, we don't have to bring ink and paper into this. Allow me to illustrate.

Here's what we'll do. I will spare you this indignity. Here's what we'll do. Even if you've never played, even if you've never held a guitar in your life, I am going to teach you to play Green Day's brain stew. right now. This is happening. Get a guitar. Find a guitar. You got a guitar? All right. I'm assuming you're right-handed. If you're left-handed, I can't help you. I'm sorry. I got no idea what you're supposed to do. We don't have the technology to deal with left-handed guitarists yet. It's play drums. That's my advice. Okay, you're holding the guitar. You're going to make a bar chord. Take your left hand,

the index finger and the ring finger of your left hand. Hold those two fingers like a little equal sign and press them down on the strings somewhere along the neck of the guitar. It doesn't matter where. It doesn't matter. Anywhere, it's fine. And now with your right hand, go durnert. See? Now move your left hand just a little bit down the neck to your left. Not a lot. Just a little like whoop. And now do the right hand thing again, Dernard. See? And then again, Woop, Dernard, whoop, Dernard, and that's it. You're done. You just learned the whole song. I just saved you $5.Brain stew. Great song. Also, Brain Stew, the easiest song to learn to play on guitar in world history.

Excuse me. One of the two easiest songs to learn to play on guitar in world history. It's a tie for first or last. You know the other one? You know the other world famous, insultingly easy song to learn to play on guitar? You know it. Sure you do. Glissorine by Bush.

Also a great song. Also a song I can teach you to play on guitar in the next 10. seconds. Now you take your left hand and you start off going up the guitar neck. This time you go, burn, burn, burn, burn, burn it, burn it, burn it, whoop, burn, burn it, burn it, burn, burn it. Now go down. Beaut, burn, burn, burn, that's it. You're basically Gavin Rossdale now. You're welcome. I am so mad that I paid real money for brain stew tablature. $5 in 1995 is like $50. Now, this transaction was an insult to literally everyone involved. Insulting to myself. Insulting to Green Day as professional musicians with respect for themselves. Insulting to the professional musician working for the

guitar magazine who had to demean him or herself by committing the brain stew riff to ink and paper. Insulting to the clerk at B. Dalton bookseller or wherever I bought the magazine. Insulting to the women whose groceries I bagged for a solid hour to afford this unimaginable luxury. I have have this crystal clear memory of standing in my little bagging station. The conveyor belts rolling groceries are rumbling at me. And I'm holding a keesh, a giant pie-sized ham and cheese keesh. And for unclear reasons, I severely bend the keesh. I fold it. I basically break it in half to cram it into the paper bag I got going. Just mystifying behavior. I didn't say I was good at this job. And the woman buying this keesh just looks at me with dim.

disbelief and the woman behind the keesh woman, the next lady in line, a total stranger, that lady taps the keesh lady on the shoulder and says, look what he's doing to your keesh. This is a voice in my head to this day. Look what he's doing to your keesh. To quote Brian Adams, those were the best days of my life. I was paid $5 for that humiliating experience. And I don't even know if I ever learned to play the fucking song. Hold on, though.

Wait a second. This magazine with the Brainstew tab in it, did it also include jaded? Because that's like a whole bonus song. The plot thickens. Guitar Magazine scared the hell out of me as a teenager. Intimidating, taunting, demoralizing. I browsed them incessantly back in my mall haunting B. Dalton years.

I bought quite a few. I even made legitimate use of a few of those. I've been sitting here in silence for the last 10 minutes, trying to think of a specific song I learned to play thanks to a guitar magazine. This is my best guess. Just that part of today by Smashing Pumptons. This is as far as I ever got. I still pick up a guitar sometimes and play just that.

That's how you play that. You're welcome. I should find an open mic night around here and show up and just do that for 20 minutes. That's like performance art. I get beaten up or elected president. Here to my mind is a key difference between vague rock star dreams and concrete, theoretically achievable rock star dreams. Wanting to be a guitar god is not the same thing as actively laboring to become a guitar god. Okay, let's take Pearl Jams alive. Let's say hypothetically it's 1992. You're in junior high. You're watching Saturday Night Live. Sharon Stone is

the host and Pearl Jam is the musical guest. And Eddie Vedder's wearing a backward baseball cap, which was the style at the time, and sitting at home, you watch an awe as Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready whoops ass on the giant rad guitar solo at the end of a live. Question for you. Does it interest you to learn that on Pearl Jam's debut album, 10, Mike McCready often played a black 1962 Japanese reissue Stratocaster through a Marshall JCP 800 amp with a 4x12 cabinet and 25 watt speakers. They'll use Defender Baseman Am for the clean tones on the song Black with the

strad in the second pickup position for that out of phase Jimmy Hendricks type sound. Shoutout guitar lobby.com. Did you know that after 10 blew up and Pearl Jam made a buttload of money, Mike McCready splurged on a super pricey 1959 Stratocaster because that's what Stevie Ray Vaughn played? Then Mike loved that guitar so much. He got 59 tattooed on his left wrist, but then later he found out it was actually a 1960

hybrid model with 1959 pickup. congratulations, Mike, or sorry that happened. Are we all clear on the fact that on the custom shop version of that strat, which a couple years back, Fender started selling for $22,000 a piece. On that guitar, Mike uses a vintage style synchronized tremolo with a Callahan bridge block with five springs on the tailpiece for a tighter tremolo for stability. So it stays in tune when he plays Evenflow and Jeremy. Shoutout Guitar.com.

Are you asleep? Did you conk out on me, still holding your guitar, on which I just taught you to play brain stew and glycerine? I would read these guitar tech magazines as a teenager, and my eyes would glaze over when I hit the technical specs, the gearhead shit, and all the hardcore technique talk about alternate tunings and palm muting and harmonics and hammerons, or maybe the plural is hammers on. That's not even hardcore terminology, by the way. I can't even name any truly high-level guitar techniques. to illustrate that I don't know what they are. Was I intimidated and humbled by all this deep dive guitar god shop talk? Or was I just bored? As a teenager anyway, I thought I was 100% intimidated.

I just thought I didn't have the talents, the guts, the spice, the range to be a guitar god. And I was right, just to be clear about that. But I was also somehow unaware at the time that I lacked the fundamental interest to ever work, tirelessly for years just to clarify to myself that I didn't have the spice. Guitar magazines bugged me out whether I bought them or not. Even glancing at the covers of guitar magazines gave me instant anxiety, which was bad news for this guy, because whatever guitar magazine I was looking at, this guy was on the cover like 35% of the time. You get just a glimpse of this guy on a guitar magazine cover and your eyes are immediately drawn to the bright red goatee. Right? A goatee

long enough to poke his chest. And either it's entirely red, or it's just got a bright red spike embedded within it. Maybe the red goatee is a satanic thing, or maybe he'd recently eaten some borsht. From there, you check out the rad, pointy mustache that nicely accentuates the often quite pointy guitar he's holding. He exudes a formidable but somehow approachable air of pointiness. Then it's time to drink in the long, flowing, majestic Leonine hair, but like scar, Leonine, Fossa Leonine. Maybe he's wearing sunglasses. Maybe he's pointing. Maybe he's glowering. Maybe he's smiling. Maybe his mouth is open in mid-dirty joke cackle. Maybe he's cradling his pointy guitar as though or a newborn baby. Maybe he's slipping off the camera. Maybe he's somehow doing all these things at once. He looks like a pro wrestler who specializes in getting suplexed off ladders into buffet tables. He looks like a truck driver if they put truck drivers in the covers of romance novels. He looks like the kind of

guy you want to have a beer with and the kind of guy who totally have a beer with you, if that were the only way he could have a beer. He looks like the raddest dude imaginable. He looks like he sounds. Pantara guitarist, Dimebag Darrell is on the cover of the April 1994 issue of Guitar World. He's got his pointy guitar flipped around and he's pretending it strangling him with its pointiness. The cover line is the world's most dangerous guitarist. The four songs with full transcriptions, including the base parts that you can learn to play in this issue are disarm by Smashing Pumpkins, creep by Stone Temple Pilots, Am I Evil by Metallica? The Metallica cover of the Diamondhead song, I presume, and Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. I did not

plan that, by the way. I picked Wish You Were Here as a random example first. At first, I wrote down comfortably numb, and then I was like, no, Wish You Were Here makes more sense. I almost got the Smashing Pumpkin song too. You come over here and cross-reference my Google Doc edits with my Google Chrome history, if you don't believe me. That is an amazing guess by me. I don't mind telling you. That's how good I am at that specific, not very useful thing. So that song is called Five Minutes Alone. It's from the seventh Pantera album called Far Beyond Driven, also from 1994. Here is Dimebag Darrell in the April 94 issue of guitar world discussing the five minutes alone guitar solo. I will not do a Texan accent.

