Zakk Wylde: “The sound of Pantera comes from Dimebag’s love for Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. The playing is rooted in precision”

(Image credit: Future / Dustin Jack)

On December 18, 2022, about two weeks after playing their first-ever show together since 2001, Pantera are getting ready to tear up the Knotfest Carnival stage at the Anhembi Sambadrome in São Paulo, Brazil.

Minutes before showtime, the ravenous crowd cheers along to Jackass-style video snippets of Pantera smashing things, blowing up shit, playing practical jokes and performing mind-blowing shows in the Nineties.

A projection of a silhouette of the late Dimebag Darrell – wearing a Dean electric guitar, fist raised in triumph – and his late brother Vinnie Paul – holding up a drumstick – fill the screens as the band takes the stage to the weird and ethereal Peter Ivers song In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) from David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The moment the nation has waited more than 27 years for has arrived.

“This is called A New Level,” shouts vocalist Phil Anselmo, and immediately Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde, Cattle Decapitation bassist Derek Engemann (who’s temporarily filling in for Covid-stricken Pantera co-founder Rex Brown) and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante blast into the chugging opening rhythm of the song as the crowd chants to the beat. Then, Wylde, armed with an orange-and-black bullseye-decorated Wylde Audio Warhammer, doubles the speed of the riff and sparks start to fly – literally and figuratively.

Wylde worked obsessively to emulate Dime’s sound and style, and if that’s not enough to convince everyone that this is an act of love for the Abbotts, the guitarist’s cut-off jean jacket cements the deal. It’s covered with orange-and-black patches dedicated to the late Abbott brothers. There are circular patches of their faces, each partially surrounded by “St. Dime” and “St. Vinnie,” respectively. A patch on Wylde’s right shoulder reads “Pantera” and features a line of stars that look like a military insignia.

“We’re up there celebrating Dime and Vinnie. That’s what this is about, and it brings joy to so many people,” Wylde says, adding that playing Pantera songs is just as enjoyable for him and Benante, whose T-shirt displays a Simpsons-style drawing of the Abbott brothers. “For us, it’s really special because we’re commemorating our buddies – the guys in Pantera who we loved – and everything they did for music.”

These days, he’s recapping his history and relationship with the guys in Pantera and discussing the tour that many – including Vinnie Paul – thought would never happen. While he’s occasionally self-deprecating and cracks a few good jokes, Wylde is absolutely reverential to everyone in Pantera and talks far less about himself than about the purpose of the reunion and Dime’s groundbreaking playing.

Following decades of false rumors and dismissed press reports, the first legitimate hint that something was brewing in the Pantera camp came in July 2022, when Billboard reported that Anselmo and Brown were putting together a new Pantera lineup and had signed with Artist Group International to book a North American tour. When it was time to pick fill-ins for Dime and Vinnie, Wylde and Benante were the obvious choices.

Five months later, Pantera played their first show with the new lineup at Mexico’s Monterrey Metal Fest with Judas Priest. Just as fans in the U.S. were getting antsy wondering when Pantera would rock North America, Metallica announced Pantera as their opening act for a batch of shows that are likely to be some of the biggest concerts of the year. Pantera have also announced headline gigs with Lamb of God and festival appearances in Europe.

Perched before a wall of at least 35 variously colored hanging Wylde Audio Odin Barbarian and Odin Grail guitars, wearing a black ski hat and matching “1998 Black Label Society” sweatshirt (the year he formed the band) and thoughtfully stroking his viking beard, Wylde is effectively out of BLS mode and in the zone for the next round of Pantera shows, which begin in a week, with two dates at the Loud Park Festival in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan.

“And I’m like, ‘It’s not gonna happen, bro. Just stop. We’ll worry about that when we go to New Orleans.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, but while we’re on tour we could get a practice room and…’ And I go, ‘No, dude. We’re not gonna get together and jam before I get up on stage with Black Label. I don’t even do sound checks with Black Label. It was funny. I said, ‘Charlie, you’re better off practicing to the records than waiting around for me to go over stuff with you.’”

