The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down

I don't mind choppin' wood

and I don't care if my money's no good;

you take what you need and you leave the rest

but they should never have taken the very best.

-The Band, The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down

In December of 2004 I was in a good place in my life. I had stopped drinking, I had met and was living with the woman who would eventually become my wife. Things were going well and I wasn't letting minor bullshit get me down, or move me off course. I had a focus that was wholly incongruous with the way I had led my life up to that point.

So I probably didn't deal with, or think about the shooting death of "Dime-bag" Darrell Abbott as much as or in the way I would have in the past. I don't remember where I read about the shooting first, but I wasn't surprised to hear that Dime-bag was playing with someone other than the group he had risen to fame with, that being Pantera. Pantera had failed to release a new album for years, and I knew Dime-bag and his brother Vinnie had grown weary of waiting around for lead singer Phil Anselmo to pull his head out of his ass. It was a shame, too, because Pantera had made some of the best Heavy Metal music ever in a time when Heavy Metal was dying on the vine. They burst on the scene in the early nineties with "Cowboys From Hell," and as we all know the nineties were a time for Grunge. Grunge dismissed Heavy Metal en toto, grouping all Metal in with those deplorable Hair Bands of the eighties. Grunge took the Heavy Metal sound and mixed it with Punk sensibility to slow it down, and to try to give it a deeper resonance. Which was great. You won't find a bigger fan of Grunge music than me, and when the inevitable Grunge renaissance occurs I will be the first one lining up for the albums. Hell, I'd start a band to begin the Grunge renaissance right now if it weren't for the minor speed bump of not being able to play an instrument or sing.

Pantera, though, refused to redefine Metal or take it in any other direction. Rather than water Metal down, Pantera made a Metal-fan's Metal. They played it harder, they played it faster, they would not apologize for being the loudest, fastest band in existence. They would not apologize for instrumental virtuosity or lyrical content that spoke of Satan, guns, women and drugs and not necessarily in that order. Pantera was more Metal than Metal. To borrow one of their album titles, they were far beyond driven.

Sticking to their artistic guns led Pantera to totally unpredictable levels of economic success. They debuted an album at number one in a time when acts like Ace of Base ruled the charts. They were the lone standard-bearers of that type of music through some of its darkest days, and they carried a lot of us through some pretty dismal times.

I know it's strange for people who aren't fans of Heavy Metal to hear that you can be inspired by songs with guitar shredding, and heavy drums, and screaming. I know it's weird to hear that songs about cemeteries can make you feel better when you're down on yourself. But I think what Heavy Metal fans realize is that ignoring suffering and hoping it goes away is a less-than-effective tactic. When I'm feeling shitty, I don't want to hear some bouncy Pop song talking about how great life is. It marginalizes what I'm going through and makes me feel isolated. But if I can hear some fat, bearded guys from Dallas talking about the same things that get me down--existential suffering, anger, rage, substance-dependence--then I feel connected. I feel like I can identify. I feel like there is someone out there who can empathize, and that makes all the difference in the world.

But, like I said, that wasn't where I was at in December of 2004. I thought it was going to be straight uphill from there on out. I thought my problems were behind me. I intellectually knew that not everything would go my way for the rest of my life, but deep down I didn't believe it. Deep down I thought I was now unstoppable. So when I walked away from my computer and saw my girlfriend in the kitchen, and I said "Somebody shot and killed Dime-bag Darrell on-stage last night" she said "I don't know who that is." And I left it at that.

I hadn't been a good Pantera fan in the last few years, anyway. Their first three albums "Cowboys From Hell," "Vulgar Display of Power," and "Way Beyond Driven" had meant the world to me through junior high, high school and into my college years, but I had never bothered to purchase or listen to their fourth and final studio album, "The Great Southern Trend Kill." Their down-home, down-to-earth approach to rock-stardom had always endeared them to me and I would, from time to time, toy with the idea of getting the "Cowboys From Hell" circular logo tattooed somewhere, but eventually new groups and sounds lead me away and Pantera drifted by the wayside where they stayed, even through Dime-bag's tragic ending.

But when the inevitable happened, when my intellectual realization came to pass that not everything would go my way without exception for the rest of my life, I started thinking about Pantera again, and when I caught the back end of their "Behind the Music" documentary I determined to check my local listings and figure out when I could watch it top-to-bottom.

It brought up a lot of feelings for me, hearing those songs and seeing those faces again. The phrase "soundtrack to my life" is bandied around a lot these days, but cliches are cliches because they are true, and hearing Pantera flashes pictures of weight rooms, parties and apartments from my adolesence across the movie screen in my head.

I know what a lot of Evangelicals would say: if you write and perform aggressive songs about depravity and violence, and profit from them, that you can expect to come to a similar end. I understand that. Live by the power-chord, die by the power-chord and all of that. But I think Dime-bag, and Vinnie and Phil, I think they were just trying to write about what they thought was real, about what they thought was true and it turned out that I thought those things were real and true as well. And I owe them for that, even if it's not what some people think should be right or true.

In my adolesence and early adulthood I knew I shouldn't think about hitting and hurting people as much as I did. I felt guilty about being as aggressive and angry a person as I was, so on top of those feelings of aggression were poured feelings of shame and self-disappointment which, again, just redoubled the intial feelings of aggression. The fact that there were some people out there willing to sum up those feelings of aggression, willing to give voice to them, acknowledge them and suggest that maybe, just maybe, something constructive could come of them kept me from beating myself up a great deal. It mitigated the self-loathing, even if it didn't totally erase it, and I appreciated that.

So I guess I would just want to say that Dime-bag Darrell was the real talent in Pantera. Anselmo could scream and Vinnie could bang skins but Dime-bag was what separated them then, and will continue to separate them, when rock historians come to weigh in on all things Pantera in the coming years.

So, Dime-bag, I raise this Diet Pepsi to you, bro. Thanks for getting me through. If there is a place where we go when we shuffle off this mortal coil, I hope it's not all hymns and harps and white and wings. I hope you can still plug in, rock out, and down a little bit of Crown Royal. It would be such a shame, and so goddamned boring, for your eternal rest to be restful.