James Niggemeyer

Ten years ago this morning, I was a college junior walking to my favorite English class when my friend Matt (on his way to becoming a famous musician in The So So Glos) stopped me. "Hey Ben, did you hear about Damageplan?"

"Yeah, Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul's new band. What about them?"

"Someone killed Dimebag and three other people last night."


This show is terrible, and the tracking is off, but please sit through it for glimpses Officer Niggemeyer's courage.

I don't remember my reaction, or what book my classmates talked about while I stressed out. I spent the rest of the day between the library, refreshing Google News by the minute in hopes of some sort of insight into what had happened, and my room, where my high school metalhead friends, tightly bonded in Virginia but now split up by college all over the country, had already left me somber messages by the time I arrived. "Cemetery Gates" was stuck in my head for weeks, maybe even months.

I've written much about Dimebag since then, and as Pantera means more to me each year I'm sure there's more to come. But today I want to honor Officer James Niggemeyer. This has not been a good year for police publicity, and I hate that it takes a case like Niggemeyer's to remind me what a noble, risky, heroic and thankless job a cop has.

The Columbus Dispatch released a heartbreaking update on Niggemeyer yesterday, in which he opens up about the counseling he's been going through for post-traumatic stress disorder. I hope you'll read it in its entirety.

Pantera, "Cowboys from Hell"

"I love heavy metal. Are you serious? I fucking love it," indie-pop songwriter St. Vincent recently told an interviewer while promoting her new album. "I love Pantera. I fucking love Dimebag Darrell, love his guitar playing. There’s a song on the record called 'Bring Me Your Loves,' that--I probably shouldn’t reveal it--but I was listening to a lot of Turkish folk music and Pantera, and there’s a riff in there that is a little tip of the hat to 'Cowboys From Hell.'"



It's a riff that would stand out anywhere, even when a dynamic artist re-imagines it as much as St. Vincent does. As much as I enjoy the exclusivity of metal, sharing a cult brother/sisterhood with a community that enjoys music at its most extreme, I'm even more awestruck by how far it can reach. For all the brutality of "Cowboys from Hell," there's no denying that Pantera could write a killer melody.

Not since the days of the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band had a musical group treated themselves to such a badass honorific nickname and earned it on record. "Cowboys from Hell" must've blown every mind it touched in 1990--the conventional hard rock of Pantera's self-released '80s records had vanished. They weren't even calling it "thrash metal," or "extreme metal." This was just Metal all the way through, purer and heavier than the rest. It took years for most of the world to catch up, which is why nobody gives "Cowboys from Hell" credit for stomping hair metal out of the mainstream a year before Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Metallica. But in any context Pantera stands tall. Nobody touches them at all.

Pantera, "Hellbound"

"Hell ain't a bad place to be," the polemicist Bon Scott tells us in his Let There Be Rock dissertation. As usual, he was being understated. Hell is the most metal place in the universe, as emphasized by Slayer's waiting, Venom's welcome and Stryper inviting the Devil there. Ozzy and Lemmy both went a-raising, right on the same song. Some of metal's finest documents start in the underworld, or at least right next door, including AC/DC's two best albums, Megadeth's most violent junkie dream and Guns N' Roses two-CD loose cannon. But no one ever made it sound louder or angrier than Pantera.

Pantera dominated the '90s as the world's best and biggest metal band, just as Black Sabbath ran the '70s and Metallica owned the '80s. They kicked off the decade by introducing themselves as the Cowboys From Hell, but bookended it by dragging us back home with them on their final album.



Even when Dimebag was still alive, there was much uncertainty as to whether we'd ever see another Pantera album. Every Pantera fan who read about them in metal mags (and if you were a Pantera fan, you absolutely read metal mags) knew that there was infighting between Phil Anselmo and the Brothers Abbott. It had been four years since The Great Southern Trendkill, years in which mainstream metal had been reoccupied by Korn and Limp Bizkit. But on the wonderfully preposterously-titled Reinventing the Steel, Pantera outsavaged not only the nu-metal legions, but more importantly their own storied career.

