A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  One afternoon in late autumn, Maynard came home to a message from yet another bubbly club manager offering yet another unpaid gig. Tool should come play third in a six-band lineup, she urged. Danny would use the club’s drum kit, of course, but the engagement would give them great exposure, great experience, and drinks on the house.

  “I called her back,” Maynard recalled. “I told her, ‘Here’s the deal. We’ll play next to last on our own drum kit. And you’ll pay us a hundred bucks. She snapped back, ‘Who do you think you are?’”

  “So I said, ‘I’m the guy you’re going to call back very soon when you realize that you need us.’”

  And after discussions of branding and percentages, options and advances and exclusivity clauses, after luncheons rolled in on white-linened carts by white-linened chefs, the band came back to Maglia. Of the many label execs they’d met, he was the one who best understood Tool’s message and methods, the importance of its creative integrity. “I’m not asking you to give me a budget for each video,” he told them. “I’m asking you to do videos the way you want to do them, and I’ll pay for it.”

  “I felt like the things I’d done all my life were finally leading up to something,” Maynard remembered. “This was my chance to do it right. You can’t keep building two-legged tables and bitch about them not standing up.”

  Working with the independent subsidiary of BMG would offer them nearly the same freedoms as if they’d remained independent themselves, the group realized. And, Maglia assured them, Zoo’s energies and budget would be directed toward what mattered the most: live performances. “Not everybody said that,” Maynard would remember. “What we heard from most of the labels was basically, ‘We’re a big machine and we can force you down peoples’ throats.’”

  Together, Maglia assured the band, they could surely create an artistically satisfying and financially sound agreement.

  “It was very much a democratic process,” Danny remembered of the negotiations. “At every meeting, all four of us fought tooth and nail for ourselves, kind of like musketeers, which was really a good thing for all of us.”

  Tool had formed out of curmudgeonly frustration, had burst with little preparation on the city’s club scene, had unquestioningly responded to Maglia’s request to meet with them. Signing with his label after only seven performances would be one more act of faith. “There’s a sense that all this just fell into place,” Maynard would explain. “But most of it was just dumb luck and trust. You step over the edge into darkness. The bliss finds you.”

  On the day before Thanksgiving 1991, the agreement was finalized, an unusual deal considering that Tool hadn’t yet recorded an album. Zoo would produce an enhanced release of the band’s demo cassette, a six-song EP, and later, a full album, and, true to Maglia’s promise, would provide greater-than-average tour support. The agreement granted the band creative control and provided for an advance to cover expenses and equipment until royalties began rolling in. “Tool was the only band I ever signed that had my complete trust and support whenever they needed it,” Maglia would recall.

  The deal included one more provision, a clause that wasn’t set forth in the contract but one the band members considered as important as all the others. Maynard and Danny and Adam and Paul were committed to pastimes and passions discovered long before they’d come together as Tool, and they were determined their private lives would remain just that. Whatever demands and responsibilities they’d just signed on for, they promised one another, books and barbecues, magic and mythology, friends and family and finches would come first.

  I didn’t want to be an animal on display. I needed to find a brake pedal to slow down elements of this opportunity and figure out how to emotionally process it. What was all this extra attention going to do to me? What would it do to my body—my emotional body, my spiritual body, my mental body, my physical body? I had goals, and being famous wasn’t one of them.

  The paperwork signed, Maynard and Danny and Adam and Paul stepped from the Zoo Entertainment office into a city that seemed spread about them like a stage set for a performance all their own.

  Their first stop was the Palace, the vast art deco establishment on Vine already filled with a club crowd eager to begin the long Thanksgiving weekend. “We went in like we were hotshots, like we’re a big deal,” Maynard recalled. “And we proceeded to get extremely drunk.” They roamed the main floor and the balcony, their shouts ringing loud above the music. A band could celebrate its first signing only once, they rationalized, and celebrate they would, until, in an access of exuberance, an upended tray of shot glasses shattered in bright shards under the spotlights and the bouncers requested they move their revels elsewhere.

