Terry Glaze Says Pantera’s Sound Got Heavier After They Started To Hang Out With James Hetfield

Pantera‘s original vocalist Terry Glaze opened up about the influences on Pantera recordings and his voice at the beginning of the band’s career during a recent interview with Full in Bloom, apparently, Metallica frontman James Hetfield affected the sound of the band once the band members started to spend time with him among other musicians.

Despite the fact that Terry Glaze was the lead singer of Pantera from 1982 to 1987, he was originally joined the band as a second guitarist in 1981.  However, Glaze shined as a vocalist when he took over vocal duties in 1982 and his vocal range caught fans’ attention in addition to many record labels, therefore Glaze often takes credit for bringing Pantera to the frontline of heavy metal music.

While being a heavy metal band, Pantera’s style was considered both groove metal and thrash metal throughout their career. However, the band’s early albums and songs have been described as glam metal, in addition to evolving and changing from one another as time goes from one album to another.

During a recent interview, Terry Glaze opened up about his evolving style of singing in his early days with Pantera with every new album, in addition to the changing style of the whole band. According to Glaze, when Pantera members started to work together, they were mostly influenced by Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, and Iron Maiden.

In addition to this, Terry Glaze revealed that guitarist Dimebag Darrell, later on, all the other band members, became close friends with Metallica frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich by the time their third album, ‘I Am The Night,’ came out the recording was heavily influenced by them, eventually making the album way heavier.

Here is what Glaze said:

“And also influences of different music. I’m sure that I probably discovered Motley Crue by that time or something like that. Because they were such a huge influence at that time. When Pantera got together, we were listening to the first Def Leppard album, and April Wine, and stuff like that. And we put our record out, and it’s got a lot of that Def Leppard to it. And then the second record sounds like Motley Crue, and we also started doing Iron Maiden, and all kinds of stuff.

But by the third album, ‘I Am the Night’ – Darrell had become friends with Hatfield and Lars from Metallica, you can just hear the influence all over the record that the band was getting heavier and heavier. We went and saw them live, Darrell used to hang out with them, and Pantera was getting heavier and heavier. It was just a logical kind of growth of the band.”

You can see the source of the interview by clicking here.