Former Pantera frontman Philip Anselmo recently appeared on the ‘Fantasm’ podcast, where he spoke of his past, his current job as frontman for two acts – Down and Superjoint – and the career advice Lemmy gave him.
“We played a festival together and he wanted to see me”, Anselmo begins. “And, of course, I went in and talked to The Great One. I’d known him for two decades before that. And he was always, always, always — especially when I was young — he was always the one to tell me that music and your lifetime in music and your popularity and whatever, it’s here and gone — it’s a fleeting thing, and it’s also ebb and flow.
“There’ll be points in time in your career, if you keep going, where you’ll be misunderstood, you’ll be not popular, what you do won’t be ‘in.’ And this was back when I was in Pantera. And he said to me back then, he said, ‘You know, what you guys do really doesn’t sound, to my ears, that different from what we do.’ And at the time, I was thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, it’s different, but I guess it isn’t all that different,’ figuring it’s drums-bass-guitar-vocals format; I can see where he’s coming from. But the bigger picture now, in hindsight, is the fact that music is ebb and flow, and the more bands that you’re in, the more different-size crowds you’ll have, type of crowds you’ll have, and all that shit.
“Looking back on it, I remember about a couple of months before he passed when we did a festival together, I reminded him of that story. And he [told] me, ‘Well, Phil, let’s have a cigarette to our voices.’ So we smoked a cigarette together.”
On a sadder note, Anselmo also reveal that Lemmy was constantly racked with pain during his final shows, and was miserable throughout.
“He was in a lot of pain. But he did not want to leave the stage. And I can feel that, because I’m a walking injury. I mean, I wake up and I feel like I’m in a car wreck every fucking day of my life; I’ve blown out a lot of different parts of my fucking body doing what I do. And I’ve realised that these days, I don’t have to go up there and destroy myself to get the fucking point across. He hated the pain, but loved the stage. And I can relate to that.”
Listen to the chat, below.
