"You see that?!" asks Phil Anselmo in the gruff, forceful growl that made him famous, as he points at his laptop. "That's the one."
It's a balmy early December day, and we're near the end of our six-hour visit at the metal legend's house. He's gesturing toward one song amid the countless iTunes playlists he's created on the days he has spent bedridden with crippling back pain. The track is titled "My Career Is Over." It totals two minutes and 14 seconds, and that's about all that Revolver can say about it. Though Anselmo has been rocking out enthusiastically to the track that appears right before "My Career Is Over" in the playlist—a brutal and melodic instrumental black-metal number titled "Katia" that he recently recorded—he makes it back to the laptop just in time to hit "stop" before the song can start.
Anselmo's protectiveness is understandable; at this point in his life, he's just not ready to share the tune, which he says is "the last song I'm ever going to put out." "It'll be a long time before I retire," he assures us. "I just can't bring myself to sing it yet, but it's there to be sung. The song is a done deal."
This is Phil Anselmo these days: introspective, productive, and looking toward the future. He's an older and wiser version of the upbeat and energetic young man who fronted Pantera in the Texas metal band's heyday, and a far cry from the surly, reclusive drug addict who played with Superjoint Ritual and Down in the early 2000s. The new Anselmo has been a long time in the making, emerging over the past decade as the musician recovered from the 2004 murder of Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, kicked his heroin habit, and found, along the hard road to personal redemption, some inner peace. This Anselmo is a renaissance man of sorts, running his own record label (Housecore), planning a 2013 horror festival, writing his memoir, interviewing boxers for BoxingInsider.com, and making music with Down and other ensembles. Most recently, in early January, he released his first-ever solo tracks, a couple of high-octane thrashers, "Conflict" and "Family, Friends, and Associates," on a split EP, War of the Gargantuas, with Housecore signees Warbeast. Later this year, he will drop his debut solo album, Walk Through Exits Only, due out in June or July.
"I felt like I needed to do it," he says of the impetus behind recording solo music. "I felt like I could create something that was tangibly different. I'm not using a band name for this record so people don't have to buy into a whole new band thing. It's just coming from me."
As he sits on his living room's ornately embroidered black-and-red couch, he takes his time parsing his answers during our interview, letting the occasional Camel smolder. But regardless of his nicotine intake, the musician, age 44, looks healthy—and not just physically. Maybe even more tellingly, Anselmo, who has stretched out his bare feet in front of him, seems calm and relaxed.
It helps that he's in the comfort of his own home. Located on what he calls "17 acres of solitude," his house might scare his neighbors the way the Munsters' did. That is, if he had any neighbors: Anselmo lives in a rural Louisiana parish that contains less than 600 occupants. His stairs and doorway are flanked with dragon gargoyles and, as you enter through his open front door, you're greeted by a statue of a butler ghoul and the sounds of the black-metal band Portal. Throughout his home, there are reminders of his past everywhere: photos of him with Dimebag Darrell and and Darrell's brother, Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul, on his mantel, a big Down poster in his bathroom, and the Billboard chart where Pantera's 1994 album, Far Beyond Driven, reached No. 1 framed in his bedroom. It's here, amid all these reminders of his personal history, that he has been able to move forward.
"I wake up at around 9 a.m. and get rolling," he says of his average day. "I work with my engineer, Steve Berrigan, and we'll go from noon to midnight, sometimes, tracking songs. Later today, I might punch the fucking bag."
Anselmo's open schedule and endless work ethic have led him to create music he describes as "unpredictable" for Walk Through Exits Only. The album's sound is so different from the two tracks on the Warbeast split that he's almost apologetic about them before he plays us the full LP. "I don't want people to get the wrong idea with those first two songs that I put out," he says of "Conflict" and "Family, Friends, and Associates." "I picked those for that split because they were more straightforward. The actual record itself is more unorthodox. If you're a hardcore Down fan, the solo stuff might go way over your head. I'm prepared for that, but then I hope people see the beauty in it."
Anselmo brings us over to his laptop and plays rough mixes of Walk Through Exits Only. The first song is titled "The Music Media Is My Whore"—a reaction to the way music mags have criticized him and helped create a rift between him and his former Pantera bandmates, trumping up negative comments he made about them. When Revolver says, "Gee, thanks, Phil," about the title, he just laughs, but when the song kicks into its harder-than-hardcore shout-along verses, he begins rocking out, banging his head and fists, and generally acting out each song on the record for the next 38 minutes. When he gets to the title track's proclamation, "I walk through exits only," he turns to us, looks us in the eyes, and bellows the lyric, "because I can!" Musically speaking, the album contains an intricately arranged amalgam of extreme metals—black, death, and grind, played in a way similar to the band whose shirt Anselmo is wearing, Deathspell Omega—but with a hardcore edge and some Pantera groove; its riffs, written by Anselmo, are all played masterfully by guitarist Marzi Montazeri, whom Anselmo has known since the '80s. "I let him put his fingerprints all over this thing," Anselmo says of the record, including its instrumental hidden track. "He has a unique thing going on."
