Far Beyond Driven by Pantera: The Story

It is March 1994. Grunge owns the rock conversation, glam metal is in retreat, and almost every major metal band in America is quietly softening its sound to keep up. Pantera, a four-piece from Texas with a frontman in chronic back pain, a drummer co-producing in a Nashville studio and a record-label boss begging for another Black Album, refuse to compromise on a single thing. Then their seventh album enters the Billboard 200 at number one, sandwiched between Ace of Base and Bonnie Raitt, and becomes the most violent record ever to do so.

Far Beyond Driven is the album where the heaviest band of the 1990s doubled down rather than blinked. It is a punishing, deliberately commercial-proof statement that sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States while never once trying to be liked. Three decades on, it remains the moment heavy metal won an argument it had no business winning, and the moment Phil Anselmo, Dimebag Darrell, Rex Brown and Vinnie Paul became the most consequential metal band of their generation.

Field	Detail
Artist	Pantera
Album	Far Beyond Driven
Release date	21 March 1994 (UK), 22 March 1994 (international)
Label	East West / Elektra (Atlantic in some territories)
Producers	Terry Date and Vinnie Paul; co-production and arranging by Pantera
Studio	Abtrax Recording, Nashville, Tennessee
Genre	Groove metal, heavy metal
Track count	12 (13 on Japanese and Driven Downunder Tour editions)
Total runtime	56:19
Billboard 200 peak	1 (debut, 29 weeks on chart)
UK Albums Chart peak	3
Other notable chart peaks	1 in Australia; 2 in Sweden; 3 in Finland; 6 European Top 100; 7 Germany; 8 Austria, Scotland and Japan
Certifications	Platinum in the US (1.53 million), Canada, Australia and Japan; Gold in the UK
Estimated US sales	1,530,000
Key singles	I'm Broken, 5 Minutes Alone, Planet Caravan

A Heavy Album in an Unheavy Year

The chart Pantera invaded in late March 1994 belonged to almost everyone but them. Ace of Base had been holding the number one spot with The Sign. Bonnie Raitt took it back the week after Pantera dropped out. Counting Crows, Toni Braxton and the Philadelphia soundtrack were the other long-term residents of the Billboard 200 top ten. The album charts were a polite, MOR, pop-leaning place, and the metal acts who had ruled them three years earlier were either reinventing themselves, melting down, or doing both at the same time.

1994 was the year Motley Crue released the John Corabi-fronted album that nobody bought. It was the year Skid Row tried alternative rock on Subhuman Race. It was the year Metallica spent on the road and in lawsuits rather than in the studio, and the year Megadeth's Youthanasia deliberately slowed everything down for radio. Across the same months, grunge consolidated its grip on rock playlists with Soundgarden's Superunknown, Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy and Stone Temple Pilots' Purple, all of them at or near number one over the same twelve months.

Into that landscape, Pantera released a record tuned lower than anything in their catalogue to date, with a vocalist screaming about chronic pain and a closing song that pretended for four minutes that none of it was happening. It should have been commercial suicide. It was the opposite. Decibel's Shane Mehling later called it "the first extreme metal record to reach that level of popularity and, in maybe a more perfect world, would have opened the doors for other extreme bands to gain a foothold."

From Glam Hopefuls to Metal's Most Uncompromising Band

Pantera had been a band since 1981, and for most of the 1980s they were a glam metal outfit gigging the Dallas-Fort Worth circuit with original singer Terry Glaze. Four self-financed albums on the family-run Metal Magic label, all of them in spandex and hairspray, are the part of the discography the band spent the rest of their career declining to reissue. The line that mattered was drawn in 1986 when Glaze left, Anselmo arrived from New Orleans, the riffs got heavier, and by 1988's Power Metal the band had begun to recognisably resemble itself.

