HELLYEAH

Cowboy from Hell Vinnie Paul reclaims his drum throne and joins forces with Chad Gray and Gregg Tribett of Mudvayne and Jerry Montano and Tom Maxwell of Nothingface for their raucous, and definitely nocturnal, supergroup

By Jon Wiederhorn
Photo by Jack Thompson

At first, the odds of former Pantera and Damageplan drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott joining a band in 2006 seemed slim. Less than 18 months had passed since his brother, guitar legend Dimebag Darrell, was murdered onstage, and Abbott was only just starting to get his professional life back together.

He had already flatly turned down several offers to play when an old friend, Nothingface bassist Jerry Montano, called him up and asked if he’d like to jam with him, Nothingface guitarist Tom Maxwell, and Mudvayne vocalist Chad Gray and guitarist Greg Tribbett. Again, Abbott declined, but Montano wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“He called me over and over, and one night he caught me when I’d been drinking and listening to some music and I was in the right frame of mind,” recalls Abbott. “So I said, ‘You know what, man? I might as well at least give this thing a fucking shot and see what happens.’”

“Even I was blown away when he agreed to do it,” Montano recalls with a chuckle. “I called Chad and Tom all cool sounding and said, ‘Hey, guys, we got a drummer.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, who?’ And I go, “Dude—[long pause]—Vinnie Paul.”

Of course, having metal’s MVP skinsman onboard didn’t just guarantee that the group, dubbed HellYeah, would have killer beats to burn; Abbott’s return was also sure to generate immediate interest from those who wondered if he would ever play again. It’s probably fair to say that even if the band’s self-titled debut were less than first rate, it would nevertheless fall on sympathetic ears.

Fortunately, HellYeah rips, reflecting the individual talents of the band members without replicating their past accomplishments and serving as a forum in which they can experiment with new ideas. The title track is a fist-in-the-air blazer that combines clawing guitars and chip-on-shoulder vocals with a swaggering repeated rhythm. “You Wouldn’t Know” is dense and brooding, mingling moody, ringing melodies with a riff that impacts like a felonious assault. “Thank You,” the band’s near-ballad, is poignant without being prissy. And “Alcohaulin’ Ass” is a heartfelt blend of blues and country that ends in a crunching display of metal might.

“It’s a really diverse and fresh album,” Abbott enthuses. “To me, it doesn’t sound like Pantera, Damageplan, Nothingface, or Mudvayne. It’s a new sound with a familiar groove, and having that kick-ass groove there was the most important thing. That’s something music’s been missing over the past couple years. Everything’s gotten so fast and intense, and the groove’s kind of gone. So we wanted to bring that back.”

Aside from the desire to get his groove back, there are a number of other reasons Abbott agreed to join HellYeah. He has been friends with Montano since the bassist was in the Deadlights (who were Pantera’s labelmates), he had a blast touring with Nothingface on Pantera’s Reinventing the Steel tour in 2001, and he was a fan of Mudvayne. But most of all, being part of a supergroup of sorts meant he could return to the music scene without making a full-time commitment.

“Mudvayne and Nothingface are still going strong, and I like that,” Abbott explains. “We’re not looking at this as a side project, but at the same time, it’s a band that’s only going to see the light of day every year and a half, and at this point, that’s good for me. So whenever we do it, we’ll have as much fun as we can and kick as much ass as we can. We’re touring this spring, and I’m looking forward to that. It’s been a long time.”

Abbott has spent most of the past 20 years of his life on tour, so it’s understandable that his eagerness to get back on the road far outweighs any fears he might harbor of stepping onstage again. “I’m a pretty strong person, and mentally I’ve had to put a lot of things behind me,” he says. “I have to look at it like I did before. Every day could be the last day. Every day’s gotta be the best day, and we’re here to live, not to live in fear. So I’m gonna give everything I got, and I think it’s exactly what Dime wants me to do, and there’s no way I’m gonna let him down by closing up shop and saying, ‘That’s it.’ I’ve had plenty of time to sit back and reflect, and it’s time for me to get back at it.”

While Abbott was pals with Montano and Maxwell when he agreed to join HellYeah, he had never spoken to Gray. However, the singer had already been thinking about HellYeah for four years. He first broached the idea of collaborating with Montano and Maxwell in New Orleans when Nothingface were opening for Mudvayne on their tour supporting 2002’s The End of All Things to Come. When the bands got off the road, Gray flew to Nothingface’s studio in Baltimore, and the musicians wrote and recorded the HellYeah track “Waging War.”

“We did it cold turkey, and it was so fucking powerful,” says Maxwell. “It was the true test of whether our styles were gonna work together.”

“I was gonna work with them on a whole album, but then I started getting really busy with the next Mudvayne album, Lost and Found,” adds Gray. “So we put it on hold for a while, and during that time, I started bringing it up to Greg, telling him that it would be really cool if we could keep working on something else on the side.”

HellYeah first met up at Abbott’s house in Dallas last summer to start working on the record. The studio at the back of Dime’s house had remained virtually untouched since the guitarist’s shooting, and returning there was emotionally overwhelming for the drummer. “There were several times when I got up and walked out of the room and I thought I was going to throw up,” Abbott recalls. “But once we got into that first song [“So Sick”] we wrote, I felt this overwhelming power that this was the right thing to do.”

