After controversial footage surfaced of Phil Anselmo giving the Nazi salute and shouting "White Power" surfaced at this year's Dimebash back in January, there was naturally a lot of blowback, including being called out by Machine Head's Robb Flynn, among others in the metal community, Anselmo offered apology after apology about how what he did was very wrong and how he will try to grow as a person to prove he is not a racist.
Anselmo claimed that the bad joke was the result of three hecklers in the crowd shouting "racist" at him all night and his internal reaction was "You wanna see ugly? I'll show you what ugly looks like," and that's why he made the salute. Anselmo eventually began lashing out at his critics, including Robb Flynn and Anthrax's Scott Ian. The subject hasn't really been touched upon lately until a recent interview on Exclaim.ca's Aggressive Tendencies, with Neurosis' Scott Kelly, which featured Kelly reminiscing about touring with Pantera. The interviewer then asked Kelly about his opinions on the Dimebash incident:
"I think [Anselmo] fucked up, man," he said. "I think Phil really said some shit that you can't really take back."
"I think that Phil's an intelligent guy and I think that… From what I've heard, he's taken steps to change his life and he's taking things more seriously," Kelly continued.
"He's the kind of guy that can have a lot of influence in the world. A lot of people listen to what he says and a lot of people respect him and kind of follow his lead. So I just hope that he chooses a positive path to go down with it, because that was ugly, man — it was really ugly."
Kelly had nothing but positive things to say about Neurosis' time on the road with Pantera:
"They treated us great," he said. "Absolutely. We couldn't have asked to be treated with more respect. Honestly, we were just… I don't think we contributed very many people to the door of those shows — those guys were packing them in at the time. And they let us have this spot and do what we were doing every night and gave us full use of the P.A. and paid us what we needed to be paid and made sure that we always had food and a nice dressing room, and they were always looking out for us. It was a totally good time."
Anselmo, for his part, has been trying to move on from the incident, doing tours with Superjoint and his new project, Scour.
[via Blabbermouth]