  They joined the crush of hipsters at the Frolic Room just around the corner, the narrow, dim dive bar where they fed the jukebox and sang along from their red swivel stools, ignoring their rising bar tab until the ceiling lamps flashed, signaling closing time.

  They stumbled to the sidewalk, their stagger a disjointed victory dance up the boulevard to Regal Liquors and the cooler at the rear of the store. “We came back to the loft hooting and hollering,” Maynard recalled. “We were out of our minds and just free.” They drained their Coors and pelted the empties about the parking lot until their shrieks and laughter and clattering brought the neighbors to their window with the promise of a visit from the LAPD.

  They scattered into the Hollywood night, Danny to his loft, Paul to his apartment, and Maynard, Adam, and Manspeaker to a nearby cab and its reluctant driver. Adam’s apartment in the Valley would be safe enough haven until the fracas blew over.

  We could have had integrity and been nice, but we chose to be dickheads because we were young and we were suddenly empowered. We were flexing. And everything you grow up seeing, you assume that that’s how a rock band is supposed to act.

  There’s no excuse for any kind of violence. I just don’t do that. Our actions weren’t directed at anybody in particular. But we’d been so beaten down, and finally there was light.

  In the morning, they searched in hungover stupor for a market open for business and returned to Adam’s apartment with strong coffee and one of the last Butterballs to be found in the city.

  And Maynard and Adam and Manspeaker—newly signed performers with every reason to enjoy their holiday in style—passed a cold and windy Thanksgiving Day searching cupboards for a pot big enough to hold the bird and for ingredients of a passable turkey soup. “Adam had failed to mention that his oven didn’t work,” Maynard remembered. “It was a dreadful fucking day.”

  News of Tool’s recording deal elevated the band’s status almost overnight. Club managers who only weeks before had relegated the band to 6 o’clock shows called to offer choice spots in their New Year’s lineups. And Maynard’s demands that had seemed baseless hubris a month before were now perfectly justified. Tool would headline, he told the bookers. The band would use its own gear, and their rate was now $500, more-than-fair remuneration for a group surely destined for stardom.

  Sensible as his requests were, Maynard didn’t mind when they were refused. Tool had New Year’s Eve plans of its own.

  Weary of Manspeaker’s blowouts, the neighbors had at last relinquished their lease. Their departure meant an expansive addition to the Green Jellö space. Maynard and Manspeaker brought out hammers and saws and opened the common wall to create a home theater complete with projection room and doubling the space for parties.

  On New Year’s Eve, the loft was packed as any club on Sunset. Punksters and rockers arrived, and actors and artists and curious passersby were drawn up the narrow stairway by the music that blared down into the street. Quantities of schnapps and Corona and Kahlúa glimmered beneath the colored lights strung from the rafters, and a mobile sound truck was parked in the lot to record the night’s performances.

  The Green Jellö troupe reprised its little-pig antics, and then Tool took up it
s guitars and drumsticks and mics and filled the new space with driving lyrics of fury and fear, right and wrong, sacrifice and shadow and pain.

  Maynard’s scream rose that night with new intensity, a deeper sincerity born of elation and triumph. His was a cry of retaliation for a lifetime of misunderstanding—a wall of defiance against hurdles that might lie ahead. And his strong, sure song continued into the first gray dawn of the New Year.

  Maynard’s announcement of the recording deal came as a surprise to old friends who’d only sporadically received news of his L.A. adventures. “Sometimes a long time would pass, but we wrote letters and talked,” Kendall instructor Deb Rockman would remember. “He would call late at night and we’d be on the phone for a couple of hours. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even talk. He’d play music and I’d listen. Then the next thing I knew, he was making it big with Tool.”

  But those who knew the full story recognized that his was no overnight success. “Everyone in the band had paid their dues in multiple disciplines,” Matt Marshall explained. “Therein lies part of who Maynard is and what Tool is. They took all their influences and molded the music into something completely unique. By the time they got together, they were just instantaneously better than almost anybody.”

