Rebel Meets Rebel

Rebel Meets Rebel arose when maverick country songwriter and singer David Allan Coe joined forces with Pantera’s rhythm section—drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, bassist Rex Brown, and guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott—to create a hyper-charged country/metal/hard rock/blues hybrid. The sole album to emerge from the partnership, also titled Rebel Meets Rebel, appeared on Vinnie’s Big Vin Records imprint in 2006. Coe first encountered Darrell in Fort Worth toward the end of the 1990s; the two self-described rebels immediately recognized a shared spirit in their approaches to their separate genres and pledged to collaborate in the studio. Sessions unfolded intermittently from 1999 through 2003 under Vinnie’s production. During that period the Abbott brothers launched Damageplan, whose 2004 tour route took them to Ohio, where Darrell was fatally shot onstage—an event that retrospectively lent the finished Rebel Meets Rebel recordings the weight of an unintended farewell. Coe supplied every lyric while Vinnie and Darrell shaped the musical frameworks, yielding not a polished fusion but an unrestrained collision between metal and country that Dimebag would surely have endorsed.