That is my pledge to you. Quote, in my guitar world column, which is called Riffer Madness, that's fantastic. I'm always talking about getting on one note and holding it, feeling it. So one day I was out in my garage, just dicking around on my eight track, trying to figure out what five minutes. it's alone needed. Since I was only going to take a short solo, I started asking myself, do I need to burn something real quick for the sake of burning? Never was the answer. Then I thought, why don't you take your own advice? So I hit that one note and it felt really good. At first I was going to hop off it, but then I thought, no, the one note, dude. And I hung and hung and hung. Then I

started bending the string up and down until it sounded like a siren. And that is all that song needed. The cover of Far Beyond Driven is a skull with a giant spike boring into its forehead. That was the alternate, the compromise album cover. Let's not get into it. Five minutes alone is about how Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo started sassing some jerk off in the crowd while Pantera were opening up for Iron Maiden and like 10 dudes in the crowd kicked the jerk off's ass and then the jerk off dad threatened to sue phil and then papa jerk off called pantera's manager and said basically i just want five minutes alone with this phil anselmo guy and the manager was like no you don't that's what this song's about it doesn't matter though only the solo matters

only the one note matters hit the one note and hang and hang and hang Fuck it. We're playing it again. Pantera scared the bejesus out of me in high school. It's embarrassing, but I don't mind telling you that either. They scared me both because they were a great big, scary metal band because Dybag Darrell was the quintessential guitar magazine guy. Guitar World loved Dymbagdell, the way People magazine loved Princess Diana. It took me a while.

It took me far too long to overcome my various proclivities and anxieties and accept dime bag as my personal lord and savior, my guitar god. But I got there. And he was waiting for me when I did, because he never burns just for the sake of burning. He burns to keep us all warm. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 76th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s. And this week, we are discussing Walk by the Texas metal band Pantera from their sixth album, Vulgar Display of Power, from 1992. That's the album cover where the dude's getting punched in the face. Except no substitutes for this Imperial era lineup of Pantera. Phil Anselmo and lead vocals, Dimebag Daryl on guitar, Rex Brown on bass, and Dimebag's older brother, Vinnie Paul, on drums.

Perhaps we will discuss aspects of walk beyond Dimebag Daryl's guitar solo, and perhaps we won't. Daryl Lance Abbott was born in Ennis, Texas in 1966. His older brother, Vinnie Paul, Abbot, who graced the cover of several drummer magazines, Vinnie had been born in 64. Their mother, Carolyn, loved her boys dearly and supported them unconditionally, and they loved her right back, which partly explains why the boys still lived with their mother long after they became famous semi-adult rock stars. As for their father, Jerry Abbott, Jerry was a big-shot country songwriter and producer. Uh, or, okay, a medium-shot country producer. Here we have Orson Wells, the Orson Wells, the wine guy.

Not so much singing as declaiming an original Jerry Abbott tune called, actually, I'm going to let Orson tell you the title himself. What it is to be young. What it is. To be old. That was the full title. I know what it is to be young, parentheses, but you don't know what it is to be old. Close parentheses.

From 1984. Is it too little? for me to rename this show that? The whole song is like five minutes long. I would describe this song's vibe as destabilizing. There'll be days to remember full of laughter and tears. There's also a George Burns version. Let's not discuss that either.

But so Jerry Abbott hit his own recording studio called Pantigo Sound. Pantigo, Texas is right near Arlington and roughly between Dallas and Fort Worth. The one year for Daryl's birthday, he turned eight, nine, ten years old. These are oft-repeated anecdotes. The details get fuzzy. His dad gets him a birthday present. His dad says, son, you can either have a BMX bike or you can have this. And he pointed at a guitar.

Daryl took the bike. And then Daryl got super into Kiss and changed his mind. That was like CSI Pantigo right there. I put my sunglasses on. Little Ace freely for you. Kiss lead guitarist ace freely burning through the 1974 jam deuce. My uncle Roger loves kiss

and he had this kiss record, self-titled, proudly displayed in his house and the cover scared me as a kid. All the Kiss dudes preening and full makeup bugged me out a little bit. That's just one way in which Dimebag Daryl and I are dissimilar. When Darrell was 11 or 12 or maybe 13 years old,

he got a Les Paul copy, a pig nose amp, and an electroharmonics big muff fuzz pedal. That's what it's called. It's not that funny. Every amateur teenage guitarist goes through the phase of being like, that pedal's called it. It's not funny. Daryl, in that guitar world interview, said that it was the big muff pedal that really sold him. Quote, feedback, distortion.

Dude, that was all she wrote. End quote. I'll tell you what. Me reading you dime bag, Darrell quotes, this isn't working for me. This isn't working at all. My voice is a terrible substitute for his This is an Orson Wells situation. Fucking, I was about 13 years old. I got a fake Les Paul, try to be ace freely, skip school, dressed up like kiss, you know,

a bunch of shit like that. This is Dimebag in the mid-90s promoting his new line of Washburn guitars. He's got a Washburn T-shirt on and everything. He looks pretty tired, is the neutral term I will use to describe his vibe. Tired, but super affable. I suppose out of respect we should let him plug the guitar.

We just built the very best guitar we could. It's the one I've always played, the shape, kind of updated the style of it a little bit, length of the wing on the back, lengthen the wing on the front, kind of offset the headstock, kind of just updated it. And you've got to figure you're working with a company like Washburn. You know, there's all sorts of shit that's going down. You take a look at the quality and the craftsmanship of the guitar.

I think it speaks for itself. I'm sold. I'm just going to put this thought out into the universe. 2025 Oscars. Best actor in a leading role. Danny McBride, victorious for the titular role in Dimebag, the Pantera story.

Directed by Richard Linklater. What's that? That's not metal enough for you? You want to really burn it. Dual roles. Danny McBride plays both Dimebag and Vinnie Paul. If this happens in real life, everyone listening to this has the Venmo me $20 apiece. I will accept that in lieu of a producer credit.

Vinnie Paul and every Pantera press photo looks like Mario, Super Mario, the popular Nintendo plumber character. He looks like Mario in street clothes photo bombing a Pantera shoot. It's amazing. So yeah, now young Darrell has been radicalized and or polluted by rock and roll. Kiss, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, a bunch of shit like that. that. His father, Jerry Abbott, was interviewed by Guitar World in 2010, and Jerry says that the first song his sons ever played together was Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. He says, they just fell in love with it and played it for three hours straight, which sounds like he's exaggerating, but if you've

ever listened to Classic Rock Radio, you know that just this part of the song lasts three hours. Pantara basest Rex Brown wrote a memoir in 2013 called Official Truth 101 Proof, the inside story of Pantera. I don't know if you say that 101 proof or 101 proof, and I feel like it's more honest if I just admit I don't know rather than go find out and then pretend like I always knew that. Do you know what I mean? The book's fine. I either want to go now and read 25 more basest memoirs or I want to read zero more.

There is no middle ground. Rex offers my personal favorite Dimebag Darrell origin myth. He says, Little Dime was only just learning the guitar. He could hardly even play fucking bar chords. But he steadily progressed until one summer in the early 80s, somebody gave him Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a madman.

Dime then sequestered himself for that entire summer. And when he came out, he was a fucking virtuoso. It was that simple. end quote. I dig this image. Danny McBride's got to recreate the scene where young Darrell walks into his bedroom as a shitty guitar player picks up these two Ozzy Osbourne albums, slams the door, and then there's like a three-month time lapse where you see the brutal Texas sun setting and rising 90-odd times, and he kicks open the bedroom door on September 1st and emerges in a billowing plume of rock concert fog as motherfucking dime bag Darrell and starts wailing like Randy Rhodes. Blizzard of Oz from 1980 is the first Ozzy house-born soul record, and yeah, it's got crazy train on it. And Mr. Crowley. But this is the last song and my favorite song on the record. It's called You Looking at Me, Looking at You.

It's Ozzy doing power pop, and it rules for two reasons. The first reason, of course, being Ozzy's league guitarist Randy Rhodes, who is not a verse to burning just for the sake of burning. For the record, according to a 1982 guitar world interview, Randy Rhodes plays three frontline guitars, a 64 Gibson list, Paul with stock pickups and Schaller Pegs, a flying V made by Carl Sandoval with Fender hardware, a DeMarzeo Distortion Plus in the treble position, and a PAF in the next spot, and a white semi-Ve by Charvel, which features all Charvel parts and Seymour Duncan pickups. Amplwise, you got three Marshall 100-watt heads powering six four-by-12 inch cabinets with all-tech high-powered speakers.

Randy bolsters a stick tone with heavy mid-range EQ, an MXR Distortion Plus, an MXR Equalizer, and a bunch of other shit, including a crybaby wad. The second great thing about this song is the chorus. How metal is that shit exactly? So thanks to Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhodes, Young Diamond is a guitar god now. And all the more godly for the fact that he can't read guitar tablature. Quote, I respect people that can read tablature and all that shit,

but I just don't even have the patience to read the newspaper. I'll read three or four lines, and that's it. End quote. Very well. In 1981, the Abbott brothers, Vinnie and Diamond Daryl, as Dime was then known, as a kiss reference, they start a band that they will eventually call Pantara. It's Spanish for Panther. Don't overthink it.

