A tale of two Panteras. Make it three.

By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Remember that time Pantera played The Electric Banana?

It was October 1986, according to setlist.fm, right around the time the Arlington, Texas, band was making a major change at the mic. By then, they had released three albums, the most recent being “I Am the Night” on the minor label Metal Magic (with album art deemed by Metal Hammer to be one of the “50 most hilariously ugly rock and metal album covers ever”). 

So, Pantera — who along with the Goo Goo Dolls and Sonic Youth appear to be the only three bands to play The Electric Banana and go on to headline Star Lake — are now on this tour ...

Wait, something’s wrong.

Pantera was doing a residency at Savvy’s Nightclub in Fort Worth, Texas, in October 1986. Why would they come to Pittsburgh for one show?

Actually, they didn’t.

The Pantera that played the famed Oakland punk club in October 1986 was a Pittsburgh band made up of students from Bishop Canevin High School that was opening for another high school band called Mean Streak.

“We were a cover band initially,” says John Karbowski, who played drums in the Pittsburgh Pantera. “Motley Crue, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, that type of music. We rehearsed at our bass player’s place in Mt. Lebanon and we were in the basement and on the wall of his basement was this poster of a black panther. And it said ‘Panthera’ — P-A-N-T-H-E-R-A.

“And we were sitting around thinking about ‘You know? We need a band name.’ And then I looked at that, and I was like, ‘How about Pantera?’ and one of the guys was like, ‘That's the kind of car Vince Neil wrecked, with Razzle of Hanoi Rocks.’ And we were like, ‘Pantera. That's awesome. Let's do Pantera.’”

This was pre-Internet so they had no idea there was this unsigned band in Texas with that name.

“I didn't find out until way later about the band Pantera,” Karbowski says. “I was like, ‘Oh wow, I used to be in a band called Pantera.’”

The Pittsburgh Pantera (which is the Spanish word for panther when spelled that way) lasted for about two years and then Karbowski, now a professional chef, went on to play drums for High Voltage. While in that group, which played originals and covers, he became a fan of Pantera, eventually seeing them at Star Lake.

“I went to school here in Pittsburgh, and then I got a scholarship, and I went to a culinary school in Italy,” he says. “I had a Pantera bootleg, and I used to wake up early in the morning and I would crank that. I was, like, an idiot, you know what I mean? I was a total idiot, but I used to crank that. And man, the people next door would get so pissed.”

The real Pantera

Here’s where the six degrees of separation thing kicks in. High Voltage featured guitarist Nick Catanese, who went on to play in Black Label Society with Zakk Wylde, who is also Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist and was at the Black Sabbath Back to the Beginning concert in Birmingham, England, last weekend — where Pantera also played.

Pantera is moving on to open its U.S. tour at The Pavilion at Star Lake on July 15 (plenty of seats are still available). It will be the 13th Pittsburgh-area show for the band, which made its actual debut here in September 1990 at the former City Limits in Penn Hills with Pittsburgh bands Eviction and Solitude.

By that point, the core band — brothers “Dimebag Darrell” Abbott (guitar shredding) and Vinnie Paul Abbott (drums) and Rex Brown (bass) — were four years in with bombastic new frontman Phil Anselmo.

They rolled him out in 1988 with “Power Metal,” their fourth album as a floofy-haired glam-metal band. The ’90 tour backed the rebranding of Pantera on “Cowboys from Hell” as a more ferocious pioneer of groove metal with Anselmo singing more like Tom Araya than Rob Halford.

During their visit, they did not make friends with Eviction.

“They did a [B.S.] move and had the tour manager pull our plug while we were playing our last song of our set,” recalls former Eviction bassist Ted Williams. “Needless to say, that did not go over well with our local fans, and some of the more artistically creative fans just happened to have spray paint and tagged the hell out of their tour RV. Not that we sanctioned that type of act…”

Anselmo did not mention that in the 1991 story “PHIL: A teen idol but a mother’s worst fear,” part of a series on 21-year-olds that won PG photographer John Kaplan a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Anselmo, photographed shirtless with his pet boa constrictor, talked about growing up in New Orleans with hippie parents and being inspired lyrically by writers like Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe.

“I love horror. I’m a big Manson and Hitler fan,” he said, before clarifying, “Not them, but the mystique, power and eeriness of it all. They had genius, but were criminally insane.”

Pantera channeled its form of insanity into 1992’s “Vulgar Display of Power,” ranked 10th on the list of 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time by Rolling Stone. The latter also ranked the band’s followers as “the ugliest fans in the world.”

“A lot of them are, and they’re proud of it,” Paul told the PG in 1994, before Pantera headlined that summer’s heaviest tour with Biohazard and Sepultura at Star Lake. The PG called it “more brutal than a Manson family picnic.”

One of the Pantera uglies was Ozzy Osbourne himself, and that connection was in full swing with the band’s trips to Pittsburgh to play Ozzfest (in 1997 and 2000) and also 1999 with Black Sabbath at the Civic Arena, which, according to the PG review, “showed how far the metal scene has drifted toward aggression since the days of ‘Paranoid.’”

If you were at the Arena on March 6, 2001, you saw the final Pittsburgh Pantera show with the Abbott brothers. After finishing that tour supporting ninth album “Reinventing the Steel,” the band took a break in Japan in August. During that time, Anselmo launched the side project Down, to go with his other side project, Superjoint Ritual.

Putting Pantera on hold did not sit well with the rest of the band and what ensued was a nasty war of words, especially between Dimebag and Anselmo, who threw accusations of drunkenness and drug abuse back and forth in the press. They called it quits in November 2003.

In December 2004, 10 days after Damageplan, the new band from the Abbott brothers, played the Rock Club at Station Square, Dimebag was shot and killed by a deranged fan with incoherent motives at a Columbus nightclub. 

Paul, who went on to play in the supergroup Hellyeah, never reconciled with Anselmo for his harsh words about Dimebag and resisted any talk of a reunion, saying that without his brother, “it just doesn't make any sense.” He died from heart disease in 2018 at 54.

The half-Pantera

To some of those “ugly” fans, what’s followed is a “cash grab” — there’s no Pantera without the Abbott brothers. So right now, there’s no Pantera even if Anselmo and Brown have been calling it that since a 2022 tour with Wylde and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante.

They’ve now played more than 100 shows together, one of them at Star Lake in July 2023.

There was no shortage of love for Pantera in Birmingham, where Anselmo took the stage saying, “This set goes out to Dimebag and Vince, and all you massive Black Sabbath people out there. We love you all, man.”

Then, one of the most intense, no-fun bands of the long day raged through “Cowboys from Hell” and “Walk” before slapping fans with two Sabbath covers, “Planet Caravan” and “Electric Funeral.”

Who had the best time there? It seemed to be actor Jason Momoa, who looked happier than a pig in mud mixing it up in the pit.

Now, starting in Burgettstown, Pantera takes that “Game of Thrones” energy on the road.

The show is at 7 p.m. July 15 with Amon Amarth. Tickets are $31; ticketmaster.com.