Hellyeah guitarist Tom Maxwell opened up about the difficulty of performing following the death of his bandmate Vinnie Paul, admitting it’s “tough” to muster the determination to get on stage.
Speaking to FM99 WNOR, Maxwell said: “We literally had to suck it up and get in there and just play for him and play for each other and play for the record and play for the fans. They were gonna wanna hear this. We were obligated — it was unwritten. It was something we had to do. And it was tough.”
“We’re still devastated about it. It’s not something that we can ever recover from, I don’t think. I think about the future, and, to be honest with you, I don’t know how we are gonna be able to do it. And I’m not trying to take any kind of credit here, but he was my partner writing. Everything that I did I bounced off of him, and then he bounced back off to me.”
He added, “And it’s just on a musical level either; it’s more of an emotional level. My love affair for trying to continue without him has been crippled.”
“It’s like losing your wife or your husband or someone who is irreplaceable. It’s, like, how do you do that? I mean, people do — people go on, and they do, but usually they find light at the end of the tunnel through another door.”
“Like with Vince — it was hard for Vince to continue without his brother [late Pantera guitarist ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott], but he found a light at the end of our door. So we’re kind of faced with that.”
In an interview last year with Midwest Beatdown, Maxwell revealed that Vinnie Paul was “always worried” about dying prematurely.
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“Every time there was a death from one of our peers – the Cornell’s and everybody – he was always pretty taken aback by it; he was always worried that it was gonna happen to him,” Maxwell explained.
“And he was always, constantly, checking his blood pressure. I just wish he would have went to the doctor sooner. Maybe they would have caught something. I don’t know. ‘Cause he was always really afraid that this kind of a thing was gonna happen, and it did. It’s bizarre.”
He added that after Dimebag Darrell was shot and killed while performing onstage with Pantera in 2006, “it took a lot for Vinnie Paul to will himself after Dime got shot and killed.”
“[Vinnie] was on a downward spiral – he was on a mission to join his brother. And we came along and kind of… He used to say we saved his life. And so I think if we were just to be weak and go, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’ he would be pretty disappointed in us.
“Because he did it. And he was happy. He came out of it. So we have to kind of use that as an example. And there’s one thing, too, about Vince. He had such a positive impact and positive energy. It was like being around Santa Claus.
Vinnie Paul died in June 2018 at the age of 54 in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas. The official cause of death was dilated cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart, as well as severe coronary artery disease.
Check out ‘Welcome Home’ by Hellyeah:
