I posted this to my FB just now...
https://youtu.be/SIcBqLzeiQA?t=375
20 Years
The Great Southern Trendkill came out in the summer of 1996. I was getting ready to be a senior in High School, and working part time at the Carquest Warehouse, which at the time was just down from Williams Brice Stadium. I worked with this guy Joe, who clearly wasn't married, and I don't know if he even had a girlfriend, but he was notable for driving a C4 Corvette to a job where we were making $8.25 an hour at BEST, and that was only if you'd been there for two years.
Joe was big into hard rock and heavy metal, and would tell us about how he had this 800 CD collection of the bands he liked, which wasn't just the ones you'd hear on the radio. He's the reason why I went to see Exodus when they played Rockafellas in 1997, and go to see them with their original singer Paul Baloff, who unfortunately died of a stroke in 2002.
However, another band that Joe got me into, I never got to see with their most well known lineup. Joe told me about how great Trendkill was, and one day when I was at Manifest, I decided to pick it up to give it a shot, as I did like some of Pantera's other songs that I was familiar with at the time like Cemetary Gates.
Trendkill was different from any CD that I had bought before. It was decidedly heavier than my usual fare, but the SONGS made the heaviness work, it wasn't just speed or growling or double bass for the sake of trying to appear a certain way.
One of those songs is Floods, and it's a song that carried with me for the last almost thirty years, especially the outro solo that's still recognized as one of the best ever by actual people that know what they're talking about and not just fans like me that couldn't string a guitar, much less play it.
I ended up buying a wall poster of the band very much like the one below, as the album had made me a fan. I even gave more than a little bit of thought to driving down to Orlando, Florida to see Pantera play with Anthrax at the University of Central Florida, as I was, and still am, a big fan of Anthrax. (Turns out, that would have been a horrible Anthrax show to see, as they were playing an awful setlist at the time, even from a fan perspective).
Pantera would tour one more time after that before breaking up, but I wasn't exactly in a position to go see shows at the time. Turns out, having your lead singer be in the throes of heroin addiction causes some problems with band dynamics. Who knew?
I was hopeful that they would get their crap together, and maybe have a chance to see them at some point in the future, because it always seems like there's a comeback tour if there's enough money involved. However, unfortunately, tragedy struck 20 years ago today, and the player of that haunting outro solo in Floods, "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott was taken from us while on stage at the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio.
People talk about what it means when one of your heroes dies for the first time. Maybe you know where you were at or what you were doing. But it's something that sticks with you for the rest of your life, even as other people pass. It's one of those things that's a marker of your passage into adulthood, as it forces you to realize your own mortality, which can be especially tough when you're young.
I got to see Pantera finally this past year when they opened for Metallica, however without both of the Abbott brothers, and while it was a great celebration of their music, and something I was glad to see, it just hammered home the fact that I never got to see them while they were still with us.
I still have that Pantera poster, rolled up and in my closet, waiting for the right time to frame it and put it up again. And every December 8th, I make sure to listen to Floods, to remember. Joe, where ever you are today, I hope you're doing well and still enjoying fast cars. And thank you.
