Nearly every metal fan over the age of 30 can remember exactly where he or she was when Pantera and Damageplan guitarist Dimebag Darrell was shot and killed onstage at the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio. It’s one of those horror stories that gets etched irreparably into the memory as vividly as a political assassination or a tragedy like the recent suicide of Robin Williams.
It’s hard to believe that on Dec. 8, a full decade will have passed since Dimebag (real name: Darrell Abbott) and three other people were shot and murdered by a former Marine about 90 seconds into the first song of Damageplan’s set.
Various individuals and organizations across the globe have scheduled events in December to commemorate the life of Dime, one of the most charismatic and virtuosic performers in the history of metal. Magazines including Guitar World in the U.S. and Metal Hammer in the U.K. have put together special issues to honor the guitar legend. One person who won’t be publicly commemorating the legacy of Dimebag Darrell, however, is his former Pantera bandmate, vocalist Phil Anselmo, whose current group Down will be playing the Fillmore in San Francisco that night.
"There is no f—-ing way on this planet Earth that I am going to celebrate the death of one of my best friends and my guitar player in Pantera," Anselmo tells Yahoo. "I won’t do any Pantera songs or anything like that. Like every night, I’ll send out a song to Dimebag. I always send out the song ‘Lifer’ because if there was ever a lifer in heavy metal music — someone who lived it and breathed it and forged it every single day — it was him. He is the epitome of a lifer whether he is in the tomb or not."
For Anselmo, there’s no specific significance to the 10th anniversary of Darrell’s death. It’s just a reminder that the man he played with partied with and lived with between 1986 and 2003 is still gone. And when he thinks about it, he remembers the ugly way the band broke up and how the situation might have been different.
"Every year gets harder," Anselmo says in a grave tone. "I look at what’s out there in heavy metal and I think about what could have been. Really, it gets tougher every single f—-ing year. This is an evil time of year for me. It’s rough, man. When you think of the madcap f—-ing way he was taken from us, I don’t think any of us in the band can really come to f—-ing terms with it. The murder made no sense, the reasoning made no sense, and because it was done by a sick f—-ing person that had nothing to do with us except help seal the fate of the story and create this gigantic gulf of so many questions, it’s just confounding and miserable."
