BANG.
A chair smashes in Pantego Sound Studio.
Phil Anselmo storms out. The Pantera frontman’s eyes are bleary and unfocused. The result of several glasses of port wine.
The wine was producer Terry Date’s idea. Fresh from producing Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, he had watched Chris Cornell “warm” his throat with port before recording particularly challenging vocal sections. But Anselmo – who’d struggle throughout his life with substance abuse – seemed more interested in “catching a buzz” than nailing his vocal line:
“There’s one note that comes up twice in Cemetery Gates that I could not do for hours. I broke a chair, I was so goddamn frustrated. Everybody’s beggin’ me, ‘Don’t smoke any weed. Have your best voice.’ And I went, ‘You mean I have to do all this shit bone sober?’”
It didn’t help that Terry Date was effectively Pantera’s “second choice”.
The album was supposed to have been produced by Max Norman who had produced Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary of a Madman. But the label had only allocated them $30,000 for a producer fee. Unfortunately, the hard rock band Lynch Mob outbid Pantera, paying Norman $50,000 to produce of their (now mostly forgotten) album, Wicked Sensations.
Left scrambling, the band went back to their contact at ATCO Records who introduced them to Terry Date. After signing a seven-record deal with ATCO, they’d already waited 6 months to record Cowboys From Hell.
Nobody was prepared for what was about to be unleashed on the metal world…
“We're taking over this town”
Cowboys From Hell was Pantera's fifth studio album, but effectively their first.
The four preceding glam metal records have been pretty much buried by the band themselves. Cowboys From Hell was their chance to reinvent the steel. Pantera answered an important question in the early 90s: what happens when you pair Southern groove with straight up 80s thrash metal?
Phil Anselmo told Metal Hammer that “a major turning point” for the band was when Slayer’s Kerry King “and Dimebag sat in a little room and jammed for hours”. This groove-laden thrash became the sound most associated with Cowboys From Hell – a record that eventually went double platinum. And buried inside it, between the chest-beating swagger of the title track and the blunt-force trauma of "Domination," was the most emotionally-charged song Pantera ever recorded, “Cemetery Gates”.
Message in Blood
The Cowboys From Hell album was not the first time I heard Pantera’s music.
I was thirteen and spending whatever pocket money I could cobble together on metal magazines and CDs. There was a free compilation CD in the May 2006 issue of Kerrang!, “High Voltage” with some interesting (and in some cases overlooked) covers, including a cover of Pantera’s “Walk” by some up-and-comers, Avenged Sevenfold.
The riff to “Walk” crushed me. The bruising two-and-a-half note riff and the brutal in-your-face lyrics changed my conception of what “heavy” meant.
It wasn’t long before I hunted down Pantera’s greatest hits, Reinventing Hell: The Best of Pantera.
Reinventing Hell was a CD/DVD package and I spent many hours watching the haunting music video to “Cemetery Gates” in a loop. Over time, the song buried itself into my psyche…
“…as the memories now unfold”
“Cemetery Gates” opens with a graveside narrator grieving the loss of his “love” who has taken her own life.
“Reverend, reverend, is this some conspiracy?”
The song focuses on the narrator’s pain – not the pain of the deceased.
Left in his own misery, it all feels “unreal” to him. Even when the narrator gets close to acknowledging his lover’s pain…
“Now I watch the falling rain
All my mind can see now is your…”
…he stops short at actually uttering the word.
Does the word’s omission suggest it’s too painful for the song’s narrator to acknowledge? Or is the intention to bring the emphasis back to the narrator who now feels “incomplete” and “alone”.
The previous year, two friends of the band had died by suicide:
“‘Cemetery Gates’ was based on suicides by very good friends that went down about a year before. It was on back-to-back weekends, if I remember. [...] We didn’t know quite what that was about, but it was these back-to-back deaths that rocked us pretty hard.”
The narrator “couldn’t cry” because of the “pride” within his soul.
He doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary, or maturity, to let himself grieve, and so – in his devastated state – he directs his anger towards his lover for leaving him and taking away his youth. All he has left is his own pain, as the memories spiral out before him.
Strength Beyond Strength
The narrator’s inability to healthily express his emotions reflects Anselmo’s own challenges to do the same. Bassist Rex Brown remembers the frontman’s reaction to watching his hero, Mike Tyson, get knocked unconscious by Buster Douglas:
“Phil was outside of himself crying. We couldn’t even get through to him or joke with him. He was just like, “Fuck y’all!” It was just so crazy to see this guy lose it completely over a fucking boxing match. But he was so into boxing and Tyson. That’s where a lot of the strength that he was grabbing was coming from.”
This inability to express oneself healthily as a man remained a core theme for Pantera throughout their career.
Anselmo’s lyrics were often directed at other young men who – like him – had grown up with abusive, or absent, fathers:
“The unwanted
The ones with fathers just like you”
This shift towards the personal sphere in Pantera’s songs made the music heavier.
And it’s likely responsible for their explosive rise in the mainstream. Far Beyond Driven, written 3 years after Cowboys, is often cited as the heaviest album to reach #1 in the Billboard charts. Anselmo himself says that:
“I decided to take the realistic route – to sing about circumstances that other people can relate to. That, to me, was the way to get to people, instead of writing about dragons or serial killers.”
