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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT YOUR SCREAMS & ADULATIONS, MANY, IN ...

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - HEADS UP

  CHAPTER 2 - DADDY BILL

  CHAPTER 3 - ON DOWN THE LINE

  CHAPTER 4 - REX, DRUGS, AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  CHAPTER 5 - 12 O’CLOCK HIGH

  CHAPTER 6 - THE KID FROM THE BIG EASY

  CHAPTER 7 - WE’RE TAKING OVER THIS TOWN

  CHAPTER 8 - EARLY TOURS AND ANECDOTES

  CHAPTER 9 - DANGEROUSLY VULGAR

  CHAPTER 10 - CONTROLLED CHAOS

  CHAPTER 11 - YOU FAT BASTARD!

  CHAPTER 12 - GOING DEEP, HEAD FIRST

  CHAPTER 13 - TRENDKILL OUT ON THE TILES

  CHAPTER 14 - THE ’TUDE

  CHAPTER 15 - SABBATH AND DOWN WITH THE GAMBLER

  CHAPTER 16 - SWAN SONG

  CHAPTER 17 - THE DOWNFALL!!

  CHAPTER 18 - LOST LOVE AND THIRTY DAYS IN THE HOLE

  CHAPTER 19 - THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE

  CHAPTER 20 - THE AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER 21 - THE HOLLYWOOD EXPERIMENT

  CHAPTER 22 - SEVEN ’TIL SEVEN NO ONE KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN

  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE FROM THE CO-AUTHOR

  Acknowledgments

  REX BROWN COMPLETE DISCOGRAPHY

  ALSO BY MARK EGLINTON

  Copyright Page

  DA CAPO PRESS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT YOUR SCREAMS & ADULATIONS, MANY, IN FACT!!! LOVE YOU ALL, REX

  I remember back in ’87 when Pantera and King’s X did a double in-store together in Dallas. Both our bands pretty much kept to ourselves, but all I remember was that Dime was in the corner shredding through a very loud amp practically the whole time, with a bunch of wide-open metalheads going nuts. He was simply fucking amazing!

  Fast-forward two years. Pantera played the Backstage Club in Houston (a real cool club that everyone played), and me and my buds Galactic Cowboys went to check them out. Well, I wish everyone could have been there to see them that night doing Power Metal. It was the tightest, most brutal metal I had ever heard in my entire life. Phil, Vinnie, and Dime were mesmerizing, but me being a bass player, I completely focused on Rex. In my opinion, Rex is not only the coolest looking bass player ever, but he could execute every song with the kind of brutality and groove that was rocking me like only a bass player can, and holding down the fort.

  Oh, and also they did some amazing Metallica covers. Pantera executed every song with a power on a level I had never experienced before. We hung out back stage drinking and having fun. This became the norm, but on one particular night they came to play, everyone was there, ready to experience this sound we had so gotten addicted to and loved so much. To our surprise, they did a whole set of new songs. It was the entire Cowboys from Hell album. All I can remember is that there was an amazing vibe that we all had just experienced the future of Metal. The rest is history.

  —dUg Pinnick, Kings X

  PROLOGUE

  “DIME, I CAN’ T HANDLE YOUR FUCKING BROTHER.”

  Those were some of the first words that came out of my mouth when communication between Dime and me resumed sometime in late 2003. Any previous contact we’d had had been strained for sure, and this was hardly a friendly greeting, I know, but I was tired of all of Vinnie’s bullshit, tired of trying to coordinate tours around his titty-bar escapades, and I definitely didn’t like the fact that Dime’s brother was drawing all kinds of negative attention on the rest of the band with his childish actions. It was all just fucking mindless horseshit, and after years of keeping quiet—although the fact that I switched buses on one of the last tours to escape all the nonsense should have been an obvious indication of my unhappiness—I needed Dime to know how I felt, and that we should all do some serious thinking before we even considered continuing to be a band.

