VINNIE PAUL Says He Is Tired Of Answering Questions About PANTERA's Breakup

In a recent interview with On Track Magazine, DAMAGEPLAN drummer Vinnie Paul was asked how the PANTERA purists have received Vinnie and brother Dimebag's new band following the messy breakup of their previous group. "Let's just say we knew when we realized it was time for us to move on that there was gonna be three, actually four groups of fans out there: 1. The ones that will never accept change and don’t want to see anything but PANTERA. 2. The ones that are gonna embrace us and follow us no matter what we do. 3. The ones that we’ll be able to win over live, that are skeptical. And 4. The new fans that never saw PANTERA and never knew anything about it," Vinnie replied. "So we've not had any kind of PANTERA backlash. Me and Dime kept our mouths shut for nearly two years when Phil was doin' his shit-slingin' all over the place. We've done nothin' but answer questions. When people ask us… and they wanta say we're talkin’ shit, but we're not; we're answering a question. You get these little blurbs that end up on Blabbermouth or on certain web sites and it's like, 'Oh, Vinnie Paul talks shit about Phil or Phil did this.' No, I did a f*ckin' 45-minute interview and they took two sentences out of it — and out of context at that — and tried to turn it into something that it wasn’t. But the fans though have been great. We do in-stores almost everyday and me and Dime made it clear that we didn't let them down. We did everything we could to hold PANTERA together and fought for it until the very end, and now that it’s gone we’re 100% focused on DAMAGEPLAN."

Asked if they are getting tired of the constant back-and-forth reporting that's been going on in the media and among fans regarding their previous band, Vinnie said, "Big time. That's what I said, I feel like anybody that's a PANTERA fan at this point, knows what happened to PANTERA. It's been well documented in every major rock magazine. Me and Dime have done the interviews, we said our piece, we did our best not to leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth, but we gotta be honest about it. Contrary to the way he's approached it, with a lot of this, that and the other. Fumblin' around the questions, not answering 'em, and basically turnin' his back on the PANTERA fans and not embracing them. I mean, dude, they’re the reason why he can do SUPERJOINT and DOWN, it's not because he’s Philip the Great, it's because he was in f*ckin’ PANTERA, period."

Read Vinnie Paul and Dimebag's entire interview with On Track Magazine at this location.