Pantera before Cowboys From Hell was a glam-leaning Arlington bar band that self-released four albums between 1983 and 1988, all recorded at Pantego Sound, the studio run by Darrell and Vinnie Paul Abbott’s father. Singer Terry Glaze fronted the first three. The fourth, Power Metal (1988), introduced Phil Anselmo and blended the old glam sound with traditional metal and thrash. It is the bridge to everything that came after.
The Short Version
- Formed in Arlington, Texas in 1981 by brothers Darrell and Vinnie Paul Abbott with guitarist Terry Glaze. Rex Brown joined on bass in 1982.
- Four albums on the family label Metal Magic Records: Metal Magic (1983), Projects in the Jungle (1984), I Am the Night (1985) and Power Metal (1988).
- Glaze left in 1986. Phil Anselmo, eighteen and from New Orleans, was hired at his audition that year.
- Rotting Corpse’s Walt Trachsler was Darrell Abbott’s guitar tech in this era, and Jim “Moe” Mulqueen was a fellow Pantera roadie.
Who Was in Pantera Before Phil Anselmo?
The band started as a high school project. Terry Glaze was playing guitar with bassist Tommy Bradford and wanted the best drummer in Arlington, which meant Vince Abbott. Vince came with a condition. “We weren’t really interested in a young kid in middle school, but we reluctantly agreed, thank goodness,” Glaze told eonmusic in 2023. The kid was Darrell.
Glaze puts the start at 1981, in eleventh grade, with Donnie Hart singing. Hart and Bradford were gone within a year: Glaze moved to the microphone and Rex Brown, billed as Rex Rocker, took the bass chair in 1982. Wikipedia says the band tried the names Gemini and Eternity before settling on Pantera, after the De Tomaso sports car.
Their heroes were Kiss, Van Halen and Def Leppard. Glaze remembers Darrell locking himself in his room and coming out “fully formed, like a butterfly.” Anthrax’s Scott Ian, quoted in Louder, says Darrell was barely fourteen when they played their first bar gig.
This is the Pantera that Rotting Corpse’s founders worked for. The site’s history records that Walt Trachsler was guitar tech for Darrell, then still billed as “Diamond” and playing Keel and Cinderella covers, and that Jim “Moe” Mulqueen was a fellow Pantera roadie. Both were carrying around the idea of a thrash band the whole time, and the timeline picks that story up in 1984.
Metal Magic (1983): The Kiss and Van Halen Years
Pantera’s edge over every other Arlington cover band was a father with a studio. Jerry Abbott was a country songwriter and producer who worked at Pantego Sound, a small room in nearby Pantego. “We got to record twenty, thirty, forty originals, awful, terrible songs, to learn how to do it,” Glaze told eonmusic. Abbott managed the band and put its records out on his own label, Metal Magic Records.
Metal Magic came out on June 10, 1983, per its Wikipedia entry, with Jerry Abbott credited as “The Eld’n.” Glaze played guitar and sang; the songs include “I’ll Be Alright,” “Widowmaker” and the title track. Vinnie Paul later put sales at around 5,000 copies, and AllMusic gave it one and a half stars.
“If you can look back past my glam singing and listen to the guitars, the rhythms, they sound very consistent to everything they ever did.”
That is Glaze on the Pod Scum podcast, as reported by Vice, and his point holds up. The riffs and drums are recognizably the Abbotts; the hairspray and choruses are the fashion of 1983.
Projects in the Jungle and I Am the Night: 25,000 Records From Arlington
Projects in the Jungle followed on July 27, 1984. Glaze was now credited as Terrence Lee and Darrell as Diamond Darrell. Wikipedia’s summary of the reviews describes cleaner production, a Def Leppard Pyromania influence and, for the first time, speed-metal-leaning riffs under the pop choruses. The band shot its first video for “All Over Tonight,” and sales passed 15,000. Glaze still names it his favorite: “I just dig the tunes, especially ‘All Over Tonight,’” he told Full in Bloom.
I Am the Night was recorded at Pantego in November 1984 and released August 16, 1985. It sold more than 25,000 copies on vinyl and cassette, a real number for a self-released record from Arlington, and “Hot and Heavy” went out as a single. AllMusic’s verdict, quoted on Wikipedia: “it is invariably Darrell’s playing that makes these growing pains more tolerable.” It was the last album with Glaze.