Cowboys from Hell in 1990, their major-label debut for Atco, made them a band Metallica would tour with. Vulgar Display of Power in 1992 made them the band a generation of teenagers would be tattooed in honour of. By the time the four of them came off the road, Anselmo was in serious physical trouble. Ruptured discs and degenerative disc disease in his lower back had him drinking heavily, abusing painkillers and muscle relaxants and, by his own later admission to Blabbermouth, using heroin to manage the pain. "I think this is one of the first times in my life, man, that I had this thing called 'vulnerability' kick in," he told Loudwire in 2014, "and that was a very uncomfortable feeling."

The other half of the band's internal pressure was external. Vulgar Display of Power had peaked just outside the US top forty. The label could see the potential for an explosion if Pantera made a few small concessions in the direction of the rock mainstream. Pantera could see it too. They decided they did not want it.

"The record company was pushing for something like Metallica's Black Album. We were like, 'No, that's not going to happen.'"

Rex Brown, Rolling Stone, 2014

Writing and Pre-Production

The title arrived before any of the songs. Vinnie Paul has been consistent on this point in every interview the band ever gave about the album: Far Beyond Driven was a thesis statement first and a record second. "We came up with the title Far Beyond Driven far before we came up with any of the songs," he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "That was the mindset going into it: just make everything over the top."

Much of the writing happened the way Pantera writing usually happened, which is to say in a rehearsal room with the four of them in a circle, two of them brothers, and Dimebag walking in with a riff he had cooked up at soundcheck the night before. The lead single is the textbook example. Dimebag's own account of "I'm Broken" tracks back to a hangover and a soundcheck:

"I'm Broken was a sound check riff, one of them ones where I'd walk in with a hangover from ripping it up night after night with everyone in every town. That's where a lot of the best riffs I ever wrote came from. I just played the first riff I thought of, Vinnie started kickin' in on it, Rex joined in, we didn't write the entire song on the spot, but we kept toying with it and finally worked on it once we got into the studio."

Dimebag Darrell, on the writing of I'm Broken

The lower tunings that define the record's bottom end emerged organically out of where the band already were going. Most of the album sits in dropped tunings; "Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks" goes as low as C-sharp standard, the heaviest tuning Pantera had ever committed to tape. Anselmo was also bringing new influences into the room. He had recently turned the rest of the band onto the Melvins; he was rediscovering Witchfinder General and the slower end of doom; he had finished his first Down demo, and the speed-for-its-own-sake side of thrash was beginning to feel redundant to him. The result on Far Beyond Driven is a record where the band's old thrash velocity is still present, in "Strength Beyond Strength" and "Slaughtered" especially, but it now coexists with churning, atmospheric mid-tempo passages and the seven minutes of "Hard Lines" that have more in common with Black Sabbath than with anyone Pantera's age.

One song bypassed the album sessions entirely. "Planet Caravan", a Sabbath cover from Paranoid, had originally been recorded for a planned Black Sabbath tribute compilation called Nativity in Black. According to Vinnie Paul, "our label got into a pissing match with the label that was supposed to put it out, so it just got put on the backburner." When sequencing the album, the band realised they had a perfect closer already sitting on a shelf and slotted it in.

Recording at Abtrax: A Producer, a Drummer and No Outside Voices

Pantera tracked Far Beyond Driven in 1993 at Abtrax Recording in Nashville, Tennessee. Terry Date, the Seattle-based producer who had shaped both Cowboys from Hell and Vulgar Display of Power, co-produced with Vinnie Paul. Date handled the engineering and the mixing alongside Vinnie; Pantera as a unit took an arranging and co-production credit; Ted Jensen mastered the record at Sterling Sound in New York. Outside of that small circle there was nobody in the room.