  From where Dime was sitting, I’m sure he felt that Phil and I had walked away from Pantera because we had taken 2002 off from the band to do the second Down record. We planned to go and tour the Down record for a bit, sure, and then the offer came to take part in Ozzfest 2002 as main headliners on the second stage—something we obviously couldn’t turn down. So those are the facts as to why things turned out like they did. The bottom line is this: Vinnie and Dime had a problem with Phil and me being in Down, and I was the one they went through to bitch about it.

  All through 2003 relations were very strained because of Philip’s inability to answer the fucking phone—not for the first time or the last—to discuss what the future held for Pantera. Neither management nor I could even talk to him, far less the brothers, who were scared to death to even dial his number. So when we eventually got confirmation that Phil was doing his Superjoint Ritual project that year, we were all left in limbo.

  Dime and I talked again on July 27, 2004, my fortieth birthday. My wife had made an effort and asked Dime to come along to a surprise party for me, but unfortunately he was out of town at the time so couldn’t make it. It seemed like a phone call was the best I was going to get. “Don’t expect me take you out and treat you to a steak dinner or anything like that,” he told me, as if to say that he owed me nothing.

  AS 2004 PASSED, our contact drifted to the point that, by the time we spoke again in November, it felt like Dime had become some kind of estranged brother. Again, we discussed all aspects of the band and the reasons why communication had broken down, and we both acknowledged that we needed some time apart from each other. It was a very emotional conversation, and when I hung up the phone I cried my eyeballs out because I missed him so much. But despite my sadness I always truly believed that all our differences would be worked out in time and that Pantera would continue. It just felt like when brothers fight and don’t talk for a while, that’s what brothers do. Despite how upsetting the awkwardness was, I never saw it as a permanent communication breakdown.

  At this stage, Philip was completely out of the picture. He was still doped out of his mind and I had decided that there was no possibility of working with him again until his addiction situation changed. It is one thing trying to reason with someone who simply drinks and has a good time, but it’s an entirely different matter when you’re trying to reason with someone who’s using—they’re on a different fucking planet. Thank God he’s got his life together now.

  But as soon as he got his shit together—which I knew he eventually would—we could at least sit in the same room again and work out our differences. But I also understood that any reunion that could occur would require a great deal of structure, and there was no doubt in my mind that the task of putting it all in place would eventually fall on my plate. I felt caught in the middle fucking big time. Worse than that, it really pissed me off that I was the one getting emails from Vinnie every day—every single fucking day, saying, “Philip said this, Philip said that” and then having to listen to Vinnie whining about everything; on top of all that, reading Blabbermouth—a metal gossip site with a particularly vicious asshole group of commenters who put their own dramatic spin on every word spoken. Eventually I just got to the point where I simply didn’t give a fuck anymore.

  On the night of the shooting—December 8, 2004, as if I could forget—I was at home. I was originally intending on heading to Dallas to a Marilyn Manson show because our tour manager, Guy Sykes, was working for him by this time, and I planned to hang out with him for the night. I’d been saucing all day long, playing golf and the whole bit, and a few friends unrelated to the band ended up back at my house.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was around 10:00 p.m. and it was Kate Richardson, Phil Anselmo’s g
irlfriend, on the line. We were chatting for a while when suddenly she got a phone call on another line, and then, when she returned to me, her tone had changed. She told me to put the television on, which I immediately did.

  I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Police sirens. Ambulances. Panic in Columbus, Ohio. Dime—our brother—murdered on stage? Dead? Dime? The images on the screen just fucking floored me. On the tiles. Straight up.

  Although I had been drinking, I sobered up real fast. It was the only way I could hope to process what I was seeing. By now the news was all over CNN and every other news channel. Friends and family, who were also catching the news, began calling before I could even come to terms with the devastation that I felt, all wanting to know that I was okay. Guy Sykes left the Manson show in town and immediately made a beeline for my house. I was so shocked that I didn’t even know what to think, let alone say, and phone calls just kept coming on the two landlines and four separate cell phones we had in the house, until I eventually fell asleep, probably as the sun was coming up.

  “RITA WANTS YOU over at the house.”

