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Dimebag Darrell died in 2004, Vinnie Paul in 2018, and in 1996 Phil Anselmo was clinically dead for half a minute - still, in the summer of 2019 I was basically at a Pantera concert. It shouldn't be possible!
Pantera was with me throughout my whole teenage period. I learned their songs on guitar in my rehearsal room, sang along to them in my car, and tried to imitate the drumming in my computer-programmed covers. I knew I'd never get to see them live. Who would want to see Pantera without Dimebag's guitar playing, and most of all, who actually believes that Vinnie Paul and Phil Anselmo will ever get out of their personal feud? I watched videos from their concerts in the 90s and imagined how cool it would be to be at Monsters of Rock in Moscow in 1991 and see them shred through “Domination” and “Psycho Holiday” at the peak of their career. But just like with many other bands, I had to enjoy their work retroactively and from a distance.
Earlier this spring a friend asked me if I wanted to go to a metal festival in Gävle (Sweden). Phil Anselmo was going to perform. Even if I'm not specifically a metal fan, I knew how much I would regret to not go. Phil is old, who knows when or if he'll come to Sweden again? I didn't know by then if he would play Pantera songs or any of his absurd solo projects, and even when I was standing in the crowd, warmed up by the ridiculously chaotic Dying Fetus, I wasn't entirely sure.
Phil walks out on stage, and unlike during his Pantera days he's calm, focused and sober. He has a stable charisma and is hard not to love, considering all good things he has made and the fact that he right now stands 10 meters in front of and two meters above us. Phil greets the audience, the audience screams. My skepticism towards pandering to the audience is completely gone, today I'm one of those easily swayed audience members who do everything the people on stage ask for. “It looks like we're going back in time”, Phil Anselmo says. Shivers all over my back. Could this be an hour of only Pantera songs? I don't want to get my hopes up too much. They kick off with “Mouth For War”, one of their best ones, followed by songs like “Fucking Hostile”, “Hollow”, “This Love” and “Becoming”. It's like if I got to decide what the concert should look like, and the hit parade continues until it ends with “A New Level”, and by then I've danced, jumped, headbanged, sung and screamed, like in a musical drunken haze.
It sounded so much better than the Youtube videos I've seen of Phil Anselmo's live shows the last years. More energetic, faster, tighter. “Everything feels better live”, I thought. But when I later sat at my computer and watched a filmed clip from the show I actually attended, it still sounded just as good. Did I manage to catch Phil Anselmo & The Illegals' best show ever on that July afternoon in Gävle? I don't know, but an unlikely childhood dream came true and the next day I woke up musically infatuated, with happiness and a thirst for living, but also with sadness over the fact that this evening that was so much fun will never happen again. And I won't leave you with just my emotions - no, enjoy the live video and experience that night for yourselves, to the extent that it's possible to do so in front of a computer screen.
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