The Short Version
- Pantego Sound Studio sat at 2210 Raper Boulevard in Pantego, a one-square-mile town inside Arlington. It opened in 1973 and closed in 1996.
- Owner Jerry Abbott was a country songwriter with a Buck Owens hit to his name. He produced Pantera’s first four albums and founded Metal Magic Records to release them.
- Cowboys From Hell (1990) and Vulgar Display of Power (1992) were both recorded in the same room, with Terry Date producing.
- Warlock, Gammacide and Rotting Corpse all cut demos there, because it was the only studio in Dallas–Fort Worth that already knew how to record metal.
What Was Pantego Sound Studio?
Pantego Sound Studio was the small recording room at 2210 Raper Boulevard in Pantego, Texas, where Pantera recorded six albums, including Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display of Power. Its owner and engineer was Jerry Abbott, a country songwriter and the father of Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul. For most of the 1980s it was also the only studio in Dallas–Fort Worth with a track record in heavy metal, which is why the region’s thrash bands lined up to record there.
Pantego itself is an odd place to find the room behind two platinum records. The town covers 1.04 square miles, counted 2,568 people at the 2020 census, and is completely surrounded by Arlington and Dalworthington Gardens. It first incorporated in 1949 to keep Arlington from annexing it, according to the Arlington Historical Society. The studio was at the dead end of a residential street.
The building predates Pantera. Peter Orozco, who has documented the site for his Ghosts of DFW Music History series, traces it to 1973, when it opened as Blue Royal Sound. Orozco reports the first engineer was T Bone Burnett, who left after six months, long before his soundtrack work on O Brother, Where Art Thou? The studio was later renamed Pantego Sound.
Pantego Sound Studio Closed 1996
Jerry Abbott’s studio, home of Metal Magic Records and the room for Pantera’s first six albums. Rotting Corpse cut three demos here between 1986 and 1988. The band’s archive has no photo of the working studio, so this card shows its own credits sheet, which lists the Pantego sessions. The building still stands, unmaintained.
Rotting Corpse archive
Who Was Jerry Abbott?
Jerry Bob Abbott was born in Abilene on April 8, 1942. He started piano at eight and guitar at fifteen, toured Texas in country bands after high school, and picked up a business degree along the way, according to Saving Country Music‘s obituary. In 1973 he went to work as a sound engineer at a recording studio, the same year Blue Royal Sound opened on Raper Boulevard. Vinnie Paul was born in 1964 and Darrell in 1966.
His songwriting is the part of the story most metal fans skip, and it is the reason the studio existed. Don Gibson recorded his “Let’s Get Together” in 1975. Freddy Fender cut “If You’re Ever in Texas” in 1976. In 1979 Buck Owens and Emmylou Harris took his co-write “Play Together Again, Again” to number 11 on the country chart, Owens’s last solo top-20 hit. Abbott also produced records for the Texas blues guitarist Bugs Henderson.
So the man engineering Pantera’s glam-era albums was a working songwriter with hits on the radio, not a metal guy who happened to own a tape machine. Gammacide guitarist Rick Perry put it plainly to Extreminal: Abbott “was very cool and knew his way around the recording studio.” He published a memoir, Over My Left Shoulder, in 2014, and died in Denton on April 2, 2024, six days before his 82nd birthday.
Metal Magic Records and Pantera’s First Four Albums
Pantera formed in Arlington in 1981, and by 1983 Abbott was managing the band, engineering it, and running a label to put out its records. Metal Magic came out on June 10, 1983, on Metal Magic Records, with the production credit given to “The Eld’n,” Abbott’s alias on every early Pantera sleeve. Vinnie Paul later said it had sold about 5,000 copies by 1990.
Two more albums followed the same way: Projects in the Jungle in 1984 and I Am the Night in 1985, both recorded at Pantego with Terry Glaze singing. The Handbook of Texas describes these three as glam-rock records that “evolved increasingly toward a heavy metal sound.” Glaze left in 1986, and by 1987 the band had a new singer from New Orleans, Phil Anselmo.
Anselmo’s debut, Power Metal, was recorded and mixed at Pantego and released in May 1988. Abbott engineered, mixed and produced everything except “Proud to Be Loud,” which Marc Ferrari handled. It was the last record Metal Magic Records ever put out. It is the record where the thrash influence starts to show, and the one to hear for the studio’s sound before Terry Date arrived.
Pantera
Arlington, formed 1981. Start with Cowboys From Hell (1990), the first record they made at Pantego with an outside producer; then Power Metal (1988) to hear what the room sounded like before that.
Where Did Pantera Record Cowboys From Hell?
