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

step in the evolution of heavy metal. Their first record had turned our heads in a heavier direction, but the progression to Ride the Lightning was huge and certainly influenced our next studio recording, I Am the Night , released in 1985.
TERRY GLAZE

We all drove to see Metallica play in some college in Tyler, Texas one time. We even wore our spandex! It was like playing in a big cafeteria and we ended up booking a show in that same room at some point in the future. I was the only one with a credit card, and the next morning I found out that everything had been put on my card. We also did a show in Houston playing with Megadeth, and I think that they actually approached Darrell to go and join their band but Darrell wouldn’t go if Vinnie wasn’t included in the deal, which is kind of ironic given that in high school it was Darrell who was the throw-in on the trade package!
     
    Sure, we were getting into heavier music but we still knew that the only way to get gigs locally was still to dress up—hair sticking up near the ceiling and the whole fucking bit—and appease the club crowd, because these were the people that were allowing us to survive. You could argue that our early look stifled our progress to some degree, but the counterbalance was that it allowed us to be seen by many more people than we might otherwise have been. Definitely a good tradeoff in retrospect, and we always put on the best show we possibly could.

    WHEN METALLICA’S Master of Puppets came out in ’86, I remember being completely blown away by it when we listened to it for the first time at the Abbott house. They had a pretty nice turntable in there and goddamn it we played that record over and over again while I just sat on the couch in awe. Metallica still had a melodic sense and they also wrote really great, complex songs, whereas with Slayer—who would also get popular in ’85 and ’86—we looked at that and said, “Yeah, well that’s cool, but not really the direction we want to go.”
TERRY GLAZE

We were all listening to Van Halen, Def Leppard, and stuff like that, but Darrell and Rex were the ones that discovered Metallica and they started going in that direction. I kind of followed but I felt with that kind of music, the guitar was the hook and the vocals were secondary. I liked songs that you could wash your car to where the vocals were the hook, but the band direction was going away from that to a place where the song was driven primarily by guitar hooks. I thought the strongest songs we did were where Darrell and I combined. He might take one of my songs and make the guitar parts better but generally our sound got progressively heavier as a wider range of bands influenced us.
     
    We saw Metallica when they supported Raven in ’83 or ’84, but never got a chance to meet them. Rita Haney—a chick who was always hanging around Dime—did know them, so then in ’85, when they came back through town with W.A.S.P and Armored Saint, we got to hang out with them. I remember being completely in awe of them and their music because they were doing exactly what we hoped we could do. That experience really had a big impact on me and Dime in particular. Even at that time Hetfield was the kind of guy who you just let talk—very, very serious and you got the sense that there was something grilling upstairs but you were never sure what it was.
    But he and Lars let Dime and I jam with them at Savvy’s on a few songs from their first record, and from that point the friendship was set. Let’s just say that jamming on some Metallica tracks with these guys made me think that we, too, could reach that kind of level and break out of the Texas scene into something way bigger. They were our idols, and remember, they were nowhere near the band they would become when they really blew up. But even at this stage they had a street-wise attitude to being on the road that we really admired and the various levels of debauchery that it involved.
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