  Maynard may have seen his destiny long before had he paid closer attention to the cups and wands and empresses the tarot readers had fanned across their tables.

  I hadn’t realized the readers might have been talking about singing. They’d always used the words voice and presentation, and I thought they were talking in a metaphorical sense. I thought pet stores and sets were the stages they were speaking of. I’d never considered that they meant band and music the whole time.

  Nineteen ninety-two would be a time of beginnings—and of letting go. The tedious and ill-paying art-dog days were behind him, and little Harpo had lived out his good long zebra finch life. It was time, Maynard knew, to step from the familiar path and open himself to this new course, and, his other birds and iguanas and fish in the safe care of his loft mates, he was free to discover where it might lead.

  Zoo’s marketing strategy had included a professional pressing of the Tool demo and given it a tongue-in-cheek label number—72826, digits Maynard chose to correspond with the letters S-A-T-A-N on the telephone keypad. Matt and his colleagues had sent cassettes to bands whose style and message complemented Tool’s, and by spring, they were performing up and down the California coast, opening for the fusion-punk Fishbone and heavy metal Corrosion of Conformity in clubs renowned as testing grounds for the most promising of new groups.

  Tom Morello’s band was now ready to perform publically as well. Rage Against the Machine had followed a track parallel to Tool’s all winter long, and its music had become a solid blend of punk and hip-hop, a sonic rant in opposition to corporate greed and government oppression.

  Opening for Tool was a fitting debut, a continuation of the creative alliance begun months before. The riffs they’d explored had at last found their proper places in Rage’s “Killing in the Name” and Tool’s “Part of Me,” and their pairing on Jabberjaw’s stage only strengthened Maynard and Tom’s faith in the other’s talents. “There was a healthy competition between the two bands,” Morello said. “We really sharpened each others’ knives early on.”

  Just as Lou Maglia had imagined, Tool’s shows created the hoped-for groundswell of interest. Audiences were captivated by Maynard’s hunched creep to the edge of the stage, his curious Mulhawk, his penetrating gaze, his confrontational delivery.

  Early reviewers were at a loss when it came to categorizing the band’s music, calling it everything from grunge to metal to alt, but the audience didn’t trouble itself with labels. Tool’s was music that mattered, whatever its genre. After more than a decade of conservative politics, conformity, and complacency in the face of oppressive dogma, they were primed for change, and they found their anthems of rebellion in the countercultural songs of Smashing Pumpkins and Dumpster, Dead, White and Blue—and Tool, whose harmonic complexities and multidimensional lyrics set it apart from the rest.

  Our songs were telling people to wake up, stop living in hypocrisy, be true to themselves, but that message had to be tempered. There’s an element of humor in all the songs. A friend might say something really funny, and we’d include a verse based on what they’d said. Satire helps push through heartfelt emotions and serious issues. That’s how you punch the big ideas through.

  Ever since he’d special-ordered from Sounds Good the Pretenders’ 1981 Extended Play album, Maynard had understood the power of the EP, the reverse chew-bone pickup, the tease to whet audience appetite for high-ticket albums and concerts. Recorded at Sound City and released in March 1992, Tool’s EP, Opiate, would bring to the band widespread attention, he was sure. Better yet, touring with a nationally known act would be the first step in building a coast-to-coast fan base.

  If ever a group complemented Tool’s raw sound and message of nonconformity, it was Rollins Band. Its End of Silence tour had begun that spring, and thanks to Zoo’s efforts, its opening band would be an ideal match. Selections from Opiate would provide a fitting counterpart to the themes of integrity and self-reflection, Tool’s sound a perfect pairing with Henry Rollins’s forceful anger and the fury of Andrew Weiss’s bass and Sim Cain’s percussion.

