Bassist Rex Brown named ZZ Top and Van Halen as Pantera’s two core influences, noting how it was where his band’s “Stomp Boogie” roots began.
Pantera has indebted heavy music in a whole list of ways, including giving the genre a much needed kick in the butt when the genre was seriously falling out of fashion, gifting the world with a new guitar hero in the form of Dimebag Darrell, and becoming the first heavy metal to seriously shake things up.
Like everyone else, however, the Texan metal institution stood on the shoulders of giants, and speaking to Rick Beato in a new interview, Rex Brown boiled down the essence of Pantera to a sped-up mix of Van Halen and That Little Ol’ Band from Texas (transcription via Loudwire):
“If you take a look at this band and you had two bands that you had to pick, it would be Van Halen and ZZ Top sped up in that 6/8 in that ‘Texas Stomp Boogie’ as we used to call it, that’s what it was all about.”
ZZ Top, in particular, was a big one, as he explains:
“It was all over Texas at the time. ZZ Top, you gotta throw them in there somewhere fellas, because they influenced more in those first couple of records than [anyone]. For us, as a region of Texas, it was a big ass state. But when I first heard them, I was driving my bicycle about 8-years-old and I heard ‘La Grange,’ and something just happened. I lost my mind.”
He added:
“There’s nothing like ‘Tres Hombres’ and there never will be. It’s just song after song after song and it’s the most magical record that I have in my collection.”
The Van Halen stuff must have been more of Dimebag Darrell’s avenue, who was also a major Randy Rhoads admirer. Reflecting on the very first time he met the late Abbott brothers, Rex noted last month that it took Dime only one summer to learn the aforementioned icon’s repertoire:
“Vinnie had a little brother named Darrell, and when I met him at 15, he still hadn’t picked up the guitar yet. And then, [around] ’81, he tucked himself inside his room, didn’t see him for a summer, and learned all that Randy Rhoads stuff. He came out of that bedroom, and I’d never heard anybody [play like that]. He was a skinny little kit with tight, permed hair. It was just like a complete metamorphosis.”
