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

guy and we’ve got to at least try him out. He sounds really cool; he’s got this Bon Jovi–type pitch to him.” To which I thought, “Oh, fuck.”
    It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1986 and we still had shows to play that year, one of them on New Year’s Eve in Shreveport. So I talked to Phil on the phone and we all agreed that he should fly out and try out for the band.
    By now I had moved from my position on the Abbott couch and was living in a place with a bunch of drug dealers who were raking in so much cash I didn’t have to pay them any rent. They had an extra bedroom and were buying us equipment as well, kind of like sponsors, so if things worked out with Phil, he’d have a place to stay right away. I should say that I had no part in their drug business; I just lived high on the hog with the money it was bringing in.
RITA HANEY

Rex had spent a lot of those early days at Darrell and Vinnie’s house, sleeping on the couch, and their mom Carolyn definitely saw Rex as their third son. His mother was sick and his father had died at a really early age, so he didn’t really have a lot of family in his life, except the boys and their mom.
     
    On the day Phil was due to arrive in town, one of the guys I was living with loaned me his bright red ’77 Corvette Stingray so I could go and pick Phil up at the airport, and that definitely made an impression. I wanted it to turn his head. Phil must have definitely thought, “Wow, this is a fucking trip.”
    We took Phil and his bags to the house and told him this is where he’d be staying for a little bit (which ended up being two years), then that night I took him to rehearse in the front room of mama Abbott’s house. Vinnie and Dime’s folks had been divorced since back when the boys were in junior high, so they lived with their mother Carolyn in a small place in Arlington that became Pantera headquarters. We kept all our stuff in the garage and we had also bought a trailer, and I’d have girls over and bang them in there, which was kind of cool back then.
    So, that first night with Phil we set up a PA, where we had a bottle of tequila—my drink of choice at the time—and a joint, and jammed like we’d been together for an eternity. Everything clicked right off the bat. Phil had just turned eighteen.

CHAPTER 6
     
    THE KID FROM THE BIG EASY
     
    E ighteen or not, Phil Anselmo was a bad ass. Even at that age he was the kind of guy that you knew the moment he walked in the room not to fuck with him. He and I stayed in the drug dealer’s house for two years until it became too hot. The cops eventually came and busted the place, thankfully after we’d both moved out. I moved in with my girlfriend, Elena, who was becoming my first real love, and Phil shared a place with some other friends but he always had that chip on his shoulder—something to prove all the time—and he would never back away from a confrontation.
    One night we were playing at Savvy’s club, which was still our regular gig, and a guy from some other band shouted his mouth off at Phil. Phil went outside and kicked the whole band’s ass without any help. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was a fuckin’ bruiser. Being from New Orleans and us being from Dallas meant that Phil immediately brought a new dynamic into the band. He’d had a different upbringing than we’d had in Texas, so he definitely brought the tough guy street smarts, and he was also as funny as hell. Really, really intelligent. The cat is brilliant at what he does. Even then he was one of the best writers I’d ever seen.
    He’d been raised mainly by his stepfather and was heavily into horror movies from a very young age. Then metal caught his attention—it really turned him around. Back then he had this incredible, high voice. He could sing Rob Halford stuff and just nail it, and that’s what we were into because we felt that the high stuff would go great with all the riffing happening downstairs.
    As part of