The Terry Date and Vinnie Paul partnership was, by 1993, one of the most road-tested in American heavy music. Date had already produced Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger in 1991 and would produce the Deftones' Around the Fur three years later, but his Pantera collaborations are the records he is most associated with. His approach with the band was famously hands-off in the writing and ruthlessly hands-on in the capture. The arrangements were the band's; the guitar sound, the kick-drum-as-machine-gun and the in-your-face vocal placement that defines every Pantera album from 1990 to 2000 were the producer's signature. Vinnie Paul, sitting next to him at the desk, was both the rhythmic anchor of the music and the band's internal quality controller.

The signature components of the Pantera sound were already in place. Dimebag tracked the album principally on a Dean ML through Randall RG-100 solid-state heads, the rig that gave his rhythm tone its sandpaper top end and made his lead lines audibly different from any other player working in metal at the time. Several of the most exotic moments on the record, the squealing dive on "Becoming" among them, came from a Digitech Whammy pedal that Dimebag had only recently added to his board. Rex Brown brought a five-string bass into the room for the first time, audible most clearly on "Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills" and on the fretless work on "Planet Caravan". Vinnie Paul tracked drums with the kind of triggered, gated kick sound that two generations of metal drummers would spend the next thirty years either copying or rejecting.

• Guitars: Dean ML and Dean From Hell, with selected Washburn models on certain tracks
• Amplification: Randall RG-100ES solid-state heads, the signature Dimebag rig of the era
• Pedals: Digitech Whammy and an MXR Six-Band EQ used as a clean-channel boost
• Bass: Spector NS-2 four-string and a five-string used for the first time on a Pantera album
• Drums: Pearl Masters kit with triggered kicks and snares feeding outboard samples
• Mastering: Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, New York

Personnel and Credits

Role	Player	Notes
Pantera
Vocals	Phil Anselmo	Lead vocals across the album; layered and double-tracked on 5 Minutes Alone and several others
Guitars	Dimebag Darrell	First Pantera album credited as Dimebag Darrell rather than Diamond Darrell
Bass	Rex Brown	Four-string throughout and five-string on Good Friends; fretless bass plus background keyboards on Planet Caravan
Drums	Vinnie Paul	Drum kit on every track; bongos and congas on Planet Caravan
Production
Producer	Terry Date	Production, engineering and mixing
Producer	Vinnie Paul	Production, engineering and mixing alongside Date
Co-production and arranging	Pantera	Whole-band credit
Mastering	Ted Jensen	Mastered at Sterling Sound, New York
Artwork
Sleeve design and photography	Dean Karr	Designed both the original drill-into-buttocks artwork and the substituted drill-into-skull cover

The Songs

The album's twelve tracks are all credited to Pantera collectively, with the exception of "Planet Caravan", written by the four members of Black Sabbath. The Japanese and Australian Driven Downunder Tour pressings add a thirteenth track, a cover of Poison Idea's "The Badge" written by Jerry A, which also turned up on The Crow soundtrack the same year.

#	Title	Writer(s)	Length	Single?	Notes
1	Strength Beyond Strength	Pantera	3:38		Opens the record at thrash velocity
2	Becoming	Pantera	3:05	Promo single	Digitech Whammy squeal riff; one of the band's most-played songs live
3	5 Minutes Alone	Pantera	5:47	Yes (May 1994)	Inspired by a real incident on the Megadeth tour
4	I'm Broken	Pantera	4:24	Yes (March 1994)	Grammy-nominated; UK number 19 single
5	Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills	Pantera	2:52		Anselmo cited Nick Cave and the Birthday Party as a lyrical reference
6	Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks	Pantera	7:01		Longest track on the album; tuned to C-sharp standard
7	Slaughtered	Pantera	3:56	B-side	Anti-organised-religion lyric; B-side to I'm Broken
8	25 Years	Pantera	6:05		About Anselmo's relationship with his father
9	Shedding Skin	Pantera	5:36		Resistance to being tied down in his twenties
10	Use My Third Arm	Pantera	4:51
11	Throes of Rejection	Pantera	5:01
12	Planet Caravan	Iommi, Butler, Osbourne, Ward	4:03	Yes (October 1994)	Black Sabbath cover originally cut for a tribute compilation
13	The Badge (bonus)	Jerry A	3:55		Poison Idea cover; also on The Crow soundtrack

Strength Beyond Strength

The album opens with a thirty-second false start of slow palm-muted churn before the track explodes into thrash tempo. Anselmo described it to Loudwire in 2014 as "the old puffin' the chest up, 'look at us now,' we're as cute as we're fucking extreme." It is the closest the album gets to a direct line back to Vulgar Display of Power, and it is gone in three minutes and thirty-eight seconds.

