A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Berry wasn’t unnerved by Maynard’s insistence on the wig. He’d explained to her the importance of differentiating his APC persona and of walking about unrecognized with his son. “Whenever something was deeply personal to an artist, I tried to understand it and appreciate it,” she would explain. “And he really wanted APC to be seen as a unit, not just as Maynard. He’s a reluctant rock star.”

  Adamant as Maynard was about stepping from the frontman role, his name undeniably drew the curious public to APC. But they paid attention because of the music. Released on May 23, 2000, Mer de Noms entered the Billboard 200 at Number 4, higher than any previous ranking of a rock band’s debut album. The record sold more than 188,000 copies in its first week and would remain on the charts for just short of a year.

  “Mer de Noms was a group of people coming together at the right time,” Berry would explain. “It was the perfect combination of the talent, the look, the personalities. And Maynard brought something else with his theatricality, the sensitivity of his voice, something intellectual and dreamy with the lyrics.”

  Even so, fans who didn’t know the backstory of the Volcano impasse perceived APC as Maynard’s abandonment of Tool. They posted on message boards and online forums their disappointment in his desertion and their demand that he return to the only band that really mattered. But reviewers and critics recognized in Mer de Noms more than a flash-in-the-pan side project. Steve Morse, in his coverage of the May 2 show at the Worcester Centrum in Massachusetts, reported that while the jury was still out on some of its songs, A Perfect Circle appeared to have “a can’t-miss future in the marketplace.”1

  And far from a trivial pastime, APC was Maynard’s opportunity to exercise his marketing savvy and meet the challenge of a music industry in flux. In the wake of a changing business model, mega record stores had begun to give way to online retailers and music-sharing sites like Napster—sites that might or might not compensate artists for downloads of their work.

  Touring was where the money was, and the joint venture meant that in exchange for bankrolling the cross country road trip, the band would reap 100 percent of tour profits and drive CD sales along the way.

  Billboards and magazine articles and radio play would never generate enough sales. We had to get in front of people and stay on the road long enough to build awareness. I’d learned that the best way to do that was to play a city and circle back a couple more times. That creates three points of reference for people to remember. And that costs money.

  Whenever you can figure out some way to cross-promote things, it helps. If you can partner with friends with successful businesses, at least it doesn’t feel like you’re selling out. You feel good because you believe in what they’re doing. Everybody wins.

  Maynard had worn the Oakley sunglasses marketed by Tim Cadiente since 1995 and was well aware that his celebrity had boosted sales. Involving Cadiente in promoting APC would create a mobile chew-bone pickup, increasing sales of one product via awareness of another.

  “Maynard came to me,” Cadiente would recall. “He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new band and we need tour support. What can you do for us?’ It was simple. I’d get companies to wrap the tour bus.” Cadiente would enshroud the APC bus in oversized vinyl sheets printed with colorful advertisements for Oakley sunglasses and goggles and Paul Frank tees and tote bags. The band’s share of the revenue would enable APC to extend its tour, compensate the crew, obtain even more spotlights and gels.

  Bus wraps were virtually unheard of in the States despite their popularity in Europe, but Maynard understood the potential impact of such a blend of the artistic and practical. “Maynard’s always had that ability to separate himself from what other people are doing,” Cadiente would explain. “Everything he does, he’s a step ahead of everybody else.”

  The two-month NIN tour was followed by appearances at the Fuji Festival and Canada’s Summersault Festival, and with few breaks, eight months of headlining sold-out shows in Australia, Europe, and the U.S. And at every stop, from Sydney to Stuttgart, from Saskatoon to Sacramento to the Grand Rapids Deltaplex, Maynard paused between songs and reminded the crowd that the force behind the music, the mastermind of A Perfect Circle, was Billy.

  “It says a lot about Maynard that he didn’t just insert himself,” Billy would explain. “In every photo shoot, he said, ‘No, put Billy up front. It’s his band.’ He was very clear about the fact that I had done the work ahead of time. He appreciates and demands hard work. The last thing he wants is a lottery winner who got there by happenstance.”

  Nor would Maynard allow himself to coast, to amble when a concerted sprint was required. If anything, the breakneck recording pace and nonstop tour fueled his imperative to take advantage of every spare moment to imagine, to write, to compose.

  And when Devo expressed an interest in making music of his own, Maynard wasn’t one to discourage him. “I’d heard Paz’s sister Ana practicing her cello, and I was absolutely enamored,” Devo would recall in a 2015 interview. “A few years later, Dad gave me my cello. He’s always been encouraging and excited about my playing.”

  From Portland to Pensacola to Pittsburgh, while his bandmates read or rested or reviewed the next night’s set list, Maynard curled in a quiet spot at the back of the bus and worked on the songs Tool fans had impatiently awaited for nearly four years.

