DIMEBAG Book Author Says There Is No Evidence Killer Was Influenced By PHIL ANSELMO's Words

Brandon Daviet of NewDealers.com recently conducted an interview with Chris A., author of the upcoming book about the murder of PANTERA/DAMAGEPLAN guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, "A Vulgar Display Of Power: Courage And Carnage At The Alrosa Villa". The question-and-answer session follows:

NewDealers.com: What originally interested you in doing this book?

Chris A.: Well, the whole event really kind of bothered me, and I don't think I had felt that way since John Lennon was killed. It was just one of those things that I had a lot of questions about, and I was always very skeptical about the break-up of PANTERA being the cause. I was also very interested in the other three people who were killed that night, and there was very little in the media about them. Their stories seemed to be obscured by Dimebag's celebrity so I started to do some digging.

NewDealers.com: What did you find out?

Chris A.: Well, after I went on line and did a little poking around. I discovered that were really very few things of any merit that had been written, so I got the idea in my mind that maybe it was something I could do.

NewDealers.com: At one point, in a 2004 interview with Metal Hammer magazine, Phil Anselmo had said that Dimebag "deserves to be severely beaten." How much do you think that statement might have influenced Dimebag's murder?

Chris A.: I looked into that aspect a great deal and the fact is that nobody knows. Obviously if he [Nathan Gale] heard about it or read about it, one could suspect that it may have influenced him. As far as finding anything absolute or concrete that he was even aware of the interview, there wasn't anything.

NewDealers.com: Did you speak with members of the Columbus Police Department in your research for the book?

Chris A.: Yes. I spoke with the homicide detectives, ambulance crews. I spoke with the families of the victims and the mother of Nathan Gale as well as speaking to tons of fans. I probably corresponded with close to 200 people while researching the book.

NewDealers.com: After doing all this research do you think that there was anything that could have been done to prevent this from happening?

Chris A.: Well, hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but as far as culpability goes I would put the culpability squarely on the shoulders of Gale. I'm not aware of any precedent to his actions, I never found any instance of somebody actually getting onstage and killing a performer. I think the biggest misconception is that there was something that the venue missed. I think the security at Alrosa Villa that night, and this is based on my opinion, was no better or no worse than the security at other clubs that I'd seen. We're not talking about somebody getting drunk and starting a fight or smoking weed. We're talking about an armed intruder coming into a club with a mission to kill people, and I don't know of a single venue anywhere in the United States that has a protocol to deal with that.

NewDealers.com: Do you think that the level of aggression present in the type of music that DAMAGEPLAN, and other bands of the same ilk, are playing had anything to do with the tragedy?

Chris A.: I absolutely, totally reject that and that is part of the thesis of the book. It's very easy to take a negative, narrow view of heavy metal based on what happened. What the book is going to very clearly explain is that the killer was not a fan, and he was not enamored with PANTERA or Dimebag for the reasons people think he was. Looking beyond that it is absolutely inspiring and amazing that so many people stayed around and tried to help. When the police showed up there were 250 people milling around the parking lot waiting to give statements. One of the detectives, Bill Gillette, said that in his nine and a half years of working homicides he had never seen that kind of cooperation.

(Thanks: Brandon Daviet / NewDealers.com)