A biography for Dimebag Darrellhasn’t been written yet.
“We still get those kind of cats coming out to our shows. Once you're into it, you're into it for a lifetime.”
“I'm a spazzer, you know?”
“Spittin' blood, smokin' guitars, fire everywhere - Kiss is where I started.”
“When you're on the road, you've got to have your four-track - or some kind of recording device to jam on and have a good time.”
“To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!”
“Jamming with other people will create energy and excitement that you can feed off, and which will help push you to do things you'd never dream of doing by yourself.”
“To me, blues is more of a feel and a vibe, rather than sitting there and saying, 'Well, I'm gonna play bluesy now.'”
“My hair's a pain in live performance. I'm always inhaling it: I almost choked to death a couple of times.”
“Each track has to be precise, and that is a problem on a rhythmically complex track like 'Slaughtered.'”
“Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.”
“The first time I heard 'Crazy Train,' I was crashed out in bed, definitely not wanting to get up and go to school, when my brother Vinnie came in and cranked it up.”
“My first killer amp was a Sunn Beta Lead. It was solid-state, but that Sunn was incredibly loud. I used to say to my friends, 'Hey, check it out. It's only on two.'”
“I was mostly influenced by bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest - Metallica's 'Kill 'Em All' was also a hell of an inspiration.”
“All syncopation means is accenting beats that you don't normally accent.”
“Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.”
“I used to skip school and paint my face with Ace Frehley Kiss make-up.”
“My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.”
“When I first started experimenting with harmonics, I'd sometimes hook up two distortion boxes just to get my strings 'frying,' which helped bring out the harmonics.”
“Always have a collection of your favorite CDs with you.”
“If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.”