From the Hammer vaults, we bring you the definitive story of the life of the legendary Dimebag Darrell.

Darrell Lance ‘Dimebag’ Abbott is simply one of the most cherished metal guitarists of all time, and his death was one of metal’s darkest days. Jerry Ewing tells his story. Thanks to: Joel McIver, Dave Ling.

“It’s what I was put on this Earth to do and I don’t know what I’d do with myself if it wasn’t this. We’ll be doing this until we’re physically incapable. We love interacting with the fans, hanging out with the bands we tour with, getting fucked up, going to different titty bars and seeing different towns. The whole package is great.”

That was how Dimebag Darrell viewed his lot.

He was one of the finest metal guitarists of his generation and certainly the finest rock shredder
since the late Randy Rhoads was first brought to prominence by Ozzy Osbourne. He’d been playing guitar in Pantera since he was 15 years old and, since that band broke through with 1990’s ‘Cowboys From Hell’ album, consistently proved himself to be one of the great metal musicians and characters. If the opening quote makes Dimebag sound like a kid in a candy store, well, that’s probably because that’s how this lifelong metal fan felt.

Born Darrell Lance Abbott in Arlington, Texas on August 20, 1966, music was always going to be part of the young American’s life. His father, Jerry Abbott, was a renowned country music producer and songwriter who would also go on to produce many early Pantera EPs and albums, under the moniker The Eld’N. And although Dime and older brother Vinnie Paul’s parents split up when they were young, life for the two young brothers was a comfortable, middle-class existence. Situated pretty much in between Fort Worth and Texas, the city of Arlington (not to be confused with Arlington, Virginia, home of the famous US military cemetery) and its environs would remain home to the Abbott brothers for their entire lives, as they eschewed the bright lights and tawdry rock’n’roll scene of Los Angeles or the music business enclave of New York for what they knew best.

“We’re really glad we are from Texas and we’re a radical metal band,” a youthfully exuberant Darrell would tell Metal Forces magazine back in 1985, when Pantera released their third album ‘I Am The Night’ on their own Metal Magic label, reinforcing the band’s pride at their mid-western roots. “We’ve never been influenced by what’s happening in LA or started playing out with Crüe or Ratt. We really kick some ass and always get the audiences to get down the front and rock.”

But before we get to that, there’s the subject of Dime’s junior years and school to counter. It appears that life moved pretty smoothly for the Abbott boys, despite their parents’ split. During a regular American childhood that consisted of long school days and larking around with friends, it was at the tender age of eight years old that Darrell would meet Rita Haney, who would become his life-long partner. The pair, who attended the same junior school, came face to face at what Rita refers to as the ‘bike trails’ – undeveloped land near the housing estate where they lived, on which they would race their bikes.

“We’d wrestle around and stuff from time to time,” Vinnie Paul recently told Metal Hammer of his younger days with his brother, two years his junior. “You always had to have one take the lead and the other follow. I was a little bit bigger than him at the time and when I used to play football he wanted to play. He’d try but he was just that much smaller and it didn’t really work for him. It was dangerous.”

However, with his father’s involvement in the local music scene, it wasn’t long before Darrell Lance Abbott began to take more than a cursory interest in music.

“I used to go down there as much as I could to see anybody play any kind of music,” he told Guitar magazine in 1999 of sneaking in to watch his father at work in the studio. “I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace… all those great Texan blues players.”

Despite his standing in the metal world, it was blues and country artists like Merle Haggard and outlaw maverick David Allen Coe (with whom he would later work in Rebel Meets Rebel) that were early listening favourites before fellow local heroes like ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd came into the picture. It was this deep fondness for blues and country that would help colour his later sound, which often carried a Southern undercurrent. However, like many American kids growing up in the 70s, with FM radio’s penchant for playing hard rock, two bands loom larger than any other: Kiss and Van Halen. And Darrell Lance Abbott and his brother Vincent Paul were, like millions of others, in awe.

“I grew up with Kiss,” Darrell told Metal Forces magazine. “They provoked me to grow my hair long and I went down and got a perm. Kiss provoked me to rock and I really don’t give a fuck what anyone says about that. Kiss got me rocking and they’re still a great band.”

