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Who: The former Texas glam rockers who became one of the heaviest metal bands on Earth, Pantera.
Album: Cowboys From Hell (listen here while reading)
http://t.co/DyQd8JS
Released: July 24, 1990
Why it’s important to you: “Pantera’s music still inspires me and I’m sure millions of other folks around the globe” —from the band’s MySpace profile, written by J from Birmingham, England
Their story: Few bands in history have undergone such a profound musical shift midway through their career as Pantera did on Cowboys From Hell. Released in 1990, with a deluxe reissue planned to hit shelves next month through Rhino, it was technically the Arlington, Texas band’s fifth album. Teenage brothers “Diamond” Darrell Abbott (guitar) and Vinnie Paul Abbott (drums) started Pantera in 1981 and self-released their first four discs while slogging through the trenches of a Southern club circuit that included Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and—according to Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo, a native of New Orleans—“not much further than that.”
Cowboys was Anselmo’s second record with Pantera. His first, 1988’s Power Metal, lashed the bombastic glam of Whitesnake and anthemic leather-metal of Judas Priest to the harder, heavier thrash of Metallica. Song titles like “Rock The World,” “Burnnn!” and “Proud To Be Loud” (the latter written by Keel’s Marc Ferrari) give an accurate snapshot of Pantera’s prevailing aesthetic at the time. Power Metal’s cover was equally indicative, featuring a photo of Anselmo, the Abbott brothers and bassist Rex Brown (or “Rexx Rocker,” as he was then known) flaunting the teased hair, blown-out bangs and fingerless leather gloves made popular by the likes of Mötley Crüe.
But Cowboys From Hell changed all that. Released just two years after Power Metal, it sounded like the work of an almost entirely different band. On the album’s cover, the Aquanet and leather had been exchanged for straight locks and street clothes. Produced by Terry Date, who had just finished recording Soundgarden’s major-label debut Louder Than Love, Cowboys pushed Diamond (who later went with “Dimebag”) Darrell’s razor-sharp riff domination and ear-splitting whammy-bar squeals to the fore, helping to carve out the guitarist’s reputation as one of the greatest metal axmen of all time.
“With Cowboys From Hell, there was a whole lot of trying to find a way to properly transfer Darrell’s guitar sound to a fucking CD,” Anselmo explains. “He always had a fucking roaring guitar sound no matter what phase of development he was in or which album Pantera was recording. He had a hot, hot tone. But transferring it from one room onto tape in another room was always a problem. Credit Terry Date, though. He nailed it.”
Meanwhile, the songs on Cowboys were heavier—way heavier—than anything on its predecessor. Gone were Power Metal’s cheesy motorcycle sound effects and standard-issue metal jags about going fast and rocking hard. In their place, merciless power-grooves like “Psycho Holiday,” “Primal Concrete Sledge” and the title track dominated Cowboys while Anselmo replaced his Rob Halford-style shriek with a gritty, streetwise snarl.
“After Power Metal, we knew we were moving in a different direction altogether,” Anselmo says. “A lot of the Cowboys songs were written between late ’88 and early ’89, when we were in a mode where we were gonna use Darrell’s crushing guitar sound to emphasize what we called ‘money riffs.’ When I first joined the band, at the end of every song, it’d be, ‘Here comes the money riff…’ The riff that fucking moves people. So we took the mentality of, ‘Fuck it, man. If that’s what we’re waiting for, let’s just make the whole song the money riff.’”
• • •
Pantera’s new musical strategy paid off. It wasn’t long before the acronym “CFH” began appearing on the band’s merchandise and was permanently etched into the flesh of many a Pantera diehard. (Check the band’s official MySpace profile for an astonishing gallery of “Cowboys From Hell” tattoos.) Even Anselmo had the letters inked on the left side of his skull. Over the last two decades “Cowboys From Hell” has become one of heavy metal’s most recognizable, landing at Number 25 on VH1’s 40 Greatest Metal Songs and even rearing its head on PlayStation 2’s insanely popular Guitar Hero video game.
Then there’s “Primal Concrete Sledge,” a two-minute face-ruler boasting a chorus that seemed like a tribute to the bludgeoning riff that followed it. As Anselmo tells it, the song was the last one written for the album. “It came outta nowhere,” he recalls. “Vinnie came up with this awesome drum pattern and I said to Darrell, I said, ‘Dude, chug against it.’ I could tell by the look on his face that he was excited, that he knew it was a fuckin’ bad little drum pattern. Next thing you know, he just fell into it and it was just this sledgehammer.”
It’s telling that “Primal” was the final song Pantera wrote for Cowboys. As Anselmo points out, they took the track’s relentless momentum into 1992’s Vulgar Display Of Power, an album that would hit Number 44 on the Billboard chart, eventually go double-platinum and ultimately change the face of heavy metal forever. “I remember thinking that the main riff from ‘Primal Concrete Sledge’ was the greatest riff ever written,” says Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams, who has been listening to Pantera since he was a teenager. “I still get chills when I hear it. It’s the most perfectly written heavy song ever. It’s short and sweet and that one riff is un-fuckin’-real. It’s like Slayer on steroids.”
Bolstered by videos for “Cowboys From Hell,” “Psycho Holiday” and “Cemetery Gates” in regular rotation on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, Cowboys introduced a new style of metal to teenagers and veteran windmillers alike. It had a profound effect on Cancer Bats guitarist Scott Middleton, who recalls being mesmerized by the “Cowboys” clip as a kid growing up in the Toronto suburbs. “I remember it was a live concert video, and it was like the craziest thing I’d ever seen,” he enthuses. “I was used to seeing big stadium rock videos, but this was kids stage-diving everywhere in a little club. In terms of really heavy stuff, I’d only really listened to Metallica and Megadeth at that point, but Pantera seemed like a whole other level.”
While Headbangers Ball spread Pantera’s thundering gospel across basic cable, the band toured relentlessly in support of Cowboys, playing 300 dates across America with the likes of Suicidal Tendencies, Exodus and Prong before hitting Europe with their childhood heroes, Judas Priest. The nearly two-year Cowboys tour cycle culminated with Pantera playing alongside AC/DC and Metallica in front of 500,000 people at the Monsters In Moscow mega-concert in September 1991, just three months before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Pantera toured, man—major markets, secondary markets, tertiary markets. We did ’em over and over and over again,” Anselmo recalls. “It’s not like it was some secret formula or anything. We knew we were a deadly live band; it was just a matter of fans learning our songs and us earning their respect.”
Though they may not have realized it while serving their tour of duty, Pantera were already redefining the parameters of heavy metal on a grand scale. Cowboys wasn’t the stadium thrash of Metallica or the glam of Mötley Crüe or the pop metal of Def Leppard. It lacked the satanic overtones of Slayer and was far more accessible than any of the death metal or grindcore that had already begun percolating in the underground. Often referred to as the blueprint for “groove metal,” Cowboys truly had a style and power all its own—a style and power the band would perfect two years later on Vulgar Display.
“Metal was changing [and] we were changing metal,” Anselmo concedes. “That’s what was going on. [But] did we know it at the time? Hell no. Fuck no.”
• • •
After recording four more studio albums in the near decade after Cowboys’ release, Pantera split up in 2003. Hopes and rumors of an eventual reformation persisted until December 8, 2004, when a deranged former marine walked into the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, and pulled out a gun. In a matter of seconds, he shot and killed Darrell Abbott and four others while the Abbott brothers’ post-Pantera band, Damageplan, were onstage.
For Anselmo, who currently plays in the New Orleans supergroups Down and Arson Anthem, Cowboys remains a transformative moment. “Pantera was a magical trio of motherfuckers,” he says earnestly. “Rex, Vince and Dime, I’m tellin’ ya—I’ve never played to this fuckin’ day with a tighter group of musicians ever, ever, ever. There was an obvious and un-obvious magic that just hovered over the entire organization.
“So Cowboys From Hell—call it a platform, call it a diving board, call it a springboard. It’s all of the above,” he says, sounding at ease with its impact. “It was an extremely developmental motherfucking-somehow-masterpiece.”