Anselmo sounds like a loosed wolf on the album's eight official tracks, bellowing, shouting, and shrieking on frantic songs with titles like "Bedroom Destroyer" and "Bedridden" that are clearly autobiographical for a man who has been in fact bedridden a lot over recent years. "It's just about the everyday struggles within my life," he says of the record.
In the mid-'90s, Anselmo's doctor diagnosed him with a condition called degenerative disc disease, an extremely painful condition where the aging of a person's spinal column advances rapidly, putting pressure on the back's nerves. Seeking solace from the pain led Anselmo to using hardcore drugs, including heroin. Although he eventually kicked the narcotic and got surgery for his back in 2006, he still feels discomfort, especially when the pressure systems change in the Gulf of Mexico.
"It feels like being cheated sometimes, when you know you have a healthy strong body, yet you're toting three levels of corpse bone with titanium clamps," he explains. "You can feel the foreign objects in your body poking and sticking. Some days I just want to be fucking left alone. The feeling makes me edgy, makes me grumpy, grouchy, tough to be with. So I'll stay alone and write or do simple, mindless things to take me away from physicality. I do resent physical pain.
"Getting injured changed the game," he continues. "I began to drink too much and drugs were too easy to come by—painkillers, pain pills, and then you gotta think about how in the '90s, neurosurgery hadn't become near what it is today. I went and saw the best back doctors in the world and they turned me down left and right. At the time, I felt very slighted: 'Why won't you help me? Why aren't you doing this for me?' I didn't know until later that they were doing me a favor." At the time, the technology for the surgery was too dangerous and could have left Anselmo paralyzed. But without proper treatment, the frontman's drug abuse got out of control. "Pretty soon there was quite a distance between me and anyone," he says. "That includes the guys in Pantera, my family, the people closest to me."
Looking back, Anselmo doesn't like the way he presented himself while on drugs, and he looks uncomfortable when he talks about the YouTube videos of his inebriated rants at Superjoint Ritual concerts and the interviews where he said some regrettable things. "It's very embarrassing," he says, looking off after a long pause. Today, Anselmo has even curtailed his intake of weed, a big deal for the guy who wrote the lyrics to the Down song, "Buried in Smoke." "These days, man, I'm a midnight toker," he explains. "It's all business first. I can't wake and bake anymore. I don't like seeing Philip wasted at all." Anselmo says that with the exception of the occasional bloody Mary, he hasn't tasted hard liquor in seven years.
"All the high feeling is really just a whole lot of blank memory," he explains, reflecting on his heroin days. "It's a whole lot of sitting around, nodding out on one's own chest, and falling asleep in mid-sentence. Which is an ugly thing. Sadly enough, a lot of people I know who were doing the same drugs as me are dead now. I probably would have ended up that way." Anselmo nearly did, when he went into cardiac arrest after overdosing at a 1996 Pantera show in Dallas. "Believe me, I've overdosed more times than just the Dallas time, which was highly publicized, because fuck, man, I flopped, hit the floor. It wasn't the first time—it was the first on a large scale—and it wasn't the last time."
According to Anselmo, his path to sobriety came in three steps: meeting Kate Richardson, the woman he's currently in a relationship with, finding a good doctor, and reassessing his life after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. "The irony is that Katrina means 'to cleanse,'" he says. "It means to start new, and I embraced that." When he returned to his home after evacuating from the storm, he had only a small amount of methadone, which he was using to get off heroin, left. "I looked at this little bitter tiny piece of shit pill in my hand," Anselmo recalls. "I said, Is this little thing really controlling my life that much? I dumped it in the trash, washed my hands, and expected the worst. That didn't happen and I walked it off perfectly."
Although he has changed, Anselmo says people who knew him when he was at his worst are still coming around to realizing that. When Dimebag Darrell was murdered onstage in 2004, the media linked some of the shooter's motive to comments Anselmo made in the U.K. music press about how the guitarist should be "beaten severely." Because of this, some of the singer's friends distanced themselves from him, and others chose sides without telling him.