His love of Kiss never left him, and indeed, upon meeting original Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, Abbott had him sign his name in marker pen underneath a tattoo of the guitarist he proudly boasted on his chest, a signature he immediately had tattooed over.

“I have some great photos of Darrell and Ace Frehley laying on the floor together listening to old-school music,” Darrell’s partner Rita Haney told Metal Hammer, reinforcing his fandom. “Darrell was like, ‘Dude, Ace is in my house!’”

Equally, the fact that Van Halen were a band built around brothers Eddie and Alex was not lost on the brothers Abbott as their own musical ambitions developed. With both originally starting out as budding drummers, older brother Vinnie pulled rank, leaving Darrell searching for his own instrument. His father bought him a guitar.

“I started on a Hohner Les Paul, ’cos I had a picture of Ace Frehley and his Les Paul on my wall. I still got it too,” he told Hammer’s own Joel McIver for Total Guitar magazine in 2004.

Darrell’s advancement on his newfound instrument was swift. Within weeks he was jamming away with his brother to Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ and Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’. Although later in life he would be associated with Washburn guitars, his main love was for Dean guitars, which he fell in love with the first time he saw one. One legendary Dimebag tale has him being bought a cherry burst-finished Dean ML hours before he took part in a local guitar competition. He used that guitar and won another Dean ML. Another prize was a Randall amp, something else that would form a staple part of his trademark sound. In fact, the young Dimebag won so many of these competitions that in the end he was banned from taking part and instead offered a position as a judge.

“At these competitions, my mum or dad would go with him and he would get up there and do his thing,” Vinnie Paul recently recalled to Metal Hammer. “I don’t know how many he won but after a while they were like, ‘Look we can’t keep on giving this guy the guitars and amps and stuff, how about we make him a judge?’ He was cool with that.”

Dimebag attended his first live gig at Fort Worth in 1979, seeing Irish band Thin Lizzy and Brits Nazareth, before heading off to see Alice Cooper, The Babys and Legs Diamond together with his older brother. As music united the two of them even further, developing the strong bond that lasted right up until Darrell’s tragic death, it seemed the most natural thing for the brothers to do was form a band.

Still at school, although Darrell would later persuade his father to allow him to opt out of high school to concentrate on music, Pantera slowly took shape, although for a while they were called Eternity and then Gemini. Alongside the Abbott brothers, with Darrell initially adopting the stage name Diamond Darrell, were bassist Tommy Bradford, second guitarist Terry Glaze and singer Donnie Hart. Like most young bands they began playing covers, unsurprisingly by the likes of Kiss and Van Halen, as they set about establishing themselves. Hart left by 1982, and Glaze, who would later change his name to the less-glam Terrence Lee, took over singing duties. Rex Brown (then known as Rex Rocker) replaced Bradford on bass.

Touring the local area and supporting such bands as Stryper, Dokken and Quiet Riot, Pantera slowly built a name for themselves as local stars.

“When you were a band in Texas, you had to play cover songs,” remembers Darrell’s partner Rita Haney. “[Pantera] were the only band who were allowed to play one whole set – they’d play three one-hour sets a night, I’d like to see a band today do that – but they were allowed to play their second set as all their own songs, because they had such a following. The kids knew Pantera songs like they were cover songs.”

The band released their debut album, ‘Metal Magic’, on their own label (of the same name) in 1983. Although musically the album was hard-hitting, yet undeniably melodic, the band’s image, of big hair and Spandex, seemed to lump them in with LA’s burgeoning glam metal scene. 1984’s ‘Projects In The Jungle’ packed more of a punch and by the time of 1985’s ‘I Am The Night’ the band were attracting the attention of the metal press beyond their local area. Much has been made, frequently with tongue rooted firmly in cheek, of Pantera’s early look and sound. Yet despite the glam image, the music was always more hard-driving than the likes of Ratt.

“We’ve a really different sound but we always seem to be put into that Crüe and Ratt category,” Darrell told Metal Forces in 1985. “We wanna be in a league with Priest, who are really heavy yet retain that certain something that makes ’em so good.”

It is widely accepted that things took a major gear shift for Pantera when Terrence Lee left the band and was replaced by Phil Anselmo. Thrash metal had a big impact on the band, not least the release in 1986 of Metallica’s ‘Master Of Puppets’ and Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’, which moved the-then slightly awkward genre further towards the mainstream and also into a dominant position against the hair metal bands. And none of this was lost on Pantera.

