Interviewing Pat Lachman of DAMAGEPLAN was really exciting for me, I’m a HUGE Damageplan fan. This interview was done at the Starland Ballroom, just FOUR days before the tragic and unjust murder of Dimebag Darrell. It almost feels strange publishing this interview after all that has happened, especially with Pat talking about Dime in the present tense. Reading it over brings me back to that night though, which was the second time I’d seen Damageplan and the first time I ever got to do photos for them. I had so many questions I wanted to ask Pat, but I barely got to do half of them before I ran out of time. Pat was a very cool guy--some say he’s intimidating, but I didn’t think so at all--very nice guy, very down to earth. One thing I wish is that I’d had more time to sit with him and talk about the band and everything else, but I’m very happy with the interview and I’m sure you will be too. 

Paragon Rob: Alright, I’ll start off with a stock question. How’s the tour going? 

Pat Lachman: The tour’s going fucking great. Can’t say enough about The HAUNTED…obviously representing [points to his Haunted t-shirt]. In about 20-30 minutes, I’ll be on stage doing a song with them. And SHADOWS FALL, cool motherfuckers, great musicians. We’re having a blast. It’s called “Devastation Across the Nation,” but we’ve officially re-titled it “Intoxication Across the Nation” because this is probably one of the drunkest tours I’ve ever been on, and I’m sure everyone else too. 

PR: You guys have been swapping positions with SHADOWS FALL, playing either second or third each night. What’ll you be doing tonight? 

PL: We will be in the second slot this evening. Co-headlining is just brotherhood across the board. Get along great, it’s all about metal and supporting each other and music. The industry’s kind of in a slump right now so everybody’s gotta stick together and we’re having a fuckin' blast. 

PR: Are you going to be playing any new stuff tonight? 

PL: New stuff is in the works, but it’s probably gonna be summertime before it hits. 

PR: I heard you have 4 or 5 new songs. 

PL: Yep, the songs are instrumentally written, there are no vocals yet, but it’s all in the works. 

PR: You guys gotta get on top of that. 

PL: When I’m not busy. We’re gonna take a couple weeks off for the holidays and then in January we’re gonna hit it hard. We’re gonna lock ourselves in the studio until we’ve got an album. 

PR: What do you like better, the American or overseas fans? 

PL: It’s really a toss-up. It just depends on where you go. Certain places are just fuckin' amazing, so I don’t want to exclude anybody. There are some cities that aren’t as off the hook as others, and globally it depends on how hardcore the fans are, it doesn’t matter where you are. Some of my favorite crowds are here, and there are some flags on the map across the globe of places that stick out in my mind and are amazing. Right off the top of my head, the other night we played Montreal and that was probably one of the best crowds we’ve played to on this whole tour. 

PR: Obviously everybody knows Vinnie and Dime are legends in what they do in metal. What’s it like to work with them? I know you’ve already worked with [Rob] Halford, and now you get to work with them. What was it like at first? 

PL: It was actually a really interesting transition, probably the biggest mindblower to me was playing with Rob, the metal god, the creator, one of the legends. That was really one of those things where I was like really intimidated at first, but he’s such a professional and such a humble person, really down to earth, what you see is what you get, and he really just kind of took out any apprehension I had about working with him and a lot of times I forgot, goddamn that’s Rob Halford. He’s a class act and we keep in touch, he’s a really cool guy, it’s great to see him back in [Judas] Priest. So during that period, I had actually developed a friendship with Dime. In the initial phases of the Halford band, we had met, and we just became drinking buddies, it was cool. He’s another person that has a real disarming personality so it was really easy to get along with him. And every time we got together, we’d just end up getting fucked up and going to tit bars and whatever, just fuckin' headbanging to our favorite CDs, we had a lot of things in common. Vinnie Paul’s the same way, a legend, but at the same time they don’t present themselves that way to their peers. It’s really cool. We had a mutual respect and I’m a huge Pantera fan, always have been. Musically, always had a major admiration for what those guys do, especially as a brother team. They’re like the Van Halen brothers of metal, Eddie and Alex right there. So it was cool, it was a real smooth transition. Once we started working together, everything just sort of fell into place. 

PR: If you guys were given the chance to play Ozzfest, the main or second stage, would you go for it? 

PL: We’re all over it. We actually had a few things on the table with that. The timing wasn’t right last year, so this year, if it works out, fuck yeah, we’re all over it. 

PR: How annoying is it when you get the same questions over and over again in interviews? 

PL: If it’s too obvious, it can be annoying. There are things that have been covered so many times for the last fuckin' 2 years, that it’s ridiculous, but at the same time, things evolved, opinions change, and you roll with the punches, right? 

PR: From your position now, do you still get jittery around certain rock stars? 

