Pantera

Pantera has nine studio albums. If you look the band up on any platform, you will find five. The other four, from the eighties, existed, sold and are signed by the same band, but they cannot be heard legally anywhere and the official site does not even mention them. The easy version says the band hid them out of embarrassment. I think they tell another story, a far bigger one: they tell you what a group is capable of when it is willing to burn down what was already working in order to invent something that did not yet exist.

Spandex, and why it matters

Pantera formed in Texas at the start of the eighties, with two teenage brothers: Darrell Abbott on guitar and Vinnie Paul on drums. Between 1983 and 1988 they released four albums on a label the brothers' father had set up. And that was pure glam: backcombed hair, hairspray, spandex, make-up, ballads. The cover of any of those records is indistinguishable from half a dozen Los Angeles bands of the period, and Pantera was not even from Los Angeles.

Here is a detail the band would rather skip, and which actually makes it bigger: that period includes the current singer. Phil Anselmo joined in 1987, and the fourth of those records is his; he moved to Texas to record it. This is not somebody else's prehistory. It is the line-up that a couple of years later would record "Cowboys from Hell", rehearsing first in glitter.

And that is where the greatness is. In 1990 "Cowboys from Hell" came out and it was, literally, another band: slower, deeper, heavier, without a drop of shine. It founded a sound — groove metal — that took up the whole decade. The same men in the spandex threw out everything they knew how to do, which was also putting food on the table, and reinvented themselves from scratch as the opposite. Very few bands have the courage to kill the version of themselves that already works. Pantera did, and a new genre came out of it.

Nobody erased them: they stopped caring

It gets repeated that the band banned any reissue of those records. No source documents it: not who holds the rights to the family label today, not a formal refusal from anyone. What there is is Anselmo's answer when he was asked about reissuing that material: that he had never considered it. That is not a veto. It is indifference. The four records did not disappear because someone hunted them down, but because the band stopped caring about that life. They had found out who they really were, and they felt no need to look back. That is not hiding a shameful past: it is not needing it.

The size of what came next

It is worth measuring the band that came out of the turn. "Cowboys from Hell", the founding record, did not even enter the main album chart in the United States at the time; it took seven years to go platinum and thirty-three to reach double platinum, in 2023. Again the story of records that take their time because they are the ones that stay.

The one that exploded all at once was "Far Beyond Driven", in 1994: it went straight in at number one in the country. Read that again: an extreme metal record, brutal, without a single radio single, at the very top of the charts in the United States. That had almost never happened before and has not happened much since. A band from Texas put the heaviest metal of its time at number one without conceding anything to anyone. They never won a Grammy; at that point, the fact is almost decorative.

The brothers

The story ends in the worst possible way, and it has to be told in full and with respect. On 8 December 2004, in a club in Columbus, Ohio, a man climbed onto the stage during the opening bars of the concert and fired. Darrell Abbott — Dimebag, one of the most loved and most influential guitarists metal ever produced — died right there, at thirty-eight. Four people died that night, among them a twenty-three-year-old fan in the audience who tried to help him. The police shot the gunman dead. The motive was never established, and what has circulated since then was never proved.

It is one of the darkest days in the history of the genre: a musician murdered doing exactly what he loved, in front of his people. The whole metal community mourned him the way you mourn a brother, because for many that is what he was.

Vinnie Paul, the other brother, died at his home in Las Vegas in 2018, of a heart condition, at fifty-four. He had said many times that he did not want to speak to his former bandmates again, and he held that position to the end. Two brothers who started playing together as teenagers, who invented a sound, and who left fourteen years apart.

The band there is today

In 2022 the two survivors of the classic line-up, Anselmo and Rex Brown, went back on tour under the name Pantera, with Zakk Wylde —the guitarist from Ozzy— and Charlie Benante, of Anthrax. Wylde himself put it with the honesty the case called for: that this is not Pantera, that Pantera were Dime, Vinnie, Phil and Rex. He is right, and saying it from the inside does him credit. What there is today is two men taking those songs to the people who never got to see them, with two friends covering the places that are impossible to fill. It is not the band; it is its memory, out loud.

What to remember

Pantera was a glam band good enough to make it in spandex, and brave enough to burn the lot and found groove metal from scratch. It put an extreme metal record, with no radio, at number one in the United States. And it lost its two founding brothers, one of them shot dead on a stage, in one of the greatest tragedies the genre has lived through.

Remember it this way: of Pantera's whole story, the only thing the band erased on purpose was its own past, and it erased it not out of shame, but because it had found something so completely its own that it needed nothing else.

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This piece deals with the murder of a musician during a concert.

Sources

Pantera, an American band formed in Arlington, Texas, in 1981, made up in its classic line-up of Phil Anselmo (vocals), Darrell "Dimebag" Abbott (guitar), Vinnie Paul Abbott (drums) and Rex Brown (bass). Before "Cowboys from Hell" (1990) it released four albums on the family label Metal Magic Records, produced by Jerry Abbott, the brothers' father: "Metal Magic" (1983), "Projects in the Jungle" (1984) and "I Am the Night" (1985), with Terry Glaze as vocalist, and "Power Metal" (1988), already with Phil Anselmo, who had joined in 1987. Those four records are not available on streaming platforms and do not appear on the group's official site; there is no public documentation about the current ownership of their rights nor a formal refusal to reissue them. Asked about a reissue of "Power Metal", Anselmo stated that he had never considered it. "Cowboys from Hell" did not enter the Billboard 200 —it reached number 27 on the Heatseekers chart—, was certified platinum in 1997 and double platinum on 26 May 2023; "Far Beyond Driven" (1994) debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The band received four Grammy nominations for best metal performance without a single win. Darrell Abbott, born on 20 August 1966, was shot dead on 8 December 2004 at the Alrosa Villa club in Columbus, Ohio, during a Damageplan concert; Jeffrey Thompson, Erin Halk and Nathan Bray also died, and the attacker, Nathan Gale, was shot dead by the police. The motive was never established. Vinnie Paul Abbott, born on 11 March 1964, died on 22 June 2018 in Las Vegas of dilated cardiomyopathy and coronary artery disease; he had publicly stated his refusal to reunite with Anselmo and Brown. Phil Anselmo, Rex Brown and Terry Glaze are alive. Since July 2022 Anselmo and Brown have toured under the name Pantera alongside Zakk Wylde and Charlie Benante, who take part as touring musicians; Wylde has publicly stated that the current line-up is not Pantera. The group announced in September 2026 two concerts in New Orleans for 20 and 21 November 2026. Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica have their own profiles in this series. A Rebobinados rewrite of previously verified research; interpretations are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Billboard, Loudwire, Blabbermouth, BraveWords, Ultimate Metal and other coverage.