MIKE PORTNOY Explains How PANTERA’s Vulgar Display Of Power Kept Metal Alive In The ’90s

Steel within the ’90s was tough. Grunge got here alongside and killed the hair metallic scene, demise metallic was simply beginning to bubble up in a major method, and thrash bands had been reducing their hair. So what stored metallic going all through the last decade? Effectively, just a few artists. However one in all ’em’ was positively Pantera, in the event you ask Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.

In keeping with Portnoy in an interview with Consequence, Pantera‘s 1992 album Vulgar Show of Energy was the one that basically floored him and cemented his opinion on the survival of metallic all through that troublesome decade.

“Vulgar Show of Energy got here out across the identical time as [Dream Theater’s] Photographs and Phrases again in 1992. We had been really labelmates on the time. So, we had been engaged on the identical label with the identical folks. And I bear in mind listening to this when it got here out, it simply floored me. I used to be already a fan from Cowboys from Hell that got here out a 12 months or two earlier, however this took their new sound and magnificence and elevated it to a complete new stage. To me, Pantera was the band that stored metallic alive within the ’90s.

“By the point I used to be arising with Dream Theater within the early ’90s, thrash was beginning to go away, grunge was killing all of us. We had been all preventing grunge, whether or not you had been metallic or prog or no matter, so Pantera to me was the band that carried the flag. When Metallica was going by means of their modifications and Anthrax had been going by means of their modifications, Pantera was carrying the metallic flag all through the ’90s. And I’ve to offer credit score to perhaps Machine Head and Sepultura, as properly.

“Pantera, they took the heaviness of the thrash and velocity metallic world, however they actually gave it a groove. I at all times appreciated that. They’d a Texas swing and so they had that swagger and so they had the riffs and the heaviness of all these heavy thrash and velocity metallic bands, however they’d the swagger of Mötley Crüe or Guns N’ Roses, as bizarre as it’s to say. And that’s perhaps why they toured with Skid Row when this album got here out.

“Vinnie Paul performed with a swing and a groove that a whole lot of thrash and velocity metallic drummers perhaps didn’t have. And I say that with all due respect, as a result of a whole lot of these drummers blow my thoughts and are extremely influential on me, however Vinnie, like a Mikkey Dee [King Diamond, Motörhead], had that swagger and that groove and actually made these riffs that Dimebag was taking part in simply actually swing and groove.”