Hard-partying rock stars are not exactly a rare breed, but Nickelback bassist Mike Kroeger has revealed that Pantera’s late Abbott brothers – Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul – well and truly cake when it came to heavy drinking sessions.
Speaking on Talkin’ Rock With Meltdown, Mike recalled how he and his brother – Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger – befriended Pantera’s guitarist and drummer, which lead to the rockers having a wild night of drinking that proved to be too much for Mike.
“They were closest with Chad because, to be honest with you, Chad was willing to run with them and tried to keep up the alcohol consumption pace,” Mike revealed, adding, “which if you are partying with those guys, you know what that means…It’s essentially a death march, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
“I only had the misfortune once of getting mixed up in a ‘party situation’ with them where Dime was bartending, and oh boy… Honestly, I ran away like a coward.”
Kroeger explained, “I got to the point where my legs didn’t work anymore, I couldn’t see, and I just did the Irish goodbye, and I just never came back. I was like, ‘These guys are gonna kill me, man.’ And they were having a great time too.”
“They had, both brothers — Dime especially — had this magnificent tolerance. They could just drink this stuff like water and they just kept getting funnier and funnier – or maybe I got more and more drunk.”
“Then you would start to notice that your motor skills are going, and that’s when they really pull it on to really get you over the finish line, so to speak. And I remember reaching that threshold where I was like, ‘This is gonna be bad.’ I was thinking I was gonna make one of their home videos or something, and I got the hell out of there,” Kroeger added.
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“My wife was actually on my bus with the kids and everything, and I would not want to see a video of me getting on that bus and kind of stumbling and crashing into stuff on the way to bed, crawling into the bed with my wife. She indicated that I had an odour of a distillery, that I should probably stay on my side of the bed or else I should go sleep someplace else, and it was pretty rough.”
Kroeger added of his brother, “I’m not gonna tell Chad’s story, but let’s just say he reached the target zone that Dimebag and Vinnie were looking for. They finished him off really good.”
Following the murder of Dimebag Darrell by a deranged fan while performing at a Damageplan gig on December 8, 2004, Nickelback penned the track ‘Side of a Bullet’ in memory of the music legend.
Vinnie Paul later passed away in June 2018 at the age of 54 in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas.
Check out ‘Far Away’ by Nickelback:
