D.A.C. & CFH – Rebel Meets Rebel
Hardcores know D.A.C. is David Allan Coe and CFH (Cowboy From Hell) is the late Dimebag Darrell of Pantera and Damageplan. This not-so-unlikely pairing was five years in the making, recorded in spontaneously combusting sessions from 1999 up to when Darrell was killed onstage by a deranged fan in 2004.
What Rebel Meets Rebel isn’t: a cash-in tribute or genre-mixing novelty. Nor is it a Pantera record with D.A.C. on vocals. What the album is: a full-blown celebration of hard rock/hard country synergy, harder liquor, and even harder partyin’.
Given both musicians’ notorious tendency for all of the above, a joint album (no pun intended) was inevitable. Loosening his metal shackles (more jewelry here than constraints), Darrell floors the riffs with all the gleeful joy of eluding a trooper across county lines. The solos may be metal, but the execution is pure Skynyrd on steroids.
The title track, with its Marshall-amplified fiddle lick, is a boisterous “pick ’em up, knock ’em down” barroom anthem (or state song if you live down south). “We raise a lotta hell and drink a lotta booze,” shouts Coe like he’s been reborn. The man who co-wrote “Take This Job And Shove It” and is now shoving toward 70 hasn’t lost his fire, just the fuel needed for Darrell’s blistering hoedown.
Likewise, the lyrics of “Cowboys Do More Dope (Than Rock ‘N’ Rollers)” — both statement and challenge — might as well have been lifted from Coe’s prison rap sheet. Hank Williams III guests (what, no Kid Rock?), and, along with some honky-tonk piano and violin, sounds more like an accomplice than an accompanist.
Rebel Meets Rebel brings together the musical arc of both Coe and Darrell. It ain’t country and it ain’t metal, just old-school good-ole-boy troublemakin’ rock. And that’s the whole point.