In terms of famous metal bands with brothers at them, Pantera, of course, echoes Van Halen, where both Alex and Eddie Van Halen started out as kids playing drums, but Alex was way better, so Eddie switched to guitar. Same deal now with Diamond Vinnie. They worked the Texas bar band circuit. They start out playing all covers, of course, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, a bunch of shit like that. They burn through a few band members. They find an early lineup that sticks, rounded out by Rex Brown on bass and Terry Glaze on lead vocals and some guitar and keyboards.

Pantara's debut album, Metal Magic, comes out in 1983. Dime is 16, and the other three guys are 19. But Terry Glaze's sex talk makes him sound like he's 12. That song's called Ride My Rocket. It's about inflation. This song's called The Biggest Part of Me. Guess what it is. Guess what the biggest part of Terry Glaze is?

Come on, guess. I guess wrong. All right? The longer I spend on this era of Pantera, the dumber this is going to get. This whole era of Pantara, the glam metal era, the not-so-deaf Leopard era, the self-released era, the mostly Terry Glaze era, this part of Pantera's history spans four albums in nearly a decade, and is available to hear right now on YouTube. Fan-driven YouTube rips of early Pantera albums that Pantera themselves no longer acknowledge,

more or less. My favorite YouTube comment related to the first Pantera record is, Wow, it's like Finding Out Slayer used to be Kiss. But my single favorite element of metal magic has got to be the album cover. Have you looked at the cover of Metal Magic, the first Pantera record lately? I say with the greatest of affection that this is a trapper-keeper-ass album cover. This cover was hand-drawn by the weirdest kid you knew in the seventh grade. It's like a half-man, half-panther guy, kind of red but more pink.

Kind of half-panther, but more house cat than panther. In the face, you got pointy ears. He's got a pointy tail. He's got a pointy sword. He's got a cool belt. He is otherwise nude. He's got super jacked muscles, including bulging leg muscles that leave very little room for genitals of any size. Oh, man, I would have loved this he man guy when I was five.

Shout out David Leatherman, who drew the metal magic cover, not Leatherman, as in the fabric. Somehow I just know that David drew this cover while sitting in detention for making crude remarks during health class. If you ask me to approximate the sound emitting from the half-man, half-cat fella on the cover of metal magic, okay, metal magic cat guy's mating call sounds approximately like, or perhaps d'r. The biggest part of Pantara in this or any other era is the burgeoning legend of Dimebag Daryl. This song's called Widow Maker, and the best part is when Dimes guitar goes woo, woo, We need to get me out of here. The second Pantera record from 1984 is called Projects in the Jungle,

featuring the not at all hit single Heavy Metal Rules. I have to tell you that recently I went to Home Depot on like a Tuesday afternoon, and I rolled into the Home Depot parking lot blasting this song, Heavy Metal Rules, at unreasonable volume, windows down in my sensible four doors today. and I found a safe parking spot, not too close to all the shopping cards. And I switched the music to headphones, right? Because my social skills of atrophied. And I saunter into the joint, like the automatic doors part, like the Red Sea.

And I just appear in Home Depot, redolent of virility and danger, as though entering an old-timey Western saloon, like the piano stops, the whiff of fresh lumber dancing in my nostrils right as the chorus hits. And it's the raddest and manlyest. I have ever felt in my entire life. And I got headphones now so nobody else can hear what I'm listening to. And yet every person in Home Depot instinctively stops what they're doing and turns as one to behold me and bask in my super macho radiance. And they're all like, ooh, I wonder what that tough guy is buying. And then I got some mulch. The third Pantera album from 1985 is called I Am the Night.

Vinnie Paul rocking the double kick drum there. We are progressing musically from album to album here a little, I think. Pantera by 1985 are a tight and well-oiled and fearsome, an extravagantly spandexed machine. Speaking of what was the style at the time. But while old Terry Glaze's charisma is substantial, and he can growl and or wail like the Dickens, I do think that in terms of lyrical content,

we'd all like Terry to progress a little, faster. You know what rules? Actually, heavy metal. That's what. I am never quite prepared for the vigor with which Terry Glaze sings, beat you with my stick. That is a delightful surprise to me every time.

This album I am the night will be Terry's last album with Pantera. in Rex Brown's book, in the bassist's memoirs, Terry gets to talk a little, and Terry says that partly there were creative differences. Terry says, quote, I liked songs that you could wash your car to where the vocals were the hook, end quote. Terry Glaze excelled at songs like that, by the way, I will wash my sensible four-door sedan to heavy metal rules anytime. But the other fellas were pushing Pantera in a more guitar-driven and heavier direction. The other fellas that all gotten super into Metallica. Metallica's master of puppets came out

in 1986, completing one of the radder and heavier first three album arcs and rock and roll history. Kill them all to ride the lightning to puppets. Plus, Terry wanted to go to college. And being in a band with two brothers sucks when they form an impenetrable voting block.

Plus the brother's dad is still around and somehow gets part of the publishing and is generally mucking up the money. Jerry Abbott is poorly spoken of in the bassist's memoirs. Pantara need a new frontman. Enter a chariastically glowering gentleman from New Orleans by the name of Philip H. Anselmo. And immediately, not a whole lot

changes. He can wail immediately, Phil. Give him that. Pantara's fourth album from 1988 is called Power Metal. We got a lot of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden influence happening. And hell yeah, out of that. This song is called Rock the World. You can watch the fuck out of your car to this. shit. The power metal album cover is just the fellas in Pantera. The Imperial lineup, the classic, the immortal, about to be superstars iteration of Pantera. And they're all looking feathered, high volume in multiple senses, majestic plumage. Leonine. I already said Leonine, but I'm saying

it again. They look like a heavy metal band in 1988. If I had to describe the sound emitting from Pantara on the power metal album cover. I'm going with Yeah! Listen! Pantara, a heavy metal band from Texas that formed in 1981 as teenagers. They made four records in the 80s and they dressed like it and they sound like it. They can sound like Maiden and Motorhead and Early Metallica and Slayer and Kiss and Ozzy and kind of sometimes

Journey. One more from Rex Brown. In the bassist memoirs, Rex recalls the moment when he was eight years old, end quote, my young life radically changed. While listening to music in my bedroom one night, I remember hearing the most fucking amazing sound emerging from my radio, end quote, AM radio, he clarifies. The song was called Tush.

That's T-U-S-H. T-U-S-H, the posterior. That confused me as a kid. I thought it was touch. T-O-U-C-H. I'm just looking for some touch. I was not confused as to the general sentiment of the song, just to clarify. I just got the word wrong.

Tush by ZZ-Z-Top from 1975. Z-Z-Top, the pride of Houston, Texas, one of them. Rex says Z-Z-Top was a new type of boogie, a new stomp, and I really dug it, end quote. This word boogie, you see, proudly attached to Z-Z-Top a lot, swamp boogie, perhaps, a bluesiness, a southerness. a heaviness, but also, yes, a boogie, a booginess. You don't just throw this word boogie at any old rock band full of hearsuit white guys, but ZZ Top earned the word boogie the way that Pantera 2.0 earned the word groove. Dimebag, can you handle this? Vinnie? Can you handle this? Phil? Can you handle this? Phil? Can you handle this?

I don't think you get the fifth Pantera album and pretty much the first Pantera album, according to Pantera. came out in 1990 and it's called Cowboys from Hell. UltimateG Guitar.com once asked Phil Anselmo. The URL is Ultimate Dash Guitar. I'm going to get a giant back tattoo of my browser history right now. They asked him, in essence, did the record company ask you to change your sound, or did you do it yourselves?

And Phil says, no. It was just us, and it was simple. It was always like Pantaro had read a great heavy metal song. And at the end of a great heavy metal song, there would be this massive riff, big hook. All I said to them was, hey, why don't we take the massive riff at the end and make it the whole fucking song? Trim off all that other bullshit, man. End quote. I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

I've been a rock critic for 20 years, and this is what I've learned. A lot of rock bands, even decent rock bands, when they super ostentatiously announce that they're going to trim. all the bullshit? They're going to be a no bullshit rock and roll band. They quickly discover, and maybe you listening discover this before they do, that their sound was entirely bullshit. And if they ever truly cut out all the bullshit, they'd be left with literal silence. Rock and roll, broadly defined, depending on the era and the subgenre and the specific band is anywhere between 85 and 99.7% bullshit. That's the point. The bullshit is the point.

The bullshit is the vast majority of the point. Very few bands in world history could even conceivably cut out all the bullshit, and basically none of those bands should. Pantera could. Pantara did. Sebastian Bach frontman for hair metal hitmaker Skid Row, with whom Pantara toured and whose asses Pantara kicked every night on stage, according to Pantara.

Sebastian once described Pantera's new sound as a cross between ZZ Top and Slayer. That about covers it. ZZ Top crossed with Slayer, kicking Skid Rose tushes in large part thanks to the red goate gentleman holding it down on guitar. When you're confronted with a groove like that, sometimes the only logical response is, Rob Zombie, frontman for Midnight Movie Metal Hit Makers, White Zombie, with whom Pantera toured. and whose bagels, Pantara, once duct-taped to Rob Zombie's dressing room sink, that is a real tour debauchery anecdote from a Pantera-themed special issue of the metal magazine revolver, the great duct-taped bagel caper.

