Dimebag Darrell: Arlington’s Heavy Metal God

Today is the birthday of Dimebag Darrell. He would be 60 today.

Darrell Lance Abbott was born in Arlington, Texas on August 20, 1966. He and his brother Vinnie Paul grew up in a musical household — their father Jerry Abbott was a country music producer. Darrell picked up guitar early and immediately went somewhere else entirely. He and Vinnie formed Pantera with singer Phil Anselmo in the late 1980s. They started as a glam metal band in Arlington clubs and then reinvented themselves as something heavier, angrier, and more technically precise than the genre had seen.

The Groove Metal Blueprint

Vulgar Display of Power came out in 1992 and changed heavy metal’s direction. Dimebag’s guitar tone — tight, percussive, dropped-tuned — became the template for an entire decade of metal. Pantera played to stadium crowds worldwide through the 1990s. Dimebag’s solo on “Cemetery Gates” and the riff of “Walk” are standard texts in metal guitar education. He left Pantera and formed Damageplan with Vinnie Paul. On December 8, 2004, Dimebag was shot and killed on stage in Columbus, Ohio. He was 38. Texas built one of metal’s greatest guitarists in the shadow of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Learn more on Wikipedia.