  1 Steve Morse, “NIN’s Hammerings as Hard as Ever,” Boston Globe, May 3, 2000.

  A half-open suitcase stood always at the ready in a corner of Maynard’s bedroom, and beside it, a satchel bulging with Rube Goldberg–style lash-ups of cables and U.K. and German adaptors. A month and a half after the final Mer de Noms show, he was off again, this time to Europe and the first leg of Tool’s Lateralus tour. The band’s legal battles had been resolved, and on May 15, 2001, the first in its new three-album deal with Volcano Entertainment debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

  Recorded during breaks in the Perfect Circle tour, the 12-song collection took the band beyond alternative metal to art rock—to, in fact, math rock. The notational structures and syllabic arrangements spiraled in a 79-minute suite of Fibonacci precision, inspired even more than Ænima by the concepts of sacred geometry.

  As always, Maynard’s lyrics urged critical thinking and transcendence of stasis. Lateralus was, he admitted, “a soundtrack for healing,” a blueprint for enlightenment that might come from tapping into the energies that lay in mathematical symmetry—and the position of the planet Saturn. Every 28 years or so, astrologers claimed, Saturn returned to the place in the sky it had been at the moment of one’s birth, marking the beginning of a new life stage—adulthood, maturity, old age—each an opportunity to reassess one’s purpose. “You either let go of past delusions and ascend to the next level, or you sink like a stone,” Maynard would explain. “If you can’t make it past your Saturn return, you remain stagnant.”

  The kaleidoscopic gestalt of image and sound that was Lateralus more than made up for the long wait between Tool releases. The circle of stylistic eyes that illustrated the disc was visionary artist Alex Grey’s invitation to look closely, to see beyond the obvious. The transparent pages of the layered insert in the jewel case were a reminder of multiple meanings, of the union of the physical and the spiritual. Curious audio effects were as well an invitation to listen—and marked the recording debut of Puppy Cat.

  The concert set was an elaborate palimpsest of videos, oversized banners depicting Grey’s anatomical paintings, a glittering backdrop of prismatic human eyes—a collage of sound and light choreographed in what Steve Morse called “the best multimedia rock event so far this year.”1

  A backlit Maynard in Speedo and blue neon body paint performed from the rear of the stage, and above him, awash in pulsating light, was suspended the design of seven points and seven intersected lines—geometric perfection in the shape of a star.

  The band would crisscross Eu
rope, Asia, Canada, and North America, enjoying little downtime until December of the next year. The September 11 show at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids was by necessity postponed until the 13th. The nation’s response to the attack on the Twin Towers had already begun to morph from a healthy patriotism to dogmatic nationalism, and though never one to broadcast his political views, Maynard broke character and reacted to the crowd’s insistent shouts. “The audience was chanting ‘USA! USA!’ between songs,” he would explain. “I lost it and said something like, ‘Maybe instead of chanting like sheep, we should take a minute to figure out what we did to provoke this.’ Sometimes my mouth opens and stuff comes out.”

  Lest the crowd believe he’d bought into the already-emerging conspiracy theories, he dialed down a notch and led them in swearing what he called the Nonconformist Oath, a pledge that borrowed from a Steve Martin comedy routine, a vow to question authority and never repeat what others said. His audience obediently echoed the mantra word for word.

  In light of the tragedy, the themes of Lateralus seemed curiously prophetic. The world was indeed in need of healing, and if the lyrics encouraged anything, it was a breaking down of barriers between individuals and thinking for oneself, and Maynard closed the show with a heartfelt entreaty. “Take the feelings you’ve experienced in the last few days and hang on to them, good or bad,” he urged the Grand Rapids audience. “And please create something positive with them.”

  Maynard had never trashed a hotel room, never stalked from the stage in a petulant snit and refused to finish a show. But the lessons of the peyote ceremony and yet another reading of Joseph Campbell hadn’t been enough to stem his becoming a celebrity cliché. The lights and applause were seductive, and Maynard’s success guaranteed that at every tour stop would be willing women, clichés themselves seeking a one-night dalliance with a Grammy-winning rock star.

  It happens to almost everybody who suddenly becomes famous. We’re not wired to handle that much attention, but it just seems like the path you’re on, so you go down it. You want intimacy, but you’re in motion. You’re not ready to settle down, so you just follow the sexual thing.

  Most people fall into chemical addiction, which is harder to get out of. I was lucky enough to fall into a kind of ego addiction. She likes me! She likes the name of the band! She likes what I sing about!

  And the more you dabble in that, the less chance there is of a relationship. She has no idea who I am. I knew the difference between attention and real connection, but I forgot it for a minute. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I was just having fun.

  He might prearrange a tryst with the woman in Berlin he’d met the last time he’d passed through, never doubting her interest. And he cavalierly skipped after-show drinks with old friends to prolong a rendezvous with an attractive stranger selected from the Seattle audience the night before.

  The assignations were consensual, no-strings-attached, seemingly perfect. But the validation was short-lived. “You’re left wanting to be wanted for you, and you’re not going to get that with these people,” he would explain years later. “They’re looking for something else, that larger-than-life thing. But you lose track of that and fall victim to your own behavior.” And in Düsseldorf and Providence, he knew, some exciting someone would be waiting.

