Opening Cowboys From Hell, the album’s title track was Pantera’s statement of intent (“We’re taking over this town”), guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell’s distinctive shred bursting into life like an attack of heavy artillery. This was heavy metal like no one had ever heard before. Pantera added a fresh, streetwise swagger to traditional heavy metal and thrash riffs, with a dollop of punk attitude and the belligerence of hardcore, and wrapped it all in slab-heavy, blues-inspired grooves. Their native Texas – and these young metallers had concocted a sound that would reshape the metal landscape forever. Combine that with the heavy blues of early ZZ Top – woven into the fabric of Pantera spent the latter half of the 80s hanging out with such bands as Slayer and Metallica, and these late-night jam sessions started to filter into their own music. They couldn’t wait to hear us play Cowboys From Hell or anything off that record, even before we recorded it, so we knew we were onto something special.” “We saw what our new songs were doing to people, to our crowd,” late drummer Vinnie Paul told Metal Hammer magazine in 2010. Pantera themselves noticed the tides changing among their own fans, too. They could be the next Metallica.’ And I was like, ‘OK, that’s the 12th time I’ve heard that this week…’ I heard the demo, and it was really good, but it wasn’t until I met them that I realised that this was something special.” As he recalled to Revolver magazine in 2014, “Pantera’s manager, Walter O’Brien, called me up and goes, ‘I’ve got this band. Terry Date was metal’s producer du jour, having worked with thrash mainstays Overkill and an upcoming band from his native Seattle called Soundgarden. “We saw what our new songs were doing to people” And, from the start, the band and the people around them knew something magical was about to happen. If 1988’s Power Metal album – the first with new vocalist Phil Anselmo – stood as a bridge into a new era, then 1990’s Cowboys From Hell signified a full-blown rebirth. Fortunately, towards the end of that decade, the Texan group began to draw from more influences than they could reasonably cram into their tiger-striped spandex and made a conscious decision to forge a less traditional path. Many people – not least Pantera themselves – prefer to forget about the band’s glam-metal 80s era.
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