In a recent chat with Sweetwater, Pantera bassist Rex Brown discussed the choice to hit the road with a new edition of the band. Apparently, the lineup got the thumbs up from the ‘ghosts’ of Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell.
The bassist explained feeling the late members’ presence on stage and referred to it as a ‘cold feeling’:
“The last show, man, I had a creepy, like a cold — something came by me. It felt like there was a cold feeling. And I’ve gotten this a couple of times before. When we were down recording with Charlie — me and Charlie just went down [in late 2022], put up eighty to a hundred hours of tape before Zakk [started rehearsing with us]. Zakk was still on the road. So we wanted to get the bass and the drum real tight, and we had this scratch guitar player. I felt that same chill.”
Brown then called the ‘chills’ angels and continued:
“And, to me, they’re angels. And I think you know who they are. Those guys, I think they’re looking down, or they’re looking around us, with us, and I think they’re digging what they’re seeing, man. I really do. And that’s the only kind of way I can look at it, and get as close as we can with Charlie and Zakk. And God, it’s getting really, really good. And there’s so much more potential to get even tighter.”
Zakk Wylde Felt The Same Signals And Messages
Pantera made a comeback in 2022 nearly after 20 years. Rex Brown and Phil Anselmo teamed up again and Zakk Wylde and Charlie Benante stepped in to fill the shoes of Dimebag and Vinnie Paul.
Before Pantera’s tour, Wylde talked about getting signals from Dimebag Darrell to bring the band back together. He shared about the tributes he made to Dime in a separate interview with On The Record:
“Even when we were getting ready to do the thing, rehearsals, and they were just figuring out how we were gonna do this. There’d be signs all over the place, whether on a license plate that would be like 333 or I’d run into a Dimebag license plate in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean. It would just [be] like him pushing this thing along, willing it to happen. So, he’s just always around.”
You can watch the interview below.