Rob once observed that Dimebag, Vinny, and Rex all acted both on and off stage, like they wanted to be Van Halen, whereas Phil Anselmo acted, both on and off stage, like he wanted to be Henry Rollins. And that's part of what made Pantara so great. That about covers it. Phil Anselmo contains multitudes. There are myriad fills within Phil. There is barking James Hetfield-esque Phil, as featured on a Cowboys from Hell song called Domination. All right, good. We snuck in some Vinny Paul double kick drum action, too. We're multitasking. There is wailing, Phil, proudly reminiscent of Judas Priest's frontman Rob Halford. Here's wailing fill on a song called Shattered. Also featuring even more righteous Vinnie Paul action.

Finally, we got wailing fill again, but proceeded by growling as though telling a scary story to a group of unruly third graders fill as featured on a song called Medicine Man. I love this guy. One more fill. It's time for peak fill. Folks, it's time for cemetery gates, which fucking rules. Dig the piano bongs. First of all, I love the bonging piano. That's a hardcore piano technique term, by the way.

You can read all about it in all the piano magazines. Cemetery Gates is Pantera's stairway to heaven. Their November rain. They're unforgiven. Their wish you were here. Their silent lucidity. What happened to this band? Really?

Eight years into their career that made their fifth album and second album with their new lead singer, suddenly 400,000 times better than all their. previous albums. No offense to ride my rocket and heavy metal rules and so forth. But what the fuck, dude? Sometimes I wash my car to the huge super dramatic caught breath pause in cemetery gates before the electric guitar comes in. There are mundane industry type reasons for Pantera's colossal upgrade here. They finally got signed to a major label. They finally got a big shot producer, a guy named Terry Date, who'd worked with Sound Garden,

Overkill, Dream Theater, Metal Church, and Sir Mix a lot. Starting with Cowboys from Hell, Terry will be producing in the next four Blockbuster Pantera albums. It's maybe more accurate to say that Pantera helped make Terry Date a big shot producer, but everyone loves him.

One of Terry's first official duties, apparently, was to personally shave Phil Anselmo's head. If you're into super obvious 80s metal versus 90s metal symbolism. Clearly, Terry had the technical skills to help Dimebag get all those rad guitar sounds, but also the cat-herding studio dad interpersonal skills necessary to get these knuckleheads to record an album without trying to blow up the sun with a beer keg or whatever. Phil Anselmo talks about

touring with Typo Negative, the rad, dark, dark, romantic goth metal band with an eight-foot-tall beefcake frontman named Peter Steele. That's his name. That name's not funny. That name's not funny. either, and Phil Braggs about hitting a singing Peter Steele in the head with an asparagus. And that's quite amusing to me, the image of Peter Steele being like, you, I'm going to balk. But to my mind, the most colossal upgrade here is the songwriting itself. Cemetery Gates is an epic, with no scare quotes and incredibly no bullshit. Here's one of these deals where I have to physically restrain myself from playing you this whole song. Let me repeat. The first four hair metal ass Pantera records are great for what they are.

And Dimebag Daryl's solos are pretty objectively the best part of all of them. And going forward, Dimebag Daryl's solos will still be the best thing about Pantara. It's just that now every other part of Pantara is, to repeat, 400,000 times better. A copy of a guitar magazine that transcribes this solo is worth at least $200. Vinnie Paul in that Revolver magazine issue, he says, I think the sound dime had and the style back then was untouchable. He played with a lot of taste, a lot of heart. He wasn't one of those dudes that just wanted to go fast and make noise.

He had soul, and he felt like he could play solos that were like a song within a song. End quote. Dime back could absolutely go fast. Just to clarify, but no guitar max. magazine can teach you how to go fast tastefully. Look at what he's doing to your kish. When a song's got a giant rag guitar solo and the rest of the band kicks into another part of the song, they go back into the chorus or whatever. That's my shit. This is Pantera bringing Home Depot to you. Last Cemetery Gates thing, I promise. Dig the rapport between Phil and Dime on the word

gates. If you ever need to teleport to a strip club, just put on a 90s Pantera record and crouch. I would try that right now, but I'm wearing pajamas. And just like that, Pantera, one of the greatest heavy metal bands in the world. Cowboys from Hell will eventually go platinum. One million copies sold in America, but in time-honored metal fashion, this record's true impact can't be measured by charts or radio or MTV or even guitar magazine covers. Groove, soul, heart, taste, call it whatever you want, but there is now a tangible depth and height and width to Pantera's sound. The sixth Pantera record called Vulgar Display of Power, the guy punching the other guy in the

album cover is a hand model. FYI comes out in 1992. A whole lot happens in the broader realm of the broader realm of the world. of heavy-ish rock and roll music between 1990 and 1992. Yes, that includes Nirvana. Nevermind comes out in September 1991 and redefines rock and roll as far as radio and MTV and mainstream magazines are concerned. Alternative rock, yes, yes.

Grunge kills, hair metal. Yes, yes, yes. Pantera going forward will serve as crucial counter-programming to the alternative rock revolution. Put that in scare quotes if you want. In that Washburn guitar's interview, They asked the guy who's now calling himself Dimebag Darrell, what do you think of Nirvana and Pearl Jam?

Bands like that. And Dime just says, that's cool. Hey, man. Whatever for whoever, you know? Oh, God. Yeah, okay. Me saying that doesn't work at all. Here you go.

That's cool. Hey, man. Whatever for whoever, you know? Much better. But I would also argue that if we're talking major rock records released in 1991, Pantera, going forward, will also serve as crucial counter-programming to Metallica going forward. Yes, Metallica's fabled Black album, which Pantera bassist Rex Brown in the bassist's memoirs, describes like this, quote, we thought it sucked, of course.

I mean, we thought it was just terrible. We didn't get the commercial sound of it at all, and this made us even more determined to make our new record even heavier than anything we'd attempted before. End quote. Pantara's vulgar display of power came out a half year or so after Metallica's Black album. I will let Phil Anselmo describe the vibe to you himself. Vinnie Paul's ride symbol. Also, make a note of it.

As a bonus, I will also let Phil describe to you his personal philosophy, as conveyed during a song called Live in a Whole. I don't want to dwell on it, but there are Pantera songs from this era in which Phil appears to broach the topic of race relations. And I myself wouldn't touch the topic of Phil's thoughts on that topic with Terry Glazes' 10-foot pole. While onstage at a show in 2016, Phil gave a white power salute in what he insisted was either an inside joke. He was drinking white wine or a response to jerk off fans in the front row provoking him or both. he apologized. He said it was ugly. It was uncalled for. And anyone who knows me and my true nature knows that I don't believe in any of that. He said, I'm repulsed by my own actions and the self-loathing

I'm going through right now is justified by the hurt I've caused. End quote. Suffice it to say that Phil endures is a volatile and combative and not at all soothing guy. And like it or not, he's a crucial part of Pantera's enduring aura of menace. So musically, speaking for myself, as a grunge kid, as an alternative rock kid, as a Pantera scared me as a teenager kid. I hear a lot of Allison Chains in Pantera. As I believe we've discussed, you can also find semi-embarrassing late 80s band photos of Allison Chains, looking all feathered and hair medley.

I just like to think about these two awesome and, yes, groove-oriented bands, down in a hole together. Alice and Shane's got way more radio play, though, in part because one of the catchiest Pantera songs ever is called Fucking Hostile. This song is about the hypocrisy of society, man, fills against it. If you're into Pantera for the sweeping, gargantuan,

punishing stairway to heaven, grandiosity of it all, your jam on this record is called This Love, which sounds like evil Brian Adams for like 90 seconds. And then it sounds like this for about five minutes. I don't know if I agree with Pantera that Metallica's black album sucked, but the highest compliment I can pay vulgar display of power is that it sounds like a bunch of guys who thought that Metallica's black album sucked. Vinnie Paul in Revolver magazine told us about mastering this album,

sitting on the couch next to his brother Dimebag, mastering vulgar display of power, listening to the finished product in full for the first time. And Vinnie says, I remember Dime was sitting there on the couch and he was crying all the way through it. I went, dude, are you all right? And he said, it's perfect. It's exactly what I always wanted and always dreamed of. It's fucking perfect. End quote.

I like to imagine that Dimebag said that at this exact moment. The first thing to know about the Pantara song, Walk, is that this riff sounds easy to play but is not. in fact, easy to play. A totally note-accurate guitar magazine transcription of this song cannot convey the swing, the groove, the gritted teeth boogie inherent to the greatness of Walk. Nick Baukot, lead guitars for the great new wave of British heavy metal band Grim Reaper, told Revolver magazine that, quote, Walk is one of the all-time great metal riffs,

right up there with Enter Sandman and Smoke on the Wall. water. He says, and it's basically just an open string and a bent note. But the funny thing about the song is, as simple as it is, it's one of the hardest riffs to play correctly. To actually get the feel is really, really difficult. End quote. Okay, now try to get the feel while Phil Anselmo yells at you. In 2012, talking to the great metal journalist Corey Grove for Spin magazine, Phil clarified that he wrote walk in response to everyone in Texas who started sassing him after Cowboys from Hell blew up and they started doing way more touring. Quote, when we came home, our friends started treating us a little different because they thought it had gone to our heads. Like we've got this rock star thing embroidered across our faces.

