A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  He remembered enough guitar chords to write at least a few new songs until he could find suitable bandmates. “When the challenge came to shit or get off the pot and show what I meant by ‘You suck!’ the Irish side of me was like, OK.” Maynard would recall. “I’ll show you how to do this better. Not forever. I’ll show you how it’s done so you can do it yourself.”

  The madcap chaos of Green Jellö was a safe environment in which to explore his art, but with his own band, he could dig deeper into his frustrations and anger. The lyrics were ready to be written, lyrics that would address the discontent and resentment simmering just below the surface—and perhaps incorporate a bit of dark humor to spice things up and keep his listeners guessing.

  On too many nights, Maynard lay alone in his bed while his menagerie settled into their nests. He watched the moon rise in the Hollywood sky and brooded over disappointments and hurts he should have laid to rest long before: the view from his mother’s VW of the Indian Lake house growing smaller in the distance; his wary walk, armed and cautious, down dark Grand Rapids streets; his grandmother’s scorn over his punk attire. Maybe she’d been right all along. Had he accepted the West Point invitation, he wouldn’t be scrambling at week’s end for change to buy crickets for the iguanas. An art degree might have meant by now a supervisory position at the studio, higher pay and regular hours.

  The wrong turns had led to a dead end, a dissatisfaction and questioning of his every decision, the weighty sense of exile from the magic he’d believed in when he’d left Boston. As it was, he’d wasted nearly a year at the studio, marking time.

  He’d ambled long enough. The time had come to sprint.

  The frustration I felt at that time is definitely what got this project off the ground then. I’d had good friends in Boston and I’d been successful at the pet store and I believed I was on the right path. Then I lose everything and I’m living on $400 a month. I needed to destroy. I needed to primal scream and I needed to be loud enough to make people go, “What the fuck was that?!” I needed to get it out. It was that tipping point where you either become a serial killer or a rock star.

  Meeting the challenge would not be a chore, but a joy, he discovered. The familiar sense of accomplishment returned as he tuned his guitar and worked out a tentative smattering of melodies and lyrics. Writing in tandem with Tom as he worked to establish his own new band energized and motivated them both.

  “I was jamming with different people as Rage was beginning,” Tom would recall. “One day, Brad Wilk, a bass player named Noah, Maynard, and I were jamming and pairing riffs. Maynard was developing a brand-new song called ‘Part of Me.’” Back and forth, the two played, creating by turns a counterpoint and a harmony of Maynard’s piece and a song Tom called “Killing in the Name.”

  “It was pretty clear right away that the songs fit together,” Maynard would explain. “We didn’t actually create a song. We were just having fun.” But discovering together the segues and intervals where their music meshed was encouraging, a validation that he was on the right creative track.

  Adding musicians to his lineup would add levels and dimensions to the music, Maynard knew. He understood the interplay of guitar, bass, and percussion, the gestalt a solo act could never yield, and he began to look at musicians who passed through the loft and the clubs with a more discerning eye.

  Over midnight breakfasts at Canter’s Deli, at the picnic table at the Libertyville barbecues, in the back corner of Raji’s, Adam had hinted for months that he and Maynard should collaborate. He’d heard the C.A.D. cassette, seen Maynard’s Green Jellö performances, and upped his urging after Mother fizzled. But Maynard had remained resistant. “I hadn’t seen what Adam was capable of,” he would recall. “I knew he was a successful special-effects makeup artist at Stan Winston Studio, but I wasn’t sure what he could do musically.”

  He’d observed Adam’s slow and meticulous process in assembling Mother—slower at least than that of Maynard, who once he embarked on a project, whether an aviary or an 800-mile walk, worked obsessively to complete it to perfection. And he wasn’t about to deal with the same lack of commitment he’d seen in the Grand Rapids bands. Unless his new bandmates shared his hunger to succeed, he knew the group would stay together for no more than one or two loft parties.