This shift in songwriting marked a turning point for metal in the 90s.
More bands began to focus on the experience of the individual in their lyrics – paving the way for genres like nu-metal, metalcore and emo in the following decades.
“...the love our souls had sworn to make”
This shift in songwriting is the result of Anselmo looking outside of the metal genre for inspiration….
The title “Cemetery Gates” is borrowed – consciously or not – from a song by The Smiths of the same name. Anselmo himself has spoken numerous times of being influenced by bands like The Smiths and The Cure. Morrissey’s lyrics were characterized by a deep emotional sincerity – almost diary-like at times. Anselmo took this same approach to songwriting, but applied it to metal.
The irony does not escape me that Anselmo “borrowed” the title of a song that rails against plagiarism… Not to mention the line “I'm a man cut in half in this world” sounds very reminiscent of another song by The Smiths, “Half a Person”. Was Anselmo intentionally seeding references to The Smiths into “Cemetery Gates”? Or were Morrissey’s lyrics so ingrained in his consciousness that similar themes simply seeped out. No one, but Anselmo, knows for sure.
In any case, Anselmo’s emphasis on the personal experience lends a vividness to the graveside scene:
“The reverend, he turned to me without a tear in his eyes
Nothin' new for him to see, I didn't ask him why”
The reverend has seen this play out time and time again.
He’s not insensitive. But there is only so much sympathy, or empathy, to go around. This is unknown territory to the narrator who remains unable to express what he’s feeling.
But while the song’s male narrator struggles to find words to express his emotions, Dimebag was figuring out his own strategy to mine his feelings… Which involved some “emotional lubrication”:
The Art of Shredding
Although Anselmo was under strict orders not to smoke or drink during the recording (with the exception of the port wine), the other band members were living by their own set of rules. One night, Dimebag got home late from the studio:
"...with a pretty good buzz on, picked up my axe, turned on the four-track, cranked it loud as hell with the loose buzz theory that anything and everything goes, and just played it, I played three solos back-to-back, didn't bother listening to them, crashed out not so happy. The next morning I woke up thinking I had a lot of work to do. I almost started from scratch, but then I decided to slow down and listen. So I fired up the four-track, put my ears on and bam! Lo and behold, there it was! The first lead I played the night before was it for sure. Hey man, the second and third weren't bad, but the first had that first-take magic! I didn't touch it."
The “Cemetery Gates” solo is revered as one of Dimebag’s greatest guitar solos.
Both emotive and showcasing Dime’s technical shred-heavy guitar style, Guitar World readers would later vote it the 35th greatest solo ever recorded (Dimebag's second-highest ranking behind "Floods".)
A solo Dimebag barely remembers recording.
Clash With Reality
That’s not the only recording anomaly. When most metal fans think of “Cemetery Gates”, they immediately “hear” the haunting opening riffs and Anselmo’s crooning vocals in their minds.
But Dimebag did not write that haunting riff. It was Rex Brown.
“One of my favorite memories is when we did ‘Cemetery Gates’. Dime already had the riff in the song where it starts getting heavy, but we didn’t have an intro. One day, I picked up an acoustic guitar and messed around with a part, which we recorded.”
The band then recorded a piano in reverse to create that wide, swelling surge that links the two sections.
And that acoustic guitar Rex used to write the iconic introduction? He’s still got it…
“I stole it!”
Shedding Skin
The recording of the song is tight. Having played together all their lives, the Abbott twins – Vinnie Paul and Dimebag – were unerringly in sync with one another. They had an almost instinctual sense of shared rhythm. To ensure this surgical precision was captured on the record…
“Vinnie would lay down all the drums, then Dime would play guitar. We’d put the bass on last. We turned all the drum channels off, and I just played along with Dime’s track. That became known as “the microscope.” If something was off, we’d get a razorblade and cut and splice the tape. We didn’t have Pro Tools back then. And that’s what created our trademark sound, where the guitar and bass are just spot-on.”
Rex would track his rhythms after Dime had tracked his guitar rhythms.
The razorblade detail is also interesting. There is a moment before each chorus – just a millisecond – where everything comes to an abrupt halt. This short silence punctuates the transition between sections, a little “breather” that makes the chorus riff “pop”. It’s likely that this moment of silence was manually cut and edited with the razorblade in question. Razorblade imagery would later become synonymous with Pantera. The custom guitar Dimebag designed with Dean Guitars – the same guitar I chose for The Chug’s logo – is even called the Razorback.
“...the memories still remain”
The song ends with what can only be called a “duet” between Dimebag’s guitar and Phil’s voice. Phil screams the word “gates” at higher and higher registers. Dimebag matches Phil’s screams with the squeals he produces from his signature “divebombs”. Dimebag’s final divebomb reaches a screaming pitch as the rhythm guitars fade out, bringing an end to one of the most iconic metal songs of the 90s.
Dime’s last shrieking divebomb reaches a note Anselmo couldn’t reach, expressing the grief the song’s narrator couldn’t release.
14 years later Dimebag would be the first band member to “pass the cemetery gates”.
It’s only fitting he gets the last note.
RIP.
🤘 Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media