“The first day was rough on him,” says Montano. “But we wrote a kick-ass song, and by 4 A.M. we were all drunk, listening to it all excited, and it was just on.” By the end of their first eight-day session, HellYeah had seven songs. It wasn’t just the chemistry between musicians that inspired them or the good times they were having—they were also driven by the memory and spirit of Dime. “A lot of great magic has come out of that studio over the years, so there’s this all-embracing aura,” explains Gray. “It’s like an old shoe. You just put it on, and it feels so good you just wanna walk around. But throughout the whole process, I felt like there was a presence, like Dime was actually there and he was motivating us.”

Abbott, too, felt the presence of his brother, and regularly received signs of approval as invigorating as the high fives they once exchanged. “Dime was all about the number 3, man, and I cannot tell you how many times we’d be sitting there talking about him or we’d be in the middle of something important, and we looked up at the clock and it was 3:33,” marvels Abbott. “And that gave me strength knowing that he’s reminding us he’s still around and giving us the A-OK sign.”

HellYeah tracked their 12-song album in three eight-day sessions. The musicians wrote everything in the studio, which meant especially long hours for Gray and Tribbett, who often worked with the rest of the band until 11 P.M., then spent another six hours finessing vocals and lyrics with coproducer Sterling Winfield, who had previously worked with both Pantera and Damageplan. “About halfway through the song, we’d start drinking. And we’d finish that song or keep tracking it until you could hear my voice slur. That was the shut-off point.”

“We were laughing the whole time,” adds Tribbett. “This whole thing was definitely all about having a good time.”

As with all scenarios involving Vinnie Paul, there were also a few “Don’t try this at home” moments during the HellYeah sessions, like the night Maxwell got hammered at Abbott’s strip club, the Clubhouse, and attempted to drive back to Vinnie’s place, where they were staying. “We tried to do a U-turn and went right over the median,” says Maxwell. “We got so fucking lost. Finally, we saw a hotel and pulled over and called a cab.”

And what expedition to Dime’s would be complete without the mishandling of pyro? “Dude, Greg lit a smoke bomb in my hoodie in Dime’s kitchen,” says Gray. “I was standing there drinking a beer, and suddenly I smelled this shit and I turned around, and it looked like someone lit a campfire of blue smoke on my head.”

“I think it was just the fact that I was in Dime’s house, and it just reminded me of the whole Pantera thing with all the fireworks,” sheepishly retorts Tribbett.

“I think it has more to do with [Dime’s widow] Rita Haney handing you the smoke bomb and the lighter,” laughs Gray.

For Gray, the rollicking vibe of HellYeah was a welcome change of pace from the more serious Mudvayne, who are currently working on their fourth full-length. In that group, Gray writes around conceptual themes and agonizes over every syllable. With HellYeah, he just popped open his laptop and started typing whatever was on his mind. “I didn’t worry about lyrical content because it didn’t matter,” Gray explains. “I just thought, Let’s create something different that’s not so goddamn intense.”

Just because Gray didn’t agonize over the lyrics doesn’t mean he had nothing to say. “You Wouldn’t Know” is about the difficulty of maintaining one’s integrity in the profit-obsessed music industry, and “Thank You” is a shout-out to all of the band’s recently departed family members: Dime, Maxwell’s mother, and Gray’s grandmother. “It’s a very emotional track for anyone who’s been through a crazy loss,” Gray says. “Dime was brutally murdered. I watched my grandmother, who was this thriving, full-of-life soul, get whittled down to nothing because of cancer. I just felt we owed a big thank you to all of them.”

“It was very powerful,” says Abbott of the first time he heard the completed song. “It made me think of how much my brother had done for me and how much we had done together and how much I miss him and how important it is for me and everyone to know we love him and appreciate him.”

While HellYeah made plenty of noise in the studio and at the Clubhouse, the band’s activities were kept under wraps like classified military secrets. If it weren’t for a stray comment made by Nothingface singer Matt Holt to a member of the press, practically no one would have known of the band’s existence.

“If we had come right out of the chute and said the five of us were getting together, everybody would have these preconceived notions of what it would be about, and all of a sudden there would be this pressure on us to fulfill what people expect,” Abbott says of the decision to keep HellYeah under the radar. “So we just did it on our own, and that way we could do what we wanted with it. And the more we got into it, the stronger we all felt about it. We all think we’ve made a great record, something that’s really going to leave a mark in music this year.”

Not to take anything away from the rest of the band, but it’s hard to imagine HELLYEAH being as powerful without Abbott. In addition to playing his ass off, the drummer coproduced the album, reshaping many of the arrangements in the process. And the group has been equally important to Abbott, serving as a major step on his road to recovery. “One of the coolest things that happened to me when we were working on this record,” recalls Montano, “was when we were in the Clubhouse drinking and Vinnie leaned over to me and said, ‘Hey, man, thanks for getting me to play drums again.’ To be given credit for something like that was unbelievable.”