Becoming

Anselmo regards "Becoming" as the spiritual heart of the record. The riff was born when Vinnie was alone in the studio working out a drum-solo idea, Dimebag heard the pattern from the next room, ran in shouting "Hold on, let me get my guitar," and the two of them had a song before Rex or Phil had heard a note of it. The defining sonic detail is Dimebag's brand-new Digitech Whammy pedal, set to dive two octaves and produce the inhuman squeal that has been one of the album's calling cards ever since.

"'Becoming,' to me, is a 'we have arrived' type of song. We have become something that was never in the forecast at all, especially for me, the ultimate pessimist."

Phil Anselmo, Rolling Stone, 2014

5 Minutes Alone

The title comes from a phone call to Pantera's manager. The band had been opening for Megadeth, a fan had spent the entire show flipping them off, Vinnie had stopped the gig to call him out, ten audience members had jumped the fan, and the fan's father had then called the manager demanding "five minutes with that Phil Anselmo guy. I want to whup his ass." Anselmo's response, several months later, was to write a five-minute, forty-seven-second song with the words bring it. Wayne Isham directed the accompanying music video. Metal Hammer later ranked the song number six in their fifty best Pantera songs of all time; Lamb of God, DevilDriver, Killswitch Engage, Ill Nino, Soilwork and Upon a Burning Body have all subsequently covered it.

I'm Broken

The album's first single and its first encounter with the world outside the band's existing fanbase. The riff Dimebag carried in from soundcheck became a four-minute confession about lower back pain, ruptured discs and degenerative disc disease. "I think that was really my first glimpse into kind of screaming to the world, 'Fucking, I am broken, somebody fucking help me here,'" Anselmo told Loudwire. The single climbed to number 19 on the UK Singles Chart, the band's highest-charting single anywhere in the world, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 1995 ceremony. (Pantera went 0-for-4 across their career on Grammy nights. "All four times, we got beat by bands that didn't even consider themselves heavy metal bands," Vinnie Paul later remarked.) The track also became Beavis and Butt-Head fodder in the episode titled "The Pipe of Doom".

Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills

Two minutes and fifty-two seconds of noise, screech and confession, with the catchiest hook on the record buried inside the ugliest production. Anselmo connected the song lyrically to his then-fascination with Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, and described the words as a true story he has refused to elaborate on in interviews since. Rex Brown's first reaction the day Anselmo tracked the vocal, told to Rolling Stone, was simply: "What the fuck, really?"

Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks

The longest and slowest track on the record, dropped a full whole step below the rest of the album to C-sharp standard. Anselmo later identified it as the song where he was first writing in the open about his painkiller use. "I think it was a foreshadowing of the fear that I felt of not being the same," he told Loudwire. "I know for a fact, I guess, that I dabbled in pain pills and stuff like that because I was miserable, and that's always a friggin' dead end, dead road, a terrible path to take."

25 Years

A six-minute song about Anselmo's father, written during what he called a "gigantic falling-out" with him. The vocalist later said he had hoped a lot of fans could relate "with the dysfunctional family vibe", and that the song was a time capsule of how far he and his father had not come.

