Recently I have been watching youtube videos of bands I used to listen to in high school.
It made me realise that the period from 1990-1995 (my high school years) was an awesome time for music if you were into metal/hard rock.
So I thought I would take a trip down memory lane talk about some of favorite bands and their albums from that time.
Pantera:
Phil Anselmo: Vocals
“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott: Guitars RIP
Vinnie Paul: Drums
Rex Brown: Bass
They were massive, They changed Metal in the early 90s, they were the self proclaimed loudest and heaviest band in the world. I went to see them live in 1994 at Festival Hall in Melbourne, then again in 1996 at the Entertainment centre. Cowboys from Hell, Vulgar Display of Power, Far Beyond Driven and The Great Southern TrendKill were all brilliant albums and they just got heavier and heavier. This was of course the bands plan as often stated by the band in interviews and at the gigs I went to. I still regard Dimebag as being one of the best guitarists ever. Phil had an awesome stage presence.
I still remember that 1994 concert as one of the best I have ever been to. Certainly the best I have been to at the dump that is Festival Hall!
It was all black t-shirts, black jeans and flannel back then. I waited for my mates on the steps of Flinders Street station along with what seemed like half the teenage population of Melbourne. I had never seen so many bogan metalheads in one place before.
It was like a march towards festival hall from then on with people randomly singing Pantera songs and screaming “Fucking Hostile!” at passers by.
Once in Festival Hall, I bought a T-shirt of course and put in straight on over my older one. Then found my seat and thought about how dissapointing it was that I wasn’t down in the pit. The good news is that back then they only had a half metre high barrier that was really just more of a marker to stop us from getting there. We decided we would make our way down once Pantera started.
They played Metallica’s Master of Puppets as background music and the crowd got right into it. Most of the crowd was singing along at the top of their voices, anyone would think we were actually at a Metallica concert.
Mantissa was the support, as expected they were ridiculed, water bottles were thrown at them and the band cracked the shits and walked off the stage at the end of their set, while the crowd was chanting PANTERA!, PANTERA!.
When Pantera came on they just blew us away. The energy of their set was amazing. Security tried in vain to stop people from the seats getting to the floor but they never had a chance. The whole place went nuts for the entire set. The band was just like I had expected after watching the Pantera home videos, I would have given anything to hang out backstage. Although looking back on it, I probably would have been far too soft to handle the sort of stuff they got up to.
My parents were a little freaked out afterwards as they came to pick me up and copped some insightful comments from some of the less than savery concert goers.
Here is a video of that 1994 concert:
