The concert Dave Grohl called “the most brutal, vulgar display of power known to man”
There were never any rules around music whenever Dave Grohl picked up a guitar.
As much as he loved rock and roll with every fibre of his benign, there was no real limit to where his muse was going to take him, whether that was working with Trent Reznor to make some of the greatest industrial music with Nine Inch Nails, jamming with Paul McCartney from time to time, or helping out his daughter when she took her first steps into making music. But if there’s one genre that Grohl will always hold close to his heart, it’s the kind of riffs that made people want to headbang from the minute that they heard them.
It’s no big secret that Grohl is one of the greatest drummers of all time, but when looking at his record collection, it all came from him falling in love with the heaviness of punk rock. All that he needed was a ton of energy and the will to play his heart out every single time he was onstage, and when you listen to Scream, you can really hear him play like he’s got everything to prove. The songs may have still been melodic, but Grohl sounded like he was trying out for a band like Slayer when he started leaning into the groove every single time he played.
He wanted to leave every other punk drummer in the dust, but metal was never too far behind in his record collection. Sure, some of his friends may have been a bit spooked seeing records by Venom in a stash of records, but the Satanic side of music wasn’t what Grohl was interested in. All he knew was that he found something that connected with him on a deeper level, but it turned out he hadn’t even begun to hear what true heaviness could sound like when thrash metal started happening.
The heaviest bands up until that point were acts like Motörhead and Iron Maiden, but Metallica and Megadeth helped open up an entirely new world for musicians like him. This was metal if it had been given a shot of adrenaline, and if Grohl wanted to kick things up a notch in Scream, Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul had a few other plans once they drafted in Phil Anselmo to sing with Pantera.
The Texas band had been the epitome of glam when they first started making records, but by the time Cowboys From Hell came out, they were practically a different band altogether. They were now looking to kick ass and take names, and when Grohl first laid eyes on them for the first time, he was in love with every demented riff that was coming out of Dime’s guitar when they performed live.
Other bands might have had a higher pedigree than them, but no one seemed to put as much muscle into the genre as they did in Grohl’s mind, saying, “[It] can only be described as the most brutal, vulgar display of power known to man. Just as I had imagined, they were absolutely destroying the stage. It was a Valhalla of volume. Let me tell you, never in my years of touring had I seen something so badass. This was a gang of hoodlums. And this wasn’t a band. It was a force of fucking nature.”
And considering how hard they worked when they played, they managed to party even harder whenever they got off the stage. The band were known to enjoy a drink or two or 19, and while Grohl did eventually get denied entry into their club when he lost his wallet, that didn’t stop him from appreciating the music every single time he heard one of Dime’s squeals on the song ‘Walk’ or ‘I’m Broken’.
That kind of music might not be for the faint of heart by any stretch, but for anyone willing to take the plunge, Pantera is the ultimate example of how extreme metal can truly sound. It was more than a little bit insane, but even if you hate metal with every fibre of your being, there’s something about the groove that they create that makes them one of the greatest metal bands that the genre has ever seen.
