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

had a chick in every town that they nicknamed “the Edna’s”—someone they were fucking on every trip—and because we knew an “Edna” in our town, that was our standing joke with them from that point on.
    We also ran into Marc Ferrari of Keel at a show somewhere, and when he heard our demo tape he went on this mission to help promote us with a view to getting us signed. That’s how we got the word around. It really stuck with him and whenever he had a break from tour he’d take a two-week sabbatical to help us out. His enthusiasm really put a foot in the door for us whenever we went out to L.A., because he knew all these guys like Tommy Thayer and the guys from Black ’n Blue. Ferrari would make sure he handed out plenty of our cassettes so that our music was heard by as many people as possible. Distribution was the issue with the early records. Yes we had an importer trying to get the word out there but because the records were produced independently, they were expensive for the fans to get a hold of; but despite that we still managed to move around 25,000 copies of I Am the Night.

    ME, A BLIND DATE, and Rita Haney were all fixin’ to go up to San Francisco to try to hang out with the Metallica boys. So we rented a car and set off—Dime, who was still pretty brand-new when it came to being away from home, ended up chickening out, leaving me and the two girls to go up to San Francisco without him. We never made contact with the Metallica guys, but we hung out a few days, took a bunch of drugs, and I puked all over every inch of Golden Gate State Park. I still have the photographs to prove it.
    We also got to see a record dealer called Import Exchange, who handled the import and export of our records up until that point. They already handled other metal artists like Metallica and Anthrax, but the purpose of going in person to see them was simply to say, “Here I am; what have you done for me lately?” Otherwise it’s hard to know whether they’re actually doing anything for you or not. Luckily it seemed that they had actually done something because we were starting to see a little bit of cash from record sales coming in.
    When we got back, we needed to make a decision on who was going to be the band’s singer going forward. Terry Glaze was a pretty good songwriter, had that high voice and the hooks, but that wasn’t the direction we were going in. He was also trying to finish his college and we were kind of tired of him trying to be fucking Dave Lee Roth, so we needed a replacement. Dime did this thing with Terry where he’d leave a boot in his guitar case as if to say, “I gave him the boot,” but Terry never did work out what it meant.
TERRY GLAZE

I was attending college while I was still in the band, so one thing wasn’t affecting the other at that time, but I was getting tired of the way that the business structure of the band was playing out, and I knew that was going to be an issue later on. The Abbott’s had three votes—the old man and the brothers and they would never ever split their vote on anything —so I knew I was never ever going to have any say on band issues. So if my commitment could be questioned near the end it was because of that and the fact that I didn’t really like the super-heavy direction it looked like we were headed in. The last night we played together was in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it was a very strange end. We got up onstage, played a great show and then afterwards, that was it. No “Hey, man, all the best” or anything; we just parted ways.
     
    We tried out a bunch of other guys as singers for a few months but none of them were what we wanted, until a booking agent of ours suggested we get in touch with a guy called Phil Anselmo out of a band called Razor White, a metal band who’d been out touring like we had but with more emphasis on states like Mississippi. Vinnie got him on the phone a couple times and then said to us, “Look, I’ve been talking to this