The "almost joined” stories usually get exaggerated. Watchtower's Jason McMaster's version about turning down an audition for Pantera stays detailed and grounded: a phone call from the Abbott camp, a respectful decline, and one more follow-up that confirmed it was a real invite, "to only audition.”
Speaking to Ralph Rasmussen of Radio Bypass, McMaster laid out the timing and the setup like this: "Yeah. To be fully correct, I was… This probably was in around '86, maybe early '87, but I know I have that timeframe almost spot-on. Mr. Abbott, ['Dimebag'] Darrell [Abbott, Pantera guitarist] and Vinnie's [Paul Abbott, Pantera drummer] father, called me on the phone and said, 'Hey, those are my boys, and I'm kind of managing them.'
"And I'm, like, 'Oh, I know who you are.' He was already kind of a legend in Texas, and Pantera was already known. And I was in a band called Watchtower, which is this progressive… Before you could put the words 'math' and 'metal' together, we were 'math metal'. We were this technical thrash band, this progressive thrash metal band, which is not… I mean, now it's commonplace for you to talk about extreme metal and have it be completely math rock and math metal, and there are so many different genres of what I'm kind of talking about.”
"But anyway, Watchtower is arguably the pioneer of that genre. But I digress. The point is, I was in this really weird metal band. And that's how those guys knew me, and I knew them to be this kind of glam rock. They didn't have Philip [in the band yet]; they had [previous Pantera singer] Terry Glaze, and they were a little bit more — I don't know — [like] Def Leppard [or] Bon Jovi.
"And that's fine. And they were kicking ass. They were a touring band. They would run around Texas and roll up through Oklahoma, go all the way to Nashville, and play their way all the way back. And they were killing it. And they were young. And, everyone, I don't have to say it — they had Darrell. But Vinnie and Rex [Brown, Pantera bassist] are these bad motherfuckers too. So as a band, [they were] unstoppable, no matter what. All my friends, we knew who they were, of course,” McMaster recalled.
"So, Mr. Abbott calls me, and I respectfully decline, because I'm about to have to replace a guitar player in Watchtower, which was no easy feat because of the style of music it is. It's like you can't just call up, 'Hey, Joe, across the street, come and play a guitar.' 'Oh, I got five strings.' You have to have the third eye wide open and be into Mahavishnu Orchestra and Rush in a blender on crush to understand what it is. And, anyway, I explained that to him, and he was fine. Two weeks later, Vinnie calls me to basically say, 'Are you sure?' And this was an invitation to only audition," he added.
When Rasmussen asked if Pantera was "kind of the biggest band in the area at that point in time”, McMaster pushed back and then explained why the band's later run still makes the "why me?” question funny in hindsight.
"No. I didn't know them to be as far as what you would call the 'biggest' band. I mean, they had a footprint, and they had buzz. Years later, I was blessed enough to get into a little conversation about what we're talking about with Darrell. And I'm, like, 'Why me?' Because, obviously, it's funny because they got Philip and ended up being this giant monster that defies genre of… They were thrash.
"For a minute, they were the heaviest thing on the radio. They were thrash, and they were power metal, and they were doom. Oh my God — the riffs and just Philip's voice, and they were this conglomerate of everything. They were monstrous, and they were obviously breaking down walls, kicking ass and taking names with Philip.”
"Whatever decisions they made, they made the right ones. Obviously, I was not the right guy, and I knew it prophetically somehow. And here's the thing, too — I got asked to audition for Skid Row too, and it was verbatim the same storyline. [Skid Row guitarist] Snake calls me one day, he calls me two weeks later: 'Are you sure?' Same answer I had," he recounted.
McMaster circled back to the real reason he passed: songwriting ownership, sharpening his lyric-writing, and making choices that fit where he was heading.
"Here's my real answer. When I'm leaving Watchtower, and I'm joining Dangerous Toys, there's something that a lot of people don't realize. It was really hard to make that decision to leave something I had been in for almost a decade, and then go with these guys I had known for six months and go make a brand new record. In less than a year, I'm in arenas and on MTV, not in that order.
"But what's missing in this conversation, and this sounds selfish, maybe not, but this was something that I had stuck to my shoe, I'll just call it, 'cause it wasn't something that I wore like a badge. I had a chance to sing my songs because in Watchtower, they wrote the lyrics. I wrote the melodies. They may have had compositions that told me where they expected me to sing and what would resemble a verse, a chorus, a bridge, et cetera.
"But that's my voice, and it's my melodies, and that's the way the song goes. And I had a lot to do with that. But I didn't write the lyrics, so that part was missing in my skillset, and I needed to sharpen that knife, and this was a chance for me to do it.”
"So by the time the Skid Row offer to audition — to be a hundred thousand percent clear — obviously they're doing the right thing too, and I have mad respect for them as well and their decisions that they've made too. And it's probably tough in the shoes that they are wearing right now. They stuck to their guns. It must be hard to have a different singer every few years.
"But they're still a badass band, and they're obviously unstoppable, and respect to that. But the point: I had a chance to be a songwriter, so when I'm saying this to these guys, I'm still working on this right here, and I don't need to tell you that in so many words. And to give you a little bit of introspection, if that's even a word, into where I am. And so, now that I have my own songs to sing, I feel a lot better, maybe even about being a replacement singer. And I have pretty much been a replacement singer since I got it all figured out," McMaster finished.
