Former PANTERA/DAMAGEPLAN Roadie Interviewed By DALLAS OBSERVER

December 22, 2010

DallasObserver.com recently conducted an interview with former PANTERA/DAMAGEPLAN lighting/guitar technician John Graham. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

DallasObserver.com: You've said that the first tour you did with PANTERA and SKID ROW was one of the greatest times you've had in your life. What stands out in your mind from that period the most?

John Graham: Watching the show from underneath an onstage stairway, with (PANTERA drum tech) Kat Brooks. There was a curtain that blocked us from being seen by the audience, but looking straight across the stage at the show, we were right there. We could see everything. Clearly the best seats in the house. We went all over the world, became pretty close with the SKID ROW guys, and fell victim to an uncountable amount of pranks from Dimebag. It was all great. It's really hard to single out any one thing from that time. Everything about it was an amazing experience.

DallasObserver.com: What did you spend most of your time working on when DAMAGEPLAN was ramping up?

John Graham: One of the most fun things was getting in all of Dime's new gear he had coming from Dean Guitars, and from another company they had called Kettner. Dime and the guys could never remember the exact name, so they were always calling it "Ketchup and Mustard." But this awesome stuff would arrive — amps and gear — and I would set it all up, and start fuckin' around with it, and Dime would call me up and ask what I thought of it. Then he'd come down and try it out. When DAMAGEPLAN first went out on the road, they had another guy doing stage tech work, but he left at some point, and they asked me to jump in and do it.

DallasObserver.com: That, of course, was when tragedy struck, and everything for DAMAGEPLAN came to a grinding halt. Did you go back to real estate and bartending again?

John Graham: I was living with Vinnie Paul [PANTERA/DAMAGEPLAN drummer] during that time. I didn't really do much of anything for a while after all that. I was pretty shell-shocked, pretty beat up in the head. Eventually, Vinnie and I started up his label, and I was made vice president of Big Vin Records. The first thing we wanted to do was put out REBEL MEETS REBEL (featuring 3/4 of PANTERA and vocalist David Allan Coe). They had been mixing that record when I re-entered the picture, right before DAMAGEPLAN got started. We really wanted to see what we could do with Hillbilly Orchestra, too.

Read the entire interview from DallasObserver.com.

(Thanks: Carl Alvarez)

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