  The following day, Guy Sykes’s phone call confirmed that Dime’s wife wanted to see me, so I headed over to her place only to find a bunch of fucking assholes hanging around. These were some of the parasitic hangers-on that Dime had accumulated over years of partying with fans and there were a few venomous looks and snide remarks aimed in my direction, but I ignored them all. I can only assume that some of these people saw my alliance with Philip as being disloyal to Dime and wanted to make me feel guilty for what had happened. Because these assholes had been following the whole thing in the press, it felt like there was already tension in the air, as if there had been an imaginary line drawn in the sand as to who was taking what side.

  One of the security guys even squared up to me and tried to block my path from entering. I had some previous history with this particular guy, too, and had actually knocked the goon’s teeth out accidentally on an earlier occasion. He’d even tried to sue me, unsuccessfully, so I certainly wasn’t afraid of his posturing now and walked by him like he wasn’t there.

  Meanwhile various friends of Dime’s and musicians from all kinds of other bands had already started to come in to town, and most of them were at the Wyndham Arlington South hotel and in a collective state of disbelief that Dime—the most fan-friendly of all dudes—could have been killed by a fan. The irony was just unfathomable. A lot of these people hadn’t been in the same room together for years, so while the reason for being there was truly awful, there did seem to be a collective sense of solidarity that was celebratory and almost uplifting, which is something that Dime would have appreciated.

  Back at Rita’s house with Dime’s close family, the mood was considerably more tense. As if to add to the uneasiness, Philip called from New Orleans to offer Rita his condolences, but when I passed the phone to her—at his request—she grabbed it angrily from me.

  “If you even come close to Texas, I’ll fucking shoot your ass,” Rita told Philip, letting him know that she felt he had a role in the whole chain of events. His unsavory comments in the music press earlier that month were a big issue: “Dime deserves to be severely beaten”—comments he suggested were taken out of context, but no matter what he claims, I have the tapes of the interview in question, so I know exactly what he said. Phil and I seemed to have been put in the same camp, the only difference being that he was completely unwanted and unwelcome, while I was just not the most popular guy around at that time. There was a difference.

  The next day—still in a state of shock—Dime’s dad Jerry, Vinnie, Rita, and I went to the Moore Funeral Home on North Davis Drive in Arlington, and there we saw the body of Darrell Abbott lying in a casket. For me, this was just too much. I had been to way too many funerals here—my mom, my grandmother, my dad—all of them ended up in this same room, but this particular one just shook me down to the core.

  “See what you did?!!!” Vinnie Paul said to me, making the strange accusation that I was somehow responsible for Dime’s death, which is obviously ridiculous. I had no idea how to reply to that, so I didn’t.

  “Is it okay that I’m here?” I asked Vince at a later point, making it clear that I didn’t want to step on anyone’s shoes in such a traumatic situation. I needed to check with him that all was cool.

  “Of course,” he said very definitively, making me wonder why he’d said what he did earlier. In my own head I couldn’t stop myself from analyzing why Vinnie felt the way he did, and I just couldn’t see why he would blame me for anything. Yes, the murderer who shot Dime was clearly mentally ill, but in my opinion the music press had been pushing all the wrong buttons with fans by constantly re-igniting the debate as to who was responsible for the break-up of Pantera. Since that point, I had talked to the police in Columbus and it was clear the incident wasn’t only about Dime, it was about the whole band; so if Down had been in Columbus that night and not Damageplan, it could have been Phil or me who’d been killed instead.

  If the press had shut their fuckin’ mouths and let us—the band—resolve our differences, I believe that Darrell would still be alive today. The killer must not have been able to deal with the fact that Pantera had split up, so he decided to take his anger out on us, and he also had somehow in his delusion convinced himself that he had written our songs. He obviously had read the continuous press speculation and that, combined with his fragile state of mind, proved to be a fatal cocktail. After all, he had turned up at an earlier Damageplan show and torn up some gear before getting his ass kicked by security and thrown in jail, so he was already on the radar before that night in Columbus.