"Hellbound" is a band at their most ruthless, throwing all of their brutality into their last testament while still hanging on the the grooves. Phil Anselmo's banshee scream in the chorus is the stuff of immortals. He couldn't keep it much longer, as his voice settled into its present-day baritone, and the band couldn't even stay together after the Reinventing the Steel tour, with Phil Anselmo famously telling Metal Hammer "Dimebag Darrell deserves to be beaten severely." That quote was run on the magazine's cover one week before Darrell was killed by a gunman.

Pantera may have no longer been friends on Reinventing the Steel, but by Satan's graces they were still a band. If Hell really is other people, than I'm glad Pantera chose to leave the tape rolling.

Five Reasons Why Boston Rocks Harder

With tributes pouring in to Boston in the wake of this week's tragedy, I imagine that more than a few of them will come from or at least cite Boston's rich musical history. I've already seen plenty about the Dropkick Murphys, and I'm sure that some well-meaning rock media figure will mistake Rob Zombie for still being Bostonian or Aersomith for still being rock. Not that anyone needs to--without resorting to "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," here are five bands proving that Boston rocks as hard as any city in the world.

1. Revocation

No band is making better death metal than these guys. Technical enough to land on this year's Summer Slaughter while still writing actual songs, this quartet gives death metal its long overdue thrash-inspired ass-kicking, from their bluesy, Dimebag-worthy soloing to their rapid fire riffs and jackhammer rhythms.



2. The Red Chord

One of the only bands to respect grindcore enough to flesh it out into something with solos, audible lyrics and fully-realized (but succinct) compositions. On their last album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine, The Red Chord destroyed genre, song structure and time signature conventions with some of the most energized performances being recorded today, although you might have to see it live to believe it.



3. Converge

It's almost unfair. Every album is a challenging, gut-wrenching and addictive example of the best that punk and metal can do, almost single-handedly keeping punk music off life support for the entire 21st century. Technically, Converge are from Salem, but their rampaging music and ardent integrity is as rooted in Boston hardcore as it is in Bannon, Ballou, Newton and Koller's chemistry.



4. Mission of Burma

Before every punk tried to pass as an intellectual, Mission of Burma made punk rock into something almost pretty, packing a few dozen art-punk tracks into a some addictive albums in the '80s. That first run helped shape the next few decades of art-rockers, and was more than enough to earn them a spot among Boston's musical elite, but then they reunited in the 2000s and set the high standard for rock comebacks with a series of albums at least as strong as the early classics. Eat your hearts out, Strokes.



5. Boston

What can I say? Boston's debut is mainly remembered for selling 17 million copies and being Boston's only good album, but what an album it is. The production has aged poorly enough for cooler bands to goof on its songs, but they still listened, and were better off for it. As late '70s hard rock, it ranks with KISS and Blue Öyster Cult.

Death to Stage Diving

"You want to get onstage, get your own band."

--Lemmy, putting a stage diver in his place.

You can do this if you're in the band.

A few weeks ago, I saw Titus Andronicus at Webster Hall. They put on a dynamic show, one that could make you believe that punk can survive in heartland rock, but every song was interrupted by attendees climbing onstage, most of whom would block the band, sing along or motion commands to the audience before diving back into the crowd. The musicians, visibly annoyed but surely aware of the communal, punk ethos of stage diving, tolerated the nuisance and carried on like the professionals  that they clearly are. 

There's an idea in punk rock that cool bands let their fans stage dive, since we're all really fans sharing the experience together. But if that experience includes some heavyweight whom I didn't pay to see blocking the band with his dance moves before crashing, boots first, onto the heads of the front row, I don't want to be a part of it. It's not communal if the act is fun for exactly one person in the venue. The rest of us will be united in exasperation at your jackassery, but I'd hardly call that community.

This February, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe is going to trial for involuntary manslaughter, after a stage diver whom he pushed off stage died from brain trauma weeks after the incident. My condolences to the late diver's family, but everything that I've read and seen about the case indicates that Blythe did nothing wrong. Maybe he was thinking of what a pain stage diving is for the band and the audience, or maybe he was thinking of metal's most famous stage-crashing, wherein Dimebag Darrell was killed by a mentally ill stalker whose mom had given him a gun. Whatever the case, stage divers should expect to be pushed back or kicked out. If things get too rough, it's perfectly acceptable for the band to stop playing.