But I felt like I was always the same guy. When I wrote walk, I had just a handful of those people in mind. And basically, my message is, take your fucking attitude and take a fucking walk with that. Keep that shit away from me. At the time, I took it to heart, big time. I was just defending my own unrockstarism, however the fuck you want to put it. End quote. Walk is about how Phil wants you to take a walk.

Yeah, got it. This is not a pop song and I will not troll Phil by arguing that it's a pop. pop song, but this is an excellent pre-chorus. I will say that. Put it this way. If you trace the long upward arc of Pantera, they got way better and got way more sophisticated in their songwriting without it ever feeling like pandering or quote-unquote selling out or explicitly chasing a commercial sound or whatever. It sounds way cooler when Phil says it, but they never submitted to the ones they will not be like. Phil Anselmo talking about the walk chorus, said, there's a sing-song feel, but it's hard as shit.

End quote. That just about covers it. That's a way more concise way to put it. As for Vinnie Paul in Revolver, he says, back in 1992, when it came out, you couldn't hear walk on the radio. It didn't matter where you went. Radio wouldn't touch us. And now I can walk into any sports venue where there's a football game, hockey game.

That song's played all the time. I hear it on the radio all the time. I hear it in bars all the time. It's like, what happened? Is this the new Pantera album 15 years later? Because they sure play it like it is. It's just crazy that it sometimes takes that long for people to accept something or appreciated. And I don't think any of us realize the magnitude about what Pantara was all about until it was over.

End quote. Now yet. It's not over yet. Not until die bag solos. 1994 is far beyond driven is by universal consensus, the hardest and heaviest and gnarliest number one album in Billboard chart history. You got a problem with everybody saying that. You take it up with Vinnie Paul.

Better yet, take it up with Phil Anselmo. This song's called 25 years. It's about Phil's father, and it appeared on a number one record. Depending on how you feel about mid-90s metal, Pantara were, arguably, bastard fathers to thousands by this point, and gods to millions, still getting bigger, still getting heavier. In 1996, Pantara put out a record called The Great Southern Trend Kill, which begins thusly.

That album came out the same year as Metallica's Lode. If you desire further contrast between famous metal bands, Phil didn't care for Lode either. There is one more Pantara record. Reinventing the Steele from 2000, I like it quite a bit. The song Yesterday Don't Mean Shit would also make an excellent title. for this podcast, but let's stick with the Great Southern Trendkill. My favorite song is called Floods. For the silent lucidity, scope, and enormity of it. Yes, but for Dimebag's solo,

especially. Dimebag's longtime girlfriend was named Rita Haney, and in Rex Brown's book, Rita says, The Flood's guitar solo was something that Daryl used to play in the pre-fill days, and he once made me a sleep tape, which I still have, consisting of 90 minutes of that solo, with all the harmonics forward and backwards so that I could fall asleep to it. End quote. When I imagine this tape, it sounds like the extremely beautiful end of the song. Pantera never officially broke up, but after reinventing this deal, they just kind of collapsed. Phil Anselmo had suffered a heroin overdose.

Backstage at a show in Dallas in 1996 and drugs and the acrimonian alienation that tend to accompany them clearly contributed a great deal to the band's slow dissolution. Side projects, too, Phil formed the band's down and super joint ritual. Rex Brown was in down for a while, and Dybag and Vinnie Paul were pissed, and eventually, in response, the Abbott brothers started a new band of their own called Damage Plan in 2003. So, my first job out of college in 2000 was in Columbus, Ohio, and an all-weekly called The Other paper. I was the arts writer and later the arts editor. But we mostly covered two things, wacky local politicians and Ohio State football. It wouldn't make sense for our office to be in

downtown Columbus near the State House and OSU campus, but we were way up north of the city. And as it happens, we were less than half a mile from a galactically seedy hard rock club called the Al Rosa Villa. I saw a bunch of grimy-ass local metal bands there with names like cringe and Boba Flex. I very much enjoyed the Al Rosa website's early 2000's ass message board where a bunch of local metalheads argued about whether keyboards were

sufficiently metal. I would not have taken a date there. It's how I will describe the Al Rosa's reputation at the time. As a much younger man, I found all of this quite amusing. I moved away. Damage plan played a show at the Al Rosa Villa on December 8th,

2004. Midway through their first song, Wally was performing, on stage, Dimebag Darrow was shot and killed by a former Marine who had diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and it would reportedly either blame Dimebag for breaking up Pantara or believed that Pantara had plagiarized his lyrics or both. The gunman kept shooting, ultimately killing three more people before he was himself shot and killed by a Columbus police officer. I know as much to say about this as I thought I would when I started talking. It's shocking and awful on a scale. that's almost impossible to wrap your head around.

In 2016, when a singer and former contested on the voice named Christina Grimmie was fatally shot while signing autographs immediately after a show in Orlando, Pantara put out a brief statement on their Facebook page saying, We are so sad and disappointed to hear that Christina Grimmy was gunned down the same way that Dimebag Darrow was. After Dime's murder, we all pray that our industry, i.e. club owners and promoters, would do whatever they needed to do to protect artists from gun-wielding fanatics. Sadly, that's not the case, and another rising star had to pay the consequences with her life. Something needs to change. That's in all caps.

R.I.P. Christina and R.I.P. Dime. Jeff Thompson, Aaron Halk, and Nathan Bray, end quote. Those were, of course, the other victims in the Al Roses shooting. Dye Bag Darrow was buried in a kiss casket. with one of Eddie Van Halen's guitars. That image also, I find very challenging to wrap my head around. Vinnie Paul died in 2018 of an enlarged heart and heart disease. I think about the Abbott brothers now, and it brings to mind that MF Doom line from Doomsday,

MF Doom rapping about his younger brother, Sub Rock. They'd been in a group called KMD together until Subrock died in a car accident in 1993. And six years later, Doom, wraps ever since the womb till I'm back where my brother went. Pantara are reuniting now, soon. Phil and Rex with Zach Wild on guitar and Charlie Beniente from Anthrax on drums. Go see that if you want.

I won't swear to you that I won't go see that. I don't know what exactly makes me say this, but a Pantara without either of the Abbott brothers doesn't feel as bad to me as a Pantara with just one of the Appet Brothers. But if this new semi-reunited Pantara takes the stage and they're immediately pelted by a freak surrealist thunderstorm of bagels and asparagus, I think you'll know why. Our guest this week is Sean Fennacy, head of content at the ringer, co-host of our Distinguished Film Podcast, The Big Picture, and apparently the biggest Pantera fan on the West

Coast. Sean. Wow. What an honor. It's just amazing to be here on one of my favorite shows. And what you said is not true about me and Pantera. But I do love Pantera's walk. Okay. I'm very excited to speak with you about this song in particular. Likewise. Likewise. So it's just your, your Pantera fandom is just locked in to walk exclusively. No. Okay. Not entirely. There are actually a lot of Pantera songs that I like a lot. But I think that there is a kind of lifestyle. identification that comes with being a fan of somebody like Pantera. And if anybody has ever met me with my swoop of brown hair, my button downs, and my elocution, I don't seem like a Pantera, dude. I was, thank you for saying it so I don't have to say it. Yes. I do really, really, really love this

song. This is a song that is among the most replayed songs, probably of the last 20, 25 years of my life. And so, wow. Let's talk about that. Absolutely. In what context do you find yourself playing the Pantera song walk now? It's usually past midnight and I've gotten bored. Sean after dark, yes. And I'm on YouTube

and I am looking for tribute videos to the professional wrestler Rob Van Dam. Ah, yes, yes. This was his entrance music when he was a wrestler at ECW which was an independent wrestling promotion and he was my favorite wrestler.

And in the same way that I think this show, scratches a nostalgia itch. The RVD YouTube rabbit hole really scratches. It hits a pleasure center in my dome. Okay. And so inevitably, a lot of those tribute videos are set to this song, which is closely identified with him. But I have other connections to Pantera too,

but that is the one that resonates to this day. Now, the ECW, the E stands for extreme. Is that like X games extreme? Like, what are we talking here, first of all? I think one could make the case that extreme championship wrestling is significantly more extreme than the X games.