“Bro, once the day gets rolling, we’ve got all these things to do, and before we know it we’re onstage again. The running joke is – whether we’re doing three or four shows in a row – as soon as we get up there and Zeppelin and Sabbath are playing over the sound system right before we go on, we’ll do a cheer with the fellas and I’ll go, ‘Didn’t we just do this 20 minutes ago? It feels like we’re back up onstage for the third set of the night!’ So, no, man. There’s no time.”

“If you take [wide receiver] Jerry Rice [who was best known for playing on the San Francisco 49ers] and put him on the New England Patriots – so that now he’s with [former quarterback] Tom Brady – once him and Brady go over the routes it’s just like, ‘Okay, Tom, just throw me the ball. I’ll be there.’ He knows the game well enough to play with anybody. It’s the same with music. You learn the plays and then do what you gotta do.”

“It’s so funny that people think I’d already played all these songs. On the first Anthrax/Black Label run we did, [bassist] Frankie Bello was like, ‘Zakk, you know all the parts, right?’ I go, ‘No, I don’t know any of the parts. Why would I?’ It’s like if Dime agreed to fill in for me doing a run with Ozzy and I asked him, ‘Hey, can you come up right now and play the solo to No More Tears, Miracle Man or Stillborn?” He’d be like, ‘Well, I’ve heard the songs, but that doesn’t mean I know how to play ’em. First I gotta learn ’em!’ You have to practice, and you have to work on it to get everything right.”

“The hardest thing wasn’t learning them; it was learning the proper way to play them so they sound like Dime – because everybody’s gonna play certain things their own way. I remember when I used to play [Rush’s] The Spirit of Radio, I learned it on the B string and the G string, and I had to do this big stretch. My guitar teacher was like, ‘No, no, Zakk. It’s all open strings. It’s on the second fret on the E and the B.’ That was way easier.

“The actual riff that Dime jammed on for Cowboys from Hell was very cool. I don’t know if Dime was doing a finger exercise when he came up with that, or he was just jamming and noodling on and on the way Slash put together Sweet Child O’ Mine – but it’s a really great pattern. Speaking of Al Di Meola, it’s almost like something he would do, but the way Dime presented it, it was totally metal.”

“People always ask me, ‘What was Dime’s legacy?’ I always think of Dime in the same way I think of Tony Iommi. He’s just beyond – and loved, obviously. We all love King Edward [Van Halen] And Saint [Randy] Rhoads and everything they did with their chops. But I think Pantera is the benchmark for what they did with insanely heavy metal, kind of how Black Sabbath is the benchmark for hard, riff-driven stuff and just heaviness in general. As far as his riffs and his playing go, I think Dime sits at the table with Tony Iommi.”

“If you’re talking about the sound of Pantera, a lot of that comes because of Dime’s love for Eddie and Randy. The playing is rooted in precision. It’s not sloppy. When you listen to punk, it’s all about aggression. You’re not worried about it being super-tight or musically complicated. You just want the aggression, and the slop that’s there is part of the flavor. But with Pantera, between Vinnie’s drumming and Rex’s tight basslines, along with Dime’s incredible playing, which is also so tight, the band is just a fine-tuned precision instrument.”

“The way he played and his core choice of sounds. A lot of them are just for dissonance purposes, and it sounds dirty and nasty, and it screams, but that’s the flavor you want in the soup. There’s a lot of thought and planning that went into the way he chose to go from one chord to another in unexpected ways, and it totally works in every song. Everything he did worked, which is pretty incredible.”

“Dude, if I remembered it then it wouldn’t be great. When we started hanging out, of course, we drank, but most of the time drinking with Dime would be over the phone. We talked on the phone all the time for several hours just drinking away. We’d make each other cry, we’d be laughing so hard. But every time we got together it was always hilarious – nothing but pure comedy. And sometimes we caused some mayhem.”

“That was complete and total insanity. I thought it was a rental car the whole time and it turned out to be his buddy’s truck that we trashed. [Dime’s wife] Rita had to do some damage control and put out some fires on that one. Pretty much whatever we did – and you can see a lot of the kinds of practical jokes on the Vulgar Videos they released – it was all just tons of silliness and stupidity. And thank God, nobody got hurt.”

