Damageplan

Members

No members recorded for this formation.

Formation facts

• Vinnie Paul later recalled that he and Dimebag were depressed and still hoping the Pantera situation might resolve when Jerry Cantrell came over. Dime played him new demos in the car; Cantrell told him, in substance, to stop waiting and do his own thing. Vinnie said Dime walked back inside ready to start the band that became Damageplan.
• Vinnie Paul said New Found Power was the inner strength he and Dime felt they had to find to start over. They kept the phrase as the album title. The band name, he told the Dallas Observer in 2004, needed more weight — when they built the atomic bomb, he joked, they had one thing in mind: a damage plan.
• Dimebag knew Patrick Lachman as a guitarist from Halford and assumed he wanted that chair. Lachman told him he could sing too. They sent him a vocal-less demo of Crawl; Dime later said a FedEx package came back in about three days and the vocal sealed the frontman job.
• Bob Kakaha already knew the Abbott brothers from Dallas clubs and tattoo work. At the audition he plugged in, and Dimebag told Eddie Trunk that Vinnie threw his sticks, said it sounded like Godzilla, and named him Bobzilla on the spot.
• Zakk Wylde was visiting Dimebag around their Guitar World camo-and-beard cover shoot when Dime asked, with no plan, whether he wanted to throw a solo on a new track. Zakk said they knocked out the Reborn outro on the spot. He later recalled missing his flight home from the same chaotic visit.
• Stone Sour were in Dallas when Dimebag played Corey Taylor the almost-finished record. Taylor asked on and sent back a last-minute vocal for Fuck You. Corey later remembered a roughly three-minute voicemail of Dime raving about what he had just heard.
• Once Damageplan was rolling, Dimebag said the old chaos came back. In 2004 he recalled replacing six doors and eight feet of Sheetrock after nonstop partying, and guitars that were smashed, taped with fireworks, and set alight.
• Damageplan's first concerts were in Japan. Patrick Lachman wrote that the Nagoya date in late February 2004 was the world premiere of the band live, before the North American Headbangers Ball run.
• After years of Pantera arenas, Damageplan put Dime and Vinnie back in much smaller rooms. Vinnie later called that reset humbling — a lot of the crowd still wanted Pantera — even as the brothers treated building a new band from the floor up as the job.
• Before Damageplan walked on at Alrosa Villa on December 8, 2004, Dime and Vinnie did their usual side-stage warmup. Their code for letting loose was Van Halen. Vinnie said they swapped the words, high-fived, and went on, with two shows left before Christmas and more work on a second record.
• On December 8, 2004, Damageplan had just begun its set at Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio, when a gunman rushed the stage. Dimebag Darrell was shot and killed while performing. Security chief Jeffrey “Mayhem” Thompson, club employee Erin Halk, and fan Nathan Bray were also killed; others were wounded. Columbus police officer James Niggemeyer stopped the attack. Damageplan did not continue as a working band.

Studio albums

• New Found Power (Feb 2004)