Phil Anselmo

Interview with Phil Anselmo, Cowboys From Hell 20th Anniversary reissue.

How’s the knee?

Good man good, I rehabbed the fuck out of it.

Outstanding. You hear a lot about bands not having a whole lot to do with reissues. 20 years down the line from Cowboys From Hell, was it a hands-on process for you?

Well, uh, we all did our part that was asked you know. There were hundreds of photos to go through, and we all wrote liner notes and whatnot so we were involved, for sure.

Was it a whole band deal though?

Well, three of us y’know, do our part so it was, and it was mediated between all of us by a lady named Kim who has worked with the band for a long, long time and she knows us all very well, so it would be her job to say ‘hey, is this picture good, is this picture not good’, or ask us what our opinions were and collectively we made decisions.

Reading a bit into that it doesn’t sound like you’ve exactly patched things up with Vinnie.

Well, y’know, no I have not patched things up with Vince, but once again I gotta respect his decisions (sigh), no matter what they are. There’s not one of us that can judge what Vince is going through and I’m definitely not going to do that. I’m very sympathetic to where life has taken him but truth be told, my door is always open. If that day comes, my door is open. We’ll see.

When you joined the band in ’87, it was a very different band to the one most fans commonly remember, is it safe to say Cowboys From Hell was the first glimpse, on record at least, of the real Pantera?

Uh, I think it was a known thing all along, when I first joined the band, that we wanted to move in a more aggressive direction. With that comes a lot of growth and a lot of time to do, to really find ourselves. We didn’t just want to be imitators, we were better than that, but not afraid to be diverse. We knew we could do several different things within heavy metal, and I think y’know, taking our influences to heart and smashing them all together and coming up with our songs. Like any band you grow and you grow, and it was a growing process. It felt natural after a few months, it took a while but everyone was headed in the right direction. It just had to pan itself out.

When you were recording it, did you have any inkling you were on to something special, because it turned out to be a ground-breaking album.

Oh man to answer your question did I think it was going to be a ground breaking album, fuck no. I had no clue it would be revered the way it was today. I took nothing for granted. I knew we were a very good band. Once we recorded that album, there was no more just being popular regionally. We were a small fish in a big ocean again, and touring was strenuous but very, very rewarding.

So many bands pinpoint Cowboys as a reference point, does it spin you out the number of bands you’ve influenced?

...what’s the question?

Well, are there any bands that have come up to you, bands that you like, that have pinpointed Cowboys as a massive influence on them?

Well you know I get it from so many side but that was funny you know, when we did cowboys from hell, it seemed amazing how many bands and how many bands from different genres of music caught on and really dug the sound. I think it all goes back to Dimebag’s guitar sound. We really worked hard, between Terry Date our producer, Vince and Dime, those guys in particular – all of us actually – knew we were a great live band but thinking back, which is you know a little bit before your time, but production for heavy metal was hit and miss a whole lot of times back then, in the late eighties. It was important to try and capture that live sound, and once again I bring up Dime’s guitar sound because the guy always had a ripping, ripping motherfucking sound, and capturing that guitar sound was very, very important. I’m not sure Cowboys From Hell was the perfect demonstration of that true Pantera sound at its fullest, which I think came around Vulgar Display Of Power and Far Beyond Driven, it’s still, from a production soundpoint, I think it still stood out from a lot of other bands because it was machine gun tight, you know like a fucking machine, so tight but it was real. I’ve never played with an entire band in my life that strove for that so much, that strove for perfection like that. Sometimes I’d think they were killing the vibe, just killing it but little did I know they weren’t killing anything, they were creating. Of course I hear it in today’s bands, but that happens. In my mind we upped the ante as far as production goes.

There’s a diversity there, that you mentioned before, the ability to pull things back like on Cemetary Gates, and it doesn’t seem like there was a lot of that in metal in the late eighties.

We knew our capabilities as far as being diverse goes. I think at some point, in some early interview I did when I was a kid, definitely during the Cowboys From Hell time, someone was trying to pinpoint us and basically I said ‘look, we’re not Skid Row but we’re not Slayer either’. So in that analogy, the word diverse comes to mind and we weren’t afraid to show it. We weren’t really interested in what other people were saying at the time, I know I was very hard headed back then. I think we did our best man, at the time, we knew what was going on around us, I just think there were certain guys in the band who think that certain things are tasteful, in music, and then there was the borderline between taste and all-out aggression. Anyway my point is we were aware and we weren’t afraid of that.

That aggressive, fuck ‘em all Pantera attitude has always shone through on everything you’ve done.

Of course, absolutely of course and that’s kind of going with the chip on our shoulder. Once we realised we had to re-prove ourselves after we’d done Cowboys From Hell, to America and eventually the world, it became a whole different ballgame. We thought we would come out and play live which in my book was our biggest strength apart from great song-writing, playing live was a major major reason for our success. We killed that image in terms of the heavy metal singer with long hair and whatnot. Back in the day if a dude was bald in a band he was probably standing in the background somewhere and he was the drummer. I was sick of that whole fucking thing, and I took the hardcore influence that was my life at the time and I bought it to heavy metal, so that was a big fuck you. Another thing was how we interacted with our audience. Instead of the regular old ‘Hey, how are you all feeling tonight, are you ready to rock?’ type bullshit, we were very gut level with the audience, we were one of them and we invited them up on stage and we made them feel like they were one of us because in all reality they were.

No separation, one and the same.

Absolutely.

Thanks for the chat Phil.

Hey, no problem man. Sorry it was so short, I don’t make the rules.