I had a feeling. The barbed wire and whatnot. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's an East Coast promotion started in the early 90s as a sort of off, off,

offshoot of the Pepsi and Coca-Cola of professional wrestling, WCW and the WWF, soon to be WWE. And it was started by a guy named Todd Gordon, but the guy who came in, Paul Heyman,

who was actually presently still working with WWE, was the kind of creative mastermind who came in in the early 90s, and he took everything that he learned from the big promotions and just made it 10 times fucking crazier. So guys were leaping off of scaffolding, they were wrapping themselves in barbed wire. They were smashing each other over the head with kendo sticks,

trash cans. Every personality was turned up to 11. A lot of what you would see in the WWE, especially in the late 90s, was very much inspired by, and one might argue, ripped off by what they pulled off in ECW. Now, RVD was a crazy wrestler in that he was death-defying and took a lot of risks, but he was also balletic and acrobatic and an extraordinary athlete. I would venture to say he is among the 10 most incredible athletes of the 1990s.

Okay. I don't know how to measure that, but like, to me, he was the Michael Jordan of pro wrestling, because he could do it all. He could leap off the top rope. He could punch you in the face really hard. he was an extraordinary kicker. He could moon salt, he could frog splash, he could do all the stuff.

And he also was a stoner, and he also was an insane, brilliant narcissist whose catch line was on the whole fucking show. And he called himself Mr. Monday Night, even though he didn't wrestle on Monday nights. Monday night was the night that the other promotions wrestled. So he was quite a character, and he often wore tie-dye unitards

that had 420 written on them. So he was really, he was a unique figure. This is a vivid picture you're painting. And did he introduce Pantera to you sort of formally? Yes and no.

He introduced me to walk, which I don't know. I'm not even sure I knew it was a Pantera song for a year or two after I became a fan of his. But I had a friend in high school. Not unlike your friend Todd,

actually. Oh, don't bring up Todd. The legendary Todd of this show. Yeah. Well, I mean, Todd is, his legend grows and I had a friend much like him, who I would,

he, my friend Anthony, got his license first out of all of us. Very important. And he had a car. And Anthony was a lovelorn figure. And when he was pining after a woman, he would ask me if I wanted to go for a drive.

And on the drive, this is the music he would play, Rob. Anthony was a skinny Italian-American kid who was very, very intelligent. But his favorite music was Cemetery Gates by Pantera, typo negative Yes Yes Corrosion of conformity The first four Black Sabbath records

Yes yes The okay And he and he He would go into a doom space You know like a thrash metal doom space With you With me To like witness this

Or like what is your role in this Like just to be To like hose him down if necessary Like this is stuff for you Lead counsel Yeah okay Okay that's right But so I, and that was, that music, as you know, having known me for a long time,

that is not necessarily my, my metier. But I was exposed to a lot of stuff because that was the music he was really into. And so I was listening to a lot of like cowboys from hell. And some of the slower Pantera records is sort of more like poetic doom songs. Cemetery gates rules, dude. That's great song. So without him and then without Rob Van Dam, I would definitely wouldn't be here today with you. Okay.

That was two pretty influential parts of 1998 for me. That's all you need is a teenager, is extreme wrestling and one weird, overly intense friend with a driver's license. Those are the two key influences on any 90s teenager, I think. Did you like Pantera? I mean, I've heard you talk about Tool and Metallica. I was vaguely aware of them, but like, I was going to ask you, because like, Pantera, when I was a teenager, seemed like a different universe, right? Like you either liked Nirvana and like grunge and Lalapalooza and like that whole universe or you liked Pantara, right?

It had to be one or the other and I was the other, you know? I just, they scared me. Like, they really did. Like, this music is too tough for me is like really explicitly what I thought when I was 17. Yeah, I felt somewhat similarly. I certainly was a grunge kid, but I was also like a Wu-Tang-Naz biggie New York rap. person as a teenager. Those were like the two genres that I probably define myself by. I didn't really listen to any metal at all until the late 90s. I didn't even listen. I wasn't

even into like Enter Sandman. There was not there was not even like the popiest version of it was not a thing for me. I do. I really credit Rob Van Damme with getting interested in this band. And then buying some of these records and like yeah, me owning, you know, the great Southern trend kill is not something that was likely to happen in 1996. I don't listen to that album is like, Sean would really like this. Well, there's a, there's also like a, there's a strand. And I think that one of the things that's interesting about this band is kind of what they, how they influenced who came after them.

Because one band that I was really into that is at least somewhat connected was, was rage against the machine, which, you know, you've talked about on the show. And I think is a kind of intersection of leftist politics, hip-hop, metal, public enemy and a handful of other things. And there are actually like kind of psychotic when I need to get pumped up on the treadmill commonalities between Pantera and rage. Certainly. And I think that that continues for like the Paul Ryan's of the world. You know, they're listening to a lot of music that maybe they don't understand or agree with. But I don't know. I still like the band and I still think, you know, obviously they've had a lot of tragedy in the last few years. And so now they have taken

on this, I think like a different weight to like what their music means and what they're represented and how they influenced like, I mean, there's probably not new metal without this band. I think, like, can you imagine corn, like, not hearing Pantera? That seems unlikely. Like, a lot of bands that came that I really don't like after them, probably owe a big debt to Pantera too. I, Rage is interesting in that way, because, like, they're a gateway drug to either rap or metal, depending on what you don't have a lot of experience with. And I can totally see, like, gravitating toward the metal side. And you end up on the Pantera side of things, which, again, just felt like way over there for me when I was growing up and it's only recently that those lines are sort of

blurred or I realize they were always blurred and it's like oh this is a huge influence on say Alice and Chains. I listen to Pantera now and Allison Chains and Pantera are sort of running in tandem even though culturally at the time I perceive them as like just shirts and skins totally different things. That's an interesting comparison. I mean they're both obviously at their heaviest very heavy bands. The thing that I've been thinking about with Pantera that I didn't get as a kid when I was driving around listening to Cemetery Gates, but that I feel now, and especially when I read more about the band, is one, they're a very southern band. I mean, they're a Texas band, right? Definitely. And I don't, regionality is not even necessarily something that a neophyte like me thinks about when

I think about metal bands. Like I, to me, Slayer came from hell. Yeah, from like a state of America. Yeah, that was very much by design. Yes, but I get you. And I think of them now, And especially when you watch their videos and you see like, you know, Paul and Dimebag Daryl and they're like the Leonard Scandard of Metal. Yes. You know, like they're like kind of good old boys. Very much so. Like to get drunk, get high and party, but their version of partying is Phil Anselmo like screaming demon sounds into his microphone. Yes.

And so I, for whatever reason, that speaks to me at this stage of my life and at previous stages. I feel like it says a lot about you as a Pantera fan, whether you gravitate toward Dimebag or Phil Anselmo. Like, I guess what it says is whether you prefer, like, the most laid back dude in the universe or like the least laid back dude in the entire universe. Like, who you got there? Well, Dinebag always struck me as just a really singular figure in the world of heavy music. Absolutely. There's not a lot of guys who are like, what a chill bro. You know, like, that's just not the energy that has promoted.

that is marketed that you see in the world, even the hair metal guys from the sort of generation previous, like, do they all seem like really like amped up and anxious and trying really hard to seem cooler than they are? And he had a much more like, we're just having a fucking good time, dude. You can even do the voice perfectly, yeah.

A little bit, yeah, a little bit. It's early in the morning, so I can tap into that. You know, Phil and Selma, I think is a really, really good metal frontman. But, and maybe we should talk about like walk and walk's message because it's very, it is very profound. What is this? You sent me the quote. It's like, this is a song about how you should stay away from me. Like, yeah, that's an important message to convey if you're Phil Anselmo at this point, I suppose.

When did you first hear this? Do you remember? Yeah, I mean, he was just in the air in high school, right? you know, and I would sort of move to the other side of the hallway or whatever when it was coming, but like I have enormous respect for that now, you know, like it felt like this monolithic, like malevolent cloud, you know, that just descended over certain cool, scary people, but that I couldn't grok yet, right? Like, you know, I think I had a vague, it's, it makes perfect sense that this was like entry

music for a wrestler, right? Like, that's the perfect. And like, did ECW people use, like, existing pop songs that way? I don't feel like that WWF wanted to pay royalties to Metallica or whatever. Yeah, I'm so glad that you asked that question because the answer is yes. And that was one of the things I think that made it seem like such a rebel outfit. Okay. Yeah.

So my favorite by far, by far, by far, was a wrestler named New Jack, who used natural-born killers by by Ice Cuban Dr. Dre. Outstanding. Which is, you know, and that opens with that kind of like scree- kind of firecracker siren entrance and New Jack was a he embodied extreme

he came out pushing a shopping cart full of very dangerous household items like vacuum cleaners and rakes and he sometimes a television and he would just throw shit at people and he would just jump off of scaffolding and land on people and he you know he passed away recently there's an incredible feature

about him that we ran at Grantland years ago but he was somebody who was essentially like trying to embody the music that he was representing. It was at that time of like kind of extreme gangster rap, you know, and he was maybe even more spice one than he was Tupac. And so a lot of the wrestlers would do that. A lot of them would take very specific songs. Like Tommy Dreamer, who is a linchpin, used man in the box by Allison Chains.

And his whole persona was like a tortured soul who is like, bound to this wrestling promotion, but it continues to punish him. And so he was the man in the box. There was a wrestler named the Sandman. And of course, his theme song was Enter Sandman. They used to enter Stanman.

