At a January 2016 event at the Lucky Strike Live in Hollywood in honor of late PANTERA guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, Phil Anselmo performed the PANTERA classic “Walk”. As he left the stage, he was caught on video making a Nazi-style salute and appearing to say “white power.”
Anselmo‘s drummer Jose Manuel Gonzalez recently recalled the incident on Jon’s Untitled Podcast, saying:
“For me, man, what made me the maddest out of that whole situation was that everybody that wanted to throw around this nasty word about one of my best friends, not one media outlet decided to look at pictures of him jamming with Superjoint. “Kevin Bond is half black and Jimmy Bower, he’s American but he’s pretty coonass, so that’s, like, kinda — he’s pretty much there. And as for me, I’m full-blooded Mexican, dude. And Marzi [Montazeri] at the time, when he was in the band, Marzi is Persian, or whatever he likes to call himself. So we have different backgrounds, and what made me the maddest out of the entire ordeal is not one media outlet or publication decided to call me, decided to call Kevin, decided to call anybody that actually worked with Philip.”
“They f*cking all got quotes from all these uppity f*cking d*ckheads that call Philip a friend and they just wanted to f*cking make it seem like Philip owed something to the rest of the f*cking world. I mean, it was just ridiculous.”
“If you’re saying that he is what he is, there is no way a person that is that evil and thinks like that would ever help somebody from another ethnicity feed their children, feed their child, grow, build a family, have a home — all these amazing things,” added Gonzalez. “I became a young man with Philip’s guidance. I’ve traveled the world with him, and you’re gonna just base your idea and negate everything this man has done over one stupid incident that happened way too far in the night when people that are professionals absolutely know that no rock star needs a microphone in his hand at 2:30 in the morning at a party. I mean, it’s just common sense.”
“The video that was posted that went viral, that’s why videos go viral — because they are snippets of the best piece of whatever tragic, traumatic, hilarious event that happened. There was a dude that was on his balls, goading him for a good 15, 20 minutes, because, like I said, it was the end of the night and he was drunk and he was rambling anyways, so there was a dude talking sh*t all the way up until that, but no one sees that, no one brings that up. That was aimed at nobody but one particular dickhead that was being a dickhead, but nobody cares — nobody cares because he’s f*cking famous.”
Anselmo claimed he was joking about drinking white wine backstage and was reacting to the audience members up front who he says were taunting him, and the taunting that was going on is something that Gonzalez backs up in his account.
https://soundcloud.com/jonsuntitledpodcast/joey-gonzalez
