“I had never heard anything like it”: The band that proved too much for Jim Carrey to handle
The novelist Graham Greene once wrote: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” But these moments where your lapels are suddenly grabbed by some foreign force and your sensibilities are shaken like a cheap Skoda rumbling over a cattelgrid, aren’t tied to childhood alone. They might become rarities in adulthood, but every now and again, something new can still be foisted upon you that shakes you from the shackles of the sentiment that you know the world and everything you like in it. Jim Carrey learnt this lesson on a road trip imbued with a hue of surrealism.
By rights, we should look out for these moments—if life really did unfurl like a self-help book, then it would be advisable to live with a readied awareness that we haven’t heard all there is to hear, seen all there is to be seen, or read everything there is to be read. However, the reminders of these salient truths usually arrive inadvertently. They slap you around the chops on an idle Tuesday when something slips free from the algorithm spigot of ‘same old stuff’, stirring you into a frenzy and wailing, ‘Where have you been all my life?’ when you were only supposed to pop into the kitchen to flick the kettle on.
This happened to Carrey on a routine road trip. He was at a stage in his career where achieving his comedy dream was transitioning towards a state of normality. He was a big enough name to now travel with his manager, Jim Miller, in tow, and shows had a slight sense of routineness to them. So, as they drove along to San Diego, there was no feeling between Carrey and Miller that their lives were about to change.
Then, Miller simply put a Pantera CD on and all that changed. “I had never heard anything like it,” an awed Carrey told Fox 5. “And it hit me on such a level of, like, extreme stimulation that I just started laughing uncontrollably for the entire track. Just like nervously laughing, like, ‘What is happening right now?'” He hadn’t had such a visceral reaction to art for a long time and he was overcome by it.
In these moments, there is often a sense that you have discovered a missing piece from your life. The world becomes more vivid, like the moment you get your ears syringed any realise your existence has been muffled without your knowledge. The frenzied energy and brooding poetry appealed to Carrey, he saw a kinship with his own radical comedy ways.
These moments also have a sense of destiny to them, as though the world was waiting for the right time to blast this cold splash of water against your psyche—that sense was about to border on the surreal for the Ace Ventura star. “Then we went to check in to the hotel, and the guys behind us in the line checking in to the hotel were Pantera. We turned around and we went, like, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?’ This is too weird, man,” he recalled, aghast.
Since that moment, he has always been a Pantera fan, how couldn’t he be? The universe pretty much dictated as much. And he probably still hasn’t heard anything like it.
