A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Jensen and Maynard James Keenan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  Published in 2016 by Backbeat Books

  An Imprint of Hal Leonard LLC

  7777 West Bluemound Road

  Milwaukee, WI 53213

  Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

  33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

  Printed in the United States of America

  Illustrations by Ramiro Rodriguez

  Book design by Michael Kellner

  The Jan Keenan photo is from the 1972 Mason County Central High School yearbook. All high school sports photos and the mock election photo are from the 1982 Mason County Central High School yearbook.

  Lines from Little, Big by John Crowley, published in 1981 by Bantam Books. Used by permission of John Crowley.

  Lines from “Burn About Out” © 1986 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

  Lines from “Orestes” © 2000 by Billy Howerdel and Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

  Lines from “Oceans” © 2011 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

  Lines from “The Humbling River” © 2010 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-4950-2442-9

  www.backbeatbooks.com

  For Kjiirt

  Foreword

  A Punk Psychopomp

  Maynard James Keenan is a mysterious fountain of constant creation. From his soul-searing lyrics and extraordinary music in multiple bands to his astoundingly delicious wine, he has permeated our culture like no other artist. He straddles guises and genres and makes us wonder what could fuel such original superhuman output.

  Behind every extraordinary person is a crisis overcome. Most fans of Maynard’s work understand the significant impact of his mother’s health and her faith. From the age of 11, Maynard was destined to be different, because his life at home set him apart from his peers. Both the creative artist and the shaman are classic outsiders to conventional society; their experiences of alienation, illness, and mortality give them a unique perspective, an altered state. This enables them to see what others cannot.

  The native American Lakota people have a tradition of the heyoka, a contrarian, jester, or sacred clown. The heyoka speaks, moves, and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them. Maynard embodies both the trickster and medicine man archetype. It’s not surprising that he lives in an area near Sedona where the kachina, the trickster god, and powerful natural forces are linked.

  In my art for Tool’s Lateralus album, the flaming central point is the throat. I saw the magic of the word empowering the music and giving it a unique poetic depth and height. Maynard swims in those depths, so his songs become the soundtrack of the soul, the confession of our united unconscious bubbling forward. I once visited his house in Hollywood Hills and saw his amazing collection of sculptures by outsider artist Stanislav Szukalski. Maynard’s not only an artist, but he surrounds himself with eccentric and amazing artwork.

  The rock star who writes songs sung by millions is a person of power. To ecstatically uplift packed stadiums around the world night after night is pure shaman magic. MJK is renowned for his uncompromising artistic integrity and a willingness to face frightening subjects. By luring listeners into the collective shadow, he guides us to face what is and what needs healing.

  After all, why do we go to the rock concert or the shaman? The ecstatic leader is in contact with a higher level of creative spirit and becomes a channel of powerful transformative energies. We go to the show for a taste of that higher reality, the source of all things good, true, and beautiful. Without saying the word, we feel his love running through all he does. Maynard’s message points us back to ourselves, and the lesson of his life is our artistic challenge: Be positively inebriated with life, be true to yourself, spiral out, keep going, keep growing.

  Alex Grey

  Cofounder, CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

  Wappinger, New York

  February 2016

  Prologue

  The houselights dim and the crowd is on its feet, expectant. And when the man in the tailored Italian suit takes up his mic, they sway and nod in time to the drums and the bass and join him in every word.

  He sings of the fire’s spirit, of the taste of ashes on the tongue, of the truth on the other side of the mirror. He sings of the desert that is no desert place but a land breathing, flying, crawling, dying—alive with spirits of the ancestors and the untold tales of children to come.

  Colored spotlights sweep over the house in a wash of color and the players move in a balanced triad of solemnity and chaos and easeful laughter. The duets and solos and skits tell the story of deception and pain repeated for millennia, and are reminders too of the eternal human capacity for selflessness and joy. And the dance is a celebration of ancient peoples not so different, the audience recognizes, from themselves.

  The video against the stage wall is their own soaring flight among a shower of stars, triggering in them a pitched weightlessness as they look down upon canyons and mesas, the landscape created by flood and wind, a place hostile and somehow welcoming, too. And their heartbeats are one with the spiral of guitar and percussion and bass and keyboards and the strong, clear voice of the storyteller.

  The tales the band tells are a prism of gone faces and lost hours, visions and tears and destruction, and the sonic river gathers speed and then cascades in arpeggios of love and of hope. Red glitter drifts in the spotlights. The players and the audience move as one, and together they dream the dream.

  Spirito Marzo believed in alchemy. He understood how a hard day’s work could transform weather and soil and fruit to a fine Barolo or Barbaresco. He’d spent his boyhood among the mountains and valleys of the Piemonte, where tending the vineyard was a matter of course.

  Small, wiry, and jovial and as full of life as his name implied, he’d captured the heart of Clementina Durbiano, a no-nonsense woman who wore her dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back severely from her square forehead. By all accounts, theirs was a happy union, strengthened by a shared zest for adventure and rosy hopes for their children.