Planet Caravan

Almost certainly the strangest closer of any Pantera record. Brown plays fretless bass and tracks the background keyboards; Vinnie Paul switches kit for congas and bongos; Dimebag's clean guitar tone bears almost no resemblance to the rest of his recorded work. Brown estimates the band tracked the song in around 45 minutes. In the album's liner notes, Anselmo added a typed disclaimer: "This is a Black Sabbath song off of the Paranoid album. So don't freak out on us. We did the song because we wanted to. It has nothing to do with the integrity of our direction. It's a tripped out song. We think you'll dig it. If you don't, don't fucking listen to it." Both Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne later told Vinnie Paul they thought it was a "really cool version" when Pantera and Sabbath toured together.

Artwork and Packaging: The Drill That Almost Got Banned

The artwork Pantera and their designer Dean Karr originally turned in to East West Records was a near photo-realistic image of a drill bit boring into a human buttocks. The intent was self-conscious: a sleeve that visually translated the band's preferred internal slogan, "metal up your ass". The label looked at it, agreed enthusiastically, took it away, and came back three days later with a problem.

"The original thought was 'metal up your ass,' you know? In 1994, heavy metal was uncool and we wanted to be as metal as we could. The label agreed with us and then came back three days later and said, 'Uhhh, we can't get this into Walmart, Target and retail and it's gonna kill us.' So we got back with the guy who did the artwork, Dean Karr, and he did the one with the drill in the head which signifies the same thing."

Vinnie Paul, Vanyaland, 2014

Karr rebuilt the image with the drill bit entering the frontal lobe of a skull. The substituted cover went out to retail on every CD and cassette pressing in 1994. The original was eventually restored on a 2010 vinyl reissue, which is now the only easy way to get it short of paying around a hundred dollars for an original promo. Karr would go on to design Slipknot's Iowa and self-titled album, Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar and a long list of other genre-defining sleeves; the Pantera drill remains the work he is most often asked about. Vinnie Paul, characteristically, later wondered aloud whether the original sleeve "might have even sold more."

Release, Number One and the Critics

The release campaign was as confrontational as the music. At midnight on 22 March 1994 the band launched a five-day, twelve-city in-store and record-store tour with MTV cameras following them between stops, signing autographs and meeting fans face-to-face in shops along the way. The single "I'm Broken" had already gone out on 7 March and was climbing in the UK and Australia. Pre-orders were unusually heavy for a band with no top-forty single. When the first-week numbers came back from SoundScan, Far Beyond Driven had moved 186,000 copies and entered the Billboard 200 at number one.

It also went to number one in Australia. Around the rest of the world it broke high. Rex Brown still remembers picking up a copy of USA Today on the way to the airport the day the album shipped, reading the headline "Pantera: The overnight sensation from Texas", and snorting "Overnight my ass." The album would spend a total of 29 weeks on the Billboard 200, ending the year at number 82 on the year-end chart. It was the fastest-selling album of the band's career.

Territory	Chart	Peak Position
United States	Billboard 200	1 (debut)
Australia	ARIA Albums	1
Sweden	Sverigetopplistan	2
United Kingdom	Official Albums Chart	3
Finland	Suomen virallinen lista	3
Europe	European Top 100 Albums	6
Germany	Offizielle Top 100	7
Austria	Ö3 Austria	8
Scotland	Official Scottish Albums	8
Japan	Oricon Albums	8
New Zealand	RMNZ	14
Canada	RPM Top Albums	18

Critically, the response was warmer than the band's reputation would later suggest. Rolling Stone gave the record four stars out of five and the magazine would eventually rank it number 39 on its 2017 list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. Entertainment Weekly awarded a B-plus. NME went seven out of ten. Spin, in April 1994, described the band as "a cross between the older, faster Metallica and today's Rollins Band", praising Anselmo specifically: "at times, Phil Anselmo is every bit as charismatic as Henry Rollins." Martin Popoff's Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal later went 10 out of 10. The dissenting voice was AllMusic's Eduardo Rivadavia, who called the album "Pantera's fastest selling album upon release, but it's hardly their best", arguing that the chart performance reflected the strength of Vulgar Display of Power rather than this record on its own terms.