  Since Tool’s first tour, Maynard had made sure the Midwest schedule included a free day or two in Ohio. His mother had treasured the rare visit with her son and ignored his Mulhawk and leather jacket, the shaved head and tattoos. And no matter his deadlines or recording commitments, he’d called her often with news of Devo’s progress at the Waldorf School, his finches, a surprise frost on the mountain. He’d wired her favorite flowers on her birthday, sent gifts and money orders when he could, and when the Lateralus tour made its way to Cleveland, he brought her to the show.

  Judith sat in her protected spot in the sound booth, oblivious to the fans who screamed Maynard’s name, to the tongue studs and nose rings, to the security crew patrolling the arena. She saw only her Jimmy. He stood on a raised platform on the stage, mic in hand, and gyrated his way through “Stinkfist” and “Pushit,” a circle of light swirling at his feet. She watched colored spotlights wash over her surprising son, her son whose sure voice rose over the crowd—and did her best to ignore his lyrics. “She wasn’t fond of his music,” Maynard’s aunt Pam recalled in a 2013 interview. “The song that said ‘Fuck your God’ was hard for her. But any attention he gave her was the world.”

  In the 27 years since her stroke, Judith’s condition had steadily worsened until she could no longer balance against the kitchen counter while she made dinner. Placing one foot in front of the other and walking from the couch to the bathroom was a struggle, and in time, even moving about in a wheelchair had become impossible. Her speech was halting, and more often now, the precise word eluded her. Her marriage had ended some years before, and her meager Social Security checks were barely enough to cover her care in a third-rate nursing home. A six-month break from touring in 2003 would give Maynard time in Jerome to devise some under-the-radar way to improve her situation without jeopardizing her benefits. “My intention was to get her into a better place,” he would explain. But the family’s streak of Midwestern self-reliance sabotaged his efforts.

  “Jimmy would call and ask what Judy needed,” Aunt Pam would explain. “But the family was too proud to ask for anything. Our mother went every day and took care of her, but Mom acted like everything was OK, so what was he supposed to do? Judy could have been better off, but they never asked for help.”

  And one bright June morning, as Maynard looked out on his garden and contemplated what he might plant there, the call, as he’d known it one day would, came at last.

  His mother could no longer breathe on her own, Aunt Pam told him, or swallow, or speak. “Judy kept pulling off the oxygen mask,” she would remember. “She wrote me a note that said ‘Help me.’ I called him, hysterical, and told him, ‘She’s dying, Jimmy.’”

  He took up the suitcase and made straightway for the airport.

  Through the day and the night, Maynard sat beside his mother. She lay pale and small under the thin sheet, her hand motionless in his. “I stayed with her for hours and explained to her that it was OK to go,” he would remember. “I could see in her eyes that she understood. I told her I would be all right. I’d be fine. She could go.”

  Judith nodded. She looked up at her son, her eyes bright with tears. She nodded again.

  Mingus Mountain rose in a nimbus of cloud. Jan was there, Devo and his mother, Maynard and his girlfriend of the hour, Mike and his partner Lisa, and the minister brought up from Jerome to perform the ceremony. They stood close beneath the wide blue sky, this cluster of people who had loved and sparred, known each other well and not at all, gone their ways or never truly met and now had gathered in joy.

  The day would be one of celebration for Mike and his new bride, and no one spoke of Maynard’s loss. “It took the sting out of the whole thing because I could watch my father follow his bliss,” Maynard would remember. “Nobody knew what I was going through, and it wasn’t really the appropriate time to talk about it.” The silence was not precisely denial, but a stoic determination to look only forward.

  Maynard glanced into the rearview mirror until his house disappeared from sight. The wedding festivities over, he drove the next morning out Interstate 17, past black outcroppings and stands of pin oak.

  He thought of the Ohio parishioners who’d convinced his mother that her paralysis had been God’s punishment for her sins—members of the church she’d attended four times a week for as long as she’d been able, the church where she’d organized events for children and ministered to the sick. His mother, who’d testified of God’s grace in seeing her through her long illness and for teaching her the meaning of faith.

  I thought about this incapacitated older man she’d met. They’d moved in together to help e
ach other and because they were lonesome. Then the church took her off their roster for living in sin. This was a couple who couldn’t even make love.

  I thought about the groupies who wanted to get close to me but never bothered to find out who I was. I thought about people who can move and walk and see, who have every advantage, but who just bury their talents. I thought about people who aren’t conscious of the most fucking important things around them.

  I’d left L.A. to get away from this disconnected horseshit.

  He drove.

  At the horizon, the Chiricahuas, the Dragoons, the Dos Cabezas glowed red in the dawn. Farther still, he knew, was Skeleton Canyon, where Chief Geronimo had surrendered to authorities more than a century before. Through this very desert, he and the Apaches had run one step ahead of the cavalry and the Mexican army, across canyon and creek bed, past saguaro and prickly pear, intent on defending their land and their tradition. At least, that’s what Maynard remembered from his reading of Cry Geronimo!, the story he’d long ago made his own.

  What a nice little irony that now I owned a piece of the land Geronimo ran across, right there in Cochise County in that elevated playa between the mountain ranges. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “This is that place I read about!”

  At some point, if you’re lucky, you realize you’re not the story. You’re part of the story. The story is much bigger than you.