The idea that we do this because it's a punk tradition is ridiculous. Punk rock supposedly eschews tradition, and it's gotten by fine without stage diving for decades. Can you imagine crashing a Sex Pistols performance? Johnny Rotten would eviscerate you. And no one would blame him.

Unless you're in a band, or if you're one of the rare, super-communal artists who invites people up en masse (meaning only Iggy Pop or Andrew W.K.), stage diving should be reserved for the comfort of your own home, where you're not in anyone's way and the only person you can hurt is yourself.

13 Songs to Ring in 2013

Other than 666, no number is more metal than 13. Its bad luck powers are revealed in musical tributes from several respected metal bands, many of whom have stumbled in mediocre musical salutes to Jason Voorhees' signature number. Better to honor the new year with a drink at the Lucky 13 Saloon than a slog through Cruelty and the Beast.

Few songwriters have survived the 13 curse, and even fewer have done so with a reasonable amount of decibels. Here's a brief audio history of 13.

1. Anvil, "This is Thirteen"

Interestingly, this is where Anvil's luck started to change--thirteen albums into their career, when a coinciding documentary gave them by far the biggest success of their lives. All their talk of wizardry and superstition couldn't hold a candle to watching them get lost and broke in Europe.



2. Anthrax, "13"

What the hell is this? Basically a short exercise for Anthrax's rhythm section, and a reminder that Anthrax were the first good thrash metal band to be intentionally silly on record.



3. Black Flag, "Room 13"

"Keep me alive!" screams 20-year-old Henry Rollins, making that effort sound like a struggle for the last time in his career. "I need to hang on!" is the part that everyone remembers.



4. Cradle of Filth, "Thirteen Autumns and a Widow"

Cruelty and the Beast is often regarded as COF's peak, but even Cradle's best songs are better remembered than reheard. Throw it in the mix for the 13-year-old in all of us.



5. Danizg, "Thirteen"

Written by Danzig originally for Johnny Cash's best studio album, American Recordings. He didn't release his own version until years later on 6:66 Satan's Child. Cash's folky reading and Danzig's goth-blues version both hold up, although it's abundantly clear whom was doing the other one a favor.



6. Megadeth, "Thirteen"

By album number 13, there was no defense of Dave Mustaine's political or social positions, but also no doubt of his chops or longevity.



7. Mercyful Fate, "Thirteen Invitations"

Mercyful Fate's influence on metal was flourishing when they reunited for 1993's In the Shadows. The result suggested that they'd ignored the last ten years of black metal.



8. Motörhead, "Cat Scratch Fever"

"First time that I got it I was thirteen years old," Lemmy amends the lyric in Motörhead's take on Nugent's staple. "Ours knocked his out of the fucking loop--of course, nobody remembers ours," wrote Lemmy in his autobiography. He's half-right.



9. Pantera, "13 Steps to Nowhere"

Anselmo was a good sport to sacrifice his lyrics to a song where all anyone can pay attention to is the drumming. A lesser guitarist than Dimebag would be trampled, but even he knows better than to stand in the way of one of Vinnie Paul's greatest intros.



10. The Pixies, "No. 13 Baby"

Frank Black honors a girl with a special tattoo, who at least had the sense to get it somewhere she can cover up for job interviews.



11. Social Distortion, "Bad Luck"

"Thirteen's my lucky number," laments cowpunk hero Mike Ness in this gem from Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, years before another country crossover would make the same claim. Hey Taylor, is it too late for your to pick a tourmate for next year?



12. Suicidal Tendencies, "Emotion No. 13"

Lights...Camera...Revolution! completed ST's first transition from hardcore to metal, with hits like "You Can't Bring Me Down" and "Send Me Your Money," plus thrashing deep cuts like this one. If "Emotion No. 13" had been released today, it would have taken the e-word back from Chris Carrabba.



13. Venom, "13"

Not bad, actually, out of context with the 300 other Venom songs that sound exactly like it.