  But Adam was persistent, and Maynard began to take his interest seriously. “It didn’t matter who I got into the room,” Maynard would explain. “The band would have a different vibe with the different people, so it didn’t make much difference at that point who it was. Any reservation I had about working with specific people was irrelevant. I had an idea and I was going to see it through.”

  It was up to Maynard to communicate his vision—the pure simplicity of the arrangements, the minimalist sonic approach, the archetypes of pain and redemption underlying the lyrics, the raw emotion reflected in guitar and clashing cymbals. Once the others agreed on the parts that must be in place, individual differences would take care of themselves. “The geometry of this table we were building was very basic,” Maynard explained. “It wasn’t Victorian. It was four legs with a top on it, a very simple structure. If somebody was going to start doing guitar solos and noodling everywhere, this just wouldn’t work.”

  Maynard invited Adam to jam on a basic song structure and recognized immediately his rhythm skills, his methodical pace that reflected commitment to his craft, and he had no doubt he’d lay down a firm base for his words and fury. Adam was no noodler.

  Adam brought one afternoon to Danny’s rehearsal space a new Stan Winston coworker, a Spokane transplant who spent his days creating special effects until his dream of working in film might come true. Paul D’Amour’s skills at the pool table were matched only by his proficiency on bass. A member of a number of Washington bands that had never quite gotten off the ground, he was eager to audition for a part in any new group with even a whiff of success about it.

  Maynard leaned forward when Paul began his aggressive picking, a style he immediately imagined enhancing the song he’d been working on that morning. Paul was an ideal candidate to fill in on bass, Maynard told Adam—at least until a full-time player might turn up.

  Identifying a suitable percussionist was another matter altogether. The Green Jellö loft was a revolving door of artists and musicians, an ever-replenishing talent pool if one were assembling a pickup band for an impromptu show or a party—unless one needed a drummer.

  “In Hollywood at that time,” Bill Manspeaker would explain, “everybody wanted to be a singer or a guitar player, and that’s it. Next was a bass player. But a drummer? Forget it. That was the hardest thing to find.”

  The drummers Maynard and Adam met failed to appear for their auditions, or if they did, couldn’t grasp Maynard’s plans for the band. They came through Danny’s loft—past his foosball machine and high school basketball trophies and under the inflated pterodactyl suspended from the ceiling—and never once commented on the décor. Their apathy only reinforced Maynard’s fear that his venture would be a repeat of Grand Rapids. He waited for no-show after no-show, calculating Danny’s rental fee while the rehearsal space sat unused.

  “I felt kind of bad when their drummers weren’t showing up,” Danny would recall. “And I really wasn’t doing anything, so I decided to play with them since my drums were already set up there.”

  With Adam and Paul and Danny onboard, Maynard breathed a sigh of relief. Their combined expertise and experience would surely get the band off the ground. With any luck at all, they’d remain interested long enough to help discover its potential, or at least its direction.

  Before they’d played their first number, Maynard began to plan the practical aspects of their partnership. He assessed the venture in the same way he’d assessed a pet store layout or a video shoot.

  When I was on the high school cross country team, I’d walk or run the entire course before the race. I’d identify the hill
s, the pitfalls, the puddles and mud, the choke points and the opportunities. I’d make the courses my own, even though I’d never set eyes on them before. And that’s what I’d do now.

  He’d make sure the pieces were in place—the budget, the equipment, the devotion to a common mission—and set out with military precision the rules they must keep if they were to succeed.

  Five days a week, he told them, rehearsals would begin at 11 a.m. sharp. “I wasn’t going to accept any excuses,” he recalled. “No ‘I gotta do laundry’ or ‘I’m too drunk.’ If I was going to do this, I didn’t want to be fucking around. We were gonna do this right or we weren’t gonna do it at all.”

  The new band would need new songs, of course, and rough melodies were there to be refined, half the lyrics, too. For years, Maynard had harbored anger and annoyance, been misunderstood, and had watched himself helplessly backslide when a goal was just within reach. If songs must be written, he had plenty of fodder.