  In America, they believed, lay their fortune. Anything might happen in a place where people were creating lightbulbs and phonographs and something they were calling motion pictures. And in the spring of 1902, the liner La Bretagne embarked from Havre, France, with Spirito, Clementina, and their two-year-old daughter, Luigia Ernestina, onboard.

  Their timing was less than perfect. Spirito had imagined a future in lumbering, and they arrived in Leetonia, Pennsylvania, to find most of its forests gone to coal mine construction, railroad ties, and paper. For a few years, he took what work he could at the remaining mills and the logging sites, until, lured by the promise of a better life in West Virginia, he packed up the family and moved to Richwood to work in a tannery there. The company house was just big enough for the growing family, but in the yard was plenty of room for games of tag and pom-pom pullaway, for a vegetable garden and grapevines trained up over the wooden fence.

  But by the 1920s, the hemlocks that had once covered the land in silvery green were all but depleted, and most of the West Virginia tanneries had closed. There was nothing for it but to pack their few belongings and sail—Spirito, Clementina, ten-year-old Peter, and baby Albert—for Italy
. And there they made their home on a narrow street at the edge of the village where snowcapped mountains rose in the distance and vines grew green in the sunshine.

  Luigia Ernestina had indeed discovered her fortune in America. Not for her an alpine Italian village. She remained behind in West Virginia and took on the thoroughly modern name “Louise.” And she set about capturing the heart of a dark-haired young man from Sparks.

  Herbert Van Keenan had recently returned from machine gun duty in Saint-Mihiel and the battle of Meuse-Argonne, and his American roots ran deep. His father’s ancestors had been among the first tide of Irish in the 1740s, and his mother was a descendent of Abraham LeMaistre, a French Huguenot who’d arrived in Maryland as an indentured carpenter in 1661. Abraham’s great-great-grandson Benjamin had served in not only the War of 1812 but during the Revolution as General George Washington’s courier at Valley Forge. And Benjamin’s brother Joseph had been a part of the 13th Virginia Regiment at Brandywine and Germantown.

  One couldn’t be more American than that, Louise decided, and as proprietor of an Akron speakeasy and with a position with the post office in the offing, Van was assured of a fine future. In 1921, the two were married at the Methodist Episcopal church in Webster Springs, West Virginia, and, thrifty and hopeful, were by 1960 able to send their youngest son off to Kent State University in Ohio.

  Mike, a star member of Kent’s wrestling team, took his daily training run through nearby Hudson, past wide lawns and tidy lots and the house where the Dover, Ohio, chief of police lived. And one morning, he stopped running.

  In the front yard, quite minding her own business, was Chief Gridley’s daughter, Judith, and when Mike sprinted toward the front walk, she smiled. He stepped into the yard and they talked—about his classes, most likely, and her hopes of landing a job one day, perhaps of the fun she’d had in her high school drama club, her love of singing, and the tap lessons she’d splurged on. After that, Mike called every morning at the white house with the black shutters. “She was the prettiest girl in the county,” he would remember.

  The baby with the big brown eyes and thick dark hair was born on the drizzly afternoon of April 17, 1964. They’d give him the middle name Herbert, they decided, after Mike’s father and older brother. His first name would be James.

  Mike took a job teaching science at Indian Lake High School a few towns west, and the family moved into a two-story house flanked by flower beds and vegetable plots with plenty of room for Mike’s side business selling the pelts of animals he trapped and raised.

  Laced with trout-splashed rivers and dotted with shadowy forests where Jim imagined deer and rabbits might live, Indian Lake was an idyllic place to be a little boy. He raised his baby eyes to see a bald eagle soaring to its aerie on Pony Island, listened to cicadas humming in the tall trees at the edge of the yard, patted his pet raccoon—tame as a housecat and all his. Scarcely tall enough to see over the sill, Jim would stand at his bedroom window and watch his father plant peas and lettuce in the garden below.

  I remember thinking, “OK, if I crawl up in the window and if I can get this screen open, I can get to that tree and climb down to help him.” I could see that what he was doing was taking a while. He seemed to be struggling to get the shovel into the dirt.

  I tried to get up on the ledge of the window and realized, “Nah, there’s no way I’m going to be able to get from the window ledge to that tree safely.” I could tell the distance from the window to the tree was too far, so I got back out of the window and just watched my dad. But I wanted so much to help.

  As idylls often do, the Indian Lake dream shifted to its dark shadow side. Judith eased her Volkswagen Beetle from the driveway and past the Italian cypress that lined the front walk. She held her arm across Jim’s middle when she braked at the end of the driveway. Whether Mike’s preoccupation with sports had distanced him from his family or Judith had had enough of opossums in the bathtub and a muskrat-skinning area in the basement, the rift had grown irreparable. Divorce papers filed, Judith packed into the VW a few belongings and Jim’s green Gumby erasers and his crayons, and pointed the car toward Interstate 71 and Hudson.

  Jim twisted in his seat and watched the house recede from view, hoping to catch one last glimpse of his father. Then he turned to his mother. “Doesn’t he love us anymore?” he asked. He was three years old.