Album of the Day: Pantera, Cowboys from Hell

A friend stated yesterday (coincidentally or not, on the 8th anniversary of Dimebag Darrell's murder) that glam-era Pantera was better than the Cowboys in Hell (sic) years. With the band's '80s embarrassments still safely out of print, I'm sure that it's hip to say that they're Pantera's best records. But it's also completely wrong.



The "Cowboys from Hell" title is almost ubiquitous with Pantera now, for good reason. How many modern musicians get honorific nicknames? There isn't anything quite up to the Killer, the Boss or the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. The Cowboys from Hell might be as close as we've gotten. A lesser band wouldn't be able to make that title stick, or even sound cool, but Pantera were experts at the implausible.

22 years on, Cowboys from Hell still gives a charge. It's not nearly Pantera's best record, and it's distractingly frontloaded when it plays out. But in some ways Cowboys captures them at their peak. Phil Anselmo delivers some of the most versatile metal vocals in recorded history here, hitting the high notes like the scion of Rob Halford. He's worlds away for the self-consciously macho growler he'd become. Hearing Vinnie Paul's drumming in 1990 must have been like hearing Eddie Van Halen in 1978--his musicianship would reshape metal, if enough folks could figure out what he was doing, learn it and put their own variation on it. Groove metal has been run into the ground in 2012, with Paul's current band at fault in part, but still no one employs a bass drum and a crash cymbal quite like him. That's why some folks can still sit through 30 seconds of a Hellyeah song.

Every metalhead knows at least two songs from Cowboys from Hell--the title track and "Cemetery Gates." The latter gets played at Dimebag tributes every year, especially on December 8, but even without the boneyard-inspired lyrics it serves as arguably Dime's best memorial. If anyone has an isolated guitar track, please post it in the comments section.



I was surprised to find out today that it's Pantera's longest song, at a short seven minutes (how many Led Zeppelin and Metallica songs are longer than seven minutes? I can't keep track.) If another band has stumbled upon that chorus riff, they probably would have drawn it out for the entire song.

Still, my favorite song from Cowboys from Hell is "Primal Concrete Sledge." Outside of a sole Poison Idea cover, Pantera's punk influences are nearly inaudible. More likely, they raised themselves to the Skynyrd and KISS records that hardcore kids turned up their noses at. Yet some of those faster and shorter concepts seeped through to Pantera, or at least enough for them to unleash blistering songs like this one. Phil Anselmo even calls it "a song of unity" in the video here, thousands of miles away (both musically and graphically) from Operation Ivy. Here's Pantera in 1991 at Monsters of Rock in Moscow, possibly hastening the crumble of the Soviet Union.

Song of the Day: Pantera, "Suicide Note, Part 1 & 2"

On The Great Southern Trendkill, Pantera's Phil Anselmo and Dimebag Darrell were fighting too much to record in the same studio. Darrell was taking out his aggression with alcohol and cars, Anselmo was months away from a heroin overdose. Yet, like the great artists that they were, the band channeled that tension into their most extreme record to date, taking the "experimental fourth album" idea further than nearly any of their metal forefathers.

"Suicide Note, Part 1" starts with effects, over-dubbing and balladry--nothing that one normally associates with Pantera--and wordlessly references Zeppelin in away that reminds me of Neil Young's shout out to the Stones in "Borrowed Tune". But then the sequel abruptly kicks the first one out, as if to remind you that Darrell and Anselmo were not just holding on to life, they were throttling it. Heard together, "Suicide Note, Part 1 & 2" documents a band fighting itself off the edge. But they also depict a light that not enough people get to.

For Gradison, 1983-2012.

Song of the Day: Pantera, "Cat Scratch Fever"

In keeping with yesterday's theme, here's Pantera's take on "Cat Scratch Fever," from the Detroit Rock City soundtrack.



Ted Nugent is someone that I'll defend in the art vs. morality debate, but even musically he gets trumped here. Phil Anselmo's an infinitely better singer, and the Brothers' Abbott's groove knocks Nugent's out of the park. The original sounds thin by comparison.

Perhaps there's no better endorsement than Nugent's himself, who was confronted about the song after dismissing the late Dimebag Darrell for being "foolish enough to take on the nickname of a life-destroying dope product and promote such family-destroying conduct on stage." (Apparently family-destroying conduct is OK if it's off stage.)