Guitar World would later place the album at number six on its top ten guitar albums of 1994 list and number twenty on its 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1994 list. "I'm Broken" picked up that Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 37th Annual Grammy Awards in 1995, the first of four Grammy nominations Pantera would collect across their career.

Singles and Music Videos

Three singles were issued from Far Beyond Driven, all in 1994. "I'm Broken" was released on 7 March, fifteen days ahead of the album, on East West and Atco in two separate CD-single configurations, each with "Slaughtered" as a B-side and a different pair of live tracks recorded at the 1991 Monsters of Rock festival in Moscow. The single reached number 19 on the UK Singles Chart (the band's highest UK position), number 12 in Finland, number 20 in Scotland, number 32 in Sweden and number 49 in Australia. Its music video became a regular on MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head, which is approximately the highest possible 1994 honour a metal video could receive.

"5 Minutes Alone" followed on 29 May, with a music video directed by Wayne Isham. "Planet Caravan" was issued as a third single on 10 October, climbing to number 21 on the US Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and number 26 on the UK Singles Chart. "Becoming" was serviced to US radio without a commercial CD release.

Single	Release Date	B-side	Director	Notable Chart Peak
I'm Broken	7 March 1994	Slaughtered (plus live tracks)		UK 19, Finland 12, Scotland 20
5 Minutes Alone	29 May 1994		Wayne Isham	Australia 76
Planet Caravan	10 October 1994			UK 26, US Mainstream Rock 21

Touring: Scuffles, Charges and the First Trip Down Under

The tour cycle behind Far Beyond Driven ran from spring 1994 through to March 1995, took the band across South America, North America, the UK, mainland Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and provided more chaos per night than any other leg of the band's career.

The South American run was followed by a billing at the 1994 Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park on 4 June. The day became infamous for two reasons. The set itself was incendiary, and is the source of the live disc included on the album's 2014 20th-anniversary reissue. Backstage, the Abbott brothers got into a physical scuffle with journalists from Kerrang! over a series of unflattering cartoon depictions of Vinnie Paul the magazine had recently run.

Less than four weeks later, on 28 June 1994 at the Darien Lake amphitheatre in upstate New York, Anselmo was charged with assault for hitting a security guard who had prevented fans from getting on stage. He was released on $5,000 bail the next morning. The case was adjourned three separate times before, in May 1995, he pleaded guilty to attempted assault, apologised in court and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

The North American leg opened with Sepultura and Prong as support, eventually rolling into a March 1995 run with Type O Negative opening. The Australasian leg, in November and December 1994, was the band's first ever trip to either country. Selected highlights of that touring period:

• Monsters of Rock, Donington Park, England, 4 June 1994 (recorded for the 20th anniversary reissue)
• Sepultura and Prong supporting on the main North American leg
• Type O Negative supporting on the March 1995 US run
• First Pantera shows in Australia and New Zealand, November and December 1994
• Anselmo charged with assault at Darien Lake on 28 June 1994; pleaded guilty in May 1995
• Backstage altercation with Kerrang journalists at Donington over Vinnie Paul cartoons

Influence and Legacy

The immediate sequel was The Great Southern Trendkill in 1996, an even uglier record made under even more difficult circumstances, with Anselmo tracking many of his vocals separately in New Orleans after his addictions had grown unmanageable. Reinventing the Steel followed in 2000. By 2003 the band had broken up, and on 8 December 2004 Dimebag Darrell was shot dead onstage while performing with his post-Pantera band Damageplan at the Alrosa Villa club in Columbus, Ohio. Vinnie Paul died of dilated cardiomyopathy on 22 June 2018. Neither brother lived to see the band reform.

The reunion came in late 2022, with Anselmo on vocals, Rex Brown on bass, Zakk Wylde standing in for Dimebag on guitar and Anthrax's Charlie Benante on drums. They have remained a touring entity ever since, including a 2026 cycle that has played most of the major European festivals.

