PANTERA Side Projects Galore, Cantrell To Join New Year's Eve Gig!

ALICE IN CHAINS guitarist Jerry Cantrell will perform acoustic versions of the ALICE tunes "Got Me Wrong" and "Rooster" at the New Year's Eve show of GASOLINE, the metallic southern rock side project of PANTERA guitarist Dimebag Darrell and drummer Vinnie Paul, which is set to take place at Dallas' Bronco Bowl on December 31st. Also scheduled to appear on the bill are DROWNING POOL, SEVENDUST and UNION UNDERGROUND. GASOLINE, which is completed by PUMPJACK vocalist Thurber T. Mingus and bassist Sean Time, will follow up the Bronco Bowl performance with a midnight gig at Vinnie and Darrell's strip club, the Clubhouse.

"PANTERA hasn't played on New Year's Eve for a while, and sitting around the house watching Dick Clark ring in the new year kind of sucks," Vinnie Paul told MTV News. "That's why we put this thing together."

GASOLINE will play covers by TED NUGENT, THIN LIZZY and PAT TRAVERS, as well as six originals, all of which have already been demoed. At the moment, there are no plans for the group to release a studio album.

Also on the agenda for members of PANTERA is the upcoming sophomore release from DOWN, featuring contributions from PANTERA frontman Philip Anselmo and bassist Rex Brown, and the debut album from Paul, Darrell and Brown's much talked-about collaboration with country star David Allan Coe, which is going by the name REBEL MEETS REBEL. Described by Paul as a country/heavy metal hoe-down," REBEL MEETS REBEL has reportedly finished mixing six songs so far, including the following:

01. Heartworn Highway
02. A Man With Nothin' Ain't Got Nothin' to Lose
03. One Night Stand
04. New York City Streets
05. Get Outta My Life

The title track (Rebel Meets Rebel) will allegedly be a duet with PANTERA singer Philip Anselmo. The album, the first right of refusal to which belongs to PANTERA's label Elektra, is tentatively scheduled to be issued sometime between March and the summer.

As for PANTERA themselves, the band is currently preparing the footage for an upcoming DVD, tentatively entitled Pantera 4, which is provisionally due for release in the summer.

"It will be another three years of video tape of us just being on the road, doing our thing," Paul told MTV. "Our fans love that sh.t and they're always coming up to us and mimicking things out of the home videos."

Fans anxiously anticipating another studio album from PANTERA should not hold their collective breathsit is presently unlikely that the group's sixth major-label release will see the light of day before early 2003 at the earliest. According to Paul, we've been on tour basically non-stop for 12 years and we've really never taken any time off. So at the end of our last tour we were like, 'Look, we all have some side projects we want to get out of the way. There's no hurry to get back in the studio, but when we all feel comfortable and ready to go we'll do it.' "