For years Pantera has been unleashing its anger in front of fanatical crowds who have helped them sell millions of albums without heavy radio airplay or video rotation.

When the band released The Great Southern Trendkill it was deemed as the darkest album and made statements that many couldn’t understand. Four years later people are only starting to understand but that’s only after Reinventing The Steel was released. The statements between the albums may have slight similarities, but the music is certainly different.

“I think the main difference between the two was that The Great Southern Trendkill came out in ’96 when heavy metal was deemed the most unpopular form of music and we wanted to make the most extreme metal record ever,” explained drummer Vinnie Paul. “We wanted to make it so if you hated heavy metal you hated it that much more, and if you loved it, you loved it that much more. It was all about aggression and attitude. With Reinventing The Steel we wanted to maintain the aggression but also wanted to get back to the song writing aspect of it and write the best songs plus really having the songs that have a memorable chorus.”

As The writing process from album to album may change slightly, which can either help or hinder the length of time that it takes to put the material together. This didn’t seem to be the case with Reinventing The Steel.

“It was four years between studio records but during that four years we did our regular two year touring cycle for The Great Southern Trendkill plus we put out a live record. Then Ozzy (Osbourne) called and wanted us to do Ozzfest. We did that and then Black Sabbath called and wanted us to do a year-and-a-half touring with them all over the United States and Europe. When it came time to write the record we really only spent about six to eight weeks writing and recording it, but we took about six months to do it. We really wanted to take our time with it and work two or three days at a time with it and give ourselves the best opportunity to make the best record we could make. It was a lot of fun and it really wasn’t any different than the others, other than the fact that Terry Date wasn’t there, and there wasn’t any deadline.”

The first song Pantera wrote for Reinventing The Steel was put together in a hotel room in Toronto while on tour with Black Sabbath. That song was ‘Yesterday Don’t Mean Shit.’

“We just knew that we’d been on tour for such a long time and we knew that the Sabbath tour was about to wind up, and we knew that we needed a starting spot for the new record. We set all the stuff up in a meeting room and had portable tape machines and started jamming. That was the first thing that came out. It really set the tone for the record and I’m sure that’s what inspired Phillip to write the lyrics ‘Yesterday don’t mean shit because tomorrow’s the day you will have to face.’ We want to keep moving forward and we approached this record like we were a new band”

Kerry King’s (Slayer) volatile guitar work can be heard on ‘Goddamn Electric’ and as a friend of the band you could say it was as easy as a phone call to get him involved.

“It wasn’t really a phone call,” Paul declared firmly. “He called us while they were in town on Ozzfest when we were making the record and invited us down to the show. We said that we’d be there but we’d be bringing some portable recording gear and wanted him to play on a song called ‘Goddamn Electric’ that pays homage to Slayer, and he goes, ‘lets do it.’ We went down and Slayer kicked ass as usual, I dragged all the portable gear into the dressing room and plugged him up. We played it to him one time and he nailed it first take.”

The media has stated that the Ozzfest was an awesome tour as a whole but there were some funny mishaps along the way. Reports also suggested that Phil (Anselmo) got pretty sick during it.

“He wasn’t sick on Ozzfest,” Paul insisted. “The only thing that happened to him was that he broke two ribs after the Ozzfest and now has a slipped disc which in his case there’s no cartilage in his back between his first and second vertebrae, so he deals with a lot of pain from time to time. He’s doing great with it on this tour but some time it gets really agitating to him and he’s not able to do what he wants to do sometimes. Right now he’s been seeing some new doctors and when the tour is finally completely over he’s going to have those two discs fused and he’ll be back to 100 percent.”

‘I wouldn’t think you’d call them mishaps like the press say, but while we were in Washington DC for the Ozzfest it was pouring down with rain when we were playing and it let up a little and Ozzy went on. Then it really came down and then the wind started blowing. The fire marshal came up on the stage and said ‘hey there’s a tornado on the ground,

everybody needs to clear the premises.’ Five minutes later all the electricity goes ot so we opted to do an indoor tour this summer instead or dealing with the amphitheatres.”

Even though Official Live – 101 Proof was released in between the last two albums, it’s obvious that the band doesn’t want to wait another four years before releasing its next album. So will this tour go on forever, or will they soon be thinking about material for the next album?

“We’ve never really written while on tour with the exception of that one song that we wrote in Toronto and that was just because we’d been on tour for four years. We’ve always somehow managed to keep pretty much to a two-year cycle between every record and tour with the exception between The Great Southern Trendkill and Reinventing The Steel so we’d really like to try and get back to that.”

Now that Pantera has completed its tour for Reinventing The Steel band members are finding time to work on side projects. Vinnie Paul and his brother Dimebag are currently in the studio mixing the songs they recorded with David Allen Coe. Rex Brown and Phillip Anselmo on the other hand are about to start recording a new Down album, which should be released in March 2002.