john kat brooks talks about phil anselmo

In hindsight, it’s hard to fully appreciate the shock that the metal scene felt when news began to emerge on July 13, 1996, that Phil had gone into cardiac arrest due to a heroin overdose, after a show at the Coca-Cola Starplex in Dallas. With Pantera heading out to play arenas across the US with White Zombie, it seemed to the outside world that this was a band who were very much still stronger than all. In 1996, The Great Southern Trendkill, their darkest and heaviest album yet, entered the Billboard charts at a hugely respectable Number Four. He’d come in with his lyric sheets every day and he’d underline every lyric that he wanted to double track, and he would be there for two hours getting it done and then leave.”

“I saw a lot of it away from the studio, but, as far as when we were in the studio together, Phil was always on his game. “I was kind of aware,” he states when asked about the frontman’s addictive tendencies.

“They always had their circle of friends and I had my circle of friends.”Įven so, Terry denies any suggestion that Phil was difficult to work with during recording. “They were always different than me,” he snarled in what became a notorious interview with Hammer in 2004. Wounded and heavily inebriated, Phil’s mood and performance levels suffered dramatically, creating resentment from which no resolution was ever to be reached. Quickly, a divide began to develop, with the Abbott brothers convinced that the band’s success had changed Phil for the worse, while the singer himself became more erratic, ignoring doctors’ orders to have an operation and instead gritting his teeth and fighting through the pain barrier as Pantera continued to tour. I definitely have an addictive personality, but it’s apparent that painkillers and drugs and whatnot are addictive.”Īs the Pantera juggernaut steamed ever onward, with Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell ringleaders of the biggest booze-fulled party in metal, Phil began to use anything he could to try and alleviate the pain. “I crushed my back for the cause, for the music,” Phil told Hammer in an interview in 2010. The catalyst could be traced to the back injury that Phil Anselmo suffered in the early 90s, leaving the frontman with three destroyed discs in his lower spine.

John kat brooks talks about phil anselmo