“We’re really into thrash,” Darrell told Metal Forces. “But there’s too many bands that sound like that so we want to be more in a Van Halen, Judas Priest mode, which is what we first got into years ago, but metal’s just got heavier. We don’t listen to death metal but we aren’t pussyin’ out. Metallica is our favourite band and there’s some other really good bands in that vein.”

After deciding that Terrence Lee’s overtly melodic approach didn’t suit where Pantera where headed, and toying with vocalists Matt L’Amour and Dave Peacock, the band settled on New Orleans-born Anselmo. His arrival and wide range of vocal skills, from Rob Halford-like screams to guttural growls, coincided with a major image change, although not before the band released ‘Power Metal’ in 1988, the cover of which, featuring the four band members still clad in Spandex and with big hair, raises many a chuckle today, forcing some band members to go a long way to disowning it, not least Anselmo.

“Ha ha ha, he has a hard time looking back on that stuff and realising it’s him,” chuckles Vinnie Paul today. “But nobody made him stand there in those pictures like that – he did it.”

Pantera finally signed the major deal they’d been earnestly searching for with Atco Records having impressed Mark Ross, who’d ended up stranded in Texas because of bad weather and caught the band live. The first fruits of their labour were 1990’s ‘Cowboys From Hell’, which gave the first indication of the awesome power of groove metal the band would continue to trade in throughout the next decade. And for many metal fans it was the first time they’d been introduced to Darrell’s incendiary skills, complex riffs and stunning solos. Having toured with Exodus, Pantera then found themselves opening for Judas Priest on their ‘Painkiller’ tour before performing alongside AC/DC and Metallica at the Monsters In Moscow concert which attracted half a million fans.

Having duly arrived with a major impact on the metal world, Pantera’s work ethic meant they weren’t about to throw it all away and for the next two years they rapidly established themselves as the premier force in metal, taking advantage of Metallica’s relinquishing grasp as metal’s kings. They released ‘Vulgar Display Of Power ‘ in 1992 as grunge was taking a hold on rock music. Relentless yet fun, it scored with songs like ‘Fucking Hostile’, ‘Walk’ and ‘Mouth For War’. In 1994, with grunge in full sway, Pantera shot straight in at number one on the US charts with the awesome ‘Far Beyond Driven’, and were even nominated for a Grammy for ‘I’m Broken’. Much as they had done when releasing their own material on Metal Magic, they continued to do things the way they wanted, striking a blow for pure metal at a time when it was universally being decried.

“Once you’re into it, you’re into it for a lifetime,” Darrell told MTV in 2001, of hitting number one with
a sea of grunge all around them. “And maybe it’s not the coolest thing when it comes to what’s top of the charts, but that shit that’s been on top of the charts, on and off, on and off, a million times, and we’re still standing strong. So we’ll be here forever. United and hard we fucking stand.”

It was statements like this that endeared the now-called Dimebag (the name came from the dime bag of dope he was so fond of in his youth) to the metal legions. Here was a man who stood atop the metal world, yet was still resolutely a fan of metal and a genuine person who thrilled at the interaction with his fans. One only has to look at the myriad of accolades that appeared in the wake of his tragic death, from both fans and the many friends he made in other bands (or read their fond words in this issue of Metal Hammer), to understand what a truly unique individual Dimebag Darrell Abbott was.

Alas the same could not be said for Phil Anselmo, who began behaving oddly while Pantera were touring in 1995. He began using heroin as a painkiller for a chronic back problem and gradually distanced himself from the band. Even when Pantera were recording ‘The Great Southern Trendkill’, the Abbotts and Brown recorded in Texas while Anselmo secreted himself away at Trent Reznor’s studio in New Orleans. Anselmo became involved in a number of side projects outside of Pantera, notably Down and Superjoint Ritual. Anselmo would eventually overdose on heroin in a well-documented episode in 1996 and, despite apologising to his band members, the rift grew deeper.

