For those of you waiting for a re-release of the early PANTERA albums featuring Terry Glaze on vocals, it looks like it won’t be happening anytime soon. According to PANTERA bassist Rex Brown, the band’s four ‘glam rock’ albums are “[like] looking at your old high school notebooks” he tells Eonmusic while promoting the newly released “Reinventing The Steel” 20th-anniversary edition.
Breaking internationally with major-label debut “Cowboys From Hell” in 1990, PANTERA released three albums — “Metal Magic” (1983), “Projects In The Jungle” (1984) and “I Am The Night” (1985) with singer Terry Glaze, as well as 1988’s “Power Metal”, which introduced Glaze’s replacement Philip Anselmo which have since become highly sought after collectors’ items.
Talking about those albums, Rex said: “This is like going back and looking at your old high school notebooks and going, “Look at how far you’ve come in between.”
Pointing to band’s early work ethic, he admitted that although they worked hard, he did not expect that the albums would still be being talked about today.
“I will say this: a lot of bands didn’t have the opportunity at 17 years old to fuckin’ put a record out,” he noted. “We just happened to do it, and we paid for every fuckin’ lick of it; none of it was given to us. We paid for the studio time, we paid for the pressing of the record, and we never thought that that would go anywhere, nationally, globally, so it’s almost like, after the fact. But we really learned how to write a song, and be a band.”
Dismissing the first three albums, the bassist went on to say that the addition of Anselmo is what kicked off the true story of the band known as PANTERA.
“The old singer? Shit, it was going nowhere really quick,” Rex said. “He just was not on the same wavelength as the three of us. The dude’s never had a job in his life. I see him shootin’ his mouth off in some of these magazines, and it’s, like, ‘Dude, you were in the band for fuckin’ four years,’ you know what I’m saying? ‘Now you’re wanting claim to fame 35 years later? Sorry, pal, you missed the boat!’ So I don’t want to give any credit where it’s fuckin’ undue, you know? Once we got Philip in the band, it developed into something else, and that was the PANTERA that we know now, and that’s why we never talk about those old records.”
Looking back, Brown conceded: “Hey, look, it’s great to go back memory lane and all that kind of stuff, but those are the farthest things that I wake up for in the first of the morning. ‘Oh, remember that one tune ‘Nothing On (But The Radio)’, and the singer?’ No! I mean, I hate fucking songs like that, but it was a growing process, and now, because the things are out, and they’ve been bootlegged a hundred thousand times, people consider it a part of our history. It’s not. Unless Philip’s singing on it, it’s not PANTERA. That’s the way I look at it.”
When asked outright to clarify that he had absolutely no desire to ever see those records reissued, officially, Rex said: “God no, god no! The brothers were against that, and I’m against it, and that’s just it. Period. It ain’t coming out.”