Behind the records was a punishing schedule. “We played four, five, six times a week in Texas, when we were in high school,” Glaze told Louder. “You might play 70 songs a night.” The band’s reach, per the Handbook of Texas and Wikipedia, was Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, with opening slots for Dokken, Quiet Riot and Stryper.
Where Did Pantera Play in the 1980s?
Glaze describes a three-set night: an opening set of covers, a second set of originals, and a last set of “stuff that was heavy.” His favorite gigs were the Arlington Skating Rink, Six Flags and Tyler, Texas, and he also names Dallas’s Bronco Bowl. A fan quoted by the Dallas Morning News saw them at Six Flags Over Texas’s Southern Palace theater in summer 1983.
The room that matters most to this site is Savvy’s, run by Rick Miller and his father. Buddy Magazine quotes Miller’s first reaction to metal bookings: “I don’t want that metal here, man.” He came around, and built a cage at the front of the stage to keep minors and adults apart. In 1985, after Metallica finished the Ride the Lightning tour, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich jammed there with Darrell, Rex, Vince and Jerry Warden, the promoter who had opened Rascals that spring, and Warden sang “Seek and Destroy” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
Savvy’s Closed
Rotting Corpse’s venue history calls it the room where the band got finished: Moe Mulqueen met drummer Dave Gryder here, and Steve Murphy saw Pantera here in high school when the set was Van Halen and Judas Priest covers. Pantera’s own tour history lists a residency at Savvy’s in Fort Worth from November 25, 1986, the earliest known shows with Phil Anselmo. No closing year is on record.
Moe Mulqueen onstage at Savvy’s in Arlington, filed in the band’s own archive as a night with Dimebag Darrell. Photo: Rotting Corpse archive
The 1987 tour history fills in the rest of the circuit: Matley’s in Dallas, the Arcadia Theater, Metalworks in Fort Worth and Cardi’s in Houston. Rascals, the first dedicated metal club in North Texas, has its own article.
Why Did Terry Glaze Leave Pantera?
Glaze’s last show with Pantera was in Wichita Falls in 1986, per Blabbermouth’s account of the Pod Scum interview. The standard version, repeated on Wikipedia, is that he wanted to stay glam while the Abbotts wanted to get heavier. Glaze disputes it: “It wasn’t musical direction. It wasn’t anything like that, ‘cause I loved playing in the band.”
What is not in dispute is what the brothers wanted next. Loudwire’s anniversary piece on Power Metal says Darrell and Vinnie had heard Metallica and Motörhead and wanted something heavier on album four, most of which was written in 1986. They invited a singer they had met on the road, eighteen-year-old Phil Anselmo of New Orleans, to fly in and audition. Wikipedia says he was hired on the spot; Pantera’s tour history has him onstage at Savvy’s in Fort Worth by November 25, 1986.
Glaze landed on his feet. He joined Lord Tracy, a Memphis band, in 1986; its debut Deaf Gods of Babylon came out on UNI/MCA in 1989 and the single “Out With the Boys” reached number 40 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, per Wikipedia.
Lord Tracy
Memphis, with Terry Glaze on vocals from 1986. Start with Deaf Gods of Babylon (1989), the record where his voice fits the songs.
Power Metal (1988): The Bridge to Cowboys From Hell
Power Metal was released in May 1988 on Metal Magic Records, again cut at Pantego with Jerry Abbott, and it is the first thing the classic lineup put on tape. Wikipedia describes a transitional record that keeps the glam and pop-metal side while pulling in speed and thrash influences, with vocals reviewers compared to Judas Priest. Loudwire calls it a bridge between the band’s British-metal-flavored sound and the groove and thrash of Cowboys From Hell. That is the fair description: a blend of glam, traditional metal and thrash, not yet the band of 1990.
One track came from outside. “Proud to Be Loud” was written and produced by Marc Ferrari of Keel, the band whose covers Darrell was still playing when Walt Trachsler tech’d for him. It is the only song from the album on streaming services today. AllMusic called the record “an interesting and transitional early effort,” and it never charted.
It did its job anyway. Loudwire reports that Derek Shulman, the executive who would sign Pantera to Atco, sent an A&R man to see the band after hearing it. Wikipedia counts 28 major-label rejections before Atco signed them in 1989; Cowboys From Hell, recorded at Pantego with Terry Date, came out on July 24, 1990. Anselmo told Loudwire what the change cost at home: the glam-bar regulars stopped coming, and a thrash crowd replaced them. “We were very responsible in the Texas scene for changing the big bar, big glam bar mentality,” he said.
