Guitarist Zakk Wylde previously said he still had to learn most of the Pantera setlist for the band’s upcoming reunion/tribute shows. Wylde, along with Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante, will join Pantera’s Phil Anselmo and Rex Brown to celebrate the legacy of late guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott and late drummer Vincent “Vinnie Paul” Abbott.
The seasoned pro he is, Wylde is now well on his way to learning the material, and he recently spoke with the “Sunday With Ola” video podcast about his involvement.
“There’s always been talks about it, for years, especially when Vinnie was still alive,” Wylde said. “And it was just, like, well, I’ll just wait till that day comes. ‘If you guys decide you wanna do it, you know I’m always gonna be here for ya.’ Phil called me up one night, and he was just, like, ‘Zakk, I was talking with Rex. We’re thinking about doing this. We were wondering if you would wanna honor Dime.’ And I was, like, ‘Of course, man.’ How could I say no? So now, it was just, like, ‘All right. Well, send me the songs for the setlist so I can start learning this stuff, man.'”
Wylde then talked about adapting his style to fit to the music of Pantera.
“I’ve been working on it for a while now,” he said. “I had to get a whammy pedal. I never owned one of those things. Grady [Champion, who was Dimebag’s guitar tech throughout his career with Pantera] will probably be running that thing, the guy who ran it for Dimebag. So, yeah, I’m a proud owner of a whammy pedal now. [Laughs] And I’ve got my Dime guitars, the ones that actually he gave me… I’ve got my rig.”
“Obviously, what Dime used that I don’t use, obviously, is noise gate. Obviously, if you’re gonna be doing [hums ‘Cowboys From Hell’ main riff]… My stuff, it’s just pure lightning all the time. If I’m gonna stop, you stop. Dime would have, like, two distortion pedals on at the same time. I remember in his rig, he goes, ‘Zakk, what pedals do you use?’ My overdrive pedals — he had one of those things in his board. I go, ‘Dime, it’s probably not even panning anything ’cause you’ve got so much overdrive on there.’ But for him, there wasn’t enough gate. He loved it. And there’s an art to controlling it.”
Wylde was then asked if he was worried about performing any of the songs, and in the process he named a handful of songs he’s been working on that are likely to appear in the Pantera setlist.
“To me, it’s just like learning Randy’s [Rhoads] stuff [to play with Ozzy Osbourne], whether we’re doing ‘Mr. Crowley’ or ‘I Don’t Know’ or anything,” he said. “To me, it’s fun.”
”But whether we’re playing ‘Goddamn Electric’, that solo’s beyond… I mean, all the solos are blazing; they’re all awesome. It’s gonna be fun when you’re playing ‘Walk’, and stuff like that, or ‘Cowboys From Hell’ or anything like that.”
“Some of the other ones that we’ve got on there like… I mean, ‘A New Level’ and stuff like that — those are all cool. I think I may have gone on your web site, just to see ‘Becoming’, watching you play. Any of these things that I got stumped on, I was, like, ‘What the hell was that?’ I would just go, ‘How to play…’ and I’d go on to YouTube and just see all these other amazing players playing the stuff…”
“For me, that’s the whole thing, too — playing it with the record is one thing, but then you take the record away and it’s, like, ‘All right. Play it for me.’ It’s a guideline. It’s like cover by numbers; you know where you’re going. Or taking the GPS off your car. It’s, like, ‘All right, do you remember how to get back down to Hollywood?’ You’re, like, ‘Zakk, I have no idea. I was following the GPS the whole time.'”
Pantera’s first shows start next month in Mexico and South America.
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