By Thor Christensen

You cant be a headbanger if you're losing your head. But Phil Anselmo didn't learn that lesson until he was halfway to the morgue. "I died and came back to life, to be quite honest with you, and it really opened my eyes," says Mr. Anselmo, lead growler for the Dallas metal band Pantera. "I'm through with the deluded path, the blinded path, the narcotic path."

The 29-year-old singer was strolling down that path July 13th, 1996, when he overdosed on heroin backstage after a Pantera show at Coca-Cola Starplex. Paramedics revived him, and the singer issued a press release four days later saying, "I, Philip H. Anselmo ... injected a lethal dose of heroin into my arm, and died for four to five minutes," the statement said. "...I have recovered completely and the Pantera tour continues uninterrupted."

But Mr. Anselmo didn't walk away from the overdose unfazed. "I took it as a sign that I cant be irresponsible anymore... I cant regress into some infantile stage where people have to take care of me. I've got too much work to do to be wasted all the time," says Mr. Anselmo, who performs Saturday night with Pantera at Fair Park Coliseum.

Formed in Arlington in the early '80s as a glam-metal band, Pantera grew into a word-of-mouth sensation after Mr. Anselmo joined in 1987 and the band released its punk-influenced major-label debut album, Cowboys From Hell (1990). Instead of steering toward a mass audience, Pantera went the opposite direction.

Their songs -- about psychotic people living in a world headed for destruction -- grew increasingly raw and foreboding. And the mass audience came to them.

The group's 1994 album, Far Beyond Driven, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard pop albums chart and sold 2 million copies worldwide -- a startling number for music that gets almost no airplay on radio or MTV. Pantera's fourth and latest album, The Great Southern Trendkill, has sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States and earned a Grammy nomination for best metal performance (for the song Suicide Note Part 1).

But while Pantera was cementing its status as one of the heaviest bands in metal, Mr. Anselmo was turning into the same brain-impaired stoner he mocked in songs like "Good Friends and a Bottle Of Pills". After abusing downers and other pills for years, he turned to heroin -- being careful to hide his addiction from his bandmates Vinnie Paul Abbott (drums), "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott (guitar) and Rex Brown (bass).

The overdose was inevitable, Mr. Anselmo says, but surviving it was pure luck. "Had I been on the bus or on the road somewhere where there weren't paramedics right there, I'd be dead today," he says. "I was just in the right place at the right time."

Mr. Anselmo hasn't exactly turned into a choirboy since his near death experience. "I still smoke a little of the green bud and have a beer after a show," he says. And he still speaks in the same surly, expletive-laced manner of a guy with an 80-pound chip on his shoulder.

But the days of thinking he was invincible are over, he says. "I used to figure nothing could beat me, but after years of abuse, your mind stops working well, and I'm sick of being in the dark," he says. "Its nice having my head back on straight because I'm tired of meeting people I've met before, or hearing about these things I did or said and not remembering any of them."

One thing he'd rather not remember are his public attacks on Metallica last year. Mr. Anselmo repeatedly ripped into his colleagues onstage for experimenting with nonmetal styles on their Load album: "Metallica has wimped out! Their new album [expletive]! I know it, you know it," he told the crowd at Starplex in July. "It started as me ribbing them, but I'd be so high onstage that I didn't even know what I was saying," he says. "I've got nothing against Metallica ... They could put out an album of [expletive] spoons and harps and I'd still be a fan. I've definitely tried to come out in the press and apologize to them."

But the singer refuses to apologize for Pantera's purist approach to heavy metal. "I could never [expletive] experiment like Metallica did, and it aint out of fear. Its just out of loyalty to our fans," he says. "When I meet the fans backstage, they say 'god bless you for not changing', and 'thank you, thank you, thank you for not selling out'. I just couldn't bear to see the looks on their faces if we tried to branch out and add industrial sounds or something. It wouldn't be fair to the fans."

Some critics describe Pantera's young, mostly male fans as Beavis and Butthead incarnate. "Even the good reviews all say things like 'Pantera's [expletive] fans are the ugliest, stupidest [expletive] people in the [expletive] world,'" the singer says.

But for Mr. Anselmo, those [expletive] fans are a constant source of amazement. "They dont come to our shows because they saw us on MTV for four seconds, and now they're curious... These are diehards who show up totally rabid. They're as pumped up as we are, and they give [expletive] 210 percent, and its beautiful, man," he says. "One reason I'm so happy to be awake again and alive is just to see these fans go ape [expletive] at our shows every night... It makes me feel like I'm 15 again, jumping up and down in front of a mirror with Kiss' Alive playing. Its like finding the fountain of youth -- you see the fans, and there's no way you're ready to pack it in and go listen to the new Pat Boone record."

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