There are, perhaps, two schools of thought on being a collector. There are those who treat their collections -- be it of baseball cards or cars -- as museum pieces, to be cherished, but not used. And there are those who take the classic roadster out on the highway and put the '52 Mantle in their six-year-old's hands. Pantera's Philip Anselmo collects bands, and he most certainly falls into the latter category.

It seems unlikely that the metal maven keeps a Franklin Planner, but indulge that amusing visual for a moment. While Pantera sits on the backburner after some eight albums in eighteen years, Anselmo's calendar has included the following events: the March release of Down II, the second album by Down, his side project with Eyehategod's Jim Bower, Corrosion of Conformity's Pepper Keenan and Pantera bassist Rex Brown; the May release of Use Once and Destroy by the hardcore-ish Superjoint Ritual; the Down tour that ran through most of the spring; and Superjoint's own nineteen-date tour, which begins tomorrow night. Then it's back to the studio with Southern Isolation, yet another side project, to record the band's first full-length release, the follow-up to last year's self-titled EP. Anselmo has other bands in various stages of development, and there's also the issue of deciding what to do with Pantera, which last released an album more than two years ago.

But for the next month, it's Superjoint. The group features Anselmo and Bower on guitars, with Hank Williams III on bass and Joe Fozzio on drums. For Pantera fans champing at the bit for new material, Superjoint is a different creature. But with Anselmo's inimitable yowl roaring through sixteen cuts -- including "Fuck Your Enemy," "The Alcoholik" and "Everyone Hates Everyone" (with most songs hovering around an efficient three minutes) -- there is plenty of guitar-buoyed anger for all.

So how did you pull Superjoint Ritual together?

I guess sometime during the early Nineties, like '92 or something like that, me and Jimmy [Bower, of Eyehategod], we'd already started the Down band, and it was basically fulfilling all our needs and desires to jam in the vein of more or less bands that were inspired by Black Sabbath the first time around. Bands like Witchfinder General and shit like that. Superjoint Ritual fills another void in our musical aspirations. This is more or less a nod to when heavy metal or thrash metal -- or whatever the fuck you wanna call it this week -- crossed over with the hardcore scene. And that was the beginning to middle Eighties; bands like Agnostic Front, and hell, even bands like Discharge to a certain degree, because they had that aggressive guitar sound and metal elements, also with the energy of a band like Black Flag. Superjoint kind of reminds me of all those types of bands.

There's a lot of sound packed in there.

Yeah, it's also an opportunity for me to play guitar, which I love to do. The whole idea of the band was for me and Jimmy to play guitar, and we were gonna find a singer. And we tried and tried and tried and tried and to no avail, so what we did basically was demo and I just faked the vocals. Believe it or not, I had a copy of The Queen Is Dead -- fucking the Smiths! -- lyric sheet or something like that and I was faking it with that. And basically it just turned out that I just went ahead and sang. And when we play live, a buddy of mine, Kevin Bond, he does all my guitar parts, because I can't do vocals and guitar, especially that style at the same time. It's kind of constricting, you know?

Did you relish the opportunity to be the guitar player?

Aw, I love it, man. I love playing. I try to play guitar on a lot of stuff, even on Down. The last track of this new record, I play all the guitars on that. And the first album I did some guitar work, so it's nothing new really.

How'd you bring Hank III onboard?

It kind of all fell together on its own. Our drummer, Joe Fazzio, had been hanging out and jamming a bit with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. And somewhere along the line they met up with Hank, and Joe started jamming with Hank. We were minus a bass player, because I think we had to have a curse or something put on us with bass players [laughs] -- I don't know what the fuck our problem was with bass players. Regardless, Hank offered. He was like, "Shit, I'll play bass." I knew the kid. I'd met him when he was a youngster in Tennessee. Shit, man, he had to be in his teens, playing in one of them Helmet type bands. And Hank tried out and he was fucking killer. He's got a killer right hand. His chops are on time, if you know what I'm saying. And he's a big fan of the material.

You seem to have grown quite comfortable with your home studio.

Well you gotta realize, I'm not a big socialite [laughs], so to speak. I don't necessarily need to be seen. I basically built my own little world. I have seventeen acres of just pure fucking isolation. Fucking woods surrounding my house. I have a guesthouse and I converted it into a studio downstairs and upstairs there's a killer fucking apartment with all the amenities and shit. It's got everything. And the studio is awesome. And Pepper [Keenan, Corrosion of Conformity guitarist] came in before we did the Down record and he was like, "Damn man, this is our fucking headquarters." And we just flew into the gear we needed and locked ourselves in for twenty-eight days and fucking pounded it out. And shit, man, it turned out beautiful.

With both Down and Superjoint, you seem to have avoided the rap-metal flavor that's so popular with the kids these days.

We wanted to definitely steer clear of all that shit. We really and truthfully wanted more influence from stuff that was I guess a little more vague to your average listener, especially these days. We were pouring on influences from fucking like Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush to fucking Robin Trower to all the old bands I was talking about before. The Witchfinder Generals, and Pentagram and shit like that . . . stuff that your average dick on the street would have no idea what the fuck I was talking about.

Do you keep a pretty well-maintained calendar? It seems you have more projects than time.