Pantera
Arlington, formed 1981. The glam-era albums are out of print, so start with Cowboys From Hell (1990) and work backward to Power Metal on used vinyl.
Which Pantera Glam Albums Should You Hear?
None of the four has been reissued, and the CDs that circulate are bootlegs, so this is a used-vinyl and YouTube exercise. If you only hear one, make it Power Metal: it has the lineup, the riffs and a singer who could already do the high and the mean parts. Start with “Proud to Be Loud” because it is on streaming.
For the Glaze years, take his own advice and go to Projects in the Jungle: better songs than the debut, cleaner production, and “All Over Tonight.” I Am the Night is the bigger seller and the heavier of the two. Metal Magic is for completists.
Glaze’s closing argument to Vice is the right way in: “Darrell’s guitar sounds amazing from day one and especially by the second album, Projects, he’s fully formed.” Listen to the guitar, and the era stops being a joke.
Where to Hear It Live
As of September 2026, the reunited Pantera has no Texas dates announced. The two shows on the books are Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, on Thursday, September 17, 2026 (passes), and The Great NOLA Trendkill at Lakefront Arena in New Orleans on November 20 and 21, 2026, with Down, Black Label Society, Corrosion of Conformity and Dallas’s Power Trip, per Consequence. Tickets for both are on Ticketmaster; new dates post to pantera.com first.
Most of the North Texas rooms from this era are gone; the venues page and gallery hold their flyers and photos. Rotting Corpse’s own dates are on the shows page.
Start with “Rotting Corpse” (1986)
It was cut at Pantego Sound in spring 1986 with Jerry Abbott engineering, the same man and the same room behind all four of the albums above, and it is what the Pantera roadies were writing while the headliner was still in spandex.
Sources
- Handbook of Texas Online: Pantera
- Louder: How Pantera went from a glam band to redefining metal
- Vice: Terry Glaze on Pantera’s ‘80s glam metal albums
- eonmusic: Terry Glaze interview, January 2023
- Full in Bloom: Terry Glaze interview
- Blabbermouth: Terry Glaze on Pantera’s pre-Anselmo albums
- Loudwire: 31 Years Ago: Pantera Release ‘Power Metal’
- Wikipedia: Metal Magic
- Wikipedia: Projects in the Jungle
- Wikipedia: I Am the Night
- Wikipedia: Power Metal
- Wikipedia: Pantera
- Wikipedia: Lord Tracy
- Buddy Magazine: Metal origin stories from Arlington
- Dallas Morning News: Still Cowboys From Hell
- Pantera.com: Tour Dates History
- Handbook of Texas Online: Bronco Bowl
- Consequence: Pantera to headline NOLA festival
- Ticketmaster: Pantera tickets and 2026 dates
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Pantera sound like before Cowboys From Hell?
From 1983 to 1985 Pantera was a glam-leaning hard rock and heavy metal band built on Kiss, Van Halen and Def Leppard, with Terry Glaze singing. The 1988 album Power Metal, the first with Phil Anselmo, blended that glam sound with traditional metal and thrash and led into Cowboys From Hell in 1990.
Who sang for Pantera before Phil Anselmo?
Terry Glaze, who co-founded the band in Arlington in 1981 as a guitarist and took over vocals in 1982. He sang on Metal Magic (1983), Projects in the Jungle (1984) and I Am the Night (1985), then left in 1986 and joined Lord Tracy.
What are Pantera’s glam metal albums?
Four albums on the family label Metal Magic Records: Metal Magic (1983), Projects in the Jungle (1984), I Am the Night (1985) and Power Metal (1988). All four were recorded at Pantego Sound, the studio of Jerry Abbott, father of Darrell and Vinnie Paul.
When did Phil Anselmo join Pantera?
He auditioned at the end of 1986, when he was eighteen, and was hired on the spot. Pantera’s own tour history lists a run of shows at Savvy’s in Fort Worth starting November 25, 1986 as the earliest known dates with Anselmo singing.
Are the early Pantera albums on Spotify?
Mostly no. The four Metal Magic albums have never been reissued, and the only track from them on streaming services is “Proud to Be Loud” from Power Metal, written by Keel’s Marc Ferrari. Original vinyl and cassettes turn up on the used market.