Recently, Anselmo reconnected with Sterling Winfield, coproducer of Pantera's 2000 album, Reinventing the Steel. "I didn't know there was a rift between Sterling and I until I spoke with him several months ago," Anselmo says of the first time they'd talked in 12 years. "He chose sides at one point, and picked Vinnie Paul's side, which is a psychotic side." He pauses his story to explain: "I feel bad for Vince. People should pity the guy. I wasn't there when Dimebag was murdered, but he sure as fuck was. That's his flesh and blood, murdered right in front of him. It's a shame that Vince never reached out to Rex [Brown, Pantera's bassist] and I. I think the healing process would have been beneficial to him, instead of his knee-jerk reaction to fear, and his therapy through tit bars and whiskey."
Returning to his story about Winfield, Anselmo explains, "He said that he drank heavily after Dimebag's death. He admitted that he hated my guts but then he got sober. Over his first two years of sobriety, he realized that these bad feelings towards me were unfounded completely." Anselmo says they spoke for an hour and that the experience was enlightening for him, bringing the singer to reflect on Pantera's downfall.
"One guy can't break up a band," Anselmo says. "After we broke up, why was Rex with me and not with Dimebag and Vince? You have to understand, it goes all four ways when a band breaks up. Yes, I made mistakes. Yes, there was a lack of communication on both sides and some of it is my fault—a lot of it is my fault. My door is open, though. I read somewhere where Vinnie Paul said, 'These drug addicts get themselves all clean and they expect everyone to hug them again. Well, it don't work out that way.' That's how he chooses to live his life? I feel sorry for him. I'm sorry that he's going to have to carry around this fucking hatred. That hate would not be such a sharp thorn if there wasn't love attached to it, because that dude loves me in his heart and he knows what he and I went through together."
When Anselmo finishes, we bring up the fact that today, the day we're doing the interview, is three days before the anniversary of Darrell's death. He becomes solemn again. "Two mornings ago, the first thing I thought of when I woke up was Dimebag," he says. "I think about Dime a lot. Last year was very rough. I don't know what it was about last year, but I got into a severe depression about the loss of Darrell and what it meant and how huge it is. How heinous it is for him not to be here and to go out the way he did. There are still a few days to go, and hopefully it's just not as bad as last year. But if it is, so be it.
"Dimebag was a lifer," Anselmo continues. "He was meant to be this guitar hero. He was born for it. We would have made amends. I would like to think he would be proud of me for pulling myself out of the muck, the abyss. I'm not a believer in the afterlife. I think this is our shot. But I guess, in an atavistic way, you hope that the fallen one's mighty spirit is looking down and smiling on you. I just choose to remember the positive things. He was almost like the perfect counterpoint to me. We may have clashed to a certain extent, but we would always find a happy medium. It was a vital relationship that I miss greatly."
"Pantera had an almost supernatural freakin' alchemic chemistry, not of this world," he adds. "I have not felt it since. Down has its own chemistry, but it's not Pantera."
A couple of years ago, Anselmo began singing some of his Pantera songs for the first time since the band's disbandment with an all-star cast of musicians, including members of Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, and more, dubbed the Metal Masters. It has been a special experience for him. "It means a lot," Anselmo says. "I love the fact that they call on me and want to do these old Pantera songs." Also, it's a chance to reconnect with some old friends. "I hadn't had any falling outs with these guys," he says. Then he clarifies, "Guys like [Slayer guitarist] Kerry King—I forget sometimes how many people I have not made amends with, and people who hadn't seen me in so long that the last time they heard of me, I was a drug addict in trouble. People will come up to me after and say, 'Honestly, man, I didn't know what to expect, but boy, this is a fucking pleasant surprise. It's good to have you back.' That means a lot to hear."
"Coming out of the drug-riddled abyss is something to be proud of for sure," he says later. "And to be able to keep trudging on and moving forward is something to be proud of. But really, and this might sound kind of strange, but I guess I'm most proud of the fan base that has stuck by me for so long and kept the memory of Pantera and Dimebag. I'm proud of them. I'm proud to be a part of them."
When he plays Revolver the album Walk Through Exits Only, amid poking us, grabbing our shoulders, and rocking out, he says the reason he's releasing solo music now is for the fans. He says the record is for those who've been waiting for him to put out a new record of high-intensity metal. But he also underscores that this is just the beginning.
Going part and parcel with the fact that he's not ready yet to record the lyrics to "My Career Is Over," Anselmo claims he has his next few solo albums mapped out. Indeed, he says he has already recorded his next solo release, though he hasn't yet put vocals on it, and he is already thinking about his third. "This album is a starting point," he says of Walk Through Exits Only. It marks yet another new beginning for a man who has already bounced back enough times to explain just how hopeful, inspired, and positive he comes across throughout our visit. "I know there's no going back to the negative," Anselmo concludes. "I'm doing one project after the next. Shit, man, I can't sit still anymore."