  But the lyrics must reach past the personal if they were to resonate beyond the walls of Danny’s rehearsal space. “In order to write effectively, you have to write from the spot you’re standing in,” Maynard would explain. “You have to tap into the pure emotion of where you are, but also the broader picture, the Joseph Campbell of it all.”

  His collection of Campbell and Jung held a prominent spot on his bookshelf, and on the rare nights when the parking lot was quiet, he lay in his bunk and read of the characters that populated dreams and legends: kings and peasants, giants and gnomes, gods come down to earth in the guise of serpents and great birds. He’d come to recognize the Shinto priest and the African Bushman, the ancient Pima Indians and Noah and his sons as no different from the leathered punk in the mosh pit or the hipster who sulked in the shadows of English Acid. They must all in the end come to terms with love and sacrifice, death and resurrection, and great floods, actual or allegorical. The great equalizer was the story repeated across time and borders as each embarked on the same hero’s journey, faced the same perils, suffered the same heartbreaks on their way to enlightenment.

  The L.A. youth of 1991 might not have been threatened by fire-breathing dragons, but they had their own monsters to slay, and they hungered for stories that would resonate with their fears and anger and healing quest. “Every step of that journey is an entire story in and of itself,” Maynard would explain. “Every five minutes of a life is a story if you tap into the archetype that transcends the individual and connects to everybody.” And songs could do that, he knew, distill a story to its metaphorical essence, provide a useful allegory to spark understanding and a safe distance from which to work through one’s dilemmas.

  He knew, too, that he must exorcise the judgmental voices that echoed in his memory, voices of his third-grade teacher, the short-sighted supervisors at the pet store, old friends threatened by his Mohawk. A journey of his own through music might silence them at last.

  “And I needed to yell my head off,” Maynard would admit. “You can’t just run down the street breaking shit.”

  According to plan, the foursome met each morning in Danny’s rehearsal space, windows closed against the May breezes and the traffic sounds in the street below. They wasted no time with small talk. All that mattered was the music, their chance to dig deep into their own discontent, their frustration with dead-end jobs, and their annoyance with the derelict camp on their doorstep.

  Maynard envisioned the new band’s sound arising at the intersection of Born Without a Face and Joni Mitchell, and used as a foundation his old C.A.D. songs. The music must depart from expected 2/4 and 4/4 time signatures, he told Adam and Paul and Danny, must break conventional boundaries, take harmonic risks on the way to revealing the band’s style.

  On a typical morning, Danny might improvise a groove while Adam and Paul jammed a free-form interpretation. Then they picked up the pace, infused the melody with a sudden brutality and then a balancing vulnerability, until the song culminated at last in the solid rhythms that formed the framework for Maynard’s spare lyrics.

  “I felt the band was something special from the very first time the four of us played together,” Danny would recall. “The hair on my arms was standing on end. It had a power I could feel instantly, the flame of those guys. I told them I wouldn’t charge them rent anymore and that I would play. I’d do this for myself because I loved playing that kind of music.”

  Within the parameters Maynard insisted upon, the group nonetheless discovered freedom, a creative leeway to experiment at will within the messy disorder of half-memorized guitar riffs and in-progress verses in a true punk atmosphere of egoless collaboration.

  Not that individuality was compromised for the sake of the collective. Quite the opposite. The band members not only respected their own strengths, but, attuned to each other’s every nuance, drew instinctively from the collective energy to complete fully formed songs sometimes in as little as a day, a week at the most. “Everybody was really open about letting an idea go and just be drawn and quartered and turned into something else,” Danny remembered. “It was a healthy process and really inspiring because the possibilities were endless.”

  The members of C.A.D. had never quite understood Maynard’s vision, his emphasis on trimming the music to a sonic minimum. But Danny and the others seemed to intuitively grasp the concept. Maynard played for Paul the da-da, ch, da-da riff that opened “Burn About Out,” the C.A.D. song Chris Ewald had urged him to pursue. Paul spontaneously broke in with a funky wave of sound that buoyed Maynard’s lyrics just as he’d always imagined. Then Danny fell upon his drums at the precise interval where Maynard had felt the need for deep bass. He created reverberation that shattered the song into a cubist version of the original, a slowed, chunky rendition that reduced it to its primal simplicity.

