No Quarter: Phil Anselmo's Influence And Beyond

In heavy metal there are two main eras: Before Pantera and after Pantera

Phil Anselmo set the standard for what a modern metal vocalist could be. Phil could seemingly do it all. He could hit Rob Halford type high notes. He could sing in the really gritty hyper-compressed style of James Hetfield. He had the physicality of Henry Rollins of Black Flag and Rollins Band. He could even sing and make it sound pretty, like he did in the intro to Cemetery Gates.

Then something unusual happened. Phil cut his hair. As a heavy metal vocalist in that era, that's somethin' ya just didn't do! Then he stopped singing the soaring high notes like he did at the end of Cemetery Gates or in Shattered, also from the Cowboys From Hell album. You didn't hear him sing pretty anymore.

Anselmo was seemingly on top of the world, but his life was becoming anything but pretty....and it was about to get a whole lot more trying. The destination Phil's body was headed for was sheer misery.

Phil had asked no quarter and given no quarter during the early days of Pantera. As he put it:

"I would either dive into the waiting crowd or into the waiting concrete. It made no difference. I would attack!

When we're young we've got a tendency to think we're invincible. When you're hopped up on a lot of booze, that tendency grows.

Phil had paid a serious price for his dives off the P.A. system and the bill was just now coming due. The cost was: Two blown out discs and degenerative disc disease.

His doctor told him he needed surgery or it would surely get worse. Phil asked what the recovery time would be and when the doctor told him it could be a year or more, Phil replied: "I've got gigs to play."

The 90s had been a tough time for heavy metal. Even legends like Judas Priest and Dio were relegated to playing venues that weren't even half the size of what they had played in the 80s. Grunge and alternative were the anti-virtuosic trend , but Pantera was a band full of musicians who could play their asses off! Darrell Abbott is widely considered the greatest lead guitarist of his time.

Phil's way of making it through the gigs involved a lot of alcohol and now a lot of chemicals of an opiate nature. It was a recipe for suicide, but Phil was in his mid-20s and he was convinced he could handle anything.

Phil was a tough guy, but he didn't have a larynx made out of titanium. His five pack a day cigarette habit combined with his alcohol intake and the painkillers he used to postpone surgery eventually killed Phil.

Of course, being Anselmo, he was able to be resuscitated by the paramedics on site. He had died for a few minutes and been brought back to life.

Anselmo described it this way: "It was the most humiliating thing I'd ever experienced."

If there was a recipe for losing the top range of your voice it would probably go something like this:

"Five packs of smokes a day, whiskey and heroin."

It is pretty much the anti-vocal hygiene regimen. It robbed Anselmo of his singing ability, but it left him with his ability to scream and he embraced that ability to scream by going even more extreme than he ever had before on the recording of The Great Southern Trendkill.

It wasn't enough to not embrace the trend; Pantera wanted to kill the trend. That's how obstinate Pantera were. In doing their best to kill the trend, Pantera started a trend.

Pantera set the template for what a modern metal band could be. The amazing musicianship. The unrelenting aggression....and the screams.

For better or worse, before Pantera, there were singers in rock, including in the sub-genre of metal. Phil Anselmo was the first mainstream vocalist who, by 1996, could barely be called a singer anymore.

Phil had become a screamer and that opened the floodgates for a generation of male vocalists who surprisingly, didn't care about singing. Melody wasn't their thing. Sounding brutal was.

Screaming had always been a part of hard and heavy music since the days of Ian Gillan and Robert Plant, but when they screamed, it was a musical experience. Now the emphasis was not on how musical you could sound but how brutal you could sound. If you could convince listeners they were listening to a lion or a hippo or an alligator, so much the better.

Enter Will Ramos.

It was the ultimate way for young guys and in some cases, young women to flip off their parents.

"Oh, you're going to be a singer"?

"Not quite. I'm going to be a vocalist."

They had essentially found a way to use their voices as percussion instruments, and since by the 2000s, hip-hop had overtaken rock as the young people's choice, that actually fit in with the times.

The screamers boiled each lyric they screamed in a cauldron of distortion. Nobody would accuse them of being rappers. If carrying a tune wasn't your strong suit, screaming, especially pitchless screaming was tailor made for you.

That's how we lost a generation of male frontmen who could do amazing things with a melody. Not that there aren't any young men in rock these days who sing, but whereas there are a few today who you could maybe call stars, in the 20th century, each year there was a litany of new male frontmen who became bonafide rock stars.

As the song goes: "One man's pleasure is another man's pain...One man's loss is another man's gain."

Or maybe the men's loss was the women's gain. If the young guys weren't going to man up and become the next generation of rock singers, then the young women were gonna do it!

In the historically heavily-male dominated world of rock music, the 21st century saw a number of young women who both could and would actually sing melodies in a rock environment.

While it was once a novelty for a band of young guys to have a female lead singer, more and more bands used this "novelty" until the real novelty would have been having a band of female musicians with a male frontman...but that's still ahead of the times so far.

Today female singers dominate pop and for the first time, they dominate rock too. Some women have even become screamers as well, while others combine singing and screaming in their music, such as Tatiania Shmayluk.

Lacuna Coil, with their lead vocalist Cristina Scabbia became the first female-fronted band to co-headline Ozzfest in 2006. It's worth noting that Lacuna coil comes from Italy and Jinjer comes from Ukraine. Sadly, the United States has allowed hip-hop and other quasi-music to infiltrate our culture of confusion to where we're now depending on bands from other parts of the world to still bring us rock and roll.

I'm glad that the foundation that England and America laid in the twentieth century has now grown roots in foreign soil in such unlikely places as a country that was once part of the Soviet Union.

If you understand human nature, you understand that the best way to. ake people want something is to forbid them from having it. Just look at the smashing success that was Prohibition, or the massive success of The War On Drugs. Both ensured a demand would still remain for those substances.

Want to make people lose interest in something? Make it ubiquitous. Make it mundane! Maybe one day, someone will actually listen to that.

As for rock music, it's an ever-changing environment. Who knows, maybe in ten or fifteen years, a young man who wants to learn to vocalize in a very melodic way will be seen as the ultimate in rebellion against the screamers and the rappers.

Maybe there will be a male equivalent to Taylor Swift - only in terms of success. Hopefully in terms of excitement, the music will create quite a bit more of that than Miss Swift's music does.

Rock music was designed to be loud, aggressive, rebellious, up front and in your face. Phil Anselmo fit that to a T and he created the template for the modern metal vocalist.

Who will be the next man to create the template for what a hard rock or metal vocalist can be in the late 2020s and beyond.

I hope it's something so creative that we will have never seen it coming.

Hopefully it's rebellious, with a whole lot of bravado, balls and swagger.

Hopefully it will even have some memorable melodies that pull on people's heartstrings.

Hopefully it will be some of the greatest rock music to have ever been made.

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