Former Pantera/Down bassist Rex Brown spoke with Greg Prato from Songfacts about his Pantera days, his current band, and his 2013 book, Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera.  

Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Songfacts: How would you say that the songwriting worked primarily in Pantera?

Brown: “We would go down into the studio, and Dime would usually have something kind of mapped out of where he wanted stuff to go. He just had a massive amount of riffs, and of course, we would change those and maybe put in more parts or whatever. Then we would work of off that. And the other times I would have something or Vinnie would come in with a drumbeat that we would work around. ‘Primal Concrete Sledge’ I remember was just him fucking around. ‘Becoming’ was all Vinnie. Just little drum patterns and you'd build a song off of them. Phil would come in with different ways that he would hear the riff in his head - either double time or half time. But a lot of the times Dime would come in with primitive riffs and we would write everything in the studio so we had it all captured on tape. There's so much DAT tape of that stuff out there, and I want to put a full record out of how the song started to the very end of it in the songwriting process. It's just going through all those DAT tapes and through all those masters. It would take two years or more just to edit that stuff. (Rex also states that there is a missing DAT tape of Dime's, that had between 20-40 song ideas that he had lost, before Pantera did the Far Beyond Driven album) We always knew which ones were going to work. Some of the stuff that Dime would bring, we'd go, ‘No, that's not going to work at all, that's not the direction we want to go in.’ And sometimes we wouldn't even fuck with that song, but I'd say 9 out of 10 times, the stuff that we did start tracking ended up on records.”

Songfacts: What would you say was your greatest contribution to a Pantera song as far as songwriting?

Brown: “We were the three-piece kind of thing. You know, that kind of Van Halen stuff. So pretty much all the stuff that was underneath the solos, and any time there was a key change, that was me. And our arrangements a lot of the time, just depending, Phil and I would work on those. But any time we changed into a key pattern, changes or stuff like that, was me. And me and Dime worked on a lot of those riffs hand-in-hand - mine with his. He'd have this little part and I would come in with a different little section at the end of it, that's what made the riff. But any guitar player in the band is going to come up with the majority of the shit a lot of the time. We had four very different individuals in the band, and it took all of us to make what I called the "magic in a box." You'd put those four individuals together, and that was magic. Once you opened that box up there were so many influences between all of us, and we would just pour them all into it.”

Songfacts: And which Pantera song would you say was the most difficult to finally complete?

Brown: “Shit, dude, all of them! We were such perfectionists in what we did. Really a lot of the time the thought process was thrown through the door, and it just came out naturally - it didn't feel contrived. That was the beauty of it. Once we started really having to think about what we were doing, which was probably towards the end with Reinventing the Steel, we were trying to take something from each record and make it into who we are. When I listen back to that record - and I couldn't listen to it for a long time, because of Dime - but I listen back to that record now, it's Where do you go past there? How much fuckin' more intensifying can you get than that, for doing what we wanted to do? Our whole plan was to take a break and then we all reconvene, and it just didn't turn out that way. But I'm sure if Dime was still around we would still be doing whatever we'd be doing. But as it turns out, he's no longer with us, which kind of sucks. We got robbed by some fuckin' lunatic. It is what it is, and it's a hell of a ride.”

Read more at Songfacts.