The Abbott brothers busied themselves with various projects – the country rock group Rebel Meets Rebel with David Allen Coe began to take shape, and they opened their own strip club, The Clubhouse, in Dallas. House policy, it seems, was $20 cover and bring your own booze. No doubt plenty of Black Tooth Grins (one shot Seagrams 7, one shot Crown Royal and a splash of Coke), Darrell’s favourite cocktail, were consumed within.

Pantera returned to action in 2000 with ‘Reinventing The Steel’ and headed off on tour. It would be their last. An inebriated Anselmo shocked anyone who saw the band at London’s Brixton Academy and, in 2001, the tour was cut short due to the events of 9/11. Pantera would never play live again. A new album was planned, but never came to fruition, with Anselmo once again embroiled in other projects. Fed up with sitting around doing nothing, the Abbott brothers called time on Pantera in 2003.

By 2004, Damageplan, featuring Darrell and Vinnie Paul, along with ex-Halford member Pat Lachman on vocals and Jerry Cantrell band member Shawn Matthews on bass (he was almost immediately replaced by Bob Zilla), had their debut album ‘New Found Power’ in the charts and were touring successfully, gaining a serious momentum.

The post-Pantera fall-out continued however, with acrimonious statements flying around the press, tarnishing the great band’s memory. Two distinct camps seemed to appear, with the Abbotts in Damageplan and Rex Brown hooking up with Anselmo in Down, although when asked about the acrimony, Brown was quoted as saying, “It was a bunch of he said/she said nonsense and I wasn’t going to get caught up in the middle of it.” Matters reached their zenith when, in the Christmas 2004 edition of Metal Hammer, Phil Anselmo told writer Joel McIver that, “Dimebag deserves to be beaten severely.”

On the evening of December 8, Damageplan took to the stage at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus Ohio. The band barely had time to strike up their metallic call-to-arms when 25-year-old Pantera fan and ex-Marine Nathan Gale, a resident of Marysville, Ohio and a man with known psychiatric problems, rushed the stage and shot dead ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott with a Beretta 92 pistol.

Dime was just 38 years old. Gale also shot and killed audience member Nathan Bray, club member Erin Halk and band security member Jeff ‘Mayhem’ Thompson, before he himself was shot and killed by police officer James D. Niggemeyer.

The awful news would send reverberations around the globe, and not least of all in the Hammer office.

“We were totally shocked and horrified at the news,” says Jamie Hibbard, the then-Editor of the magazine. “And of course, it put a very bad twist on the cover given the unfortunate timing of Alselmo’s statement. And then the phones started ringing…”

As the day progressed, the Hammer office would be deluged with phone calls, first from UK newspapers, TV shows and radio networks, then – as the world woke up to the news – from New York. And then LA.

“I couldn’t believe it. He’d just been at the Golden God Awards earlier that year. It was nuts,” says Jamie.

The fallout was immense, with the Hammer story immediately coming under scrutiny. A few days later, Damageplan’s management contacted Hammer and asked for a transcript of the Anselmo interview that went into the Christmas issue, and was sent audio files. Anselmo denied making the statement to Hammer. This he later retracted on a VH1 Behind The Music broadcast in May 2006, claiming he’d either been misquoted or the words had been said in jest.

“He said it word-for-fucking-word,” said Vinnie Paul in an April 2006 interview with Revolver magazine. “Phil called me when he was trying to get into the funeral and left me a message that said, ‘I can prove to you I didn’t do that interview!’ I got the fucking audio files, man. Anyone that wants to hear them, I’ll be happy to play them for you.”

What’s more, investigators in the case never ascertained Gale’s motives, although it was later revealed that he had taken to the stage and caused a disturbance at another Damageplan show eight months prior to the incident at the Alrosa Villa.

Yet none of this detracts from what a senseless waste of human life the tragedy is. It’s made even more poignant by the fact that Dimebag was one of the good guys. A man who put friends and family first, who loved a drink, a prank and a laugh and wanted everyone to join in the fun. And a man who was, quite rightly, proud of his achievements in Pantera and Damageplan, and as one of the most revered guitarists of the modern metal world.

The last words he uttered to Vinnie before that fateful gig in Ohio was “Van Halen”, their brotherly pre-stage ritual and their code word for having a good time. Even at the end he was still thinking about the band who helped inspire him and his brother to become musicians. That’s the kind of guy he was.

And we miss him still.