Man, that was expensive. I don't, but they didn't pay for this stuff. This was, this was rebel shit. This is extreme. Yeah. Yeah. And they would air this on, on Madison Square Garden or local satellite affiliate networks. And I'd just be like, I guess you're allowed

to use this song? Like, I don't. Because of course, like WWF and the ECW, they would have original compositions. So that was the other thing, too, is it felt like it made Pantara seem not just more extreme, but it typified the taste of someone who I cared about. Yes. And it was almost like a friend. It was almost like my friend Anthony saying, like, how awesome is typo negative dude? And in his car, I was like, this band is awesome.

And then I would go to the wall and listen. on the headphones to the new typo negative record and be like, should I buy this? And I'd be like, this is terrible. It's different at the wall than in the car. The car is a complete It's the power of, yeah, the power of influence and discovery. You know, you know all about that. You mentioned Metallica, like, as the

poppiest end of this. Like, I was surprised though, I guess I shouldn't be, like, reading about how much contempt Pantara had for Metallica's black album. And, like, Metallica in the 90s in general, like, load, certainly. Like, was Pantera versus Metallica a hard either?

or binary where you were growing up where Metallica had sort of gone, pop, sold out, whatever? None of my other friends were metalheads at all. And I don't know why that... I mean, I grew up on Long Island. There are a lot of metalheads on Long Island. That's my understanding. But the crowd that I ran with was either jocks or pretty geeky.

And like, ultimately, here I am 20 years later working at the ringer full of jocks and geeks. And bodying both, yes. Yeah. But neither of those crowds, you were either basically like a fan of Biggie or you were a fan of Sebado. You know what I mean?

Like that was really like the binary. And so I didn't have as much of an awareness. I mean, I knew of Metallica, but I thought of Metallica the same way. I thought of like Michael Jackson. Sure. They were like a monolith. They were the most popular band.

And the people who were really into them were honestly like people like yourself, like living in Ohio. I was like, that's a middle American phenomenon. This is like cheap. or something, you know, like, it just didn't, it didn't even feel like,

it felt, yeah, I would watch that sitcom. It didn't feel like, it felt so mainstream, it was beyond me. And Pantara was not that, you know?

I think that's what Pantara was pushing against. Like, I think Pantara specifically, we were like, Metallica left us, created this vacuum, and like, we can now be the heaviest and scariest

and scariest, and, in existence because Metallica has vacated that title to be Michael Jackson, basically. And they did it. But you liked Metallica, right? And when you were in high school? I think it was the same deal. Like, I knew more about them because they were more like pop radio, right? But like I didn't own the records. Like, I wasn't living the lifestyle that I associated very specifically with Metallica in that moment. I think I understood that Pantara was like a few levels up from Metallica on the scariness scale. But I didn't, I didn't see them as opposed to where I, the way I saw Nerva.

Vana and Pantera as opposed necessarily. Metallica is a band, though, that for me in the last 10 years, I would say I've really come around on. And I saw them live maybe three or four years ago when it was like 10 out of 10. You know, and they were older, and obviously it's not the same like speed metal power from the injustice for all era. But they just, they have an incredible catalog of great songs. And some of them are undeniable and some of them are now kind of like stitched

into our popular consciousness in a way that they maybe weren't when I was 13 years old. But I didn't have like regional or cultural wars between liking Pantara or liking Metallic. I don't think I even understood what it meant to like Pantera. I think I was, that to me was, that was like being into Russian cinema or something. It was like, that's way obscure on the other side of the universe. The French New Wave, yeah. A platinum band. Yeah, they weren't the French New Wave.

But it's hard to talk. about bands like this without reducing your appreciation for them to, you know, like this shit rocks. Like there's something very primal about enjoying walk and the like silliness of can't you see I'm easily bothered by persistence, you know? Like that's, that's an odd way to open your song. But, but Phil is, Phil is primal. Phil is primal. Phil gets his point across. In general, are you a guitar guy, like a guitar solo guy, a guitar god guy. Like, I also knew Dimebag as like the guitar magazine, like, worshipped guitar god dude. Like, do you lean forward a little bit when he's soloing or is it like a generic CGI

Marvel action scene where you sort of just disassociate a little bit? I love that comparison. It's probably more of a lean back than a lean forward. I think I don't understand a lot of the technical greatness of things like soloing. I don't have access to that. I do see that some people have an appreciation for it, the same way that people have an appreciation for, like, an ace starting pitcher or like a Shohei Otani

where it's sort of like only seven people on Earth can do this. And Eddie Van Halen is one of them, and Dimebag Daryl is one of them. And I think that that's cool. But I just lack a kind of critical or technical understanding of how they accomplish those things. I also don't think that Pantera is necessarily

the sort of like has the sort of mystical greatness of a Jimmy Hendricks or someone like that. What I respond to more, I thought about this a lot with Jack White. I was really,

really into Jack White in the 2000s and the White Stripes. And he had a kind of like possessed power when he was doing his thing and even if it wasn't always, yeah,

if he wasn't as like, sometimes he was a messier guitarist like he would make mistakes during his shows. but whatever he was after, it felt like he was channeling something, the same way that people would talk about, people like Hendricks.

And I'm more interested in that than I am. Eric Clapton's proficiency as a guitarist or Kirk Hammett's proficiency as like, you know what I mean? That aspect of it just doesn't really speak to me. Okay. The Pantera story is a movie, right? Like, there are profoundly upsetting parts of that movie,

but, like, Danny McBride's got to play Dimebag. Right? Like you're a power broker now. Like, can you set this up, please? That's not true. I'm not a power broker. Well, so if you did that, if we did the David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, I don't know, John C. Riley. Who is Phil Anselmo?

Who's like a young bald-headed actor? Bradley Cooper. I just don't do that, actually. Well, it's like a young Mark Strong, you know? Like who embodies Phil's energy? But if you did that, that's kind of a comment. that's kind of like a dukes of hazardy comedy about a southern band hitting it big

but there's another version of it that is really tragic and really sad and two members of this band have died and they're still active but they're it's I guess it's not necessarily a fun and games band and a lot of their music as funny and strange and powerful as walk is a lot of their music was a lot like cemetery gates

you know it was about the the mortality of existence. And so there's like an Ingmar Bergman version of their movie. You know what I mean? There's a Nicholas Winning Refin version of their movie. There's a version that stars Timothy Chalmay. There are all kinds of variations, I think,

on how you tell their story. All right, that's going to ruin my day right there. Who is Timothy playing in this? Is he Phil or is he dime bag? He's me in that Ford Explorer in 1998. That's right. What is this? Oh, God.

Yeah. It's a coming of age story. Of course. Of course. It's a boy bird. It's a sort of sequel to Lady Bird. I am embarrassed to say that you had to remind me, Sean, that the Pantera song Walk appears briefly in the film Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which I rented for $20, right?

Because my kids made me. I forgot that when Jim Carrey takes control of the giant robot and stuff. starts reaping havoc. He plays his world domination playlist. And it's Walk by Pantara. And my question for you is, did Jim Carrey personally pick Pantara for that scene? Yes or no?

First of all, it's Dr. Robotnik, not Jim Carrey. He's portraying a character. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Second of all, I highly doubt it, in part because if you watch that scene closely, and I'll tell you what, I have. I know you have.

That's why I'm asking. His dance is not perfectly syncopated to the rhythms of walk. Okay. It certainly feels like an after decision made by the producers and their filmmakers. You're ruining the scene for me now. But okay. That being said, I mean, come on. They got Walk into Sonic the Hedgehog, too.

That is incredible. And what a representational thing that, like, how our culture evolves, the thing that seemed like so scary and so far away from the mainstream. is now being used in children's entertainment. Like, doesn't that sum up how we kind of chew up ingest and regurgitate our culture 10, 20, 30 years later? Like, Jim Carrey is dancing in a kids movie to what was once the most intense rock song of 1993. It's pretty remarkable.

Did you like Sonic the Hedgehog, too? It was fine. It was better than Scoob, X, I'mation. That's always the movie I reach for when I talk. Sorry about that. Yes. When I sort of set the baseline of like the worst children's movie that I paid $20 for, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is fine.

I remember liking the first one way better. Like the big Jim Carrey dance scene and the first one is some weird like 60s pop song. Yeah. I like that song. Yeah. And like I ended up listening to that a lot. Now like this is a choice that Jim made very specifically just to like scramble pop culture. But you know, now he's, as you say, now he's doing the scariest song, you know, from the 90s.

he's doing the guitar, air guitar on the leg move. That's one of my favorite Jim Carrey moves. And it's just like, this is my culture. It wasn't my culture, you know, but it's still not a costume, you know, but it still worked in the movie. Answer this honestly. Okay. Please, please.

Did you try to book Jim Carrey before me for this episode? He never said no. He just didn't respond to anything I've ever said to him or any of. of his people. You were this. Is he hold now for like the salt and pep episode? There we go. Yeah.