“Oh, man. If you think about them or you want to celebrate them, then treat every day like it’s a Friday or Saturday night because that’s what they did. Don’t feel sorry for yourself for 10 minutes, five minutes, five seconds. You should not be bumming about anything for even one second because that’s not gonna fix anything anyway. They were always having fun and they were hysterical. They videotaped everything, and looking back it’s all just Benny Hill comedy reels.”

“I was just like, ‘Dude, you’re like Eddie or Randy to so many kids out there. You gotta take that gift and just carry on.’ I had a famous shot of Randy, where he was sitting there looking into the mirror, practicing guitar. So, I sent it to Dime when he was making that Damageplan record and I said, ‘Whenever you’re feeling down, just look at this picture for inspiration.’ Aside from that, he was always a powerful light and a force of positivity.”

“It was definitely crazy. They had played Seattle [on November 14, 2004] and then they were in Ohio [where Dime was murdered on December 8]. They were scheduled to go to L.A. from there. Not long before the Ohio thing, I spoke to Dime and he said, ‘I’ll see you in about two weeks!’ And I went, ‘Alright, cool, man. We’ll all have a good time.’ And then, suddenly, we’re in fuckin’ bizarre land.

“I have no idea where Vinnie was with Phil back then. Like I said, I don’t get involved with that stuff. I’m not saying this [group of performers] is Pantera. I just want to honor Dime and the band. It’s like asking Eric Clapton, ‘If Mitch [Mitchell] and Noel [Redding] said, Would you honor Jimi and go out and play and sing with us?,’ of course Clapton’s gonna say yes. It’s not even a matter of saying yes. You have to do this. So if they ask you to do it, you do it.”

“The curtain opens up, and it’s me and Charlie playing their stuff with Rex and Phil! They’d be going, ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing right now!’ They’d be on the floor crying, laughing, high-fiving each other, going, ‘This is hilarious. The guys actually took the time to learn our stuff.’ I know they’d be having the best time. And I can just hear Dime saying, ‘Holy shit, Zakk bought a Whammy pedal for this!’”

“All the time. And it’s so crazy because when we started talking about doing this thing, there would be constant reminders about it wherever I went. I told Barb, ‘Dime is willing this thing to happen. He wants this to happen.’ I’d just get constant reminders of him all the time, whether it was a picture or something on my phone, or I’d be driving and I’d see a Pantera license plate or a ‘333’ somewhere – that was Dime’s lucky number. I was literally going, ‘He’s watching and he’s here with me.’”

“When Pantera released Far Beyond Driven, I asked Dime why he wrote such aggressive riffs, and if he’s a really angry person inside. He said, ‘Dude, I’m not angry about anything.’ I realized Dime and Vinnie were literally the Van Halen side of the band – exciting, energetic and always ready for a good time – and Phil’s lyrics and vocals made the music darker and more vicious. And the contrast was amazing.

“When you look at the bands we love – whether it’s the Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Cream – when you look at them, every one of them had this special chemistry. With Van Halen, you got Eddie and then you got Dave [Lee Roth]. And it’s just a perfect combination. But if you took John Bonham and put him in Black Sabbath, and you took Bill Ward and put him in Led Zeppelin, you’d have two completely different bands.

“And then imagine putting Robert Plant in Black Sabbath and Ozzy in Led Zeppelin. Completely different. When you talk about all these amazing musicians we love, if you mixed and matched them, it’s crazy to think of what the outcomes might have been like. Pantera were four guys that were a perfect fit for each other – all of them – when they came to the table and made that soup. And for a while it was the best of all possible worlds.”

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Jon is an author, journalist, and podcaster who recently wrote and hosted the first 12-episode season of the acclaimed Backstaged: The Devil in Metal, an exclusive from Diversion Podcasts/iHeart. He is also the primary author of the popular Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal and the sole author of Raising Hell: Backstage Tales From the Lives of Metal Legends. In addition, he co-wrote I'm the Man: The Story of That Guy From Anthrax (with Scott Ian), Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen (with Al Jourgensen), and My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory (with Roger Miret). Wiederhorn has worked on staff as an associate editor for Rolling Stone, Executive Editor of Guitar Magazine, and senior writer for MTV News. His work has also appeared in Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Yahoo.com, Revolver, Inked, Loudwire.com and other publications and websites.

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