Pantera Takes a Tour Detour and Plays the Great Indoors

For Pantera, the novelty of playing outside in the summertime has worn off.

“The weather, the elements, the bugs,” says Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul over the phone from Dallas. “You never know when it’s going to rain. And then there are those times when it’s 115 degrees and humid.”

Being from Texas, the band knows those kinds of days all too well.

“One time we were on the Ozzfest in Washington, D.C., right before Ozzy [Osbourne] went on, there was a humongous thunderstorm and someone said, ‘We’ve got to shut it down. There’s a tornado on the ground a mile from here.’ ” Paul says. “Anything can happen with the outdoor thing.”

So this year, after playing two summers of Ozzfest and doing its own amphitheater swing, Pantera is taking its “Extreme Steel Tour” indoors--including a July 19 stop at the Long Beach Arena.

Though the band’s music is harsh and uncompromising, there was no reason to have climactic conditions like that at shows, Paul says. “We opted to take advantage of all the nice, air-conditioned hockey arenas, to make it enjoyable for fans.”

The tour’s roster includes Slayer, Static-X, Skrape and Morbid Angel.

It’s the first time Pantera has toured with Slayer, though they shared the bill once on the Ozzfest tour two years ago in Dallas--a meeting that led to Slayer’s Kerry King recording the guitar part that ends one track on Pantera’s latest album, “Reinventing the Steel.”

“The Extreme Steel Tour” makes its debut in a season when the main metal show is outdoors and headlined by Osbourne.

“We knew we’d be competing with Ozzfest and the Family Values tours,” Paul says. “But this one is more intense and extreme than that. We were lucky enough to be part of Ozzfest, but it seems to be a pretty commercialized tour this year. We wanted to do something to the left of that--less of an MTV-type of audience kind of thing.”

After all, Pantera has built its career on the kind of music “you can’t hear on MTV and you can’t hear on radio.”

“We’ve always been about playing live,” he says. “We’ve been doing it for 12 years on this level, and we’ve seen 1,000 bands come and go; 1,000 trends come and go.

“Any time a band depends on MTV to get the word out, you never know. What works real good one year, the next year there’s some other flavor of the month, and you can kiss it all goodbye.”

Pantera hadn’t had a new studio album for four years before “Reinventing the Steel” was released last fall.

The band toured off its previous album, 1996’s “The Great Southern Trendkill,” for two years before Osbourne asked the band to join his huge metal fest for a couple of years, with Black Sabbath headlining.

The band had been planning to go back into the studio, Paul said, but being lifetime Sabbath fans, “there was no way we were going to turn that down.”

Singer’s Injury Delays Tour

So Pantera crossed America one more time and did the European leg as well, before venturing into the studio in late 1999.

After lead singer Philip Anselmo broke two ribs, a big tour to coincide with the album release last fall was put off until spring.

The broken ribs didn’t happen onstage but, rather, while Anselmo was involved with his other preoccupation, an elaborate haunted house he operates in his hometown of New Orleans.

“He caught his foot on something and fell down,” Paul says. “He got up the next morning and got X-rayed because he was urinating blood. The doctor said, ‘You have two broken ribs, and one of them punctured your kidney. You’re not doing anything for six weeks.’ ”

Like Anselmo, the rest of the band--which also includes guitarist Dimebag Darrell and bassist Rex Brown--has side interests, the most lucrative of which is a nightspot in Dallas called the Clubhouse.

“It’s a strip bar two miles north of Texas Stadium and does real good business,” Paul says.

When bands are in town, they come to “unwind and enjoy the sights,” he says. “Poison was in the night before last, and Metallica and Nine Inch Nails have stopped in.”