I don't like to look into the future at all, I'm not a chicken counter. I'm not looking for shit to hatch. I just want things to be heard. I've done so many different projects over the last decade that eventually I want to either put them out in their purest form, like their demo form, a crappy sounding form where you just bump up the sound a little bit and throw it on a CD [laughs]. And just say, "Hey, this is it." This is what we did '92, '93, '94. Either that or re-record some of the material from some of these other bands I'm in. Fuck, man, it's very fast how many bands that I do do. But I wouldn't do 'em unless I was getting positive feedback. There's people that are like, "Jesus Christ, man, I had no idea that you could do this kind of stuff." Cause a lot of it is truthfully not in the heavy metal vein. There's this one band I do called Body and Blood that uses a lot of clean guitar a lot of synthesizer, even actual piano and different types of instruments that you wouldn't hear on a heavy metal record. But that doesn't mean at all that it's something being shot at the Top Forty or fucking radio or anything like that because it's really, truthfully not. It's really more of an extremely wrist slashing depressive type music, but beautiful in its own way. So eventually, I do want people to hear this stuff. But I am feeling that I've spread myself thin a bit here [laughs]. So I am gonna do this stuff, I'm gonna finish this little cycle of touring here. I'm gonna start and finish up the full-length album of Southern Isolation, because we just released the EP, and that is some trippy fucking mellow-ass music. Then after that, man, I'm just hopefully gonna chill out a few months and decide what I'm gonna do with Pantera.

You can always fish on your compound. That's a good way to relax.

I got a fucking pond man, stocked with bass and bluegill, man, so I just might do that.

The fish aren't so good here in New York.

You're damn right -- you ain't gonna eat that shit. But I got all these fucking trails that lead back to this river, which is the deepest and darkest of Louisiana territory and I got two white sand beaches man, and it's fucking kick ass. You can catch all kinds of stuff back there.

Sounds like an inspiring locale.

It really is, man. Just to fucking get out there, you cannot hear any cars, traffic, horns blowing, stereos pumping and fucking cop sirens. You never hear any of that fucking shit, and it's total seclusion.

So you mentioned Pantera. Is there a status report? Is the group on hold?

No, not really. As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to sit back, take a look at the landscape of things. If Pantera wants to continue, then I think we need to advance in a way that is the best way for us. I feel like we need to take some steps to really think about what we want to accomplish here because, we're one of them bands that never broke up, we never went away, we never were part of this gigantic fucking trend. We never allowed ourselves to be. To this fucking day, when Pantera plays big cities -- shit take Detroit for instance, we fill fifteen-fucking-thousand people every time we play there. And that's just a band from word of mouth and a diehard audience. You gotta realize that if we're still doing that type of business today, shit, yes, we are a major player and we are a band with longevity. We're not a one-hit wonder. We don't even have a fuckin' hit [laughs]. Really.

People at these shows, from Pantera to Down, their basic reaction is, "Thank you. Thank you for doing this while the rest of these other bands are chasing each others' tails to see what the coolest thing to dress up in this week is. While they're doing that, y'all are writing severe fucking music. With Pantera, the whole point is to be this gigantic fucking heavy metal son of a fucking bitch that's gonna kick your fucking brains out. And with Down, we realize, more or less, that the heavy metal rock and roll influence is going to always be there. For us, it's really about writing the best song, no matter how it comes out of us. No matter what the situation may be. Down is a band that hasn't pigeon holed itself into this thing where we have to be whatever. We can be whatever we want and that's what bands of yesterday were. I hate to bring it up, I know it's a common band, but think of something like the Beatles. They could get away with almost anything on their records. They could be one thing from track to track and it'd be totally different. Something from Abbey Road, from "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" to "Octopus's Garden," you gotta be like, goddamn! You know? There's only been a few bands to pull that shit off. Queen did it. Some other bands, but it's tough to do that.

Must be nice to have the various bands to deal with various musical itches. Because you guys never turned Pantera into something different to fit the times.

Naw, I wouldn't do that. And people do ask me why I have so many side projects. To me it would be utterly ridiculous to approach Pantera with material that better suits another band, and put it on a Pantera record. Why hit your audience with this complete turnabout of musical styles and put the name Pantera on it, when instead you could start a fucking side project and have it make a lot more sense? Instead of basically fucking up your hardcore audience by putting this experimental music on [laughs] on the record. You know, fuck doing that.

Do the various bands keep it fresher for you?

It keeps it in place, that's for sure. When we write Pantera records, I know exactly what it's supposed to be. I know exactly what it sounds like and I know what we want to achieve. And I know the same for every band. It's formulated that way. It's meant to be that way. And if I write a riff, there's very rarely an occasion that I can't pinpoint what band that riff would go to.

It doesn't look like you have much time scheduled between Down and Superjoint's tours.

We got about a week off and then it's Superjoint [laughs]. And then back again.

Then perhaps some time to rest and fish?

Which is when? I'll ask you that.

Superjoint Ritual tour dates:

6/6: Atlanta, Masquerade
6/8: Washington, DC, 9:30 Club
6/9: Philadelphia, Trocadero
6/11: Worcester, MA, Palladium
6/12: New York, The World
6/13: Pittsburgh, Metropol
6/15: Detroit, Harpo's
6/16: Cleveland, Odeon
6/17: Chicago, House of Blues
6/19: Minneapolis, Quest
6/20: Kansas City, Beaumont Club
6/21: Denver, Ogden Theater
6/23: Las Vegas, House of Blues
6/24: W. Hollywood, CA, House of Blues
6/25: Scottsdale, AZ, Cajun House
6/27: San Antonio, Sunset Station
6/28: Dallas, Deep Ellum Live
6/29: Houston, Engine Room
6/30: New Orleans, House of Blues

ANDREW DANSBY
(June 5, 2002)