Pantera recorded Cowboys From Hell at Pantego Sound Studio, in the same room as the four independent albums. The band had signed with Atco in 1989 after, by Wikipedia’s count, 28 major labels passed. Atco’s Mark Ross saw them play in Texas and pushed the deal through. Rex Brown dated the sessions to February through April 1990; Anselmo has said the work began in 1989.
The producer was supposed to be Max Norman, who had made records with Ozzy Osbourne and Megadeth. Louder reports the collaboration fell apart before it began. The band picked Terry Date instead, on the strength of his work with Soundgarden, Metal Church and Overkill’s The Years of Decay. Vinnie Paul told Louder the band walked in ready:
“We had really honed our skills. We were a machine and we played really, really tight together.”
The method was unusual. Vinnie Paul cut drums first, Darrell tracked guitars over them, and Brown added bass last, playing to the guitar tracks. The album came out July 24, 1990, sold slowly, didn’t chart until 1992, and is now double platinum in the United States.
They went back to the same room for Vulgar Display of Power in 1991. The band spent about two months at Pantego, flew to Moscow to play Monsters of Rock on September 28, 1991, then returned to finish. Most of the songs were written in the studio. Date produced with Vinnie Paul as co-producer. Released in North America on February 25, 1992, it debuted at number 44 on the Billboard 200, stayed on the chart for 78 weeks, and has passed two million copies.
That was the last Pantera album made in Pantego. Far Beyond Driven was recorded in 1993 at Abtrax, the studio Abbott opened after moving to Nashville, and it entered the Billboard 200 at number one in 1994.
The Other Bands in the Room: Warlock, Gammacide and Rotting Corpse
What almost never gets told is that between the Pantera albums, Pantego Sound was where the Dallas–Fort Worth underground went to make demos. Rick Perry explained the logic to Extreminal: because Pantera had already recorded “2 or 3 of their early glam albums there,” Pantego “was the most experienced studio around Dallas/Fort Worth as far as heavy metal, so it was a no-brainer” to record there too.
Warlock got there first. The Dallas band’s classic lineup of Jerry Warden, Perry, Eric Roy and Les Choate recorded its first release at Pantego in 1985 and its second at Rick Rooney’s Planet Dallas in 1986, according to the band’s own history. Perry told the Dallas Observer in 2013: “We made a bunch of money at Rascals, went to the recording studio, and made these demos.” That Rascals is the Arlington bar where Rotting Corpse played its first show, covered in our piece on the club.
Warlock
Dallas, the band that gave Gammacide its guitarist, its bassist and two of its songs. The 1985 demo with “Name Your Poison” is the one made at Pantego.
Gammacide formed in 1986 with Perry, Roy, drummer Jamey Milford and singer Varnam Ponville, and carried two Warlock songs, “Gutter Rats” and “Walking Plague,” into the new band. The debut demo was cut at Pantego in 1987. Vinnie Paul was supposed to produce it; his father did instead. Perry remembered about $25 an hour, four or five hours of tracking, and a couple of hours mixing the next day. They pressed 500 copies, mailed them to Kerrang!, Metal Forces and Morbid in Norway, and the reviews brought requests from zines around the world. Victims of Science followed in March 1990.
Gammacide
Dallas–Fort Worth, formed 1986. Start with Victims of Science (1990). Reformed in 2025 with Perry, Ponville and Scott Shelby; their site posts dates as they’re booked.
Rotting Corpse had the closest ties to the room of any band that wasn’t named Abbott. Walt Trachsler was Darrell’s guitar tech, and Jim “Moe” Mulqueen roadied for Pantera; both knew Jerry Abbott from the road crew before they had a band. Their first demo was cut at Pantego in spring 1986 with Abbott engineering, credited on the tape as “The Elder.” John Perez, who mailed the tapes out, said the production “was the best yet from any Texas demo band.” The second demo, F*ck It, It’s Only Thrash, was recorded there in summer 1987 with Vinnie Paul behind the board, and the third in 1988, also with Vinnie, paid for with a boat. The whole account, including what happened to the boat, is on the band history page, and the session details are on the discography.
Put the dates side by side: Warlock in 1985, Rotting Corpse in 1986, Gammacide and Rotting Corpse in 1987, Rotting Corpse again in 1988, the year Power Metal was mixed there. By the time Terry Date walked in for Cowboys From Hell, the room had already been proven on Texas thrash.
Rotting Corpse
Arlington–Dallas, formed 1985. Start with the spring 1986 demo recorded at Pantego with Jerry Abbott—the closest thing on record to hearing what those sessions sounded like. Thrash in Pain or Die Insane, the remastered anthology, is available now.
