By Martin Popoff

There’s more drama these days in the PANTERA an’ DOWN camp, and add to that the hot seat that is the drum stool at future BLACK SABBATH concerts (well wishes for Tony’s recovery from cancer notwithstanding), the time seems to be ripe ‘n’ rife for fresh starts. Ergo there goes Texas bass bad-ass Rex Brown and Vinny Appice, percussion legend for DERRINGER, Sabbath, DIO and HEAVEN & HELL. Their new joint is called KILL DEVIL HILL, with the band rounded out by lesser-known typical metal burgers Mark Savon and Dewey Bragg, who, as these things often go, are probably the most important components of the band, actually, being guitarist and front man/vocalist respectively.

“Hard rock/metal,” is how Rex Brown begins his summation of the band’s thoroughly catchy mix of Sabbatherian stadium metal with reunion-era ALICE IN CHAINS (and if Vinnie and Dime’s DAMAGEPLAN comes to mind, well, yer not off-base). “You have your elements of older-style hard rock, ‘70s hard rock similar to what Sabbath did, with a new edge on it – old meets new, but with its own identity.”

And hey, even if Savon and Bragg are obviously capable of colluding o’er a smoke-choked collection of doomsters, without a rhythm section this seasoned and strong, the end effect wouldn’t be so steely pro.

“Shoot, I’ll just put it this way,” ventures Rex, asked what it’s like to be in a backbeat with one of the classiest, most distinct old school metal drummers in the world. “I’ve been blessed three times. If you’re a bass player, that’s pretty overwhelming. With Vinny, that was definitely one of the considerations going to check and see if this thing could work. Because, you know, we really lock in tight. You know, it’s just three different styles of music, basically. I call it my little musical journey. I’m just going down a path that, when you get something dropped in your lap like this, you then really have to say, well, is your heart into this? Are you ready to go and do this again and leave nine years of stuff behind, and go your separate route? But for some reason, when I heard it, I just felt like it was real. It had the melody, the hooks, the harmonies, and everything I was looking for in a singer, I found in Dewey.”
“And with Mark being an unbelievable, incredible guitar player,” continues thrash’s Michael Anthony, “I just thought… it was so odd; we went into the rehearsal space, and I don’t know, it’s cliché to say, but everything just clicked on a major level. And that’s what we really started working on the songs. They had them in demo form, and then we started… when I got in the band, you know, I would go down every three weeks or whatever, fly in and out, and make this thing happen. And I got to be really good friends with the rest of the guys in the band and it just felt right. It was just the obvious, natural choice, where I wanted to go – I didn’t want to be in a contrived, bullshit environment. Then Vinny and I got tighter, and Dewey is singing better than he ever has. We did a little five-week run in October, and every show just got better and better and better. We just wanted to take this out into small clubs and see what kind of reaction we would get. At first they were cheering a little bit, and by the end they were sold. We would go dry off for 15 minutes or something like that, and then come out and meet all the fans coming out; it was very cool.”

Subtext to all of this is Rex leaving Down, the notorious bad vibes band with Pepper that picked half a peck of Pantera. Always one to parse his words (more so now, one suspects, with an autobiography on the way), Rex ventures, “You know, I went down for the writing sessions for this next EP that’s coming out with those guys. But that was the only thing that was happening. In between that certain period of time, we would be on the road for two-and-a-half years, and nothing was really going on, and I couldn’t turn the switch off, and I just kind of separated from my wife and took all the furniture out of my main room of the house – you know, and it’s a pretty big fucking room – and put the PA in there, and half stack and drums, and I just had different musicians from clubs here and shit like that, everybody coming in and jamming, and you know, I just wanted to make a fun jam session. In fact, I was playing guitar at the time. Which has always been a passion of mine. I can play guitar half ways decent, so it was a departure from just playing on the bass.”

Rex’s brief sojourn with ARMS OF THE SUN was the eventual result, but, weirdly, like partner in grime Phil Anselmo, getting cut wide open turned out to be part of the “musical journey” as well…

“Yeah, during that period off, they diagnosed me with pancreatitis, and I’ll just say now, dude, I feel better than I have in five years. I had to go in and they cut me from ear to ear, and down to my stomach, and redid the plumbing, so to speak, but I’ve never felt better. I kept going to the doctor saying, ‘I’ve really got some pain here,’ and they did CAT scans, they couldn’t find it. I went to specialists in Dallas, cutting-edge, doing different procedures and stuff, and they did a 3-D MRI and figured out what was going on with my pancreas – stones that were blocking everything that was going on – so I went through six months worth of treatment and finally we decided just to operate on the thing, and cut that in half and get all the stones out. The pancreas is very small organ, but it’s one of the major organs in the body that you just can’t afford to fuck with.”

But with these Down cats, there’s always more… “So they kept doing these dates, and I’m like, I’m just not ready for it. Plus you know, Phil and I had been together 24 years, and I’m not going to get into the specifics, but that’s a long time to play with somebody. You’ve got to come up with different… you know, I was ready for a change basically; I’ll just put it that way.”

“The album cover just kind of came from someone and we dug it,” says Rex in closing, with respect to this swift-moving, expensive-sounding Kill Devil Hill self-titled, issued on a big label no less, namely SPV. “Where Kill Devil Hill comes from, all the pirates back in the day, they would sink ships and steal all the rum, and they would go bury this rum in different places that were marked, or some that weren’t, and it was said that the rum was so strong that it could kill the devil. And that’s where Kill Devil Hills comes from, because it’s nothing but rolling hills around the ocean side, and they have a bunch of flat land over those dunes which is where the Wright brothers flew, and that’s where it came from. And then Mark came up with the name, and we thought it was a pretty cool fucking name. It’s just a name, man (laughs). It’s like, what the fuck does Pantera mean?”