PL: Not really. You get used to it. Probably the last person that I met that fuckin' freaked the shit out of me was Brian Johnson of AC/DC. That’s like, again, metal royalty, rock n roll fuckin' history. Everybody else is, in a strange way, a contemporary. But I started listening to heavy music when I was a kid. The first rock n roll vinyl that I had was Highway To Hell. Fuckin' 6th grade I was listening to that shit. I got into PRIEST, MAIDEN, SABBATH, all that shit. I had a huge diet of classic rock as well. A Rob Halford or a Brian Johnson is a pretty intimidating thing, at first, but he’s the same way. When I met Brian Johnson, he really had that attitude of not, “Hey, I’m a rock star,” but “Hey, I’m a real person.” He was telling jokes and we were fuckin' drinking shots. He’s just an amazing person, and I think that adds to the respect for the people of that stature. If they’re truly a fuckin' star, they don’t come off as assholes. They’re actually really, really fuckin' cool people. I’d say they’re definitely two of my heroes right there. 

PR: You use a bunch of different voices when you sing, and you use a lot of different ranges. Some of them sound like they’d really hurt your throat, so after doing this night after night, how do you keep your voice in tip-top shape? 

PL: Well, basically, I think the diversity comes from having an admiration for a lot of different singers. Like I said, I fuckin' love AC/DC, I love Judas Priest, I love really extreme music. When I first heard Slayer it changed my life. The progression that metal has taken, all the way into some of the modern Swedish bands like Meshuggah and of course The Haunted, are amazing, I mean, how much farther can you go? The real deathcore stuff a lot of times gets kind of cheesy to me. But it seems that Slayer and some of the real heavy modern bands who have picked up the torch, like Lamb Of God, fuckin' sick shit, and the Swedes in particular, have an understanding that I think a lot of bands don’t have. They have this emphasis on musicianship and it’s not real cheesy. The black metal stuff is kind of a joke to me. They’ve got it going on, they know how to make extreme music. So my influences are extremely varied as far as fatigue, it’s a matter of technique and self-discovery. Me not being a singer by trade has sort of allowed me a lot of freedom not to be locked into one style, and I have seen some of the best of the best. Bruce Dickinson, Rob Halford, all on the same tour, which was a fuckin' master class in how to be a frontman, so that helped me out a lot. And like I said, it’s a muscle like anything else, I learned that from Rob, and you have to work it out, you can’t just jump out of bed and do a marathon when you haven’t gotten off the couch in 6 months, you gotta get into it, and I feel stronger toward the end of this tour than I did at the beginning. 

PR: Speaking of vocals, AJ of Diesel Machine is now fronting Soil. I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that. 

PL: Well, I did my best to try and hook that up, you know, hook up talent with talent. Me and AJ go way back, he was one of the first friends I had when I moved out to Los Angeles and he’s one of my best friends. The Soil guys are incredibly cool, talented, and I didn’t want to see that thing go south after Ryan decided he didn’t want to be a part of it anymore, so I tried to hook up AJ with that gig and he went out and got the part, so watch out for the new Soil record because I think it’s gonna be one of the best, if not the best. 

PR: Since word of Damageplan’s lineup got around, there’s been a lot of loyal followers of Phil Anselmo, and I was wondering if any of those fans have come up to you to say anything negative. 

PL: Never once. 

PR: If someone ever did, what would you reply to that? 

PL: It really doesn’t bother me. I’m used to the flack that I get from the Internet, people who hide behind a computer screen, but no one’s got the balls to do that, no one’s even got the balls to step up and do what I’ve done and get up there with Vinnie and Dime and even attempt to make any kind of music, and it’s in no way an imitation of Pantera. It’s a totally separate thing. And if anything, I’ve got people saying the exact opposite, patting me on the back saying, “Hey, you fuckin' blow away Phil.” And I really don’t care about that either because it’s not a competition. I’ve never met the man. I’m a big fan of what he’s done in the past and there’s absolutely no competition or bad blood between us. Like I said, I never even shook the guy’s hand. 

PR: How many bottles of Crown would you say you guys go through on tour? 

PL: That’s ridiculously impossible to even guess, but I’ll tell you what, on the promo tour we did in January just before the album came out, we were sponsored by Jagermeister and they started us off with like 4 cases of Jager and in 24 days, I think the final tally was 40 cases of Jagermeister. That doesn’t include whiskey, vodka, beer, and all the money we spent at tit bars and whatnot, so that’ll give you somewhat of an indication right there. 

PR: There are a few lines in the song “Fuck You” that aren’t in the booklet and I couldn’t find anywhere online. I can’t find anyone that knows what you’re saying during, “Nothing changes, nothing phases, nothing stays the same…” 

PL: Yeah, that was a bit of a mistake in printing. For the record, it’s “You, obsolete, just a tool, that has outlived its usefulness, so listen up, hear that sound, it’s your world crashing down on you.” That was the first line. “A sobering glimpse, does it make you sick to watch it all drifting away, now all that’s left, that familiar bitter taste, you can’t get it out so swallow it all.” 

PR: Any plugs? 

PL: Fuckin' keep heavy music alive, watch out for the new Damageplan record coming up by this summer 2005, and listen to The Haunted because they fuckin' rock, and I’m just about to get up there and do a song with them, so check it out.