"No soul, no balls, no feel. Caucasian all the way," Nugent griped on his web site. "There is no excuse for such horrifically negative, irresponsible, criminal, America-wrecking behavior as such chimp-like substance abuse." Maybe he's jealous, or maybe he's confirming his status as the kind of moralist that rock music is meant to stick it to, but either way it's worth celebrating with Pantera's "Cat Scratch Fever."

Help Randy Blythe

Randy Blythe is still in a Czech jail. I thought that this would be taken care of in a few days, but even after posting a nearly $200,000 bail, Blythe remains imprisoned.

I don't believe in fans jumping onstage during shows, unless the artist (i.e. only Iggy Pop or Andrew W.K.) encourages it, and even then in moderation. Especially after Dimebag Darrell's murder, no artist should be blamed for the fate of some jackass who jumps at the band during their performance. The more I read about this matter, the more infuriating it gets that Blythe is being detained. By all accounts from my friends in the music business, he is a good guy.

Please take a moment to help Randy Blythe here. There's been an absurd backlash to this fund, which Chris Adler has addressed here, and I can't see a good reason for Randy to be in jail. Send your best thoughts and support his way.

Anthrax for Bobby Digital

My office comrade, Bobby Digital (no, not that one), got to see Anthrax play Jimmy Fallon. Right as I was congratulating him, he described the event the way that Jesse Helms would probably describe an Anthrax show. No surprise there--Anthrax aren't a band that inspires a lot of indifference. But Bobby D also enjoys Iron Maiden and Metallica, so I sought to give him an audio discourse on New York's greatest metal band.



Anthrax for Bobby Digital

1. Bring the Noise
2. Only
3. Antisocial
4. Got the Time
5. Caught in a Mosh
6. Hy Pro Glo (Al Jourgensen remix)
7. Inside Out
8. What Doesn't Die
9. Among the Living
10. Cadillac Rock Box
11. Taking the Music Back
12. Think About an End
13. I'm the Man
14. Madhouse
15. I am the Law
16. Fueled
17. Refuse to be Denied
18. Metal Thrashing Mad (John Bush version)

One look at Anthrax for Bobby Digital gives me away. I am a John Bush fan. In most circles, that's like saying you prefer Van Hagar, but the fact is that Anthrax were at best with John Bush's growls and not Joey Belladonna's mewls.

Of course, the Joey period is their most popular, and there are plenty of killer songs. "Caught in a Mosh" and Madhouse" should be in any metalhead's collection. Anthrax caught up to their peers in the Big Four by rapping ("Bring the Noise," "I'm the Man,") covering new wave ("Got the Time") and telling jokes (S.O.D.) better than any other metal band. "I'm the Man" has got to be the deftest rap parody outside of Fear of a Black Hat, and "Antisocial" reinvents hard rock as punk rock, but their signature is "Bring the Noise," a perfect rap-metal bridge to Public Enemy that took both bands to their peak while paving the way for Rage Against the Machine and the Judgement Night soundtrack. I like it more than "Walk This Way."

But if Anthrax spent the Reagan Era in the shadow of Slaygadeth, they caught up with John Bush's debut on Sound of White Noise. "Only" and "Hy Pro Glo" deliver a TKO punch to mid-'90s grunge, and "Fueled" earns its Bukowski reference by sounding like it was sung by him. "Inside Out" scores with their best video (because it re-enacts a Twilight Zone episode) and their most ripping solo (because Dimebag Darrell plays it.)

Best of all though is We've Come for You All, their jaw-dropping 2003 comeback, where, amidst the worst publicity of their lifetime (we hope,) Scott Ian and the gang roared back to show the world who the real Anthrax is. From the zombie anthem "What Doesn't Die" to the rifftastic "Cadillac Rock Box" to the all-time heaviest "Think About an End" and beyond, Anthrax claimed the best Big Four record in the past decade. Not that it paid off commercially, but nothing more can be expected from metal's greatest team of underdogs.

Finally, I've alerted you to appearances by Al Jourgensen, Dimebag Darrell and Public Enemy. See if you can find Roger Daltrey.

Download here: Anthrax for Bobby Digital