  The following evening I got a phone call from Rita, and she asked me to be one of Dime’s pallbearers and of course I agreed. It would have seemed disrespectful not to, but even still I couldn’t help notice the glaring contradictions. Vinnie seemed to be blaming me in part for his brother’s death, while at the same time Rita was asking me to perform an official duty. It just didn’t make sense.

  On the day of the funeral I didn’t know what I was doing, who I was, or where I was—and that’s no exaggeration. Unless you’ve ever been in a situation like this you can’t understand. I had a couple of shots of whiskey—I simply had to or else I just could not have gotten through the day—and headed over to Rita’s house again, very early, where there were more people than on the previous visit, guys like Zakk Wylde, Kat Brooks, and Pantera’s sound guy Aaron Barnes, with whom I later rode in the same car to the funeral home. Everyone was just hanging out and trying to offer Rita as much support as possible.

  “Let’s do a shot for Dime!” someone shouted. This wouldn’t be the only time these words would be heard over the next few days and consequently most people, myself included, seeking to ease the pain of what had happened, were at some level of inebriation throughout the funeral and memorial.

  There were a huge number of Dime’s musician friends there, and Eddie Van Halen and Zakk Wylde were asked to make speeches. I was sitting in the second row beside Eddie, who was just totally out of line, really disrespectful actually. I told Eddie on numerous occasions to shut the fuck up but there was no point. Zakk was always one of Dime’s best friends, as well as being, like Dime, a great guitar player, but on this occasion he was in the bizarre situation of having to keep Eddie Van Halen—who was coked out of his head and acting like a complete idiot—in line.

  “Fuckin’ shut up,” Zakk told Eddie after he had rambled on for a while while he was giving his eulogy—something about his ex-wife if I remember it right—but that didn’t stop him, he just kept going. It was really disrespectful.

  Despite the somber nature of the day, there was a danger of it becoming the “Eddie and Zakk Show” but thankfully it all calmed down. I was one of the last to go through and see Dime’s body (my second time), and on this occasion I simply kissed him on the forehead. He was just so cold. Right then I emotionally checked out. Of course I was physically there, but mentally I
was gone. I was just a shell and couldn’t feel anything.

  After the ceremony I went outside and lit a cigarette. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to get out of there and had a limousine waiting to do just that, but all I really wanted was my wife Belinda, who had come separately, to drive me home.

  “Put me in the Hummer and just take me home,” I told her.

  And when I got there, I fell into a coma-like sleep. I didn’t show up at the burial even though I was supposed to be a pallbearer. I just couldn’t face it. I’m not even sure if anyone ever said anything about me not being there, but I wouldn’t have cared if they had. Dime was the last person I wanted to put in the ground. I couldn’t bear the thought of doing that to my best friend.

  I woke at seven that evening to find my house full of people. I was persuaded to get up, get dressed, and of course have a shot or two for Dime. Our next destination was the Arlington Convention Center for Dime’s public funeral service, and for some reason I was feeling uneasy, and up until the last minute wasn’t sure that I was even going to go.

  My uneasiness was entirely justified. Almost as soon as I walked into the venue, which was jammed with almost five thousand people, someone handed me yet another shot as I walked up toward the stage where Jerry Cantrell and his band were still playing. I was standing at the side, intently watching what was going on, and suddenly I was put on the spot. It was totally unexpected. There was this DJ guy there who had been given the role of official emcee, and I knew this clown from the past. He’s one of those strip joint compere guys who introduces the girls in an overly dramatic way like, “Hey, on stage right now it’s Ciiiinammmooooooon!” or “Lusciousssssssssssss on stage three!” That’s fine at a strip club—I would know—but I remember thinking that this guy being here wasn’t just inappropriate, it was total fucking blasphemy and it seemed like the whole deal could turn into a fucking joke at any given second, if it hadn’t already. Everything seemed to be disorganized and running behind schedule, but somehow Dime would have liked it that way as he once said—a little ironically, it turns out—that he’d even be late for his own funeral.