The musical legacy of Far Beyond Driven specifically is everywhere in the heavy music made after it. Lamb of God's entire 1998-to-2006 catalogue is unimaginable without the album's combination of detuned riffing and percussive vocal delivery; Killswitch Engage, Trivium and Mastodon have all separately cited the record as a formative influence; nu-metal absorbed its low-tuned aggression even as it diluted everything else; the entire metalcore aesthetic of pinch harmonics, syncopated breakdowns and chest-out machismo runs straight through this album.

The 20th anniversary reissue in March 2014 packaged the original remastered album with a live disc recorded at Donington Park during the band's 1994 Monsters of Rock set. The first-week sales for the anniversary edition were, fittingly, reported in chart trade outlets the same way the original release had been: as a story about how much heavy metal a major-label release week could still move.

"Our top priority with Far Beyond Driven was to make a balls-out, heavy-metal record with no compromising. I think we pretty much did it."

Phil Anselmo, Rolling Stone, 2014

Things You Might Not Know

Fact	Detail
The title came first	Vinnie Paul has said in multiple interviews that the four band members agreed on the title before they had written a single song, and used it as a brief for the whole record.
The heaviest debut at US number one	No record as aggressive as Far Beyond Driven had ever debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and Decibel has called it the first extreme metal record ever to reach that position.
Chart neighbours	The week Far Beyond Driven hit number one, it was sandwiched on the Billboard 200 between Ace of Base's The Sign and Bonnie Raitt's Longing in Their Hearts.
The original sleeve	Dean Karr's first design showed a drill bit boring into a human buttocks, intended to translate the band's internal slogan "metal up your ass". The label vetoed it on retail grounds before release.
Original sleeve, restored	The buttocks artwork was officially restored for a 2010 vinyl reissue, which is still in print and is the only commercially available way to own the cover as the band originally drew it.
First album as Dimebag	Far Beyond Driven is the first Pantera album on which guitarist Darrell Abbott is credited as Dimebag Darrell, having retired the Diamond Darrell credit he used through Vulgar Display of Power.
Planet Caravan was a hand-me-down	The Black Sabbath cover that closes the album was originally tracked for a Sabbath tribute compilation called Nativity in Black, which got tangled in inter-label politics; the band salvaged the recording as their album closer.
Rex on Planet Caravan	Rex Brown plays fretless bass on Planet Caravan and also tracks the keyboard atmospherics; Vinnie Paul swaps the drum kit for congas and bongos.
The Crow connection	The Poison Idea cover The Badge, a bonus track on the Japanese and Driven Downunder Tour editions, was also featured on The Crow soundtrack in 1994.
I'm Broken on Beavis and Butt-Head	The music video for I'm Broken got a glowing reception from Beavis and Butt-Head in the episode The Pipe of Doom, which in 1994 mattered for record sales.
I'm Broken in the modern wild	I'm Broken was used in a Carl's Jr and Hardee's TV commercial starting in December 2015, and has been the opening theme to the National Wrestling Alliance series NWA Power since February 2020.
0-for-4 at the Grammys	Pantera were nominated for four Grammys across their career, including Best Metal Performance for I'm Broken in 1995. They won none; Vinnie Paul liked to point out that they lost every time to bands that "didn't even consider themselves heavy metal bands".
Lowest tuning on a Pantera record	Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks is the heaviest moment on the album in pure pitch terms, dropped to C-sharp standard, the lowest tuning the band had committed to a major-label record up to that point.
The Donington 1994 set	The live disc on the 20th anniversary reissue captures Pantera's 4 June 1994 Monsters of Rock set at Donington Park, recorded the same day the Abbotts had their backstage scrap with Kerrang.
SpongeBob's metal moment	Among the unlikelier afterlives of the band's catalogue, Pantera music has surfaced in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, a fact Rolling Stone surfaced in its 2014 retrospective.