What Happened to Pantego Sound?
Abbott moved to Nashville and opened Abtrax Recording, where Far Beyond Driven was made in 1993. Orozco dates the closure of the Pantego studio to 1996. The Raper Boulevard building never became anything else. A geocache listing for the site describes it as abandoned “at the end of a small street in Pantego,” and Orozco, who visited in April 2023, found it “largely unmaintained and forlorn,” with only the painted-over address numbers left to identify it.
There is no plaque. Darrell Abbott died on December 8, 2004, Vinnie Paul on June 22, 2018, and Jerry in April 2024, when Blabbermouth and the rest of the metal press carried the news. All three are buried together at Moore Memorial Gardens in Arlington, a few miles from the studio. If you go looking, it is a residential street; look from the road, then go home and put on Power Metal, the closest you can get to standing in the room.
Where to Hear It Live
As of September 2026, no Texas dates are on the calendar for the bands in this story. Here is what is announced, and where to watch.
- Pantera plays Louder Than Life at the Kentucky Expo Center in Louisville on September 17, 2026, then a two-night stand billed as The Great NOLA Trendkill at Lakefront Arena in New Orleans on November 20 and 21, 2026, with DOWN, Black Label Society, Power Trip, Corrosion of Conformity, Crowbar, Eyehategod, Pig Destroyer, Rāde and Herakleion on the bill. Tickets and any new dates are on Ticketmaster and pantera.com.
- Gammacide reformed in 2025 and played Trees in Dallas, Canyon and Denton that year. Nothing new is listed yet on the band’s events page, which is where the next run will show up first.
- Rotting Corpse played Austin twice in September 2026 and has nothing booked at the moment. New shows are announced on Instagram first and then listed on the shows page.
Start with “War on Drugs” (1986)
It’s from the first demo, the one Jerry Abbott engineered at Pantego in spring 1986, so it’s the closest thing on the record to hearing that room the way the thrash bands used it.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Jerry Abbott
- Saving Country Music: Jerry Abbott, Country Songwriter and Father of Pantera Brothers, Has Died
- PAO Productions (Peter Orozco): Ghosts of DFW Music History: Pantego Sound Studio / Metal Magic Records
- Handbook of Texas: Pantera
- Wikipedia: Cowboys from Hell
- Wikipedia: Vulgar Display of Power
- Wikipedia: Metal Magic
- Wikipedia: Power Metal (album)
- Wikipedia: Far Beyond Driven
- Wikipedia: Pantera
- Louder: Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell: the story behind the album
- Extreminal: Gammacide Interview with Rick Perry
- Dallas Observer: Dallas Metal Legend Warlock Is Releasing New Material, 27 Years After an Ugly Breakup
- Warlock Texas: Band history
- Gammacide: Official site
- Geocaching: Pantera: Pantego Sound Studio (GC9YVMH)
- Wikipedia: Pantego, Texas
- Arlington Historical Society: A Brief History of the Town of Pantego
- Blabbermouth: Dimebag and Vinnie Paul’s Father Jerry Abbott Dead at 80
- Ticketmaster: Pantera tour dates
- Wikimedia Commons: File:VinniePaul2008.JPG
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did Pantera record Cowboys From Hell?
At Pantego Sound Studio, 2210 Raper Boulevard in Pantego, Texas, a small town surrounded by Arlington. The studio belonged to Jerry Abbott, father of Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul. Terry Date produced, and bassist Rex Brown put the sessions at February to April 1990.
Who was Jerry Abbott?
A country songwriter, engineer and producer born in Abilene in 1942. He co-wrote Buck Owens and Emmylou Harris’s 1979 hit “Play Together Again, Again”, ran Pantego Sound, founded Metal Magic Records, and produced Pantera’s first four albums. He died in Denton on April 2, 2024.
Which Pantera albums were made at Pantego Sound?
Six: Metal Magic (1983), Projects in the Jungle (1984), I Am the Night (1985), Power Metal (1988), Cowboys From Hell (1990) and Vulgar Display of Power (1992). Far Beyond Driven was cut at Abbott’s later studio, Abtrax, in Nashville.
Which Texas thrash bands recorded at Pantego Sound?
Warlock cut its first demo there in 1985, Gammacide recorded its debut demo there in 1987, and Rotting Corpse made its first three demos there between 1986 and 1988, engineered by Jerry Abbott and then Vinnie Paul.
Is Pantego Sound Studio still there?
The studio closed in 1996 after Abbott moved to Nashville. The building at the end of Raper Boulevard still stands but is unmaintained, with only painted-over address numbers left on it.