  Three months on the road with Rollins Band would give Maynard the chance to observe in action the man whose musicianship and work ethic he’d long admired and to learn from seasoned musicians the ins and outs of touring. “Andrew Weiss gave me great advice,” Maynard would recall. “He helped me understand that the working man is what makes this shit happen. He told me, ‘We’re just these rock dudes who show up late and leave early, but it’s the crew who really gets things done. Treat them well. Respect the guys who actually do the work.’”

  Their Atlanta stop included a rare evening of freedom before their gig at the Cotton Club. After investigating the many bars along Peachtree Street, the band members stepped into the mild springtime evening, and the conversation turned to the dedication necessary to excel amid fierce competition. Maynard shared with Cain his memory of Black Flag’s 1986 Grand Rapids show and the lasting influence of its opening band. He couldn’t quite recall the group’s name, but the energy and passion they’d displayed even before the embarrassingly sparse audience had been a glimpse into a world of professionalism he’d dreamed even then of inhabiting.

  I get uncomfortable when people give me weird accolades. So I had no intention of boring Henry with the story of this thing I had once witnessed. But I felt comfortable talking to Sim, because he loved music so much.

  I told him about this amazing show I’d seen years ago and how it had just blown me away. My heart was racing after the show, I told him, and it impressed me so much that it basically shaped the way I approached my performance with Tool. I’d learned that night that if you’re professional, if you mean it, it doesn’t matter if there’s five people in the audience or 500,000, they’ll feel it. That honesty translates.

  And Sim said, “That was me. That was me and Andrew Weiss in Gone. You just described our performance in Grand Rapids.”

  Maynard soon came to understand the rhythm of the road, the daily routine of packing the Ryder truck, the club parking lots often the only glimpse of the city he would see. He mastered the fine art of unrolling his futon over the equipment cases in the back of the truck and napping a bouncy nap before the next show.

  The monotony of the highway was tolerable, he learned, if he took comedian Bill Hicks’s advice and embraced the journey. En route to Omaha and Austin and Providence, Hicks’s cassettes were in frequent rotation in the tape deck, his satirical monologues an echo of Maynard’s impatience with mediocrity and apathy—and belief in redemption.

  Behind all the dark humor, Bill was talking about the same things I’d read in Joseph Campbell. If you look at things, really look, if you lift the
veil, you start to recognize that light is love, is infinite, is unconditional. Bill was saying that once you understand the nature of nature, you can let go of difficulties and sign on for the ride—knowing that it’s just a ride.

  And Maynard grew familiar with the Holiday Inns that replicated themselves across the landscape and the occasional Motel 6 on the outskirts of town. In city after city, he walked from stage doors all alike, crossed yet another parking lot, and watched the last of the club-goers depart into the night, leaving him at the other side of the low fence, alone in the darkness.

  Familiar faces along the tour route balanced the anonymity of weeks on the road: Kathy Larsen at New York’s CBGB, Ramiro at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, and at Tool’s one-off show at the Reptile House in Grand Rapids, DJ Steve Aldrich.

  Art students and alt rock aficionados wedged into the club on Division to experience the garage punk of Michigan’s own Soiled Betty. Then the headliner took the stage, and the space vibrated in a fury of tempestuous rage, in the complex rhythmic force that was Tool.

  “The Reptile House wasn’t ever supposed to be a live venue. It was supposed to be a dance bar,” Aldrich would explain. “The building was all hard surfaces, tile and concrete. Shows normally sounded like crap in there. But when Tool played, it was just like they’d put the CD on. It sounded incredible.”

  Aldrich recognized in the music familiar echoes. Tool’s atypical time signatures, its subtle nuances, its hint of Swans minimalism blended in a mature rendering of the C.A.D. tracks he’d featured on his Clambake radio program. And Tool seemed to him the fulfillment of the band abandoned for lack of a suitable vocalist, the realization of the sonic space and experimental chords he and Maynard and Chris Ewald had explored years before. “As soon as I heard Tool, I thought, ‘This is the final version of what was supposed to happen a long time ago,’” he said.