Pantera: Re-Firing The Forge Page 4
by Martin Popoff

"The first song that we wrote for the record was "Yesterday Dont Mean Shit", answers Vinnie in response to a question addressing the bands philosophy this time around. "We wrote it in a hotel room in Toronto while we were on tour with Black Sabbath. It definitely sets the tone for the record. That was our goal. We dont want to live on what we had accomplished in the past. We were proud of it, but we wanted to make sure that Pantera continues to move forward, and that was our goal with this record. Its a very roots-oriented record but its also very modern sounding."

And in general, just what is the core sound that people think of when they hear the name Pantera? "Its always been very groove-oriented, its always been very intense, always very heavy. It's almost, to me, very underground but also accessible. More people than just the underground can listen to it. And its always been very honest, very real. Its what comes out of us. If somebody came to us and said 'hey, its the year 2000, heres a drum machine, Phil, you need to start rapping, the bass player needs to start thumping the bass, wed all look at each other and laugh, because thats not what's in our hearts, and its not what we want to do. Weve always done what's in our hearts. Pantera, when you hear it, there is no doubt about that it's us."

Side project wise, Phil's always been the maniac, whether it was sinister black metal or something radically un-heavy. Not heavy? "Yeah, he's got a new band he's working on called Superjoint, and hes got a band that is nothing but acoustic piano, acoustic drums, acoustic guitars, that is almost like bizarre Halloween music called Body & Blood. The three of us, myself, Dime and Rex, have been working with this country and western artist David Allan Coe, doing like a combination metal country thing that has been a lot of fun. Just many things that come along, guest appearances on other records. We've done quite a few soundtracks. We did "Cat Scratch Fever" for the Detroit Rock City movie. Gene Simmons asked us personally to do that, so we were part of that. We wrote a song for the Heavy Metal 2000 movie. But boy, I think most of that side stuff got put out. We did a couple of Black Sabbath songs when we were getting warmed up to go on the Black Sabbath tour. We would just be playing some stuff in the studio and we would turn on the tape machine. "Electric Funeral" is definitely going to end up on the second Nativity In Black, N.I.B. or whatever, and "Hole In The Sky" is something we put out just as a kind of radio thing during the Sabbath tour. We were actually clowning around with a version of "I Dont Care Anymore" by Phil Collins, and it is very heavy and very different, but we didnt feel that it fits our record or anything we wanted to put out at this time, but you never know, it could come out in the future. So thats probably about it."

Pantera: Re-Firing The Forge Page 5