He wants to just do Nirvana, I guess, nothing but Nirvana. When are you doing Nirvana? People want to know. People do want to know. I receive DMs to that effect quite frequently. I'm still mulling it over, man. Are they really emblematic of the 90s, truly? Or is that all just a smokescreen?

I mean, they just, they don't have the stuff like achy, breaky heart. I feel like it's just, I, you know, I'm doing them in exact order of significance to the 90s these episodes. And I don't know if we're going to get to Nirvana, honestly. I think you should do Francis Farmer. We'll have her revenge on Seattle. That is a great song. Or all of in utero.

Could you do 13 individual episodes about each song in utero? If we have the budget for that, I would love to do that. I would, dumb. I remember very much identifying with the Nirvana song, Dumb at the time. I still do. I couldn't say why. But yes, there we go. There's my next show.

is just Nirvana's every Nirvana song. Can I ask you one more question? Please. Well, let me just say quickly. In utero is a good example of a record that even though it's like sold like whatever, 5 million copies, 10 million copies, is so, so, so heavy and dark. It's Pantera by other means, absolutely. It is very close to the song that we're talking about in a lot of ways, even though they were

a pop band by that. But if you listen to like, Sendless Apprentice or something, like, that's really heavy. Yes. No, I get it. I see that absolutely. So I think part of that, I think that that makes it easier for someone like me, especially as a kid, to get into a band like Pantera, when what was at the Vanguard was Trojan horsing, like a level of heaviness that, like, we kind of just haven't seen in our music culture since then. You know, there really hasn't been anything that has gotten really popular that feels that way.

And so that's part of the reason why I think music doesn't really sound like this anymore. There's the decibel level and the guitar-driven nature of it. But okay, here's the question I wanted to ask you. Do you like Nirvana? I do. I don't, not like wearing the t-shirts, you know, going into my bedroom and not coming out for three days when he dies, kind of fandom. But like, yes, I was, yes, by the standards of the 90s, I was a huge fan, but like not relative to like the people whose whole lives. changed around him.

But are you not doing it because it's like we're not doing Pulp Fiction on the rewatchables because we're not ready yet. Like it's, this will be the last episode or something like that. I think that I do have a natural instinct to save it for closer to the end. You know what I'm saying? Like we're trying to space out the heavy hitters, etc. And that's sort of a moving target.

You know, it's, it comes up all the time. Like, and then nevermind came out and it all changed. You know, like he keeps coming up just haunting the edges of these. other stories. But yes, pulp fiction on the rewatchables is a good way of framing it, right? It's like, it's so obvious and so exact that there's this natural instinct to sort of put it off. Can I ask you one other question about how you and what Justin Sales do with this show? Please do. Is there a song that you really want to spend time on and focus on and make an episode about, but you know that if you slacked me and said, I'm thinking about doing this, I would say,

absolutely not. Well, first of all, my life's philosophy is to ask forgiveness, not permission. That's a very, I know a lot of people live by that creed, and I am one of those people. So I'm not asking you about shit. No, no, no offense. No, that's true. You don't. I don't.

And it's just going to show up one day. But it would be such an extreme choice, such an RVDEan choice that you would have to ask. I don't know if I can live up to RVD. um wow like detachable penis you know have you considered that song people people have mentioned that to me because like the cake episode right like the talk singing sardonic white guy yeah you know yeah thank you but yeah you wrote so brilliantly about cake i love cake cake cake might be the closest cake was the one who is like i'm going to talk you into this actually being relevant like cake was the one i was like oh god they were they were huge yeah huge to me i don't i wouldn't

had a problem with that, but there's nothing like even like sticky or gimmicky or offensive. I think that's the other thing that's interesting is there are now some songs that are like, well, no longer safe for our culture. Right. Like, they might be giants as a band that's enormously important to me.

And I think enormously important to a ton of people and like a very specific sort of, you know, I don't want to say nerd, but like this sort of a mentality that people have, like, the eccentricity of them was extremely important to like eccentric teenagers of the time but like i sort of grapple with whether that's too indulgent you know there's a handful of episodes that i'm sort of sitting on that are very

specifically for me right like they're very exclusive to my experience and like if you were looking holistically at like what are the biggest songs you know that's why it's like the explain the 90s crutch is just like you know i can waffle in anything by like it can explain the 90s or just my night like even tom petty you know was sort of that way for me like it's good to be king as not the biggest tom petty song like of the 90s necessarily but like it's important to me that's your most critically acclaimed episode well well thank you so yeah i'm trying to think of one that like you know like we debate like can we get away with not doing daft punk and do like music sounds better with you instead because we like that song better than we like a daft punk song from the 90s

They're like, do we do daf punk for like, not the SEO, but like whatever the term is now, right? But that's innocuous. I mean, that's not going to offend anybody. It's interesting that there is no like, no boundary. Like the idea, the fact that we're doing this episode, which I'm very grateful to be here. And I love talking about ECW and my friend Anthony. I, uh, there's like a flexibility to the concept that is really great. Um, and I also just feel like you're, you're just scratching the surface.

Yeah, there's too many songs. Like, what's going on by four non-blons, right? Like, everybody was pissed when that ended up on the pitchfork list that they just did, right? Like, that's a song that still to this day is very polarizing for people. Like, there's some people when you want to talk about, like, the worst music of the 90s. Like, just that chorus, you know, her voice is just so intense and so in your face that, like, if you, I understand people who just don't want to deal with that song at all. but I also understand people for whom it's like a cathartic, like karaoke, like sort of ironic,

but not really ironic. I actually love this song, you know, sort of anthem. Like, I think that I always think about that song is still having this volatility in terms of people who either love it or hate it. And in terms of people who love it or hate it, like sincerely versus ironically, I think a lot of like that energy has been bled out of a lot of music. As you say, as it goes into children's music. and children's movies and stuff like that.

Like even the scariest music of our childhood is now just fodder for nostalgia, and that's fine. But, like, I respect those songs that still have that aura of danger and you can't quite fix, like, how you feel about it and, like, why you feel the way you feel about it. I think there's an interesting idea there that maybe is in a future episode for you, but that is looking at whether or not

the things that felt transgressive at that time were actually transgressive, or whether they were like knowing machines inside of the system. Like horror core rap comes to mind as you talk about this, which was a genre of music, I liked a lot. And at the time, I was like, this is very scary. But everybody who was making those songs was like a 22-year-old who was like, I'm super into Michael Myers. It was not actually, they weren't actually possessed by demons. The same way Pantera was like a bunch of good old boys who were just, just made sick noise. And it's never as, it's never as transgressive or extreme or shocking as you think.

And that's one of the reasons why it can be transferred to future generations as like a, like, as cotton candy, you know, and now Pantera's walk is, is cotton candy. You mentioned the great Southern trend kill. Like that's, you see that often referenced as like the hardest and scariest number one album of all time. Like, Pantera kept getting more popular as they kept getting more extreme. And like they, I don't, that's not, I don't know if that's their commercial. peak, but like, that was a number one record. And that, like, that record does not sound like a pandering, you know, watered down pop record that's going to go number one. There's a two-part song right in the middle of the album that runs a total of nine minutes called Suicide Note. Yep.

And it is like, it is, it's intense. It's intense. I mean, it's awesome. It's very good. Yeah. It's very intense. Yes. They, they never pulled punches, I think, or at least I'll tell you what. I'm, I wasn't keeping up with them into the early 2000s, but I think reinventing the steel was the last big original release that they had. That was it for them. It's, yeah. But you're right. They got,

they never pulled back. And I think probably some of that Metallica feuding that you were referring to references that they had a kind of like ethical point of view about what kind of music that they were making, maybe for better and maybe for worse. And obviously their lifestyles were very extreme and they led to some tragic ends. but at least you got to respect the fact that they believed in a modality and they stuck to it.

Last question for you, Sean. Are you ever going to play Pantera for your daughter? Are you definitely not ever going to play Pantera for your daughter? You know, I get a lot of questions from folks who listen to the big picture about what kinds of movies I have shown her or I'm going to show her. You and I've talked about this on the show in the past

about your kids and what you show them. I think the thing that is, I've actually thought about more is, would I share with my daughter that I like professional wrestling? Because to me, like, Pantera, that's like dad's in his garage lifting weights, listening to metal. That's like an understandable archetype. But dad watches men in tights throw each other around. Pro televisions at one another, yes. Yeah, that's a little hard, especially when you're like watching a 30-year-old video on YouTube, then you just seem like a real weirdo. This was really cool back in 1919. Sure. But I wouldn't say that, but I would say that, but I

would say to me it was. To me it was the coolest thing. It was the most fun thing you could watch. Yes. And if she loves me, then she'll understand where I'm coming from. And I hope she does. What a touching moment that will be. Sean, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Rob. I love your show and I'm proud of it. Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Sean Fennessee. Thanks as always to our producers, Jonathan Kerma and Justin Sales. very much to you for listening. Minor technical note, the song is no longer tacked on to the end of these episodes for very boring technical reasons. And so let me say now that I encourage you to go listen to Walk by Pantera. See you next week.