  Mother and son made their home with Grandma Gridley until Judith had set aside enough of her earnings from her job with Western Reserve Telephone to rent a place of their own—the rear portion of a farmhouse in Tallmadge. Judith did the best she could to mask the smell of the pigsty out back. “She painted every room and worked away at that house to make it a home,” her half-sister Pam would remember. “She was like June Cleaver, always baking and cooking, doing whatever she could to be the perfect parent.”

  Nonetheless, Jim would recall the house as dark and strangely empty, and the swine farmers living in the front rooms as less than nurturing caregivers. Charged with watching over him while Judith was at work, they thought nothing of leaving him alone while they slipped out to the movies.

  “She’ll be back any minute,” they reassured him, and left the four-year-old to wait the eternity before his mother came home again.

  Jim slung a set of toy guns and holster around his hips the way he’d seen Marshall Matt Dillon do on TV or created swirling designs with his Spirograph, one after the other, and no two alike. And at bedtime, Judith sat at the edge of his bed and read from Andersen and Mother Goose and his collection of Little Golden Books about puppies and kittens and three little pigs. And she told him stories of her own, of her recurring dream that she stood on one leg, stretched her fingers toward the sun, rose with the wind, and flew over housetops and rivers and trees.

  Judith recognized Jim’s artistic inclinations and brought home one day a small organ so he might experiment with chords and tempo and simple melodies. And Aunt Pam, only a decade older than Jim, became more a sister than an aunt. “I had a cheap guitar and he was very interested in that,” she would explain. “The first song he learned was ‘Little Black Egg.’” On sunny afternoons, she’d climb with him into the shady cool of the oak tree in her parents’ yard and read to him Bartholomew and the Oobleck. His pets were a cat and a canary—a combination that ended in tragedy and taught him early about competition and survival of the fittest.

  He seldom saw his father, but Mike remembered him on birthdays and at Christmastime and faithfully sent Time-Life books about Native Americans or biographies of inventors and industrialists, stories of men who’d struggled against all odds and persevered just the same.

  Jim looked forward most to holidays at Grandma Gridley’s house, when aunts and uncles and cousins gathered to share stories of Christmases past and Grandma’s sugar cookies. The real Christmas tree in the living room sparkled with tinsel and baubles, and on the top branches hung pipe-cleaner candy canes and paper stars. “We’d make handmade ornaments every Christmas,” Pam would recall. “Each of us made one for everybody in the family. One year, Jim made macramé Santas for me and my mom, and when he was really young, he painted a pinecone to look like Santa.”

  On every street, one house becomes by unspoken agreement the place where children gravitate for hide-and-go-seek and tag and elaborate games of make-believe. The rambling ranch house on Hayes Road was the gathering spot of the neighborhood boys who became Jim’s friends. Enclosed by a split rail fence, its deep front yard was big enough for ball games, and the white barn just beside was an open invitation to explore its shadowy mows. The backyard extended all the way to the woods, full of mystery and adventure.

  When Judith remarried in 1968, they moved into the spacious house in Ravenna, a town of blue-collar workers lured from the Virginia hills by the steady paychecks and insurance plans offered by General Motors and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron. After a day on the assembly line, they’d drive the 20 miles hom
e, smoke their way through the evening news and an episode of The Sonny & Cher Show or Hee Haw or Laugh-In, then rise in the morning to do it all over again.

  For Jim and his friends, the house served as base camp for endless exploration and invention. Isolated in a pocket between highways and interchanges and three miles from the center of town, the neighborhood was far enough removed to feel to them like a world apart.

  The small terrace surrounding the recessed flower bed in the side yard made a fine cockpit for a boy perched on the top step, the flagpole rising from the middle of the garden a perfect propeller post. From such a vantage point, the fields beyond were enemy territory concealing untold invaders or an arctic wilderness just waiting to be claimed.

  The abandoned outbuildings behind the barn became bunkers and command centers where the boys reenacted movies like Kelly’s Heroes and The Bridge on the River Kwai, or episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, Jim taking on the Richard Dawson role. Trapdoors in the old chicken house were secret passageways where they could hide deserters and spies—and stay out of sight of enemy eyes.

  Liberated from the classroom, Kirby and John and Teddy and Billy, who lived just next door, joined Jim in the barn on Friday afternoons and selected their allegiance—German or Ally or member of the French Resistance—and to formulate the weekend’s battle plans. Strategies in place, they scattered home for dinner and reassembled after breakfast the next morning to resume where they’d left off.

  They dispersed across the field and into the woods, enacting their carefully crafted drama. They crept through the tall meadow grass, darting behind trees and the van in the driveway if they sensed the enemy nearby. The opponents might not meet again until Sunday afternoon, when they came crawling on their bellies from the edge of the woods to take each other by surprise. In a flurry of toy rifle exchange and excited shouts—“You didn’t get me! I got you!”—the battle was over in seconds, until it all began again the next weekend.