  And Maynard added the most primal sound of all, the deep, throaty scream, the sustained cadence of birth and new beginnings.

  We were four people listening to each other and making songs that were based on the songs, not on a hat. It wasn’t like, “Chili Peppers and Nirvana are popular now, so let’s wear flannels and funny Cat in the Hat hats.” How about no flannels, no Cat in the Hat hats?

  Get rid of all the fluff, don’t worry about all that shit. Focus on the point of the story and the sounds and energy that drive it home. The primal scream was the key to making it sound sincere.

  This thing needed to punch you in the face, back up, extend a hand to hug you, and then punch you in the face again.

  “It did have a different sound,” Danny said of the band’s music. “I just didn’t think it would ever have any commercial possibilities.”

  One last piece of the puzzle remained, one final detail to bring the concept to reality. The band needed a name.

  It must be catchy, brand-new, not in the least derivative or gimmicky, an intriguing name that suggested a backstory, a name they could live with for a long time should the band actually succeed.

  While they riffed and jammed and jotted down lyrics, one of the four might spontaneously shout out a word or a phrase, a potential candidate dismissed often as quickly as it was proposed. Nothing seemed to quite hit the mark, until one or another of them flippantly suggested a word that silenced the guitars and cymbals.

  “Toolshed” seemed entirely fitting, a name that brought to mind the shadowy outbuilding where a menacing uncle might bring a young charge for a beating—or worse. It implied the mystery and terror of the themes that wove through the emerging songs, the recurring motifs of violence and outright horror, the pain and tears necessary for healing to begin.

  Less was more when it came to a name, Maynard knew. His merchandising work at Boston Pet had taught him that much. Paring the name would lend space where multiple meanings might arise. Lop it in half and the word could mean whatever one wished: the right gizmo for the job or a blind and unquestioning follower. It might evoke the image of an implement digging deep
to touch a nerve or a midnight spin down Sunset Boulevard in a Corvette ragtop. And if the name was a double entendre, it couldn’t hurt.

  Maynard spoke the word aloud, whispered it, sketched it in his notepad. It was a fine name for a band, they all agreed, a name with pleasing mouth feel and eye appeal, its elongated open vowels bounded by sturdy consonants. A one-syllable name that left room for interpretation. A hard-to-forget name. A solid name. Tool.

  “Green Jellö just got signed,” Manspeaker would recall. “Of course we’ve got to have a party.” And of course Tool would perform.

  If past parties at the loft were any indication, this one was sure to be an event, complete with revelers spilling to the roof deck and the parking lot and sure to annoy the neighbors who operated the design firm on the other side of the common wall.

  Musicians and writers and aspiring painters descended upon the squat white building on Hollywood Boulevard that mild June evening, toting Heineken and Corona and SunChips and sidestepping the vagrants who’d begun to assemble outside Regal Liquors. They climbed to the loft, where they joined Adam’s coworkers and the Libertyville crowd, friends of friends of friends, and Green Jellö pigs in their offstage blacks and leather. Tom Morello arrived, and tattooed young punksters befriended at Raji’s and Club with No Name, and Kevin Coogan, who’d introduced Manspeaker to Zoo Entertainment.

  One corner had been cleared of foam and discarded department store mannequins in various stages of dismemberment—raw materials for Green Jellö costumes—to make room for Danny’s drum kit and a portable amp. Nearly a hundred guests crowded the loft, curious to learn just what this new band might offer.

  At last, Maynard and Danny and Adam and Paul set down their drinks and took their places. It had been a long time since C.A.D.’s Top of the Rock show, a long time since Maynard had performed his own music. Adam took up his Gibson Silverburst and Paul his Rickenbacker, and from the moment Danny began his staccato intro, Maynard’s old confidence returned, and with it the surge of all that had brought him to this place.